Synchronicity Foundation holds news conference

By Darrell Laurant

Published: December 3, 2008

FABER — Meditation centers don’t usually stage news conferences.

These are, after all, places where the outside world — with all its noise and negativity — is politely asked to wait outside. That could certainly have been the prerogative of the Nelson County-based Synchronicity Foundation after two of its members were killed in the terrorist attack on Mumbai, India, last week.

Instead, the retreat center run by Master Charles Cannon chose not to mourn its dead in isolation, but opened itself up to an invasion of media. Not once, but twice.

“There was the sense that people were looking at us, waiting to see how we would react,” said Cannon after answering questions for 45 minutes on Tuesday afternoon. “We wanted to send the message that love can conquer fear.”

So Cannon and Kia Scherr, whose husband Alan Scherr and 13-year-old daughter Naomi were fatally shot in the dining room of the Oberoi Hotel on the night of Nov. 26, sat in green padded chairs in front of a wall-length painting of the Virgin Mary and faced the cameras and notebooks calmly.

“We have all been astonished by her (Kia Scherr’s) strength,” said Synchronicity member Cheyenne Alexander, a native of Israel who helped set up the sound for the news conference. “Her family came to support her, but as it turned out, she has been supporting them.”

A small, waif-like woman, Scherr only seemed in danger of losing her composure on one occasion. Otherwise, she answered the inevitable, “What were your husband and daughter like?” questions without flinching. In the process, two pictures emerged.

Alan Scherr was a former college professor who loved to cook, majored in photography as a graduate student and met his wife when both were teaching transcendental meditation. At the time he and Naomi joined Cannon and other group members in their Indian pilgrimage, he was teaching his daughter how to play the electric guitar.

His widow also remembered his ability to translate the sometimes-arcane metaphysical pronouncements of Master Charles into common language.

“People would say, ‘Nobody explains it better than Alan,’” Kia Scherr said. “With him, it was not just some beautiful concept that stayed in the head. He brought it down to a level that worked for people.”

Naomi Scherr, said her mother, “simply loved being a teenager. She loved everything about it.”

Multi-talented, Naomi had just been accepted into a prestigious high school in Troy, N.Y., and used her Indian trip to plant a small stud in her nose. (“We finally told her she could,” Kia Scherr said). She loved the band My Chemical Romance, among many others, and occasionally dyed her hair fuchsia or teal.

These were the people shot, execution-style, because they happened to be sitting at the wrong table in the wrong restaurant at the wrong time in history.

Once again, Cannon reprised his description of being trapped for 45 hours in a hotel room with smoke curling under the door and explosions reverberating from downstairs. He told of stepping over bodies to get to the place where Alan and Naomi Scherr lay, so he could identify them.

Yet he also guided his dialogue with the media around a corner and into a place where he felt more comfortable — his philosophy.

“If people are in turmoil inside,” he said, “there is bound to be turmoil outside. What we’re trying to do is heal the inside first. Then, perhaps, peace will follow.

“Do you see?”