Although their coming together appeared to have been miraculous, the seven people in that classroom represented a strange mixture of backgrounds and personalities. Some of their differences would work in their favour, while others would represent huge obstacles to be overcome if they were to achieve anything worthwhile together.
Chaim had been drawn to Vaishnu and Molly because of their leadership skills. It was Vaishnu who introduced him to the whole concept of people working for love instead of working for money. The others seemed to share Chaim's respect for Vaishnu, as they learned more about his beliefs and about how he had practiced them.
Molly was not the organiser that Vaishnu was, but she had great wisdom, and amongst her people she was held in high regard. Listening, in one way or another, was what had drawn them all together, but Molly was the group's authority in that area. She had been both a comforter and a guide in Chaim's own quest for spiritual self-realisation.
Right from the start, Chaim had found Sheree easy to like in a different way. His attraction to her grew deeper as he got to know her better. Paganism, or whatever it was that her religion consisted of, was not a part of his own spiritual journey, but neither was it a problem to him, as he had known many wonderful pagans both at the university, and through his years with the Quakers.
But it was Sheree's cheerful personality that attracted him most.
Although she did a good job of covering it, Chaim sensed that Sheree felt the same unease that he felt around David, with his irritating sense of Christian superiority. Outwardly, Sheree was open and accepting of everyone. Like Ming, Chaim, too, suspected that the voices Sheree was hearing could be linked to schizophrenia; but that was just his academic approach to something that was obviously quite spiritual from Sheree's perspective. And even if the phenomenom really was a mental disorder, Sheree had obviously turned it into an asset. She showed no embarrassment about her voices, and she appeared to have none of the paranoia or delusions that so often accompany them. Her charming confidence and goodwill were highlighted by Chaim's belief that she must have overcome a lot of other difficulties to achieve them.
David had to be respected for a similar triumph in the area of religion.
Evangelical Christianity seemed to be as much a part of David's makeup as the voices were for Sheree; and yet, like Sheree, David had been able to retain the good without being overly affected by the bad. He had introduced Chaim already to many religious concepts that were traditionally Christian, and which Chaim would have never even considered without David's help. Nevertheless, there were still serious differences between the two, and he knew to avoid certain topics around David, and to take others only in small doses.
Mashallah was probably going to be the hardest one for Chaim to work with, if, in fact, that was to happen at all. Perhaps in time Mashallah would give up this search for the Imam Mahdi. Chaim knew of Muslims with whom he had no problems getting along; but they were not the sort who talked about Dajjal or looked for the Imam Mahdi. Mashallah's quietness indicated that he too was having some serious misgivings about whether he could or should work with a Jew, given that just about everything evil had Jewish roots according to his religious upbringing. Nevertheless, fundamentalist Muslims had been known to convert to a more liberal understanding of their faith.
And then there was Ming. She was so new that Chaim was still piecing together his own feelings about her. She seemed to be both delicate and strong.
Her tears had revealed her fears; but they also revealed that she had made a brave decision to follow her conscience. Time would tell if she also had the wisdom to survive and work around the opposition that her family might represent.
But if anything augured well for the future, for all of them, it was their miraculous coming together. God had spoken to each of them, and they had listened. Focussing on that would help to keep their other differences in perspective. Quakers had been able to accommodate so many different belief systems over the years, primarily because of their silence. No two Quakers would agree on everything, yet it was their ability to let others find their own way that both made the movement possible, and made it great. Chaim was hoping to draw from that experience in this present situation.
To Quakers, a 'gathered' meeting is when unity transcends personal differences. For some the experience is rare, while for others it is a common occurence. The concept itself is subjective, so that it becomes pointless even to discuss to what degree a particular meeting was gathered.
What was happening in that room represented the highest degree of gatheredness that Chaim had ever experienced. But Quaker history had shown that, in order to maintain their spiritual unity, they would need a lot of wisdom about what to say (and what not to say) when the talk began. For that reason, he pushed for more silence (listening, meditation, or prayer, depending on how each person saw it). They lost all interest in the conference, and stayed in the classroom over the next three days.
It was a minor miracle that no outsiders, not even a janitor, interrupted them throughout those seventy-two hours. They were able to flow freely back and forth between periods of silent worship and periods of tentative discussion.
There were trips out for food, for blankets from Ming's room, and for a few walks around the campus; but they kept returning to the privacy of the classroom.
On one trip out for pizza, David picked up news that an agreement had been made in Jerusalem, involving the United Nations and heads of the Muslim and Jewish faiths in that city. It was an agreement to build a Jewish Temple adjacent to the Muslim Dome of the Rock. Construction was to begin immediately.
David announced that, according to the Bible, the decision was historically and spiritually significant, that it had something to do with a false superchurch which would eventually turn sour. The others accepted his explanation with varying degrees of conviction. Chaim supported what David was saying, by offering some statistics about how much the average church spends on buildings by comparison to how much it spends aiding the poor. He said that George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, often called church buildings 'steeple-houses', and many Quakers still refuse to call the building they worship in a 'church' because they feel it detracts from the far greater importance of the people who worship in the building.
This skepticism about buildings was a new concept for Vaishnu, who had always associated worship with temples; but, as with so many other things, he quickly saw the truth in what was being said and agreed with the others that the drive for bigger and better temples tends to draw people away from what matters most with regard to true spirituality.