Listening by Dave Mckay Mckay (best summer books .TXT) 📕

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 super-church 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.

 

(Table of Contents)

 

 

Reaching Out

Chapter Fourteen--Reaching Out

Seven people, each following quite different and largely separate spiritual paths, emerged from that classroom after three days of intense fellowship, with an exciting concept of a world where each person would take no thought for their own material needs, but would just do what they could to help others and to listen to God. Vaishnu had done an excellent job of inspiring them all, although David was quick to point out that what he was saying was really coming from the teachings of Jesus. They agreed that they were each prepared to give up all other plans or ambitions in order to create such a world.

Ming packed her belongings, and the seven new-found friends squeezed into Chaim's station wagon for the drive to Newcastle. Ben Black was there when they arrived, with five Aboriginal friends, bringing to thirteen the number of occupants in the sprawling two-bedroom home unit.

 

Vaishnu and Ben

"Vaishnu, your flight to India leaves in two days. What do you want to do about it?" Chaim asked soon after they had unpacked.

"Of course I must go; but I will need help. With my people I can lead, but I was not thinking before about teaching non-Hindus. So much will be different now."

"I fink I should go with him," said Ben.

Ben had never been outside of Australia, and, in common with many other Aborigines, he went through periods of great lonesomeness once away from his beloved homeland. But he showed no worry about the decision now. Chaim arranged to purchase a ticket for Ben, and the two men took a train to Sydney for the flight to Chennai.

Ben and Vaishnu were an ideal team. They were both humble and teachable. Over the next few months, with only the slightest hints, Ben was able to steer Vaishnu away from Hindu references which would hinder his dealings with non-Hindus. Ben's full-blooded Aboriginal skin was his ticket to acceptance by the Tamils of South India, although their journeys through India ultimately led them to settle in New Delhi.

One by one they had located many of the old followers and expanded the vision of these people to include all faiths and all countries. New recruits started to pour in from amongst Muslims, Sikhs, and even Christians. All of these people resumed the offer of free labour. As news of the offer spread, and as their workforce grew, so did public interest.

Media coverage resumed, but Vaishnu himself (with promptings from Ben) stayed out of sight this time. Of course, this secrecy only heightened the curiosity of both the public and the media, about who was behind the new movement.

 

Ming and Carl

Ming flew out of Sydney for Beijing just two weeks after Vaishnu and Ben. She was accompanied by Carl Chang, a young Sydney political activist, who had briefly visited China three years earlier, as a representative for an Australian trade union. His father was half Chinese and half Aboriginal, hence the Chinese surname. Ming emailed her parents that she had quit her studies, but did not inform them of her plans or of her whereabouts.

On the flight to Beijing, they sat next to a retired Chinese businessman, in his sixties. He too had been searching for the truth, and what they shared with him touched his heart.

"Equality and justice can only come through faith and love," Ming explained in Cantonese. "Communism tries to do this with force, but there is a better way." They went on to talk about people trusting God for their material needs, and about a community of people who willingly give up all private ownership.

Something clicked, and the businessman, Ree Woo, invited them to share his home with him. A week later, he was liquidating his assets and planning ways to finance this new movement in China. He not only sent Ming and Carl on their way to their next destination, but he started recruiting others in the movement himself.

It was only a matter of weeks before word was spreading in China as it had in India. The movement, with its emphasis on spiritual communism, attracted several idealists in the government, who left their positions (amid protests from colleagues) to take up this new form of communism, where people serve one another freely, for love and not for profit. Once again, the media became involved, and once again, the leaders (Ming and Carl in this case) stayed out of the limelight.

Every new member of the movement also became a new recruiter, so that Ming and Carl only needed to find one or two receptive spirits in each area of the country for those members to spread the message further after the pioneering couple had moved on.

 

Mashallah and Gambuti

Mashallah left Australia about the same time that Ming and Carl flew to Beijing. He was accompanied on a flight to Indonesia, by Gambuti, a tribal elder from Arnhem Land. Gambuti was a handsome elder, with a big head of white hair, and a bushy white beard, both of which made him stand out wherever he went.

The pair spent a week doing volunteer work as cleaners at a beach resort in Bali before they met their first disciple. He was a tourist from Germany, who had been travelling the world in search of truth. He decided to stay on permanently in order to continue the search for other believers in that country.

It was more than a month before they made their first Muslim convert, and then it was Gambuti who figured most strongly in the conversation.

"You talk too much about perfect," he had said to someone who was defending Islam on some minor point. "You say your book is perfect. You talk like your prophet is perfect, and your organisation is perfect. But only Allah is perfect."

The man they were talking to did not change; but there was a young Muslim woman listening nearby, and she approached the pair when the conversation ended, hoping to learn more.

"Allah will bring together all who are open to his Spirit," Gambuti explained to her. "But we must listen, and we cannot hear when we are full of our own answers."

Sometimes Gambuti and Mashallah would spend a week or more just waiting on the leadings of the Spirit, then they would get a strong impression about where to go or who to help, and before long, they would have located one more person who was ready to drop everything and become part of the chain reaction that was spreading all over Asia. They spent about three months planting seeds in the hearts of people in Indonesia, before moving on to Bangladesh and then Pakistan, where they ministered to many more Muslims.

In Australia itself, Molly, David, and Sheree had started by approaching three different sub-cultures; but in the end, only Molly stayed on in the southern continent.

 

Molly and Bess

Molly was helped by Bess, a younger, stronger, heavy-set motherly woman from a mission station in Western Australia. Bess had left her youngest child in the care of her oldest daughter in order to join this movement, a decision that had been very difficult for her. Together, Molly and Bess were finding far more than the handful of Aboriginal assistants that David and Ben had been able to round up prior to the meeting at Macquarie University. And it wasn't long before their followers were reaching out to the White population of Australia as well. A race that had often been maligned for its indifference to work, responded with enthusiasm to the idea of labouring for God and for love, even if many of their workers lacked professional skills.

Converts would do tasks as simple as mowing lawns or weeding gardens, but with the help of the media, they were soon getting more requests for help than they could handle.

At one point the two women made a trip to Papua New Guinea to locate a disciple. They then took a trip to New Zealand, where they met two Maoris who were open to the leadings of the Spirit. After they returned to Australia, their recruits carried on looking for others on their own islands, and on other islands in the Pacific.

The strangest thing about this new movement was its adaptability. Converts all quit their jobs and dedicated all that they owned to the cause; they all spent a lot of time just listening; and they all seemed to travel a lot.