Today was indeed a very long day. Breakfast was great but we had to get
our own lunch. At first, everyone was still kind of holding back. Muslims, Jews
and Christians in the class were still breaking the ice slowly. We tried to organize
in getting dinner together and carpool to a restaurant. Apparently, this ignited
the spark and started the ball rolling.
It is always good to talk over food. An informal setting that erases
away any awkwardness and tension. Things got better when at least all 21 of us
we break into a team of three, one from each faith. In the team we had to share
our experience of the Divine. Spiritual experience in our life in whichever way
we want to describe.
My newly met Christian friend starts by sharing her spiritual experience
while she went for a healing session and felt as if she was covered in black,
feeling that positive divine presence in her. Our Jew teammate shared her
spiritual experience while visiting the Wailing Wall while another Muslim
shared his spiritual feeling when visiting the Kaabah and during his near-death
experience at sea.
I had a hard time recalling any specific spiritual experience occurred in
my life. Hence, I decided to define spirituality as something that we go
through every day. It may or may not occur on a daily basis but spiritual
experience are closely related to our daily routines, such as our prayers,
success, challenges, people around us. At any point of time, we may feel a
sense of peace, tranquility and solace, that spiritual feeling which most of the
times are mysterious. I shared how reciting the Holy Quran or listen to poems
that reminds me to God may shed my tears unexpectedly.
To me, this exercise can be considered as the first thing that has really
built the bond between the three Abrahamic faiths. Spontaneously, we did not go
into the details of our individual religious text to define spirituality, but
we shared our common spiritual experience that we had in our own personal
lives. This has moved us closer to one another, putting aside our differences and
focusing on our common area that is to “tap deep reservoir of spiritual power”
as the Prof puts it.
