During the land-use fight, it had been impossible to fully divorce emotion from the conversation. All these years later, the only clear thing was the facts: Sufism Reoriented were better organized, better funded, brasher in their actions, more confident in their convictions. The opposition had been outmaneuvered, outgunned. Who gets to define our communities? Whoever has the resources and the will to get their way. In the simple language of our treasured American wherewithal: the Saranap Sufis had won.

Now, there was a force of unity here, a force of commitment. And there was a joy. Look at this wild dream we had all these years ago, Deitrick and Kaplan seemed to be saying. Look at how we worked to make it real.

From the outside, at first, the sanctuary was not as imposing as it seemed in the renderings I’d seen online. Maybe that was due to the now immutable fact of its existence; maybe I’m just partial to circles. It was certainly surreal to roll into a lush, scruffy bit of brown-and-green suburbia and see domes of blazing white. But it was positively surreal — a step toward quietude. Traveling farther down into the pale nothingness, in the calming presence of my devoted Baba Lover guides, I feel more and more removed from the outside world.

That, in no small part, is the whole point. To believe you can conquer 700 years of future requires a special kind of insular single-mindedness — a special kind of chutzpah. I wondered: even if the building becomes the only man-made structure in North America to survive all manner of calamities for centuries henceforth — how do you know there’ll be anyone around to inhabit it? How do you know this will all survive?

“If Meher Baba is who we think he is …” Kaplan answers me, with a small smile. He shrugs, trails off, picks up again, with some force. “It’s not in our hands!”



“It’s his,” Deitrick says, echoing the fervor. “The order is his. The building is his. It’s directly under his guidance. Meher Baba does that.” Down here, under the earth, under the domes, in the pure white, in the still and quiet, he sounds about as sure as anyone I’ve ever heard.