It’s a strange thing to hear words and know them to be Truth. To hear them echoing in your mind and heart at odd times for weeks and months after, and to feel yourself, your actions and emotions being molded around those words. It’s an equally strange blessing to realize, even later, that you are not so much being molded as discovering in those words, and the patterns of thought they are guiding, an expression of truths you’ve always known, polished and made clear.
It’s wonderful (literally) to hear a voice in Meeting speaking the message you were fumbling around. It is also, as one traveling Friend has reminded us, miraculous. Uncomfortable as I still am with that idea.
It is a delight to sing together. To hear another member of the community requesting and sharing their own love of a beloved song, and to feel that shared expression of faith, and Love. (Is there a difference?)
It is a delight to rejoice together at a shared joy, or to feel a shared Concern expressed.
It is a revelation to witness us building community together. To see us worship, care for grounds, and go through the messy and tedious process of Meeting for Business. To see Friends hurt others, or those who are hurt, and to hear them express, or acknowledge that, and to see the Community around them. In Meeting for Worship with Attention to Business (and other contexts), I have seen tension, and seen listening that can only be accomplished because of the tension. I have seen us outrun our guide, and be restrained. I have witnessed a community gathered together in what I can only describe as a shared faith, or love, because what else but the sense that we are gathered in the presence of something greater than all of us would keep us returning? I have, to put it more simply, witnessed our community living into a Beloved Community.
It is strange to describe these moments of individual and corporate miracles. I am still not comfortable with miracles. They are flashy and dramatic. Immediately recognizable. I have not experienced a dramatic miracle that I can point to with certainty to say “Yes, God is real and this Quaker faith is correct because of a single experience which, if you shared it, you too could not deny.” And yet I have experienced the presence of God amidst the community of Friends, and what else could I call that if not miraculous? I have experienced miracles that settle deeper into me the more I reflect on them, or live into them. I have learned spiritual truths about myself, about how that of God in each of us can be made manifest, or hidden, and about how to live in a holy community with others. Knowing what has already been revealed to me, and the time it took between hearing Truth for the first time and seeing it manifest, I eagerly await more opportunities for divine revelation, knowing that I will not recognize them all (and that some will not be Messages for me), but hoping that I can become more practiced in noticing the manifestation of God.
Posted without explanation or context, though of course there's a reason, which I might dive into more later. For now, I'll let this stand as it is, with just a quick link to this Message on another basically-defunct blog.
