A candle lighting a Christmas tree candle holder. Photo: By Anne Nygård on Unsplash.
Ad/venture: Dana Littlepage Smith’s Thought for the Week
‘And we wait.’
On some level, none of us knows exactly what our life story is, even if we have lived consciously committed lives. We may be young Quakers setting forth on life’s journey, or Quakers at their century’s close, with a discipleship lived on countless continents.
Perhaps it is a grace and happy lack not to really know. As the poet William Stafford writes, ‘Ask me if what I have done is my life.’
No CV can sum up love that has been spent wastefully, wondrously and prodigally. Nor can any memorial encompass the love that we may have denied, or that which has been denied to us. The good we think we have done might not have been an ultimate good, in some ways. A mistake made might have encouraged, or aided, a situation beyond our imaginings.
We live deep in the lap of mysteries. Our sins of commission and omission are like the butterfly’s wingbeat, which may create a cyclone. The reverse may also be true: within the uneventful life of a hermit’s presence, a bit of the world’s peace may flower.
A Friend pointed out that, whenever we gather in prayer, all of our stories are being pooled together. Yet I will never fully know your story and you will never know mine. The mystery of our gathered Meetings may, in part, lie in the fact that, although I sit next to you, I will never fully know the pressures, gifts or sufferings you bear.
‘We live deep in the lap of mysteries.’
We live amid new relationships and the deaths of beloveds. We may be moving toward the culmination of some work, or useful letting-go of unrealistic goals. The specifics matter and they don’t matter. The point is, we bring all of our lives into worship. We might even bring the lives of the ancestors who dwell within us, our inherited cultures and languages. Some believe we affect the lives of those not yet born.
We bring earth’s stories, its ravages and its beauty; its crises and its joys. We carry the lives of people like Wangari Maathai and the fifty million trees planted in Africa to create a greenbelt. We are weighted with the destruction of three billion birds in less than a lifetime. We bring the torture we cannot conceive, and the goodness of lives that shine even in captivity. We bring it all into the deepest and most loving silence we can create. And we wait.
While Quakers may not attend to the season of Advent, its Latin root is derived from the Greek word parousia or presence. This presence is related to a participle which means being present. Amid the fiddly etymology here, something looms. Presence arrives as I learn to be present. Gathered Meetings, as we call them, gather more than our individual stories and actions. The silence that we gather-in may be gathering us up. Into Presence? Into being present?
This silence may be one of the most salient gifts of Quakers, one of our most creative acts, and our most profound adventure.
