Letters - 11 March 2016
From Meeting for Worship to Plane Stupid
Meeting for Worship
I am unable to get to Meeting very often but I managed it one Sunday recently, needing and hoping to absorb some of the healing silence, which is one of the most beautiful things about Quaker worship.
I came away, however, feeling quite discomfited after the ministry, or rather the lack of it, which was a large part of that day’s experience. I suppose that with the news as it is these days, and with constant reminders through the media of the direness of it all, it should be understandable that the thoughts of those taking part in Meeting for Worship would, inevitably, be on these serious world events.
But surely, Meeting for Worship should be just the very place where we lay aside all these worries and concerns, where we give them over and ‘let go and let God’ and trust that eventually, even though the ‘mills of God grind slowly’, they will, in time, give forth good results.
After all, why do we call it Meeting for Worship? For the very reason that it is a sacred time set aside from the affairs and concerns of the world, in which we can open our hearts and minds in the silence and become aware of the presence of God/Spirit or whatever term one wishes to use.
Meeting for Worship is not a time for airing our own thoughts and views.
Meeting for Worship is not a soapbox for anyone who wants to promulgate something, worthy though it might be.
Meeting for Worship cannot be called Meeting for Worship unless we give over that time to worship!
Rosalind Smith
A man that looks on glass
Our Friend, in his book, speaks my mind.
Having read the introduction to Derek Guiton’s book A Man that Looks on Glass – available online – I see echoes of my own most recent essay: ‘The Challenges of Change’. The Society of Friends in Britain is being faced with its most difficult challenge yet. We need to decide if it is possible now to become again the Society of the Friends of Truth or to become an irrelevance and slip away into the sands of time.
Diana Sandy
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