Meeting for Worship -- May 1

May 1, 2011

Meeting for Worship --- Lewes Friends Meeting

The meetinghouse was built in 1784 and the meeting room has essentially remained unchanged since then.

It reminds me of lines from one of my father’s sonnets:

            Rough benches in a square  . . .

            A room as plain,

            As decorous as love

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            About 70 folks gather for worship on a windy, sunny day.   We sit on stiff wooden benches in the traditional square.

Advices and Queries are read fifteen minutes in –- the ones about our finiteness, accepting your own approaching death and of those that you love, and about helping the bereaved.

A woman reads a portion of the gospel that she has been pondering:  Peter’s denial of Jesus and Jesus’ response.

Another woman, quite elderly, speaks about the news that Gadhafi’s son and grandchildren have been killed in the bombing and how it reminds her of another bombing that took place about this time of year.  She tells about being a child in Exeter during WWII.  One time a bombing raid was over, but the air raid warden came and told them to leave their flat as fast as they could and go to a shelter due to an unexploded bomb nearby.  On the way to the shelter, they walked by a bombed out house. “It was as if some great monster had clawed and scraped it out,” she recalls.

            At school two days later, she learned that one of the teachers, his wife, and their two young sons had lived in that house.  All of them had been killed.

            “I think about those two boys from time to time.  If they had survived they would be in their 70s now.  What could they have done? Those of us who did survive have gone onto profitable lives.

            That’s what war is about – waste and lost potential.”

A man on an oxygen tank speaks about contemplating his own death.  He is in line for a lung transplant and hopeful he will receive one.

            “But I know that the lungs I might receive will come from a death, a tragic loss for another family.” 

            He asks us to hold him in the Light and to remember that, as in the gospels, “sometimes from death comes life.”

            Another man rises and reveals that he had been the recipient of kidney transplant a number of years ago.  Not from a cadaver, but from his brother.  “I hardly think about it now,” he says.  “But how can I forget such a gift?  I am not mindful of the big sacrifice he made.”  He resolves to ring his brother when he got home.

            Other ministries and prayers are offered.  And twice during worship the door blows open, as if the Holy Spirit is blowing in.

            The younger children come in five minutes before the hour’s end.  They scan the room for their parents, their faces sparkling with delight when they spot each other.  The beginning of meeting was like that as well –- F(f)riends joyfully greeting F(f)riends. 

            My thoughts return to the saying that was in my mind at the beginning of the hour:   “See how they love one another.” 

           

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Prayers offered, thanks given, and after worship, tea served.  I’ve come to a good place.

Garden and graveyard in front of the meetinghouse