Jenifer Wates
At a recent Area Meeting, John Mason spoke about an initiative he called ‘Living in the Spirit’, and explained his idea. Using the facility of Zoom, to which so many of us have been introduced over the last two years, we were invited to meet as a group to pay attention to a passage of spiritual writing, and then share our responses.
These meetings take place on the first Wednesday of each month, hosted by John, and on each occasion one of the group offers a piece of writing that they have found useful. I had volunteered to do this for the January meeting, and had brought a piece from a book by David Steindl-Rast called A Listening Heart: the Art of Contemplative Listening. Very helpfully, John circulated this in advance of the meeting so that people could ponder on it beforehand and be ready to share their thoughts.
In the event, some parts of the piece were found difficult, especially the idea of ‘listening with the heart’ if the heart was identified as the seat of emotions. Although the writer had specified that he was using the heart in the sense common in earlier spiritual writers as the deep core of our being, several people preferred to look beyond emotions – e.g. “sink down to the seed”. So this in fact led to further exploration as others spoke, and seemed to have served as a useful focus for contributions.
There is no general discussion in these meetings, and no specific responses to each other, but it seemed fruitful in enabling each of us to deepen our understanding and thus our practice, beyond the meeting itself. I hope others too found this to be so.
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Forty-Three Newsletter • Number 514 • February 2022
Oxford Friends Meeting
43 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3LW