Trio Watson

Dear Friends,

I want to share with you a lovely experience I had today, and warmly invite you to try this. Now that COVID is so profoundly challenging our meetings for worship together, I find Zoom Meetings for Worship a struggle, and a roomful of people wearing masks somehow allows COVID to invade the space more than I like.

I had a chat with Ellen Bassani about this a while back, and we agreed that an expression of faith is to answer the question “what does love require of us – for the world and for ourselves?”

I decided this morning that love required me to take a walk to my parents’ house and give them a hug. I needed the exercise (it’s over 5km) and the day was bright and breezy. I decided I would try to make it a Meeting for Worship walk, held at the same time as meeting for worship at 43, similar to ‘holding at home’, but ‘holding on the hoof’.

I packed my bag: a flask of coffee, my copy of Faith and Practice, mask, sunglasses, general handbag gubbins. And I walked.

Silent waiting is not silent – we sometimes call it forest silence, but I guess you could say that because we are sitting intentionally in a room away from the hubbub, we are seeking less of something external. What if we let it in?

n my Meeting for Worship I was soon joined by two drunks, and an ordained woman in a dog-collar, pushing a buggy. It occurred to me I needed to think about what ministry meant on this walk, in terms of giving and receiving.

I passed a friend who invited me into the place where she was working, creating a community space in town where people can go and be with others without the expectation of having to spend money. I offered to contribute in some way but admitted I couldn’t really find my fit with her project straightaway.

I had a sense of giving that could still happen, but how would I fit that into my existing schedule? The idea of ‘what has been left undone’ stayed with me.

Next stop was a veg stall with a wonderful variety of produce, in particular some tomatoes of awesome colours and shapes. I bought tomatoes for Mum, as she is growing some just now.

I’d say I gave ministry at that point. I remembered the fabulous nun who made regular visits to the acute ward I stayed on in the 90s, who asked me to help her write a few lines of dialogue for a play she was writing for her community. Remembering ministry is also ministry.

I wondered how worshipful noticing was a kind of prayer – rather like meditative walking. For some practices I’m sure there is such a thing. I noticed I was definitely breaking more of a sweat than usual for Meeting!

Around the corner from my parents’ house, a family had decluttered and left a pile of things in their driveway with an invitation to ‘help yourself!’ It included an unopened box of ‘Spiritual Incense’ from Bangalore, a fragrance that “provides an ideal atmosphere for prayer and meditation”. Deciding it was OK to need help with prayer, I took the incense with me – and at home it is indeed, lovely. It felt like receiving ministry and thinking about it all day.

When I got to my parents’, they had just come off the Zoom for the Sunday 11:00 meeting. They were expecting me and the hug. But the tomatoes from the veg stall, and actually the lovely journey, were new pleasures.

Shaking hands at the end of Meeting marks the end of the worship period for Friends and also contains and shapes the worship space. As we ask ourselves how we include and exclude others from our worship as Quakers, I’d offer the following invitation. Take the walls away and walk around.

See what happens.

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Forty-Three Newsletter • Number 507 • July 2021
Oxford Friends Meeting
43 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3LW

newsletter@oxfordquakers.org