05 November 2012

Quaker Meeting

I attended the Quaker Meeting today, as I sometimes do. I don't wear special clothes, in fact, my shoes and trousers were muddy from the riverbank walk into Durham. Neither do I attend with especially lofty thoughts. I just take my ordinary, everyday self. The room in which the meeting is held is quite unremarkable: a small hall in a rather shabby, somewhat run-down community centre. The meeting begins even as people, Friends, are still arriving. I wait. I wait in the light. Attentive, I vigil. In the presence of each other, a presence becomes discernable. Not the presence of a person, although some would say that it is. Not the presence of something supernatural, although others would say that it is. Some would say that it is a divine presence, but I don't really know what that means. The presence is an awareness of space, of volume, a potential that wasn't there before.