A couple of more things about my meeting

I am loving how many comments I've gotten on my last post, and a few private e-mails as well. I want to be clear about something, though, which is that my monthly meeting is actually a splendid one. We are very good at listening to each other and holding our differences lovingly. For instance, year before last the Adult Religious Ed committee held a retreat at which we talked about our different relationships to Quakerism. It began in the morning with a panel of Friends describing their paths, and in the afternoon we did this great exercise where the leader would read a statement, such as, "I have a personal relationship with God," and then we would place ourselves along a continuum based on how true it felt for us.

The discussions then of why people places themselves where they did were deep, loving, and at times hilarious. Sometimes a person listening to someone else speak would move a few places down the continuum; once the people on the opposite ends of the continuum decided that they were talking about exactly the same thing using different words and that we should more properly therefore form a circle. It was great.

And I want to say, too, that during our almost-two-year custody dispute with Yehva's birthfather, my meeting's support for us was incredible. The meeting helped us financially through the fund for sufferings; two different families in the meeting were independently led to send us large checks to help out with legal fees; the meeting convened a support committee for us; and, more than any of that, I could feel how deeply people in the meeting were entering with us into our fear of losing her and our deep love for her. People's sympathy for our situation seemed to go so deep that I felt like some members of the meeting, at least--and not always the people I'd had the closest or best relationships with--were feeling it all with us.

That my hiatus from meeting began only two months after the appeals court finally settled the case in our favor once and for all sometimes makes me feel, as I told David recently, like the guy whose wife puts him through med school, and then he dumps her for a younger woman right after graduation.

But, you know, it is what it is. God told me to leave my meeting for awhile, in one of the clearest messages I've ever gotten in meeting for worship. I'm just a little cranky that the next step hasn't been made so clear.