Was it 20 years of eating Quaker oatmeal? Was it the jaw-dropping assortment of pies at the clam bake? Or was it the Grace, when Peter said : "Drenched in the Spirit?" The penny dropped, and I went to the Quaker Meeting at Allen's Neck.
What happens in a meeting of Friends? Is there a critical mass? A minyan? Two or three gathered together? Shekina entered in, a Presence, a Light emerged in the syllabled silence. With the support of Friends, I found a deep place and I was refreshed.
The fit was nearly perfect, after many, many years of knocking on doors. And now, finding myself in the silence, much of the troubling theology makes sense.
Craftsmen performed magic when they produced a galleon inside a bottle. But we know that they slipped the rigged hull through the neck of the bottle and then with one, essential thread, they pulled up the prone masts and glued that line to the bow.
I have been searching long enough to have some theory, some knowledge; the spars, lines, shrouds, sky sails, and jibs were there but I lacked a unifying pull, something beyond a creed, a theology. Then out of the deep came the line that pulled everything into alignment.
Just one line, once found, is simple. But, as I stand on the deck of my ship I notice that the bottle is infinite, that communion in the Light takes away boundaries, and that the direction becomes a pulling, not a pushing. It is a yes, not a should - an orthodoxy born of joyful movement forward, not a tightly circumscribed path bounded by law.
Anonymous