By Kevin O’Brien

There are some weeks that I look forward to coming to Meeting, and some weeks when I would rather do something else.  And most weeks, I come either way.

And then I arrive, enter the Meeting room, and immediately feel the Silence of our shared space begin to work on me.  And then more people arrive, presumably feeling similarly, and we fill the space with expectant waiting – sitting together, breathing together, sifting through our cares together.

Like being with a true friend, I can feel my body begin to regulate to the deeper, slower, softer rhythms of life.  Some Meetings I leave with a new sense of clarity; some I leave nearly unsure of any “lessons” the Light has for me. 

I almost always leave with a sense that my body-mind has been tuned up, reset, recalibrated towards love.

I want to thank you all for your being together with me in the co-creation of our Silence.  I appreciate the silence of solitude in a morning sit in my house.  But it is a different space, a different experience than when I come together with you.  Somehow we transcend our seemingly separate little internal worlds, and the Silence knows all of our cares, joys, struggles, musings, misgivings, regrets, despairs and mistakes.  And the Silence holds it all in love, blessing it all, sanctifying it all.

There are times when it seems we lose trust in the power of the Silence we create and share to hold all that we are going through.  One of the recent, post-election Meetings had that quality to me.  There were many leadings.  Each one was special in its own right.  I, too, was wobbling in my decision about whether to share a leading for the group, or to let it work further on me first. 

My body and mind could not settle between leadings, and I left feeling about the same as I had arrived.  That will happen sometimes.  What left me sad is that I could not hold on to any one of the leadings.  One led to the next and the next without sufficient space for our Silence to properly bless each message.

And it left me sad that we had lost that precious balance of hearing the contributions of people who are led to share and of hearing the contributions we each make to our shared Silence.

So, I offer an invitation.  When we are all touched by the enormity of pain and distress in the world, please know that we minister as powerfully in our Silence as in our tender breaking of the Silence for vocal messages.  When we create the still pond of Silence, we create the capacity to see, and hear, and feel all the ripples of the pebbles of a shared message dropped in the water –  before the pond returns again to stillness.