Sitting among so many people in Meeting for Worship this morning I found myself thinking about different kinds of connection. We are a large group together here but we are also only a fraction of Britain Yearly Meeting, a small part of Quakers worldwide and a tiny part of the total population of these islands. Although here I am amazed by the number of people I know, at least by sight, sometimes when I am in London I feel overwhelmed by the realization of how many people I don’t know anything about and never will!

But each of us does have a network of connections reaching out to others and making those connections can be part of our spiritual practice. I am an introverted only child so this does not come easily to me but coming to Friends made it clear that I had to make that effort in any way I could.  Having 139 Facebook friends, following over 100 blogs and writing one does not make me a better person but does help to make me more connected, to people and to different Quaker perspectives.

So listening to Tim Peat-Ashworth and Alex Wildwood talk about their soon-to-be-published book which aims to open up an honest dialogue about how BYM today can be both ‘rooted in Christianity’ and ‘open to new light’ made me eager to use their work to explore those connections in my own meeting.

I ended the day in a meeting about the use of testimonies to the grace of God as seen in the lives of deceased Friends and that reminded me about another kind of connection. Britain Yearly Meeting is not just us here today, but all those Friends who went before us. In their own words and in the words of their meetings they are still with us, a cloud of witnesses to encourage our own faithfulness.

Posted on July 26th, 2009 by Gil Skidmore
. Filed under Creating community