Meetings
The Quakers have a wisdom about calling their weekly gatherings meetings. They take place in what I believe they call Meeting Houses. We call our meetings services, but I’ve never heard the places we gather called Service Houses, and I’ve never been all that clear about what service to whom takes place there.
Here’s a short story that suggests an answer. A visitor arrived somewhat early at a Quaker meeting, took a seat, and impatiently waited in silence past the appointed time. Then she turned to her neighbor, thinking she might have made a mistake, and asked what time the service was to begin. Her neighbor answered gently: When the meeting is over.
This brief exchange which could easily go unnoticed reflects what is perhaps a necessary difference between religion and organized religion, between church and institutional church, between, if you will, what indeed are we doing here.
Perhaps it is a human thing, a necessity because of the way we’re hardwired, a fact that somehow we must transcend in order to get on with things. It seems to reveal itself in the two ambiguous ways we speak of faith, faith as belief as in the creeds, faith as will and commitment as in the covenants we make. Maybe it has something to do with Paul’s notion that faith and hope are mostly of this life, but love as in servant leadership endures in both so as to include itself in whatever is next.