(Note: This meeting was postponed to March 2, 2015, due to severe weather.)
The next gathering of Westport Meeting’s Seekers Group will be on Monday, February 2, 2015 at 7pm in the Community House. Our topic will be “What is your plumb-line to God?” I have attached two readings to get your juices flowing. One is a wonderful piece by a Chicago pastor named Trey Hall (permission granted) who shared wisdom he learned while taking a language class. You can read it HERE.
We encourage all who come to consider bringing a bit of writing, art, music, etc that serves as a plumb line to the Holy. No pressure – but it’d be a joy to share such things with each other! Below is an excerpt from Francis Spufford’s Unapologetic that one Friend in our group considers a plumb-line for him. Perhaps it helps you find yours:
When I pray, I am not praying to a philosophically complicated absentee creator. When I manage to pay attention to the continual love song, I am not trying to envisage the impossible-to-imagine domain beyond the universe. I do not picture kings, thrones, crystal pavements, or any of the possible cosmological updatings of these things. I look across, not up; I look into the world, not away. When I pray I see a face, a human face among other human faces. It is a face in an angry crowd, a crowd engorged by the confidence that it is doing the right thing, that it is being virtuous. The man in the middle of the crowd does not look virtuous. He looks tired and frightened and battered by the passions around him. But he is the crowd’s focus and center. The center of everything, in fact, because if you are a Christian you do not believe that the characteristic action of the God of everything is to mold the course of the universe powerfully from afar. For a Christian, the most essential thing God does in time, in all of human history, is to be the man in the crowd; a man under arrest, and on his way to our common catastrophe.
Quotes on the topic, “What is your plumb-line to God?”
The Seekers Group is a circle of Ffriends who gather for worship, conversation, mutual spiritual nurturing, and tea. All are welcome to join us!
Gretchen Baker-Smith, convener