SHOPPING FOR A PRESENT TO GIVE ME, she winds up in an antiques store, where the clerk finally sells her a Quaker Mixing Bowl from the 1800s – a slight crack, with QUAKER embossed on the side.
How delightful! Quaker style is, after all, distinctive … and part of me.
I'M CONTRADANCING IN WINONA. Turns out it's Sunday morning and I've missed Meeting. (Fun versus the Old Folks.) Later I'm trying to help a Jewish group use the meetinghouse for their worship … a place we can share.
WITH A MALE COMPANION EXPLORING around the Beltway in Baltimore County. (Picks up on another dream, a year earlier.) This time I'm trying to locate a former Quaker stone meetinghouse and burial ground. A burial ground I find behind a motel is not the right one; another effort, and the road ends abruptly in a golf course.
IN A PARK-LIKE GLEN, MIXED FIELDS AND TREES … from a hilltop looking down toward a small stream and a black steel shed – a fieldhouse with bleachers – run into a few other people and we enter for Quaker worship … my suggestion of circling together countered by "No, others will come," and soon both halves of the building are full – mostly young people – a solid worship.
Somehow feels like my ancestral Hodgson dreams with the New Jersey twist. Looking back, I seem to also recall a Poconos/abandoned steel mill feeling.
Exploring the park later, find lots of sleeping bags available for borrowing – REST! – so that's where everyone came from?
Soon I'm in a white-walled plain room – under a fairgrounds grandstand or a livestock auction? At a long table, one of maybe a half-dozen, old-order Brethren or Mennonites – I'm their guest, eating very tasty sirloin tips, which my host pushes away from me before I'm finished, and everyone else pushes their dishes away – we all slip into prayer, a worship service with testimony, and while my host keeps trying to prompt me to speak, I wait and defer – even when we get down to time "for one more," I yield to two women. "I came to listen," I explain later.
In both, a sense of rich worship. So much so that real Meeting for Worship felt like the third one that morning.
A sense, too, of Elijah's 8,000 remnant or the cloud of witnesses or the circle of elders in Revelation:
WE'RE NOT ALONE
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