Maybe the Velcro WAS the message.

RantWoman has been meditating on a recent week in Meeting's life including spells of words and silence, messages, new Friends working into worship, and people with specific concerns on their hearts. RantWoman writes in a spirit of Love and Truth and holds many in the Light. RantWoman promises to get to the Velcro. The road will wind a little. Tough.


Adult Education featured a pastor from the Interfaith Task Force on Homelessness. He had much to say. One story: he and a much younger advocate recently spent 8 hours walking alongside a guy who had been living in his car. The car got towed and impounded. The owner came up with money to get the car back from the towing company but it was obvious to everyone except him that the car did not run and continuing to try to live in it was untenable. It took 8 hours of him trying different things and falling short of goal after goal. Finally the guy realized that he needed a different plan. RantWoman does not even remember all the details such as what happened to the car or the guy's housing issues. RantWoman was simply transfixed by the 8 hours it took of walking with.

Off RantWoman and everyone else went to Meeting for Worship. RantWoman remembers hardly any trouble settling in. RantWoman remembers a long spell of blessed silence. Considering the disruptions to come for others, RantWoman has to consider the possibility that part of this blessed worship included a nap.

RantWoman completely missed matters of which she learned complaints later in the afternoon after those wading through John Woolman's journal chewed our way through a good deal of Woolman's essay on the keeping of Negroes.

In worship, after the long spell of silence or what RantWoman remembers as silence, there followed three nicely space messages:

--One was about something to do with suffering for one's faith and the possibly contradictory Biblical thought that when one is in line with God, one's yoke is easy and one's burden is light.

--One was a Friend reading Dietrich Bonhoffer in German with a message about "blessed are those who mourn," except that the German was Martin Luther's translation from the Greek, where the Greek usually translated as "mourn in English came out as "carry sorrow."

Language brain noodled about briefly around how different "the Lamb's War" sounds in English, Russian, and Spanish but none of those noodles seemed ripe for the rest of the room carrying sorrow.

--A third message RantWoman remembers poorly except that it came from II Corinthians and was a non-annoying message offered by a Friend whose messages sometimes annoy RantWoman.

RantWoman's mind wandered toward her standard "grab the blind person and bless them" / "I don't know what to do with all these blessings" meme but worship closed before anything came close to wandering out of RantWoman's mouth. Probably just as well.

The monthly meeting of the group meandering through John Woolman's journal turned out to be blessed sharing. RantWoman came without having done the reading and means to pen a separate item about texts and formats and why SOMETIMES it can be a gift just to work with what others digest of certain questions. RantWoman admits to considerable inconsistency about this point and an fact finds some people's print digestion efforts decidedly uncongenial, vexation, and annoying. Would anyone expect anything less than rabid flaming inconsistency of RantWoman?

Apparently RantWoman's call to listen extended beyond Woolman. After the reading group broke up, New Attender / Deeply Grieving Friend spoke to RantWoman and Weighty Friend of her grief and of multiple disruptions to her worship experience before she left worship and went to the library, apparently before the verbal messages.


The complaints RantWoman and Weighty Friend heard:

--One easily identifiable Friend, urk, a member of Worship and Ministry bounced into worship in his usual energetic way, LATE.

--Deeply Grieving Friend spoke again of her grieving situation and how she felt all the noise was just TOO MUCH disruption and going to sit in the library.

The things RantWoman heard from more listening:
--Another easily identifiable Friend disturbed the universe opening her velcro. This Friend admitted to feeling fidgety and RantWoman thinks was probably sitting near Deeply Grieving Friend. RantWoman just knows where these two Friends usually sit and has sometimes had the experience of feeling something close that others in a large room miss. Okay so that sounds a little woo-woo, somewhere between movements of Holy Spirit and emotional lie detector. Use what language you like. Sometimes it happens.

--Grieving Friend was so put out by the ripping Velcro that she fled and spent ther rest of worship in the Library. She later told RantWoman that she was just too overcome with her own grief. She had been reading Howard Brinton on worship and was worried about being too much for worship. RantWoman thought of all the others in Meeting grieving, of all the times that different people report being called to give a message and hearing from more than one person that the message was clearly for them. RantWoman has assured Deeply Grieving Friend that she should trust her Light because sometimes her message WILL also be for others in the room.

--RantWoman picked up one of those "it makes RantWoman fret when someone tells me..." points that RantWoman could not ignore and had to recognize the reality that probably she specifically was the one called to minister about.

--RantWoman also heard enough "Help" and felt enough "help!" on her own behalf that RantWoman AGAIN inflamed Friends' inboxes with email. The email bore all kinds of fruit for which RantWoman is VERY grateful.

So maybe the Velcro WAS the message.