I guess anything a hundred and nine years old shows some changes…
This gathering of the Fraters of the Wayside Inn features a closed kitchen and therefore not many people other than staff and us the ones who take up the twenty beds at this venerable hostel.
This also meant many disruptions to our regularly scheduled events, perhaps not the tragedy of the Babylonish captivity (see the historical note linked above), but it must be close…
We were informed that room two, which my colleague and friend Walt Wieder and I have shared for the past several years will be, upon our departure tomorrow, turned into an expansion of offices. We are quite literally going to be the last guests in this room.
We were each in our own way worried about this as membership is limited to the number of beds here, and, it is our beds that are disappearing. The decision of the leadership, after some discussion during which I reminded them I was generally liked better than Walt, was that we would not be cast out into the dark and cold, but instead that we would not be advancing any of our guests to full membership this year.
Probably the most striking thing about this gathering is that Frater Charles Howe is not here. We shared memories of him, and I keep thinking I see him out of the corner of my eye. One of the good ones, and God I do miss him.
We proceeded with the reading of learned papers. After one of the papers was read touching upon the struggle for civil rights, Frater Charles Gaines spoke briefly about being a twenty-nine year old minister and being one of those who answered Dr King’s call to come to Selma. There was a moment in which he spoke of the Universalist good news (and we are all Universalists at this clergy conference…) that took him to Selma and he choked up, and a number of us wept. Wept for many things…
I’m so glad to be among this crowd…
At another point someone quoted Leonard Cohen, and not a bad way to end this note, a sweet cover…
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