And the next thing I knew, I was flooded with light, because looking around the room, I could see just a glimpse of how utterly, dazzlingly beautiful every single person there is, in the heart of their spirit, in the deepest truth of their soul.<\/p>\n
Now, I don\u2019t want you to think that the members of my monthly meeting are a bunch of saints. \u00a0Many of them are pretty wonderful, and almost all of them are trying hard to do right in a world that often seems willing only to reward doing wrong. \u00a0But, at the same time, we have members who are self-important, officious, or judgmental. \u00a0We have members who are models of compassionate action in the world\u2026 but also members who throw themselves into peace and justice work as a way of distracting themselves from their own brokenness, whose tongues are sharp, or whose kindness never comes without a self-approving note.<\/p>\n
Often, I am one of those members myself. \u00a0In other words, though my experience of Quakers is that we are The People who Try, we are, at the end of the day, just people: flawed. \u00a0Sometimes selfish. \u00a0Often wrong.<\/p>\n
I think the point of belonging to a spiritual community is to practice compassion and love surrounded by those you come to know too well to believe are bodhisattvas. After all, how many\u00a0bodhisattvas are we going to have call to interact with in the world? \u00a0What would we learn from a spiritual practice that only taught us how to cope in a community of saints?<\/p>\n
So. \u00a0There are no saints in my community. \u00a0But there are people undergoing a host of challenges and demands\u2013illness, grief, recovery from trauma, parenting, adolescence, divorce. \u00a0While I don\u2019t know every burden members of my meeting are carrying, I know many of them. \u00a0And I see them struggling to serve even as they are struggling to cope with whatever their life is dealing them. \u00a0These same people who can seem pigheaded or stubborn or foolish to me as we conduct the business of our meeting together are the people I see doing the honest best they can, one day at a time.<\/p>\n
Of course they\u2019re beautiful. \u00a0Of course they make me cry.<\/p>\n
But what about outside my meeting? \u00a0If those I worship with seem to me to be filled with light, does that mean those outside my meeting are, too?<\/p>\n
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