Sunday, January 09, 2022
One night outside Roswell
This is a story about the faith of a meeting. Our Cloud Quaker meeting is actually a worship group, but as a meeting it's a diverse but faithful bunch. We don't get a whole lot of new visitors these days; most every week it's the same half-dozen or so, and we've come to know each other a little. It's at least as much as can be possible, given that it's all on zoom.
But I went on a rare trip, about eight hours north to the Oklahoma panhandle, and found myself having to come back on Sunday just as I knew that meeting would start and zoom would only let it start if I were there to start it. So I gave my log on and password to a friend hoping she could click on "Are you the host? If so log in" but it literally did not give her the option. It made me wonder how it knew it wasn't me trying to log in - physically, we are not that far from each other.
When she found out it wasn't going to work, I was driving my family on the back roads near Roswell, and the sun had just gone down. In Roswell, outside of the mountains, you have a few more minutes of sunlight and in fact the sun had been so intense that I had shot past the Roswell exit and that's why I was on the back roads - I had slipped around it, got caught behind the airport, and was on some lonely two-lane that was probably the original southbound road before they built the new highway.
It was so deserted that I had no trouble just trying to use my phone to log on, but that wasn't flying either. I lost a meeting. We just couldn't have it.
I felt so good to get back to meeting this week. It was like I missed it all the more, a kind of crisis of loss of meeting. One person said we could always just join in silence virtually in that situation, knowing each of us, one at a time, would be somewhere in silent worship.
Yes, it's conceivable, possible, yet the whole experience led me to really value real connection with real people all the more. The back roads outside of Roswell were definitely quiet enough, and my family cooperated with the general idea that staying on a cold lonesome road at night is hard enough without distraction - they were as taken as I was at the utter desolation of Roswell's country roads - but, sorry, nothing replaces a good Quaker meeting.
But I went on a rare trip, about eight hours north to the Oklahoma panhandle, and found myself having to come back on Sunday just as I knew that meeting would start and zoom would only let it start if I were there to start it. So I gave my log on and password to a friend hoping she could click on "Are you the host? If so log in" but it literally did not give her the option. It made me wonder how it knew it wasn't me trying to log in - physically, we are not that far from each other.
When she found out it wasn't going to work, I was driving my family on the back roads near Roswell, and the sun had just gone down. In Roswell, outside of the mountains, you have a few more minutes of sunlight and in fact the sun had been so intense that I had shot past the Roswell exit and that's why I was on the back roads - I had slipped around it, got caught behind the airport, and was on some lonely two-lane that was probably the original southbound road before they built the new highway.
It was so deserted that I had no trouble just trying to use my phone to log on, but that wasn't flying either. I lost a meeting. We just couldn't have it.
I felt so good to get back to meeting this week. It was like I missed it all the more, a kind of crisis of loss of meeting. One person said we could always just join in silence virtually in that situation, knowing each of us, one at a time, would be somewhere in silent worship.
Yes, it's conceivable, possible, yet the whole experience led me to really value real connection with real people all the more. The back roads outside of Roswell were definitely quiet enough, and my family cooperated with the general idea that staying on a cold lonesome road at night is hard enough without distraction - they were as taken as I was at the utter desolation of Roswell's country roads - but, sorry, nothing replaces a good Quaker meeting.
