The Gift of Presence Is Enough

On the last Sunday of 2024, we gathered for First-day class in the meeting library for worship sharing. After an introduction to the worship-sharing process for visitors and recent attenders, we settled in silence. The query was the following: Do we regard our time, talents, energy, money, material possessions, and other resources as gifts from God to be held in trust and shared according to the Light we are given? There were only a few messages in the hour of sharing, and I sensed that others were as challenged by the query as I was.

I said the query reminded me of Luke 12:48, which I recalled as, “To whom much is given, much will be required,” and that I struggle with feeling that I can never give enough. I know that I’ve been given many advantages: loving parents, a faith community, a good education, a career where I can use my talents, time, retirement, health, and the ability to keep learning with the support of material resources. My ministry among Friends, which is to offer spiritual guidance, is supported by Atlanta (Ga.) Meeting. Meeting regularly with an anchoring committee keeps me from accepting too many requests and becoming overwhelmed. I am getting better at discerning what is mine to do and when I need to say no. I am slowly learning to wait for guidance from Spirit and to share my gifts with the Light I’m given.

As I was leaving the library for meeting for worship, I noticed a friend who sat crying. I stopped and sat with them to listen. They spoke of living hand-to-mouth without money to donate to the meeting and felt that they could not be a member as long as this was true. They were a longtime attender who contributed time and skills on committee work that helped the meeting in many ways. I reassured them that a financial contribution is not a condition of membership and that gifts of time and talent are just as helpful. When they felt ready to leave, we went into meeting for worship.

This interaction along with the responses to the worship sharing query were on my mind when I tried to settle into worship, hoping to let it all go. I resolved to talk to the friend with money concerns later to see what the meeting might do to help, and I realized that their struggle was the same as mine: feeling that we can never do enough. We think we need to give what we do not have and that what we give is not enough. What if we could remember to share according to the Light we are given?

Eventually Issac Penington’s advice “sink down into the seed” helped me settle, and I began simply to feel grateful to be in meeting on this day. I looked around the room at all the Friends gathered and realized how glad I was that we were together. Gradually I felt the silence within me and around me deepen. The words “the gift of your presence is present enough” came clearly to me with the sense that they were spoken by Spirit. Even though I had occasionally seen this phrase on party invitations, I felt that now these words offered a profound, deep reassurance and relief from my struggles.

The gift of my presence reminds me that coming to meeting for worship is a gift I give myself. Just being present, simply showing up, especially when I’m tired and not sure why I’m there, usually leaves me feeling better. Advice from Faith and Practice reminds me to come, whatever state I’m in, and “[l]et meeting for worship nourish your whole life” (Britain Yearly Meeting). My first visit to Atlanta Meeting was in 1979 at the age of 33, and I think about the many ways this meeting has nourished my life for more than 40 years. When I enter the meetingroom and sit in my usual place, I feel at home and safe in my community. The light around us and within everyone gathered grounds me in the present, and I listen to be guided.

And today, I am struck by the realization that being present is a gift I receive and give at the same time. I know that my presence may help someone else, as perhaps it did when I sat and listened to my friend. We have opportunities to be a channel of God’s love and hands.

When we show up for each other and feel held by all those gathered, we are supported by the meeting community through what individuals say or do. The weekly hour of worship embraces us and, I feel, is the experience expressed by the African word ubuntu: “I am who I am because of who we all are.”

The gift we come to meeting for worship seeking is the gift of God’s presence. When I sit in meeting, wondering when or if I’ll ever be able to center, hymns and Bible verses that I memorized growing up in a Baptist church help me settle. The words of the hymn “Spirit of the Living God, Fall Fresh on Me” and the Bible verse where Jesus says, “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the midst of them” (Matthew 18:20, KJV), are among my favorites. I read that this verse was the inspiration for the painting The Presence in the Midst by James Doyle Penrose. In a letter to The Friend in December 1916, Penrose described a visit he made to the historic Jordans Meetinghouse in Buckinghamshire, England, one autumn afternoon:

There seemed to rise before me a picture of the past. The benches were once more filled with those early Friends, the builders of our society. . . . The idea of showing in some way that this was the secret of their power, the close and intimate connection between Christ Himself and the soul of His humble follower wherever he is, took hold of me and I determined to try and paint a picture embodying this idea.

I am grateful that I have experienced meetings when we have been deeply gathered; I feel God’s presence among us, and we are one in the Spirit.

Building the beloved community invites all of us to a Spirit-led process of giving and receiving, of being available and present for each other, and of seeing the Light within everyone. I accept that maybe all I can do is show up and sit with one person in need or attend meeting, and the gift of my presence is present enough.