This weekend we attended both Messy Church organized at St. Dunstan’s in Scarborough, and Worship at Toronto Monthly Meeting. It was a nice mix of things. I was prompted to reflect on a bunch of things.
There are lots of “just show up” communities. They are small and quiet places where all you need to do is arrive with a smile, and you’ll be welcomed in. These are not big flashy enterprises with tonnes of advertising. You wouldn’t notice them unless you went looking. In the hyper-connected contemporary internet world, it is easy to overlook an event which only advertises itself on a LED sign out front of the venue.
However, I think that these are some of the most wonderful events in my life. It is great to see a bunch of people who all live near by, and to meet the people that I’ve seen for ages on my walks to-and-from work. We immediately hit it off and felt the local community grow a couple stitches tighter.
The Messy Church event was absolutely wonderful. We showed up, immediately set Mira to a craft with the youth leader, Alex, and then helped set up chairs and tables. The organizers of the event were a bit surprised to see two new comers immediately roll up their sleeves and start helping. But, that’s the way we do community — we help setup.
I think it would be really neat if there was a secular equivalent of Messy Church. A place to gather an inter-generational group together for songs, soup, and stories1. You get a bit of this sort of gathering from public libraries, but they tend to have narrowly defined age-ranges for their events and there isn’t much food.
There is a real magic to getting people together for these three things, and I don’t think there are many secular structures which provide them. Of course, I would love to be proven wrong about this matter.
Toronto Monthly Meeting is experimenting with running a pre-Worship program to help people get “hearts and minds prepared”. Today, the program was walking meditation. A bunch of Quakers wandered around Taddle Creek Park, with a couple young kids running around amongst us.
As I was walking, I started kicking some leaves ahead of me. Another worshipful walker came up and said: “You’re playing my favourite song.”
Wonderful.
As we were worshipfully walking, our guide encouraged us to look at the world around us as a message, or a metaphor, for our inner lives. I noticed a dog digging around in a pile of leaves, trying to sniff something out. This got me wondering: What am I sniffing out? What do I smell?
The less secular version would be songs, soup, and silence. ↩︎
Published: Nov 17, 2024
Last Modified: Nov 17, 2024
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