This Very Faint Light Within Me

The building could define unassuming. White, clapboard, rectalinear, the front doors so utterly lacking in fengshui that they open directly onto that homeliest of all American creations, the parking lot. You see more people arriving on foot than by car, though perhaps that will change in the cold of winter. The few cars that are parked here are at least six years old. This is the Meeting House of the Friends. The Quakers, as they're more commonly known.

About a mile away, the Unitarians are meeting. The Unitarians are a force to be reckoned with here in this liberal university town, and they meet for services in a building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Their dues paying membership numbers in the thousands. Their music is outstanding. Most of the instrumentalists have CDs you can purchase from them. The parking lot is full of Priuses and recumbent bikes. Their message is divine. Well, as divine as you can get without ever mentioning God.

No one mentions God in the Friends' meeting either. In fact, no one mentions anything, unless one is fluent in the intermittent language of a stifled cough, a rheumy throat clearing, the uneasy rumbling of gastric juices that embarrasses the novice sitting in silence in the cushioned pew facing the windows: Me.

I have come here before. In fact, in another city, I came often enough to become almost comfortable with the conspicuous noises of my unfed stomach on a Sunday morning. But that was a more beautiful building, a place where I felt solace when I looked up, a place where I didn't feel boxed in as I do in this inhospitable shelter where there is no seat you can claim that doesn't leave you looking straight into someone else's eyes. I am a curmudgeon of design, I suppose. If I was homeless and sleeping in a cardboard box, I'd probably paint it first.

In a Quaker meeting, one is nothing if not  modest and demure and straightforward. I am better at handling the straightforward than the demure and absolutely wretched at the idea of modesty. An alternate name for this hour of silent meditation might accurately be "The Gathering of Sensible Footwear." I tuck my own platformed sandals inconspicuously under the pew and rearrange my neck scarf so it hangs over some of the sequins on the front of my blouse. This is where Birkenstocks went when they died. Here, socks are ever de rigueur with sandals. This is fashion hell. No one in the room except the woman who I brought with me today has paid more than $45 for a haircut. In fact, most of them are proud to confess that they cut their own.

And I like these simple people so much better than the Unitarians, a congregation where even the men are happy to pay handsomely for handsomeness. There is nothing self-congratulatory in the Meeting House. There is no padding, no frills, no flounces.

Here I am left with no liturgy but that of my own thoughts, and the light filtering through the swaying tree trunks outside the squared windows. There is nothing but myself here; nothing but my thoughts and the stillness of a room full of people who wouldn't see an advantage to wasting time evaluating me or judging me. Most of them sit for the hour with their eyes shut. Only my friend sitting next to me notices when I jerk in surprise, the result of a random imagining of being a brilliant blue butterfly pinned to some lepidopterologist's specimen board. And even she does not seem to notice when I jump at the sight of a heavy black hickory nut ball plummeting to the ground from the high branches of the tree outside the windows we are facing, abrogating the gentle sunshine like a missile, punctuating my flow of thoughts like an oversized black period at the end of an unvoiced sentence. Here, you face your own soulscapes.

Ah. It seems so simple. By the end of the service, I notice my feet have stopped hiding under the pew and are planted quite squarely on the ordinary carpet. The Friends rise to their feet and come over to shake our hands, bid us welcome.

We'll be back next week for their pancakes.