Meeting for Worship 4.09.11

Reading: The 8th Query
 Are you concerned with the Preparative, Monthly, Quarterly and Yearly Meetings during which the business of our Society is conducted? Are these meetings held in a spirit of worship and dependence upon the guidance of God? Do you take your right share in the service of these meetings, realising they are essential for the support and development of our corporate concerns? Do you carry out discipline, when advisable, in a sensitive and Christian manner?

Notes from today's Preparative meeting:

• Last month's collection for Irish Quaker Faith in Action (IQFA) raised €520. There's a new page over on the Quakers in Ireland site which lists and gives details about the concerns which this group have supported during the last year. Click HERE to take a look.

• Monkstown is taking part in a Tri-Lateral Conversation Group, an initiative launched by canon Patrick Lawrence of Monkstown Church of Ireland. The group encourages dialogue and shared activities between the Catholic, Church of Ireland and Quaker traditions represented in Monkstown. Eleanor, Padraic and Neville are our representatives in this new venture. The group has launched a Wednesday hour of shared silent reflection  - I'll post more details about this when I have them - and are planning an open evening which will be co-hosted between all three locations.
•  On September 25th there will be a hymn celebration in the Church of Ireland, for which Monkstown Meeting have suggested "Dear Lord and Father of Mankind", by the American Quaker and anti-slavery campaigner John Greenleaf-Whittier, (pictured below), which includes the verses:

Dear Lord and Father of mankind,

Forgive our foolish ways;

Reclothe us in our rightful mind,

In purer lives Thy service find,

In deeper reverence, praise.

...

Drop Thy still dews of quietness,

Till all our strivings cease;

Take from our souls the strain and stress,

And let our ordered lives confess

The beauty of Thy peace.

Breathe through the heats of our desire

Thy coolness and Thy balm;

Let sense be dumb, let flesh retire;

Speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire,

O still, small voice of calm.

• Our annual after-meeting produce sale is now up and running and will continue throughout September and into early October, (by which time I might have achieved at least one fully ripened tomato). Monies raised will be donated to the St Vincent de Paul - if you are bringing items, please add a price to them as this will be a great  help to Sue and Ray who are organising this.
• Congratulations to Philip Jacob who has celebrated his 80th birthday, a copy of his recently published  memoirs has now been donated to our library.

Next Week's Reading:
11th: James ch 3 v 13-18
Who is a wise man and endued with knowledge among you? let him shew out of a good conversation his works with meekness of wisdom.
But if ye have bitter envying and strife in your hearts, glory not, and lie not against the truth.
This wisdom descendeth not from above, but is earthly, sensual, devilish.
For where envying and strife is, there is confusion and every evil work.
But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and easy to be intreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy.
And the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace of them that make peace.