Whether we come up the stairs from below or enter from the street level, all of us here at the Westerly Friends meetinghouse enter our sanctuary through the middle aisle. The pews are arranged to face each other and the empty space in the middle.
We walk through it to our chosen seats, and when the silence takes over there is what I think of as the possibility of middle ground.
Metaphorically speaking, middle ground is a gracious, spacious place we can tend in silence, the place where differences are allowed to be side by side, where intuitions and invitations to serve float up, where rest can be found and where permission to simply be as we truly are can be experienced.
We have an actual middle ground in our sanctuary in which we walk and talk and we don’t think much about it, other than that it is useful. But should we, from our place in one of the pews, begin to feel the blazing inner middle ground that already exists inside each of us, we might realize how eternal permission and inclusion is the center of sanctuary.
Many times I have sat in my preferred corner and thought I was in a penance pew (those wooden Quaker seats are not luxurious) because I could not relinquish my preferred point of view and relax into the gift of middle ground; i.e., that of God in me.
Now I always feel like bowing when I enter our shared place of worship. From whatever place we sit we are facing into the possibilities of middle ground. This shared, sacred space can be an icon for what is asked of each of us—to open, to live with gusto expressing that of God within us as best we can.