What Happens in a Quaker Meeting? Part 1: Worship

I was at a party a few weeks back, with most of my closest friends in the world. In the middle of the laughter and bad puns and off-key theme songs from 70’s TV shows, Jonathan asked me that question.

“Nothing!” broke in my friend Laura, grinning at us across the room. And there was a wave of friendly laughter.

“Not nothing!” I countered. “Definitely not nothing.” And I paused to collect myself, and then launched myself into an answer that was more serious than the setting really allowed, but less thorough than the question really demands.

So, for Jonathan and for the world, here’s my real answer. This is not what I said amid the popcorn and the porter; it is what I would have said if we had all the time in the world, to anyone who really, really, wanted to know.

When I arrive at the meeting house, I stamp the snow off my feet, hang up my coat, and fetch my name tag from the rack where they are kept. Sometimes, Peter gets my name tag for me, at the same time he gets his own.

And all the while, my mood is getting happier, and I am feeling quieter and somehow shyer. At the same time, if I see a Friend I know well, we may hug quietly for a long time. I feel deeply glad to be with them again.

Or maybe there’s nobody I’m on a “hugging” friendship with there when I walk in. That’s OK, too… either way, there’s a big bubble of both quiet and excitement growing in me every minute.

At last, I move toward the meeting room, through the lobby. At our meeting, the greeter is always someone from Care and Counsel. I think that’s great, because, after all, these are the people you want the members to feel comfortable turning to with anything painful or difficult they need the help of meeting to deal with. And, once you have taken someone’s hand enough times as you enter worship, you can feel a wonderful connection and openness to that person rising up in you at the sight of them standing by the door.

Of course, for a long time, I did not know these Friends by name. But I could always feel the love and tenderness flowing from the palm of their hands into mine when they would shake my hand at the door. Is it because of the years of practicing Witchcraft that I can feel in a way that is clearer than words the heart of a person through the touch of their hands? Or is it more to do with Quaker skinlessness? I don’t know.

Sometimes the touch of palm to palm is as powerful a touch as I could bear, and sometimes it bubbles gracefully into more hugging. Either way, I am generally feeling an almost physical sensation of softening in my heart by this time, and the first deep wellings of joy.

As I enter the meeting room, if those who are already there are already centered down in worship, there is a feeling, as palpable as the softness of cotton wool that meets me at the threshold.

I try not to make an outward show of it, but I generally pause, at least for a heartbeat, and try to greet inwardly the Spirit that is there. There’s a tangible Something that waits in the gathering meeting room; it’s like the feeling of a hand resting on my shoulder or like the feeling at the end of a really good Pagan ritual–the warmth of candlelight and kinship and the nearness of the gods–but it’s also different.

I understand that that Spirit is always present. I am not always open to it, but it is always there. Sometimes I wonder at myself, letting myself go so long thirsty when that Water is never gone; mostly I am just grateful that something about a gathered meeting for worship reminds me to rediscover it week after week after week.

Now I cross the meeting to my bench.

If it were up to me, I would sit where the full light of the sun could shine on me. I don’t care if sometimes it is uncomfortably hot or that the glare is sometimes blinding–I like the light shining on my face! The Light is not only the sun, of course, and I know, intellectually, that it is as available to me on cloudy days or at midnight as it is on a brilliant winter morning. But I learned long ago, as a Wiccan, that our Younger Minds can be helped a good deal by symbols and associated images and physical experiences. And for me, well, the experience of the Light is in large part about light–brilliant, overwhelming, soul-flooding Light. To bask in the light of the sun is an outward experience that so suggests the inward reality that morning light alone can take me halfway into worship.

But Peter does not tolerate brilliant light very well, so we compromise. Whenever possible, we sit at the very back bench, facing the double doors into meeting.

This is another physical representation of the experience of worship for me. As a Wiccan, my worship took place in a circle, with the members of my coven seated all around me. And at my meeting, the benches are arranged in a big octagon–as close to a circle as a shape made by benches can efficiently create in a four-sided chamber. By sitting in back, I’m not declaring myself to be a “back-bencher” (Quakerese for a do-nothing Friend who contributes as little as possible) but rather, I am positioning myself where I can, in my imagination, stretch my hands wide and embrace the whole meeting within the circle of my arms. (This is particularly helpful when I am holding meeting–the term our meeting uses for the Friend whose turn it is, not just to signal the rise of meeting by shaking hands, but also to monitor and hold in prayer the meeting as a whole.)

Sometimes, as I sit down and begin to center down in worship, I will take Peter’s hand.

Of all the many things I am grateful for in this lifetime, Peter’s love is the most wonderful. So, when I take up Peter’s hand, I am, in a sense, giving a physical thanksgiving for what I am most deeply grateful for in this world.

Gratitude is a very good gateway to worship.

But also, sometimes, I just crave the reassurance that there is someone with me I am close to, not just in a spiritual community way, but in a very everyday, mundane, take-out-the-trash and do-the-dishes kind of a way. Worship is a very intimate and skinless kind of experience for me. I like knowing that Peter, who saves me from crawling spiders in my tent when we go camping, and who brings me hot and sour soup when I am sick, is beside me and will care for me if I need care.

I like knowing, too, amid all this upwelling of intimacy and care, that there is one person who will never feel my taking his hand as an intrusion or a distraction. I will never be an unwelcome demand to this man, and that knowledge helps my armor to drop away just a bit more.

For, though I try to prevent it–with greater success as time passes–the armor of cynicism and feigned indifference and judgmentalism crusts onto me during the week. I need meeting for worship to strip it away–it gets harder and harder for God (or my fellow man) to reach me, if I go too long between meetings.

So. There I am, on the bench. I take a breath, perhaps square myself into a comfortable but centered position on the bench.

And I open.

Sometimes, no effort at all is required; I’m just there–in the Light. And it feels like being a little, little girl, holding up my arms and being swung into the air by my daddy, the tallest, best man in the world.

Sort of. That’s not quite it.

Nor is it quite like it was to learn to float–again, with my father, who would hold his arms under me (warm and strong in the cold of the pool) and tell me to lean back… a little more… just lean back… trust… float… and his arms would slide away but I still knew they were right there to catch me if I needed them. And I could float.

But it’s sort of like that.

Often there will be waves of that feeling before I start settling back into myself again.

When I do, I try to let my mind float, like a cork, in whatever direction it feels like all that Light is nudging me. Or, if I’m back to feeling the holes in my socks and being distracted by worries about the grading that is waiting for me back at my house after meeting, I just look around.

There are my Friends.

I let my attention be drawn to them, one by one. I am not usually systematic about this. It’s a soft focus, attention-wandering sort of thing. But I find myself seeing each Friend in turn–really seeing them, sensing who they are, maybe remembering some story they told that caught my compassion or my attention, or some ministry they gave that moved me once. Sometimes I am just quietly grateful for the Light I can see so clearly shining from the faces of some of our older Friends. Sometimes I notice which benches are empty of their usual members, and my heart reaches out for them, like a hand.

There was an exercise we used to do, in Stepchild Coven and, before that, in COW up in Vermont, to strengthen our group wraith–our spiritual interconnectedness. We would all breathe deeply and rhythmically, and let ourselves deepen into a half-trance. Then we would speak the names of each member of the coven in turn, and as each name was spoken, each of us would try to touch the deep sense of that person within us. We’d try to hold the sense of them in our centers the way you’d hold a flower in your hand. And as each individual in the coven came to have a sense of the person who had been named that was as real as a touch on the arm, they too would speak that person’s name. One by one, until all of us held each of us.

Watching members walk into meeting for worship is often like that to me. And when a person I have missed and reached out for walks into meeting, my heart leaps up in me, with such happiness to know that they are there.

There are Friends I don’t suppose I have spoken more than a dozen words to over the years that I feel this way about. I am as happy and excited to see them as I was when I was a child and I woke up on Christmas morning to know the presents were downstairs waiting.

By the time the room is full, I may be continuing to feel the simple joy of the Light filling me up–in which case, I’m probably leaking into my hanky, and trying not to snuffle–or I’m on my way down again, into a more prosaic, thinking-thoughts kind of a space.

There are a lot of techniques Pagans use to alter consciousness. And I have very little doubt that having worked with those techniques over the course of years is what allowed me, when I became a Quaker, to “hear” the silence and to commune with the Light of Friends. Different techniques I learned and later taught are similar to Quaker waiting worship. But Quaker worship isn’t the same (I think) as any Pagan technique–in fact, I try hard not to treat worship as a “technique” at all, though I use plenty of different tricks to get my mind to pause, center, and let go of its willful and hurried pursuit of my own goals and ends for at least a little while.

Scrying is like what I do when I worship, in the long holding of an openness (and sometimes of a specific question) in my mind. It’s also similar in that, having learned to experience the divine in imagery as a Pagan, I often receive messages from God in Quaker meeting in the form of imagery–and sometimes physical sensation.

But scrying is a technique, and, after the first few weeks of worship, I began to try quite deliberately not to technique myself into worship. In magick, as a Pagan, I learned to sense the living substance of the Holy that permeates the universe, in the course of reaching out to shape it myself.

As a Quaker, I attempt to sense that substance without imposing my own forms or plans on it, and to wait and see what it holds for me on any given day.

And I wait–on the Light and in the Light. And sometimes images rise, and sometimes memories. And sometimes I am just thinking-thinking-thinking and I have to stop and push that aside and begin again. And again. And again.

And then, sometimes, Spirit will pull me in deeper. And sometimes a message will rise.