What’s it like to attend Quaker meeting for worship for the first time? We asked 6 Friends what they remember about their first experience.
Resources:
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- Read Friends Journal to see how other Friends describe the substance of Quaker spirituality
Discussion Questions:
- Do you remember your first time at Quaker Meeting? What was the experience like?
- Charlotte Cloyd says, “The first time I went to Quaker Meeting, I didn’t know how to listen, and I sat and was uncomfortable and noticed the silence and was too analytical of what the silence meant for the first time”. What resources can we provide to newcomers so that they understand the silence of our worship and the concept of listening?
Transcript:
Victoria Green: Well, one of the members, JoAnn Seaver, came up to me and, very friendly, started a conversation. And I asked Joanne, “Is it true that for worship, you sit in silence for an hour?” And she said, “Yes, why don’t you come and join us and see how it is?” I told her, “Well I don’t think I can do that. I don’t think I can sit for an hour.” And she said, “Well, just come and do the best you can.” And that’s how I started coming.
My First Time At Quaker Meeting for Worship
Robert Fischer: My first impression of Quaker Meeting was confusion. I could not believe that people really were uniting together in practice not in dogma. It was literally incomprehensible to me, the fact that people believed different things and used different language but could be a community – and such a great community – because they shared the same set of practices, and because they came together in the same space and through that shared worship – that waiting worship – they developed a kind of sense of community and a sense of body, a sense of integration.
Learning to Settle Down
Charlotte Cloyd: The first time I went to Quaker Meeting, I didn’t know how to listen, and I sat and was uncomfortable and noticed the silence and was too analytical of what the silence meant for the first time, and then I kept going, and I didn’t stop going. And then I understood the very beginning of what listening meant. I didn’t really understand what listening was, because I never listened in church before, and then I had to work on the process of figuring out: what am I listening for? Am I listening to myself? What’s going on? What is everyone else listening to and how does that affect the community and me?
Victoria Green: At first it was quite different. It took a while for me to settle down, but then they had hospitality. The people were so friendly and gracious; there’s diversity there, and I just loved it. It was like two worship services in one. The silence, and hospitality is worship too.
Hearing a Message
Joseph Olejak: I just entered in and it was silence, and silence for a long time. And I thought to myself… you know, I heard about Quakers having a quiet meeting but I didn’t really have a sense of what that was in reality until actually sat for an hour in quiet. And there was like one message in that first meeting, and I think it was Elizabeth Grace who actually stood up and said something at that meeting about what was going on in the war in Iraq, and and I thought, wow, these people are serious people. They think about stuff that’s happening right now. And that was my first experience.
Anthony Smith: What impressed me about it was that there were people struggling. Not that they had the answers, but that they had questions and difficult questions that they were wrestling with, and they were trying to do so in a spiritually informed but also very intelligent way.
Scott Holmes: It felt like coming home. I felt like I had been wandering around a long time and had come home. Before I went, I did that thing with the Bible, where you kind of flip through real quick and just kind of peg a passage, and I pegged Micah, “What does the Lord require of thee but to justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with thy God?” And even though I was fairly familiar with the Bible in my tradition of Methodism, I had never run across that one before.
And so the only message given at my first Meeting was that, which became a very important passage for me. And the person who gave it, Cal Geigar, was an important person and was on my clearness committee. Turns out that’s the message he always gives, so it wasn’t like, you know… but it was still pretty cool. And it was coming home to me.
The views expressed in this video are of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views of Friends Journal or its collaborators.
I love reading and taking in the learnings of folks experiencing their first time in a silent Quaker Meeting. Many years ago when I first took my first child, then a toddler of 3, to Meeting I noticed how silent she was, thoughtful, listening. When she got restless she sat on the floor and put her book on the chair..”reading it”. After Meeting I complimented her on her behavior and thanked her for being mindful of others.
She responded with, ” But Mom, Meeting was asleep.” Loved it. Out of the mouths of babes, honesty but respectful of the silence. Warms my heart even now, 40+ years later.
Meeting is always like coming home.
I was taken to my first Quaker meeting in 1990 here in Peterborough, Cambridgeshire (UK) by an American friend staying with me over the summer. It was very strange being silent for an hour but I knew immediately two things; one, like so many others, that I had found my spiritual home and two, that I had probably always been a Quaker without knowing it. And I’m pretty sure there are an awful lot more Quakers “out there” who just don’t know it! I hope “Quakerspeak” finds some more of them. Perhaps someone could say this on one of your videos!
My first experience of silent meeting was when my confirmation class visited a Quaker Meeting as part of our class. We also visited a Catholic monastery and a synagogue-but the Quaker Meeting really resonated with me. Imagine my surprise when I was told (for the first time) that our family had Quaker roots going back to the 1600s. But one of my ancestors got read out of Meeting and that was the end of that.
I did not attend Meeting again until many years later. What struck me about that Meeting was that someone rose to share a message and ended with something along the lines that if other Friends are also led to address this problem. I was amazed that there was not one right answer, but that each of us needed to decide for ourselves. Ironically, I forgot what the message was about, but the idea that we could disagree stuck with me and got me to return.
Noel and Eileen speak my mind. The silence was spiritual in a way I had not understood I had. And the words Friends used indicating their experience were individual, not corporate, words. I realized I would be free to seek in my own way and I discovered my need for reverence. That need was developed and met further, elsewhere, when my wife and I sat in silence with just the one other Friendly couple within perhaps a thousand miles..