Why do Quakers sit in silence (stillness) in meeting?
I read that I was supposed to make ‘a place for inward retirement and waiting upon God’ in my daily life, as the Queries in those days expressed it… At last I began to realise, first that I needed some kind of inner peace … and then that these apparently stuffy old Friends were really talking sense. If I studied what they were trying to tell me, I might possibly find that the ‘place of inward retirement’ was not a place I had to go to, it was there all the time.
Elfrida Vipont Foulds, 1983 Quaker faith & practice 2.21 (part of)
I’m not good at stillness as I fidget. I’m not good at silence as I speak too often. I don’t know how to interpret ‘worship’ because I don’t have a belief in God. We come together in silence because we don’t need to be talking to each other all the time. Importantly, we are seeking to understand our own spirituality. I would like to try to explain what happens to me and how I try to handle the silence. This isn’t easy and each meeting is different, but this describes something of what happens.
I often bring myself into the silence through visual imagery – Ellingham Mill and the river, or the high Pyrenees are examples. On sitting down in the meeting I often read passages from Quaker faith & practice, probably in Chapter 26: Reflections or Chapter 28: Sharing the Quaker experience. By doing that I am likely to find something to latch on to, to think about. (Some Quakers don’t believe that thinking has any part in the silence, but I have never managed without it.)
Spoken Ministry is not confined to a few ‘chosen members’ but is open to all those present. Once a sentence or thought has arranged itself in my mind I try to see the spiritual meaning and how that applies to me and the present day world. I may see something that may be spoken aloud to the meeting in ministry.
I think around it working out how I might say what is in my mind. This is changed and mulled over as I try to deepen my thinking on the issue. I wait and wait. Often it goes unspoken because the urge is not strong enough and it doesn’t seem the right time. If I do stand and speak, what I say comes from deep down and is rarely expressed in the way I thought it might be.
In the nearly 30 years that I have been among Quakers I have learned much about myself and my understanding of what is spiritual during the silence. Many Friends rarely speak during meeting but everyone in the meeting is contributing to the silence. When I first joined Quakers a Friend described the connection between the members sitting there as a spiderweb; each thread connecting us to the spiritual centre and to each other. Sitting in silence on your own is not the same experience. On rare occasions the meeting is completely silent, and extremely deep, and we all experience something that is very difficult to explain to ourselves or others. That is, in my view, a spiritual experience.
This description is what happens sometimes but not always. It may be the Advices and Queries reading that sparks a thought; or another Friend speaks and what is said speaks to me. One thing is certain; no two meetings will ever be the same. That is the great joy and excitement of a Quaker Meeting for Worship. I should give a warning here. I have found that in some meetings I cannot settle and that I come away disappointed. So don’t expect meetings to always be mind-blowing.
Mike Price - Beccles Quaker Meeting