Many Quaker Meetings have a tradition of sharing “After Thoughts” at the close of Silent Worship, and Reno Friends is one of those Meetings. After Thoughts (also called After Words) are messages that people did not feel led to speak during the Silence but that they still want to share.
Every so often we get a call at Reno Friends Meeting from someone wondering if the Quakers are Mennonites or perhaps part of the Amish faith. I used to find these questions amusing, as if people thought we drove buggies, dressed in simple clothes, or wore colonial-style hats, like the guy on the Quaker Oats box. But it turns out the question is not that silly.
Sometimes I wonder what Christmas would be like if we got rid of presents.
We would have more time to sing carols and deck the halls with boughs of holly. Instead of spending Christmas Eve madly wrapping our gifts, we could gather around a wassail bowl with close friends and family and swap memories and aspirations. We would have time to step out under a starlit sky and imagine angels appearing to the shepherds as they tended their flocks. We could edge closer to the stillness that abides in the dark cold of midwinter, and take time to appreciate the warmth of the candlelight when we come inside.
Spiritual experiences can come in many forms. They don’t have to be sudden and spectacular upheavals; they can also be small lessons based on an everyday experience or a thought or statement which may be mindfully contemplated. The latter may be what some call the educational variety of spiritual experiences since they come in small bits over time. What may be challenging is recognizing spiritual experiences and growing in their understanding when they occur – or just being open to them.
The first time people attend a Quaker Meeting, they often find Silent Worship mystifying. It looks like nothing is happening: there is no minister guiding the worship, no liturgy lending structure, no music filling the soul. In short, there’s no apparent reason why everyone has gathered. There are just Friends, each head down in his or her own private silence.
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. ~ AA Serenity Prayer
In a blog a few months ago, I made the Case for Silence in a Quaker Meeting. Today I want to make the Case for Words.
When Quakers worship, the silence inside the Meeting House occasionally is broken by someone who rises to share a message they feel moved to say. These messages are usually simple, and most have a universal element, since messages should be shared only if they offer something to others. So, yes, we Quakers worship in silence, but we also listen – to God, to each other, to our own hearts – and share that with the community around us.
Few people love a meeting, but most organizations hold meetings because they have essential business to accomplish. Quaker Meetings are no different: once a month, most Quaker Meetings hold what is formally known as “Meeting for Worship with Attention to Business.” To be honest, a Quaker Meeting for Business is unlike most meetings I’ve had to attend in my life, either for work or with community organizations. And the key to the difference is in the formal name.
There is something about the stillness of midwinter that soothes the soul. Much of the natural world sleeps. Though the wind still blows and birds hop about searching for seeds, for the most part the cold and dark confer a deep, healing silence.
Many of us who attend Quaker Meeting on Sundays are drawn by the opportunity to sit in communal silence for an hour. The Quaker silence started, in part, as a reaction to church services of the seventeenth century, which were filled with ritual and liturgy. Early Quakers believed, instead, that each person must come to her or his own understanding and experience of God. The silence is a chance to listen for God – the stillness enables us to quiet the busyness of our brains and discern what God might want us to hear. It requires waiting.
January, the season of resolutions, is always a time when I vow to do better with my Gratitude Practice. I usually start out strong, listing three things every day that I am grateful for, but – inevitably – sometime in the cold, dark days of February when it looks like winter will never end, I give it up. I’m not sure why. But I found a clue the other day: a note to myself that I should write a blog about the dark side of gratitude. And that was all it said; I had no idea what I had meant when I made that note months earlier.