Quaker Silence Offers Healing

This excerpt from the issue of Liturgy on “Liturgy in Rural Settings” is a continuation of Peterson Toscano’s writing in the previous blog (see October 20) of his experience finding respite with the Quakers as a Christian who is gay. He found acceptance and worship with the Friends in Central Pennsylvania.

One Friend reminded me that I should not confuse people when it comes to our worship. Quiet worship is not the same as silent worship. We are not placed into a sensory deprivation tank. We may often be wordless and without the pageantry of some churches’ liturgies, but we experience our own auditory and visual accompaniment to our seeking after God. 

 This past summer on a Sunday morning, or First Day as Quakers call it (a tradition that sprung from rejecting the non-Christian names of the week drawn from mythology), I took time to attentively observe what was happening in the midst of the quiet. This is a small sample of what I experienced: After ten minutes of quiet worship, all the children present got up, herded by two adults out of the room in a sudden flurry of active, whispering, playful energy. Things quieted down, but then all sorts of sounds emerged. I heard tree frogs and cicada, like the earth breathing in long slow breaths, rising to a crescendo, and then falling again. The clock ticked relentlessly, seeming to fill the space and getting louder as we grew more quiet. (A Friend has since told me that they had forgotten to wind it once and some people were distracted by its absence.) I heard a distant lawn mower, the clip-clop of horse and buggy, the whoosh of automobiles passing at the rate of one or three per minute. The wooden benches creaked. Friends turned pages and coughed. 

Visually the space looked the same as always, altered mostly by who was present or absent. Doors to the outside were open. Natural light came in through the open doors and the glass panes. A cemetery rises on a hill behind our pacifist meeting house, and I saw American flags on nearly one-third of the graves, a testimony to veterans of wars dating back to the American Revolution. The deciduous trees outside the windows filtered in greenish light. 

 As in the liturgical church traditions that change the colors of the vestments and altar for the corresponding seasons, in our small Quaker meeting house we experience a multitude of alterations to our worship environment as the leaves change color, drop off, and are covered in snow. The gas heater produces heat and noise and an acrid odor in the winter season. The spring birds return and the doors soon open once again. We Friends sit quietly looking inward as an active natural world transforms all around us. 

 While an outsider observing Quaker worship may wonder if anything is happening, action arises out of the contemplation. The experience of inward focus of Quaker worship for me and many other Friends does not lead us to separate from the world. Rather, I find that this corporate quiet, punctuated with Friends’ sharing their concerns, compels many of us to engage in passions outside of the meeting.

The full essay is available in Liturgy 32, no. 4 available by personal subscription and through many libraries.

Peterson Toscano is a theatrical performance activist exploring issues of sexuality, faith, and climate change. See his work at https://petersontoscano.com and https://climatestew.com/.
 
Peterson Toscano, “Quaker Liturgy in a Rural Context,” Liturgy 32, no. 4 (2017): 20-24.