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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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.