Quaker Meeting

February 26, 2006

It is a well kept secret, but Emily and I have been going to the Quaker meeting in Decatur most Sundays.. at least when we are in Atlanta. The meeting starts at 10 am and lasts an hour, although a battery of introductions and announcements can extend that time by about 15 minutes.

I have taken pictures of the outside of the building.. one of which I have posted below.. but I naturally do not take pictures inside during meeting. So despite the ever changing light sweeping into the hexagonal worship hall, and the seasonally varied views just out the large windows.. views containing a pleasing mix of natural and industrial elements.. the meeting remains off limits to photography. It is one of those curious public events that, by reason of unwritten social codes, admit of no visual representation.

Inside the meeting hall is a circle of chairs. Or, more accurately, there are eight distinct sections of chairs that face an empty center. Four of those sections are padded new chairs, and the other four are wooden benches saved from the first place of meeting.. which I think was at some school or other back in the 60s. In the center is always a colorful arrangement of flowers, sitting in a bowl upon a small wooden stand that is given a Zen meditative cast by unevenly cut angles.

Meditation, variously defined, is the goal of the meeting. There is no music and no sermon, just a long silence that continues until someone stands up to deliver a message from their heart, and then the silence reigns again. I generally look out the windows and think about life, watching the occasional jogger make his or her way down the concrete sidewalk or looking at the empty branches of winter and thinking about how seasons change just like life. The past two years have brought some dramatic examples of the way life can change from one week to the next. I guess it is fortuitous that, in the academic calendar, fellowship and job information come just as one starts looking for signs of coming spring.

Others are more spiritual about this experience, I know. They sit with head bowed and eyes closed.. and gently smile or nod as someone delivers a message. Some of the literature speaks in terms of interior doors that the Quaker should seek to pass through during the silence.. Emily knows more about this than me. Today one Quaker stood up to give a message about spiritual health: just as physical health is not about simply feeling good, but about enabling one to act and do things in the world, so spiritual health is not about feeling good, but about enabling one to do spiritual work in the world. By this analogy, Quaker meeting is something like a gym: a place to exercise spiritual muscles.

This kind of spiritual talk has come to mean less and less to me.. and although I do cherish a time of silence, I enjoy meetings in which a number of people speak up. I like the way, from a distance, characters and people start to develop in my imagination. There are lots of people in meeting to whom we have never spoken, but who are living characters.. with nicknames.. in our minds. I am always fascinated at the way meetings tend toward a narrative. Once one person speaks, there is an unspoken cognitive pull to build a line of thought and to find connections. In a more traditional church setting this might occur as one listens to disparate lectionary readings, and to find hidden connections. But in Quaker meeting such narrative construction is entirely built from spontaneous personal responses.. and it is amazing how often a strong theme develops.