Artist's mannequin on window sill Photo: JoshSemans/flickr CC
Drawing on Silence
Stephen Yeo explores the nature of Quaker worship
Silence is the best known bit of the Quaker brand other than Peace. In this prepared ministry, I will reflect on three things: silence in general, the Quaker silence, and my own experience of the latter.
Silence is powerful as a presence rather than an absence. One way of understanding silence is as a frame for everything. As conscious, noisy beings we come from it and go into it. We appreciate noise through silence, rather than silence through noise. It is to be celebrated, rather than endured. It can be very still, and it can move. It is a source of artistic, lyrical delight. Music enters silence and plays on it in rhythmic patterns. A poem sits on the page, with that blank, right-hand margin, interrupted by the most important word in any line of poetry, the last one.
The Quaker silence is made in company rather than alone. It is, at best, much more than the sum of its parts. It frames a great deal of what Friends do: eating, making business decisions, managing a library, worshipping… The quality of the Quaker silence varies enormously; coming out of a Meeting in which nothing has been said, Friends discuss whether the silence has been generative or dull. When spoken ministry happens, there is, again at best, a shared sense that it is drawing from the silence rather than being dumped into it. Prepared sermons are not the thing, or even those 3am insights, which each of us think are profoundly original, until breakfast. Growing the silence rather than breaking it, speaking or not speaking because of it, is a great (divine?) skill.
My experience of the Quaker silence changes every week. But I do have a sense of anticipation in Meeting, even of theatre. What is going to happen next? Besides, the phrase ‘nothing happened’ or, in the present tense, ‘nothing happens’ is worth thinking about for at least a week! Meetings are made up of surprises, which is why I have heard outsiders accustomed to other liturgies wonder how we tolerate the arbitrary nature of interruptions to our silence. (And yes, ours is a liturgy.)
Anything can be said by anybody in hour-long, self-governing, republics; and there are off-stage noises, blind-dogs drinking, birds singing, compulsive twitching, chairs creaking, coughs and sneezes. Hypnotic. I think that that is what the Quaker silence continues to teach me, in a society based on hierarchies, or secular priesthoods of measurement and knowledge. Human difference is wonderful. The most seemingly irrelevant,, ‘off the wall’ ministry stays with me the longest and, when I am wise enough to let it in, it speaks to my condition directly. The light shines best in dark places. ‘The other’ is very hard to get to know and to love, in me as well as in others. It may be important for the continuation of human life as we know it, to recognise that ‘the other is ourselves’. The darkness and the light are more evenly distributed than the Western, post-enlightenment eye likes to recognise. There is that of God in every person.
This was first given as a ‘six-minute ministry’ at Somerville College, Oxford, chapel.
