A person holding potatoes in cupped hands. Photo: By JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash.
First Light: An anonymous enquirer at a Quaker Meeting
‘I found myself unexpectedly moved.’
It was my first time at a Quaker Meeting.
I had been to religious services before, but usually under circumstances in which the Almighty had been warned that I was coming and had arranged for somebody to explain what was going on. This was different. There was no priest, no altar, no organ, and absolutely no pictures of anyone nailed to anything.
I stood in the doorway for a moment, holding my coat like a man who has entered a bank during a robbery and is waiting for somebody to tell him where to hide. Around thirty people were sitting in a square. Most were older than me – not elderly in the sense of having recently acquired a bus pass, but elderly in the grand, sovereign sense: people who had been elderly since the 1980s and had simply decided to make a career of it.
A woman in a red jumper sat knitting something that was either a scarf or a small goat. One man seemed to be asleep, in such serenity that I suspected this was not his first nap in the presence of God.
I found a chair and sat down. But had I made the wrong choice? The problem was that there was no wrong choice. In an ordinary church, there is a front and a back. This is one of the great comforts of Christianity: if you are a visitor you can sit towards the back, where you can observe the natives and, if necessary, escape. Here there was just a square of chairs, a low table in the middle, a vase of flowers, and several books that looked important.
The man opposite me looked up. He had a beard, a tweed jacket, and the kind of eyebrows that suggested he had spent his life disapproving of governments. I half smiled; he grinned back. Obviously I looked away. Then, because I am constitutionally incapable of behaving naturally when another human being is watching me, I became convinced that I was breathing too loudly. I tried to breathe more quietly, which is considerably more difficult than it sounds.
I began to wonder whether there was a correct way of sitting. There probably wasn’t, but this did not stop me looking around to see how everyone else was doing it. Some people had their eyes closed. Some had their eyes open. One woman was reading. A man with a magnificent moustache appeared to be examining the ceiling.
I concluded that the basic Quaker position was to do whatever you like, provided you don’t make a fuss about it. This struck me as either profound or extremely British.
I had come because I was curious about spiritual things, although I would not have put it quite like that when making conversation in a pub. I’d had some fairly grim experiences with mainstream Christianity, beginning in Sunday school and progressing through a period in which I had briefly attended a church where a man with a wireless microphone explained that my personal relationship with Jesus was inadequate. It was not that I disliked Christianity. I just disliked being told what my relationship with it was.
The Quakers seemed to have a different arrangement. No one had asked me to accept anything. Nobody had handed me a leaflet containing words in a threatening typeface. Nobody had mentioned my eternal soul.
Then someone stood up. In the quiet context, this was startling. I had begun to think that the thirty of us might sit there until lunchtime, at which point somebody would quietly unlock the biscuit cupboard.
The speaker was a small woman in her eighties. She hesitated for a moment but then said: ‘I was thinking about potatoes.’ There followed a long pause in which we all seemed to be holding our breath. Then she spoke again: ‘When I was young, we grew our own.’ She spoke for perhaps three minutes about potatoes. I listened carefully. There was something about potatoes, apparently, that had brought her to reflect on patience, mortality and the tendency of human beings to interfere with things that would be perfectly all right if left alone.
I found myself unexpectedly moved.
When she sat down, it struck me that this was rather different from the usual religious experience. In other churches, if somebody stood up and started talking about potatoes, you would expect an usher to remove them. Here, everyone listened as though potatoes were one of the accepted routes to God.
I began to relax. This was unfortunate, because that was when my stomach joined the Meeting. It was not an enormous noise. Nor was it particularly musical. But in the absolute silence of the Meeting it had the acoustic properties of a rifle shot.
‘Everyone listened as though potatoes were one of the accepted routes to God.’
Thirty heads did not turn. This was worse. The fact that nobody had turned meant that thirty people had successfully demonstrated that they had noticed and had decided, collectively, to spare me the humiliation of acknowledging it. I considered leaving the country. Instead I sat very still and attempted to look like a person whose digestive system had not just issued a public statement.
A few minutes later another Friend stood. He was a tall man in his seventies with a face like a benevolent ice cream salesman. ‘I don’t normally speak,’ he said. Excellent, I thought: a man who doesn’t normally speak. He then spoke for eleven minutes. It was, however, an excellent eleven minutes. He talked about a train journey, a stranger who had helped him carry a suitcase, and the curious fact that we often remember acts of kindness long after we have forgotten the people who performed them. There was no real conclusion, no demand that I agree. He simply sat down. And because I was now dangerously susceptible to this sort of thing, I found myself thinking about all the small acts of kindness I had forgotten to notice.
At the end, we shook hands. The thirty people immediately ceased being a congregation and became, with alarming efficiency, thirty individuals. There was tea. There were biscuits. There was a brief argument about whether the kettle had been switched off.
The woman with the knitting turned out to be called Margaret and had been a Quaker for fifty-three years.
‘Do you knit during the silence?’ I asked.
‘Sometimes,’ she said.
‘Is that allowed?’
She looked genuinely puzzled. ‘I don’t think anyone has ever made a rule about it.’ This seemed to me a remarkably Quaker answer.
The man with the beard introduced himself as Arthur. ‘I saw you looking worried at the beginning,’ he said. ‘You needn’t be.’
‘I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do,’ I said.
‘Nothing’, he said. ‘But that takes some getting used to.’
We sat down with our tea. People asked what had brought me here, and I gave the edited version. I told them I had never quite managed to make Christianity work for me. That I still felt there was something more to life than the ordinary business of getting up, going to work, paying bills and wondering why the internet was behaving strangely. That I didn’t know what I believed.
‘You don’t have to know,’ said Margaret. I waited for the qualification. There wasn’t one. ‘Most of us don’t.’
I looked around. There was nothing remotely impressive about the room. The tea was weak. The biscuits were joyless. Someone’s coat had fallen off a chair. The heating appeared to have been installed during the Crimean war. And yet I felt, rather to my surprise, that I had arrived somewhere. I was still in my own neighbourhood, and the Number 36 bus would shortly be doing its best to destroy any lingering sense of transcendence. But I was somewhere else. A place where nobody seemed particularly interested in whether I had the correct answers. A place where an eighty-year-old could talk about potatoes and people would listen. A place where silence wasn’t something you had to fill. A place where, for an hour, nobody tried to persuade me of anything.
Someone offered me another biscuit. I took it.
‘Will you come again?’ she asked.
It occurred to me that I had spent much of my life looking for a religious community that would tell me what to believe, and then rather more time looking for one that wouldn’t. Perhaps, I thought, the trick was to find one that would simply give you a chair.
‘Yes,’ I said, and she pushed the biscuit tin towards me. This time I knew exactly what I was supposed to do.
Comments
I love this. So honest, peeceptive, refreshing - and funny! Thank you, Anonymous Friend.
Jennifer Kavanagh
Westminster Meeting
By Jenniferdk on 25th September 2026 - 11:49
Thank you for this lovely piece.
By Lucy P on 7th October 2026 - 15:41
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