Meeting in Swarthmoor

Rex Ambler writes about experiencing a two-hour Meeting for Worship

For the last two or three years I have been attending a two-hour Meeting for Worship at Swarthmoor Hall in Cumbria. It is held on the last Thursday of the month, from 11am to 1pm, followed by a lunch of soup and bread. It was initiated by Jane Pearson, the present manager of the Hall, and Lee Fitton, a local Friend and active supporter of the Hall. Their intention, as Jane explained to me, was to make a spiritual connection with the very first Quakers who had met there. There was already a well-established historical connection.

People who visit the Hall now can get a guided tour that brings its history to life: how George Fox came there in 1652 at the end of his great journey in the North, how Margaret Fell welcomed him and was indeed convinced by his message, how she and her husband Thomas made the Hall a safe haven and base for the early Quaker mission, and how Margaret and George later married and lived there, though for George only occasionally. But what was the faith and vision that motivated them? How did they get access to that deep source of insight within them they talked about so much? What happened in those Meetings when they gathered in silence?

The ultimate source

This last question particularly interested Jane and Lee. They knew that the first Friends gathered there for worship, in silence, and that worship often lasted two or three hours. What was going on that they needed so much time to see it through? Perhaps they were undergoing an experience that could be important for us today. Perhaps the very act of our sitting there in the very same place, doing the same thing (as far as we can understand that) could enable us to make a new connection, not only with those events of many years ago, but also with ‘that of God’ within ourselves, which is our ultimate source of light and life.

That is also what drew me to these Meetings for a rigorous two-hour period of worship. I had already experimented with longer periods of worship, or rather of meditation, since I was doing this alone, and I had found new possibilities opening up. The time was important. After an hour of sitting in silence, while paying full attention to what was happening inside, I found my mind becoming clear and my heart more open. I was able, for example, to deal with some difficult personal issues in my life when I gave them all the time they needed, sometimes picking up a theme on another day and taking it further. But here with other people it was different. I was more aware of the issues that concern all of us. In Swarthmoor Hall it was different again, because I was aware (from my studies) of what the Friends who first met here said about the Meeting: about the need for silence, the presence of ‘the Light within’ and the leadings of God.

Continuity

It made a difference that it was in the very same room, though I don’t think I can describe that feeling or begin to explain it. Others have said the same thing. Knowing that George Fox and his friends met on this piece of earth, within these four walls, enables us to feel the continuity through time in our bodies. There has been some discussion, it is true, about where exactly they did meet, but I feel confident that it was the large dining room we now refer to as the Great Hall. We know they met regularly somewhere in the Hall because we have a record of Thomas Fell saying so.

Some days after Fox’s first visit Friends who were convinced by his message – Margaret Fell and others on the estate – were talking among themselves about where they might meet regularly. Thomas Fell overheard them – he was sympathetic, but was not convinced himself – and said to them: ‘You may meet here if you will.’ ‘Then notice was given that day and the next,’ Margaret wrote later, ‘and there was a good large Meeting on First Day, which was the first Meeting at Swarthmoor, and so continued there a Meeting from 1652 till 1690’.

But how do we know that it was in the dining room? We don’t have firm evidence, but we have a tradition, recorded within a hundred years of the event, that Thomas Fell ‘though he himself did not come there [in the large room] yet when a Meeting was kept, he used to sit in a chair so near to it, that though he could not be seen of everybody, yet he could hear what was preached’. That chair has to be in the small room attached to the dining room we can see today, which would almost certainly have been Thomas Fell’s study.

This was also the place Friends like James Nayler, William Dewsbury and many others met when they came to plan a mission to the rest of England. These were ‘the valiant sixty’, and it was here they discerned how they were to communicate the new message, who was to go where and who to support whom. And this is where they came to seek refreshment when they were exhausted from their travels or, indeed, from persecution.

All this came to mind when I sat there a couple of weeks ago. I had been travelling myself, most recently in America, communicating the Quaker message as I now understood it, but I needed inspiration. I was confused about what precisely I should be doing next. There had been many changes in my life, big losses and new opportunities, and I was not sure what to do. Was I to go on travelling, for example, or to sit at home and write?

As I sat in the silence – no one spoke in the first hour – I became aware of how those first Friends, sitting there, had to work things out from scratch. Nothing was set. Everything had to be discerned there and then on what to do, or at least, what first steps were to be taken. So I allowed myself to come fully into the present moment, the present experience of life. What was really happening to me and to those around me?

The great mystery

All sorts of things occurred to me in that first hour – my present commitments, state of health, relationships with friends – but in the second hour they dropped away. I became more fully aware of myself, now moving towards the end of a long life, in the presence of the great mystery of life itself, as full of wonder and delight as I had known as a child. My sense of myself, and my world, reduced to this childlike simplicity. It became clear to me that I was to make decisions about my life with that sense of myself, and the world, in mind. That is, I was to act in response to the felt needs of those around me, here and now. What, more specifically, I should do would become clear later.

When the two hours were over I shared something of this with the others – we talked quite spontaneously about what this experience had meant and why it was important to us. Everyone agreed that after an hour things begin to get clear, feelings are better focused, life becomes simpler. I suggested that our bodies might play a part in this. Perhaps it takes time, a precise time of two hours, to relax sufficiently that we can give attention to what concerns us most deeply?

Further information: There will be a two-hour Meeting for Worship at Swarthmoor Hall on 26 January. Friends can walk from Ulverston train station along the very path that George Fox and Margaret Fell must have walked and can stay overnight at Swarthmoor Hall.

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