Muting for worship, a Shakespearean sonnet from the pandemic

A poem by Glenn Oldham

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought,
By host assigned, I join the breakout room;
My sighs and teacup’s clinks make others fraught,
If I neglect to mute myself on Zoom.

But muted, I can blithely cough and yawn,
And call the cat to purr upon my lap;
Such sounds are not to others’ speakers borne;
My snores aren’t heard if I should chance to nap.
Yet though that assured silence is thus freeing,
We seek a larger, deeper, vital one;
A silence more than that from just there being
A red line through each microphone icon.
Seek to be here and now, and, in time, find
A spacious calm beneath the chatt’ring mind.

Glenn’s notes
Line 1: ‘When to the sessions of sweet silent thought’. This is, of course, the first line of Shakespeare’s sonnet 30. Sessions of silence made me think of Meeting for Worship and gave me the idea of a sonnet with affectionate humour about Zoom. (Affectionate because Zoom meetings of all sorts have done much to keep me sane over the last two years.) A session of thought is not, however, how I see MfW. I’m attracted to Geoffrey Hubbard’s view: ‘One approaches, by efforts which call for the deepest resources of one’s being, to the condition of true silence; not just of sitting still, not just of not speaking, but of a wide awake, fully aware non-thinking’ (Quaker faith & practice 26.12).

Line 6: ‘And call the cat’. This is artistic licence since, in reality, I don’t have a cat. Dogs have been attending Meetings for Worship for many years. Cats, however, have preferred to wait for Zoom. I welcome them. (Cats are mentioned in Quaker faith & practice (21.24) as are dogs (22.62)).

Line 7: ‘others’ speakers’. That is, the (loud)speakers and other audio outputs of devices in use by other people attending the meeting by Zoom, not ‘other speakers’.

Line 8: ‘...if I should chance to nap.’ No artistic licence needed here, sadly.

Line 10: ‘a… vital one’. Vital in the sense of lively, alive, as in Rufus Jones’ delightful expression, ‘vitalised hush’.

Lines 13 &14: ‘Seek’. Lovers of Shakespeare’s sonnets will know how they build to a climax of two profound last lines. I decided to end the sonnet seriously, not frivolously. All I need to do, I thought, is to distil several hundred years of Quaker wisdom into two revelatory, life changing lines. As you can see, my distillation left out far too much. It doesn’t do justice to the variety of approaches to Quaker Meeting for Worship or its gathered, group nature. Chapter two of Quaker faith & practice has, of course, much of relevance to this, particularly from 2.41 to 2.54. My closing couplet, born from mindfulness practice, has affinities with 2.49, 2.53, and 2.54. as well as with Hubbard’s approach (which seems to have been very mindful years before mindfulness became well known).

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Comments

A wonderfully inventive poem, thanks. Robert Kyte

By Robert K on 21st May 2022 - 17:49

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