Thought for the Week: Silent day
Jenny Wallace reflects on a day spent in silence
It was a Saturday in May. There were about fourteen of us. The venue was the old Meeting house at Wandsworth in London. At the end of long, not-very-creaky wooden benches were copies of Quaker faith & practice and the Bible.
The morning started with hot drinks and a chat, then a Meeting for Worship from 10am until 1.30pm, followed by a silent lunch, with Meeting for Worship at 2pm and worship sharing between 2.30pm and 3.30pm. The day finished with tea and another chat.
The long Meeting for Worship was wonderful. There was a very deep silence and no ministry until near the end, when several people spoke very profoundly and helpfully.
All the while, in the silence, I had been tussling with how I try to shut out the past – but it keeps coming to ‘bite’ me: there was my mother’s carpet on the Meeting room floor (albeit a different colour); at the Woodbrooke weekend in April there was the shell from my beloved beach in Cape Town; my phone number has the number of my erstwhile flat – and a quote from Isaiah 48, found in the Deepening the Life of the Spirit book, that so grabbed me:
‘From this time forward
I make you hear new things
Hidden things that you have not known.
They are created now, not long ago;
Before today you have never heard of them,
So that you could not say,
“I already knew them”.’
And another quote from long ago: ‘There is another world, but it is this one’. Someone ministered inter alia on prisons and monks. Their time is not their own. I found myself thinking that prison is, also, past prejudices and misconceptions and that we need to view things anew. The Isaiah quote!
Then we were shaking hands, at half past two, which took me completely by surprise. I was disappointed. I had thought it was to be an hour’s Meeting for Worship after lunch and a half-hour for worship sharing. This does not speak to me as deeply as Meeting for Worship.
I spoke of Westminster Meeting’s Tekels Park silent weekends in the 1980s: silent from supper on Friday to lunch on Sunday, with six Meetings for Worship and Saturday afternoon free. Silent mealtimes were full of laughter and fun as we tried to pass various plates, cutlery and condiments to each other and often got them wrong!
Then someone spoke, as she had never before, of an appalling disaster she had been caught up in. Someone else talked of her dreadful home situation. I thought that I had, maybe, imagined that I had ‘got’ the Isaiah but, boy, I’ve a long way to go!
It was such a worthwhile day. I hope they repeat it. And I do hope that we in our Meeting do the same.
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