Quiet as a Gateway
Spirit and Place – Nourish
Indianapolis First Friends Quaker Meeting
Pastor Bob Henry
November 11, 2023
Good afternoon, Friends and welcome to Light Reflections. This morning at the Meetinghouse we are having a guest speaker, so I have decided to share the talk I gave at the Spirit and Place Event on Saturday.
When Christy Tidwell from the Senior Academy at IUPUI first came to my office to share the idea of this Spirit and Place event, she said something that I have quoted often since. She said, “Quakers are kind of on the cutting edge of silence.” I had never heard anyone put it that way, but it is true. At least that has been my experience.
A few years ago, I began describing myself as a “spiritual mutt.” I was born a Hoosier and a Lutheran outside of Fort Wayne, Indiana. Since then, I have been on an adventurous spiritual journey. I have served Lutheran churches, a Mennonite church, and was even ordained and served as an Anglican Priest, but in 2008 I began a doctoral program at a Quaker university on the west coast that changed everything for me.
To my knowledge, up until this time, I had only met one Quaker. And that was Richard Foster who wrote the classic book, Celebration of Discipline. At the time, I was studying to be an Anglican Priest and attended a Renovaré Conference where after being introduced to Richard Foster (remember a Quaker) he asked if my wife and I would help serve communion with elements. Looking back that was an odd experience since Quakers do not observe rituals like communion with the elements of bread and wine. Well, more on that in a minute.
Back in 2008 My doctoral program with George Fox University met on Cannon Beach in Oregon. Each morning for our two-week intensive, I would get up early, take a walk on the beach, stop for a cup of coffee, and then head to a small chapel on the campus of Ecola Bible College.
The first time attending this intensive was not only my first time in Oregon, it would also be my introduction to Quaker silent worship. That first morning, I awoke to thick fog and was startled by the bugle calls of a herd of Elk heading to the beach crossing my path on my way to get coffee. I was in another world all together and this was not Indiana.
There was a line at the coffee shop, so I was running late when I entered the small chapel. As I opened the door, I stopped in my tracks because I found my cohort circled up and sitting in silence.
I immediately assumed they were beginning to pray. So, I stopped and stood at the door waiting for the silence to break. The silence would not break for almost 25 more minutes. I stood there a long time, uncomfortable and wondering what was going on.
Did something happen?
Were we waiting for our leader?
Did I miss something?
After standing at the door for several minutes, I decided to silence my phone and capture the moment by taking a photo of this scene. I still have the photo of this moment which I keep in my office to remind me of this monumental experience in my spiritual life.
As I continued to stand in the door of that chapel, I soon realized I was going through a deep transformation. The quiet of this sacred space was becoming a gateway for me to finding something I was deeply missing in my crazy busy life and my spiritual journey.
For the first time in a long time, I could hear my breathe and even my heartbeat. I stopped rushing, even put down my coffee and slipped into a chair in the circle – no one moved or even acknowledged me. I began to wrestle in my soul with the silence and realized my jetlag made it harder to keep my body and mind awake.
In just 5 minutes my mind had been all over the place from wondering what the rest of the day would be like, who are the people in the circle, and moments of dozing off. I often opened my eyes to look around to see if anyone else was struggling.
Just as I began to sense a centering experience with the silence, the facilitator, who would become my spiritual director for my entire doctoral program finally broke the silence by reading a poem. This continued to be a completely new worship experience for me. At this point, people began to share out of the silence their experiences, what spoke to them in the poem, even words which the Divine had put on their heart as they waited expectantly in silence.
Soon, I was welcomed by our facilitator and told, “It will get easier as you experience sitting in the silence every day over the next two weeks. In our world today, he said, silence must be a discipline that you practice. Don’t worry, it will come over time.”
How did he know what I was experiencing?
I started to realize I might have been showing a little of my lack of comfort and experience with the silence.
Richard Foster explained this well, when he wrote in the Celebration of Disciplines,
One reason we can hardly bear to remain silent is that it makes us feel so helpless. We are so accustomed to relying upon words to manage and control others. If we are silent, who will take control? God will take control, but we will never let him take control until we trust him. Silence is intimately related to trust.
So let me return to communion. As I said earlier, Quakers do not celebrate the Lord’s Supper or Communion with elements like bread and wine. Rather they commune with the Divine through silence. It becomes the gateway, the sacrament, the opening to the Divine. Quaker Rufus Jones explains it this way,
“[The Early Quakers/Friends] made the discovery that silence is one of the best preparations for communion [with God] and for the reception of inspiration and guidance. Silence itself, of course, has no magic. It may be just sheer emptiness, absence of words or noise or music. It may be a dead form. But it may be an intensified pause, a vitalized hush, a creative quiet, an actual moment of mutual and reciprocal correspondence with God.”
Take for instance, when we have our first snow fall of the year that covers the ground with a white blanket. I love to run outside and simply experience the silence it produces. Or last week when the fog was so thick, I love to drive through it with my windows down and the radio in my car off because it produces a special silence that our noisy world does not offer us anymore.
Just before I discovered Quaker silence in that chapel in Oregon, I heard of a man named Matt Mikkelsen on NPR who was travelling the west coast looking for the quietest places in the United States. He works for a non-profit called Square Inch of Silence that promotes the preservation of quiet places – those without human-made sounds. He says there are only about 10 such places in the United States left, one being in the rainforests of the Olympic National Forest in Washington.
I had the privilege before moving my family back to Indiana to go to this rainforest and experience the silence. It is breath-taking.
Yet, Matt’s research has found that noise has negatively affected the ecosystem, just as noise negatively effects our social and emotional systems. He points out that the world needs silence to thrive and live to its full potential and the more we recognize this the more it changes our lives.
Thus, like snow, fog, or in the depths of a rainforest, I believe the same can happen gathered in a circle in a chapel or meetinghouse for worship.
Ever since my first experience in 2008 with silent worship, I have come to not only appreciate, but long for it in my life.
Let’s be honest, since 2008 our world has been through a lot, whether it was a recession, a pandemic, four years of insane politics, racial upheaval, wars, you name it, I and many others have been seeking a place to reconnect with something greater than us, something that can make sense of the world, something that can bring peace, clarity and a sense of community again – and I believe silence or as we are saying quiet is the gateway.
At First Friends, we have seen extensive growth coming out of the pandemic and the tumultuous political season of the last several years. When talking with our new attenders, the one thing that is always a huge attractor is our emphasis on silence whether in our Unprogrammed or Programmed Worship. [For those not familiar with those terms Unprogrammed Worship is simply sitting in silence for about an hour and waiting expectantly for the Divine to speak in the midst. Some may be moved by the Spirit to give vocal ministry or speak out of the silence. As for programmed worship, there we include music, choirs, prayers, scriptures, and a sermon, but we always have a significant amount of silence or what we call waiting worship, as well.
Like me, our new attenders may not know when they first attend worship that they needed silence in their lives, yet overtime they come to value it and choose to find ways to incorporate it into their daily lives.
Richard Foster’s son, Nathan said this so well in his book, The Making of an Ordinary Saint: My Journey from Frustration to Joy with the Spiritual Disciplines. He says this,
“Today silence is one of the most essential disciplines of the Spirit simply because it puts a stopper on all this mindless chatter and clatter. It enables us to step aside from the noise and hurry and crowds of modern life long enough to allow God to create in us attitudes and habits that will hold us constantly in the loving presence of God.
There was a time, not so very long ago, when solitude and silence were available to people by the normal conditions of everyday life. Not any longer! In our day we have to choose solitude and silence and plan our lives accordingly. It can be done, of course, especially as we catch a vision of their liberating qualities.
Thomas Merton wrote, “It is in deep solitude that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love [others]… Solitude and silence teach me to love [others] for what they are, not for what they say.”
Just maybe quiet or silence can be the gateway for those of us struggling in our world, today. Just maybe as we center down and enter a time or place of silence, we will begin to connect as Quakers say, “to that of God in every person” around us.
Just a few weeks ago in one of our new attender dinners, I heard one of the best descriptions of waiting worship among Friends. The person said something to the effect that during waiting worship, she senses that even with all the diversity of people and thought in our Meeting, at some point during silent worship she imagines all our hearts unite and begin to beat in rhythm together. That has stuck with me – because so much is happening in the silence and often it is our words that get in the way. We need to let the silence be the gateway again to greater moments with the Divine and with each other.
So, this morning, as I do every Sunday at the close of my sermon here at
First Friends, I would like us to enter a time of what we label “waiting worship.” To help us center down in a Quaker tradition, I am providing a couple queries for you to ponder in the brief silence. The queries are from a book I highly recommend, “Holy Silence” by fellow Quaker and Hoosier, J. Brent Bill.
1. How could taking time for silence enlarge my day?
2. Which takes a bigger place in my life – silence or noise? Which of the two do I feel more comfortable with.