Is Quaker Worship Meditation?
August 10, 2017
Can you meditate in Quaker meeting for worship? According to these 5 Friends, having a meditation practice can be fine, even helpful. But it shouldn’t end there.
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Transcript:
Amy Ward Brimmer: So is Quaker meeting for worship the same as meditation? Is meditation practice the same as sitting in meeting for worship? The short answer is no, they’re not the same thing. Not at all. The other short answer is yes, there’s a lot of overlap. And I think both Quakers and Buddhists or meditations practitioners would appreciate that “yes and no” answer.
Is Quaker Worship Meditation?
Valerie Brown: The question about the difference and the common space between meditation and meeting for worship is a really important question and it’s something that I struggled with initially.
Doug Gwyn: The meeting for worship can be mistaken for meditation. If you bring a background or intention in meditation to it, that’s what it’ll be. But I think over time as you listen to messages coming out of the silence, you probably will begin to shift your understanding of what’s going on to something that maybe includes meditation but is also something larger than that.
Individual vs Group Experience
Amy Ward Brimmer: There’s a difference in intention between meditating and gathering for meeting for worship. While it’s true that I can meditate in a big hall with a hundred people, for the most part each of those hundred people is in their own experience of meditation.
Mark Helpmeet: I’ve seen for Zen Buddhism when you sit in meditation there, oftentimes they have you sit facing a wall. It’s explicitly not looking into the center of the group. But I find worship to be a central… it’s like there’s a prism of light that we’re all focusing together in our center. So it’s invaluable to have other people there.
Valerie Brown: This is not just disparate people that decided to show up on a Sunday morning or whatever. We’re here and we’re engaged in an act of being in the presence of something that is quite mysterious. Mystery. Sacred.
The “Point of Reference” of Quaker Worship
Doug Gwyn: The point of reference of worship is a transcendent God, the divine—or perhaps another non-theist understanding of what that transcendent reality is—but something we’re giving worth to in the basic meaning of worship, “worth-ship”.
Kevin-Douglas Olive: For me, the Spirit is my high priest, or my high priestess if you will. The Spirit is the one who guides the worship. The liturgy—the works—depend on what the Spirit wants me to do. So I come in with one intention (on a good day) and that intention is to be faithful.
Amy Ward Brimmer: We gather together as a faith community and as a faith community open our minds and hearts to receive whatever Spirit, God, the universe has for us in that intended hour of worship.
Mark Helpmeet: It’s kind of like I go through my individual experience, and I think we all do that to reach that common thing that’s in the center. A voice that we all can hear, and we’ll hear it differently and that’s fine. But in the worship, by clearing out our chatter I think what we find is a stillness that enlightens us.
Vocal Ministry in Quaker Worship
Amy Ward Brimmer: Sometimes it’s completely silent for an hour, but most of the time there is vocal ministry. And so it’s different in that way than meditation as well. So I’ll hear somebody give a message, or I’ll be moved to give a message myself.
Valerie Brown: When I first started, everytime somebody would stand up to speak I got irritated, like, “You’re interrupting my meditation here with words!” But over time I came to understand and got it a little bit that in meeting for worship, this is a practice of waiting and a receptivity as well.
So can you meditate in Quaker Worship?
Amy Ward Brimmer: I use actually a lot of my meditation skills—my mindfulness skills—to center down, to get prepared. I’ll follow my breath, I’ll feel my body, I’ll scan through my body and release where I’m holding tension as a way of saying I’m open to divine revelation.
Mark Helpmeet: Meditation can teach you—and there’s a lot of different forms of meditation—can teach you disciplines that allow you to remove your focus from where it normally sits. So there’s overlap in any case with meditation.
Kevin-Douglas Olive: Sometimes worship is work, you know? Turn. Feel. Sense. “Oh crap, there’s another thought in my head.” Turn my mind to God. Turn my mind to love. Turn my mind to that healing energy. Turn my mind to that small voice and feel the love, the growth, the creativity.
Valerie Brown: And so it does take a discipline. It’s takes a capacity to notice that the mind has wandered to Tahiti, or wherever I’m not. Here. And to, with a sense of awareness and compassion, to bring back that wandering mind, to refocus.
Amy Ward Brimmer: There are many ways to meditation but the basic Vipassana meditation is to do as little as possible, just meeting each moment, any object that arises moment-by-moment for your attention, you meet it with your attention and see what’s here. But the idea is not to connect to anything in particular, or be inspired by another being or a divine being. And so in Quaker expectant, waiting worship, there is this sense that altogether, here we are. What do you got for us today, God?
The views expressed in this video are of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views of Friends Journal or its collaborators.
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Discussion Questions:Have you ever meditated? Did you find the experience spiritual? How was is similar or different from meeting for worship?
Mark Helpsmeet describes the unity of Quaker worship as “a prism of light that we’re all focusing together in our center.” What visual metaphors have you come up with for what happens in meeting for worship?
Doug Gwyn
Quaker Meeting for Worship
Quaker Theology and Beliefs
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Jon Watts launched and directed the QuakerSpeak project for its first 6 seasons. Keep up to date with Jon’s work at his website.
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Irene OleksiwAugust 11, 2017 at 7:43 pm
An educational QuakerSpeak for new attenders who seek guidance as to what’s going on in Quaker Meeting for Worship
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James SuppleeAugust 23, 2017 at 3:34 pm
This is a helpful QuakerSpeak because new attenders will often perceive that Meeting for Worship is a lot of folks meditating individually or as a group. I am amazed at how much I learned in a short time. Often the more powerful part of Quaker worship happens when those there are present to both the divine and to each other and the separate self dissolves. Zen practitioners know this experience as well as big mind, an experience beyond concepts. So as some of the folks in the video said- there is some overlap.
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Edward FidoAugust 29, 2017 at 5:10 pm
Simply illuminating. For someone new to the Quaker way it does succinctly point out the difference between Vipassana (or other Buddhist) meditation and Meeting for Worship. I think this is important because those not familiar with the Quaker way may be lost as to what to expect.
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Ray ReganDowningtown, November 19, 2021 at 2:30 pm
I feel no conflict in studying Buddhism, meditating for 11 years, and attending Meetings for Worship every Sunday for the last 7. Everything can be seen as mediation, knitting, folding clothes, driving a car, or sitting in silence.
Advanced mediation is not disturbed by anything, including vocal ministry; all of our senses, hearing, seeing, and awareness, become alive in Meeting. Meditation can include contemplation, which one can bring to Meeting, on say gratitude, forgiveness, or love of God.
On the other hand, Non-meditation at Meeting is when we sit sleepy, or our mind is stolen by unconscious discursive thinking and worry.
I see the question as different labels with the same result—helping our mind feel our light, our love, and seeing it in others.
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