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Anticipating My First Quaker Meeting: Speculation; Apprehensiveness
Some of the Quakers I’ve met insist on being referred to as ‘friends’---cf. The Friendly Persuasion---but I like the word Quaker and its attendant associations, and the websites I’ve looked at use the term, so: Quaker, Quaker, Quaker! I pray---silently, of course---that it will work out for me. I'm running out of options, frankly.
And I am desperate for a place to land. I feel that religion has been inflicted on me. I started out reading the Gnostic Gospels (initially via the scholar Elaine Pagels after a conversation with my friend and associate John) and somehow something sank in and took root---exactly like that parable he told; remember? To paraphrase one of the wild-eyed fanatics from one of Flannery O’Connor’s novels, it fell into rocky soil, “ but it fell in deep.” Or to quote that Bob Dylan song, also involving rocks, “I want to let go, but I can’t let go."
But I can’t go back to a conventional church. The last time, I looked round at all the people sitting there in rows (not so many of them either, though it’s a big church) standing, kneeling, singing, listening, and I just couldn’t see what any of it had to do with religion or with the Gospels. This is a religion about a man who wandered preaching from town to town in the hills of Galilee, then in the dust of Judea. Every word he said---and you have to do some reading on the history and the context to fully get this----subtly undermined the theocracy-loving established order and their laws and mores.
Every other word he spoke to the crowds decried hypocrisy and those whose religion consists in ‘correcting’ or ‘punishing’ the sins of others. You don’t get to do that, he said. God doesn’t want that. Look first to the mess inside yourself; sort that out, and then---when you are perfectly righteous, which you never will be---you might be in a position to judge. Love (and judge) others as you love (and judge yourself). Look at me; I say I’m the Son of Man, and yet I choose not to judge.
Another point that he made repeatedly, and particularly in the parable of the Good Samaritan: The good Samaritan did the right thing even though he was a despised Samaritan. The point of the story is that someone outside the faith who does not follow the prescribed practices is more greatly favored than the faithful follower of the letter of the law. Could this teaching have been more radical for that time and place?---that a Samaritan whose heart prompted him to behave with compassion might be a better man than a man who complied with the law, but who could pass by an injured man without stopping to assist him? Throughout the Gospels, Christ emphasizes the disjunct between compliance with the letter of the law and compliance with the spirit expressed in God's two essential commandments.
If it doesn’t sound so radical now; it’s almost all worn out from repetition, but these were new ideas for most of his hearers. And truly, they would seem to have been forgotten by most practitioners of conventional “Christianity” today.
A part of me doesn’t want the silence of a Quaker meeting. If the light indeed resides inside all of us, shouldn’t we follow the practices of the Pentecostals? Shouldn’t we be moved to shouting, speaking in tongues, yelling, “Hallelujah, Jesus is in my heart!” I had a friend at one point in my life, a recovered alcoholic, who had a strong Pentecostal bent. He went to church several times a week. “I have to get my fix of Jesus,” he told me. But I found the ‘Praise!”-ing and “Hallelujah!”-ing disruptive and embarrassing. In addition, I simply don't trust it.
If the Holy Spirit exists, shouldn’t it overhelm the person on whom it descends? Shouldn’t it chill you or burn you to the bone, render you quiet, render you speechless? Did the Apostles really babble like loonies, or does the story mean that they suddenly and miraculously had the gift to speak other tongues? I don’t really know or care, to tell you the truth. I don’t like any part of the Bible that doesn’t have the Christ in it, walking, talking, dying on the cross, or---as they said---coming back from the dead. I’m more interested in the parts before he died, to tell you the truth.
So what’s going to happen during the meeting? I don’t like any practice I’ve so far experienced; how will I manage among people who just sit there? Will I feel anything? The few religious experiences I had (and though I can't explain them in a way that makes sense to anyone else they struck me at the time as authentic, which is why I’m here now) terrified me---I definitely ‘quaked’; I was afraid even to move or turn my head for fear of seeing something that would take away my choice to believe or not. (PS. I didn’t turn my head but I lost some of my choices). It was shocking, terrifying; I am sure it could not happen to me while sitting in a circle with peaceful people whose whole philosophy is all centered on the light. I don't want it to happen.
But will I be bored or become distracted if I sit in silence for too long? Will I become impatient? I once attended a religious meeting with some friends who practiced an alternative Indian religion. Their religious service consisted of silent meditation. Perhaps it was because my heart wasn’t in it, but I can remember literally itching with impatience for it to be over. I found it embarrassing and awkward. Will this happen again?
I don’t even know what I am looking for from a religious service. Something that gets at the core of my desire for some sort of safe connection with the thing that so terrified me during a certain period of my life? I don’t know. I was honest about this with the very nice man from the Quaker meeting who kindly explained to me the basic elements. The truth is that I don’t know what I want.
“This place is terrifying, for it is the house of the Lord.” I am not sure where you find Bethel in the time of the internet or if I could endure it if I found it. I don’t want to find it. But can I accept anything less?
RELATED POSTINGS
“Infinite & Unforeseen.” The Cathars, the Quakers, T.S. Eliot, & Me
Chaotic Simplicity
Quaker Meeting
5:03:16 PM 
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