Silence of spirit: Quaker worship focuses on listening to inner voice

Feature story for Faith Matters in The Commercial Appeal

July 30, 2011

On a recent Sunday morning, as was happening all over Memphis, a group of like-minded people came together to celebrate their spirituality. This was no typical house of worship, however, with hymns and high praise, or a robed priest’s hint at Latin. At the Friends Meeting House — a small house on Walnut Grove in East Memphis, only a stone’s throw from a Kroger, popular restaurants, dollar stores and a post office — nearly 30 Friends, or Quakers, gathered, as they do every Sunday, for a morning of thought-provoking spiritual silence.

At the appointed time, as if on cue, the chit-chat ceased, and silence prevailed. But there was no cue. It was as if a switch had been flipped, perhaps the spiritual call of Sunday morning that is instinctive within so many of us. Silence filled the room, and even the sounds of the light Sunday-morning traffic on Walnut Grove seemed to fall away.

“That’s what we call Quaker practice,” said Carol Ciscel, the clerk of the Memphis Friends. “All of us who stay with Quaker meetings stay with Quaker meeting because that discipline of silence really helps us in our lives and dealing with the anxieties and conflicts and difficulties of being human in this physical world. We don’t pray to God, we don’t talk to God — we listen to God.”

It is this aspect that may be the most difficult for the converted, those referred to as “convinced friends,” to grasp. Unlike most Christian ideologies, Quakerism has no dogma, no creed at its base. Rather, adherents practice what Ron McDonald of Memphis, a Quaker since 1985, terms “upside-down theology.” … (read more)