2003, (Though my mother's side of the family is old Iowa Quaker (Whittier- Springville, Ia. via Flushing, Oh. and the Carolinas) and runs directly back to England, I am not currently really versed or participating in things Quaker. My own interests are more abstract. However, I thought you all might appreciate these thoughts on Quaker Meeting as practice as we are doing it out in the hinterlands. Best Regards from very Southeastern Iowa,
[paste:] Friends Journal Dear Editors; Your July 2003 'Welcome to Newcomers' article in Friends Journal came in good timing as good food for thought. I live in a community where several of us have sat on occasion and worshipped as Friends. In our town we have several experienced Quakers. Some Earlham College grads. Some Eastern birth-rights who went to Friends schools out there. Some Midwest birth-rights. Some Scattergood Friends. Also a few convinced Friends who were in Meetings elsewhere at other times. In the last 25-30 years in our little town occasionally we have met but nothing as far as having a regular Friends Meeting. Following after the vocations of our different lives we are 'fallen between-the-cracks-friends' as Teddy Milne describes in her Friends Journal article on membership. I believe that all of us here, whether formerly affiliated as Quakers or not, would claim our religious or spiritual affiliation as Quaker, regardless. Though none of us are members of organized formal Friends Meetings otherwise. Hence, when we do meet it is truly as friends pursuing a corporate practice of sitting together in a powerful silence. When we do meet it is in common as with the Quaker Practice suggested by Esther Greenleaf Murer in the Friends Journal on 'Why Come to Meeting' on time? Coming to Meeting, as in the corporate nature of our peculiar Quaker worship. For those of us as Friends living here in this little Iowa town known for its thousands of Transcendental Meditators, mostly our Quaker practice as Friends we have absorbed into a larger testimony of a group practice of meditation with a larger activist endeavor. In itself that is an endeavor of corporate practice of sitting in cultivated silence towards a so called 'Field Effect' of a collective world spiritual peace. Living in our 'meditating' community here as Friends we each recognize it experientially as Quaker in form though it has been part of another larger experiment incorporating aspects of Quaker method of sitting in group, on large scale. For years and now for decades, we have had group meditations of many hundreds people everyday and sometimes thousands, with many of us spending an hour and a half to three or four or five hours a day silently meditating in group. It has been a very powerful corporate experience spiritually for the many of those who have pursued it. The 'weight' of it I think any of the founding Quakers would have recognized as part of their own experience. The experience, while I experience it as similar, does not exactly transpose over in the terms of definitions that Quaker authors like Davies or Knowles in their Journal article would like. It is much more simple and powerful in nature; more like Marty Grundy in her 'Sit Thee Here' article in the Journal . I know weighty Friends in the same way that I know weighty 'meditators' from our community here. Weighty in the 'throw-power' of their cultivated silence. I really appreciate the way that Marty Grundy catches the gravity of this weight in her words. It is a very abstract thing but Marty catches it: [snip] " Â…But the older Friend did much more. As she settled into worship, slipping into that familiar deep openness to God's Spirit, she silently drew the visitor with her. Many Friends have had the precious experience of sitting near a weighty Friend and being drawn by that Friend's experience into a deeper, more prayerful place." And then the next two paragraphs enlarging on this. This weightiness comes in time from just doing it through time in practice. It becomes its own standard of weight in experience. Now, recently as aspects of the larger Transcendental Meditation (TM) group participation here in this town have become less inclusive, the larger group meditation practice has dwindled in scope. The several of us old-Quakers who have been active in the larger community group meditations have been exploring a refuge in the tradition of our old Quaker practice that is without the exclusive trappings of our community 'meditation' TM organization. Separations are nothing new even to Quaker Meetings also along the same lines: cultivated experiential practitioners (conservatives) on the one hand and then those dogmatic cultist mood- makers of faith (evangelicals) on the other. I see this even still within the range of so-called conservatives in your pages of the Friends Journal. There seems an evident split of idea about Quakerism. Whether Friends exclusively are those who must also believe in all the testimonies or if they are first Quakers who worship in meeting and then maybe are lead to testimonies, or not. Is it all or nothing to be a member Quaker? Can there be a place for those who just come for worship and possibly have an intense experience at that without having to also become an activist on every social issue also? What is minimally fundamental here? Myself, I look to the words of the primitive Quakers for those answers, for original intent. That is always clarifying and tempering. Where I live, in a quiet reaction which seeks a refuge from forming dogma, poor administration, and bad behavior in the TM organization several of us as old Friends have begun to sit together again more regularly in Quaker Meeting. As we have gathered month by month for the last half year or more, we have come simply as worshipping Friends, without agenda and without burden of other Quaker testimony other than to sit together in worship as method, primitive in form. We have gathered some appropriate quotes from founding Quakers for reference to lead us in our practice. Then too we draw on our experience as Friends. Together in a corporate practice it has been very satisfying spiritually in experience. We pick a Sunday every month that works and meet in homes for Quaker worship without a clerk. The meetings have easily happened between friends. For some time now, The corporate practice has progressed in to weekly Friends Meeting as Quakers. Following your July Issue about membership, I felt you might enjoy learning of these experiences. We live in an area of Iowa where there were once many un-programmed Quaker Meetings in the 19th Century. As near as I can figure there probably have not been un-programmed meetings in the Southeast corner of Iowa since around the turn of the 20th Century. I do not see that we will form a Meeting though we will continue to meet in practice of worship as Quakers. In time there may be the possibility of forming a Meeting. For now there is not a large affinity with everything else that is Society of Friends that might also not also be necessarily relevant to us as individuals for now. In many ways we are already working on our own activisms of issues and testimony. I would say that this generally is a pretty 'activist' group of people, each in their own right. However, for now, First things first. The first thing here seems to be more about turning on the light. Sincerely, Doug Hamilton Fairfield, Iowa p.s. if there may be things of interest to you or your Journal writers in what I have written here, you can forward and share this around. -D
