Silent waiting worship, the Seed, and vocal ministry
January 29, 2018 § 3 Comments
Based on my own vocal ministry last Sunday, January 28.
Friends practice what we call silent waiting worship. Why do we worship in silence and what are we waiting for?
We worship in silence in order to make room for the Spirit, in order that we may hear the Divine Voice, which often is quite faint and easy to drown out. And we are waiting, first, for a sense of the Presence in our midst, and also, for the truth, for Spirit-led vocal ministry.
With the silence, we strip away the outward accoutrements that characterize conventional worship services so that we may hear the “still, small voice.” But we also seek something deeper than this lack of liturgical busy-ness; we seek what early Friends called the silence of all flesh, seeking to let go of the surface thoughts and concerns that we bring with us into the meeting room, so that we may sink down in the Seed that has been planted in each one of us, and there, to water that Seed with worship, with our attention.
It is as though, with this silence, we have raked away the stones that lie on the surface of our garden soil/soul, so that when the Seed sprouts and reaches for the Light, no obstacles stand in its way.
And when it finds the Light, then it flowers, and our nostrils are filled with the sweet scent of God’s presence, within us and among us.
And sometimes the Seed bears fruit and the Presence raises one of us up with vocal ministry that carries the truth and power of its Source.
Through the Flaming Sword 
This Message arrived while I was… I’d been meaning to say something about your assumptions (in a previous post) about Messages prefaced by a person’s story of its provenance — that the fact that someone is talking for itself and adding unnecessary detail does not mean he isn’t delivering a valid Message direct from The Big Guy, only that he’s flavoring it with some personal stylistic features that annoy you. (Some people’s delivery annoys me, also. But that annoyance is every bit as merely-personal as we often feel those objectionable Message have to be.)
Anyway… What came to me it a dream last night is that Quaker Meeting is a yoga/sacrament/art-form. We can find all sorts of fault with the way someone does an asana; an Eucharist can be just a bite of carbs; a person’s Inspired work of art can be clumsy, ugly, and/or naive…
but the object isn’t to do any of these things perfectly. One could injure oneself or produce really bad art in that sort of effort. The object is to realize and respond to the (already there but unrecognized} presence of God in a practice.
We can be sitting there idly thinking, together with our God (God’s God?) just as well as we can be forcing our minds into perfect silence together with God. We’re still personal beings, with our limps and our follies still included — (and it’s wise to seek to recognize where our inspiration is personal quirks vs where it’s the real soul-chow, if we can) — but it’s still God at work behind the scenes.
How does this assertion, given the very visible fruits of the floatsome and jetsome of institutional Quakerism, not constitute ‘hopium”, Steven? What constitutes the functional “eldership” defining the “Quakerism” of the ‘privileged’ – if not an “I”-centric practice regarding the ranteristic “yearly meeting Friend” and their ministry? Has not such become the mentored ‘Good Order’ that indoctrinates any imaginable “we” within such a society? Isn’t such delusional AND all that can be imagined today … within a hope (what we do, not what we wish: hopium) that is hopelessly entangled in its trust in CapitalismFail?
Privileged piety has a dark side. When such is experienced as light, isn’t the ‘presence’ in such darkness [also] very deep?
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My mind was busy during meeting for Worship.