appened. They refer to the meetings as “a space of gathered stillness.” Actually, they sit in collective silence – for an hour.
As a child, a Quaker friend of mine, a Friend friend if you will, attended meetings with his grandmother. He said that each time they entered the meeting room she would direct him to “Go in and greet the light.” The “light” is a metaphor to Quakers for one’s relationship with God.
So I sat in silence and looked for the light. For an hour.
There are many forms of silence. There is the popular “silent treatment,” prized by angry couples worldwide, the spiritual “vow of silence,” the evocative “moment of silence,” Simon and Garfunklel’s famous “Sound of Silence,” a parent’s desperate plea for “a little bit of silence, please!” and the cruel silence of censorship. My mind was wandering.
I looked around the room and noticed that everyone, save the man with special orthopedic shoes, was wearing sandals. That says something about a religion, I thought. I was not sure what, exactly. And I was the only one with a pedicure. Though I couldn’t vouch for the woman wearing striped socks under her sandals, I’d be willing to bet that she didn’t have painted toenails.
I wished that I could take out my notebook. I didn’t think that pencil against paper would really be that disruptive. What about the woman next to me with the dodgy stomach? That wasn’t distracting? It positively screamed. And the woman who kept flipping maniacally through the pages of the Bible. What was she looking for?
I closed my eyes and tried to enter the silence, or the light, or whatever. My mind followed the sounds of a dog barking down the street, birds singing, distant traffic sounds, there goes that stomach again. What could she have eaten? And then the neighbor next door began to play the piano. Loudly, with the windows open. What Kind of Fool am I. Anthony Newly. I recognized it right away, having appeared in the play in high school. I could still remember the words as it turned out.
I started to relax. To sit in silence for a