Transformation in Sunday Meetings

I was reading a passage in a Quaker pamphlet which talked about what happens in Quaker meetings. It felt so familiar, for it is how I feel about our Sunday meetings. Joel thought highly of Friends and we feel a kinship with their worship as their meetings are meetings of silent meditation.

“Through the process by which Quakers attain the sense of the meeting, transformation occurs. We are changed. We feel, in a literal way, the loving Presence which hovers over us. It manifests in the love we have for one another. We form invisible bonds among ourselves which transcend the petty and make the next sense of the meeting more desirable and more readily attainable. We are participants in each other’s well being. Later we may stop to wonder whose idea evolved into the sense of the meeting. But we can’t remember. We sense that the sense of the meeting came through us and for us, but not from us. We are amazed that it works- exactly as it’s supposed to…. 

We absorb and are absorbed by the Light. We reach, if only momentarily, that place beyond time where we taste tranquility. We have slipped beyond issues and answers to a place where peace and love are the same words. We are immersed in a mystical moment even though we might not consider ourselves mystics. We take to ourselves the gift of experiential faith which the early Friends promised…. There are no political solutions to what are basically spiritual questions…. Laws do not transform hearts. Disarmament treaties do not disarm minds. Cargoes of food temporarily fill bellies but never fill the cavern of spiritual emptiness. The process through which Quakers reach the sense of meeting transforms hearts, disarms minds, and feeds the spirit.” 

Barry Morley, “Beyond Consensus,Salvaging Sense of Meeting”