June 6, 2024

Last weekend I traveled to two familiar places that are dear to my heart.  On Saturday I extended the charge to the New York Conference UCC at the installation service of the Rev. Dr. Marsha Williams as Conference Minister.  Having served there as an Associate Conference Minister for nine years, it was wonderful to be with friends and colleagues again, some of whom I have not seen for several years.   Immediately after the service on Saturday afternoon I traveled again to my undergraduate alma mater Swarthmore College for a class reunion. Getting there just in time for dinner, I saw classmates and dear friends from other classes, some of whom I had not seen for many years. Both ‘reunions’ contained a sense of gratitude in seeing one another, present in part by our experiences living through, and to date surviving, the COVID-19 pandemic.  That gratitude was particularly present in my spirit when we observed a time of remembrance for classmates no longer with us.  It reminded me that aging despite its internal challenges and sometimes external condescension, is at its heart a mark of the grace of God.  

I had the good fortune of sitting between two of my best friends from college at dinner. One of them, the son of a Methodist minister who was ‘defrocked’ for his participation in the Civil Rights movement in the sixties, mentioned that he was planning to attend the Swarthmore Quaker meeting the next day. When he mentioned that, I realized that I never attended a Quaker meeting while a student at Swarthmore and years later as an active alumnus.  With that realization, I let him know that I might attend the Quaker meeting for a while before going to another event I was committed to. Later that night I decided that I would attend because after all, it was Sunday, and I wanted to be a sacred space.

And a sacred space it was. The meeting house was the only building on campus that in its layout resembled a church, so it was the place of rehearsals and concerts during my years singing with and directing the Swarthmore College Gospel Choir. Being in that space again welled up a flood of beautiful and emotional memories. Yet In addition to those memories, I was moved in that sacred space by the presence and spiritual power of silence. Silence is hardly a stranger in my spiritual life. It is part of my daily meditation practice, stemming in part from my experiences at Swarthmore where, in Quaker tradition meetings often began and ended with moments of silence.  However, being in silence, sharing a bench with a dear friend, and sitting with over fifty people from all walks of life, made the presence of the Holy Spirit both powerful and palpable. The great mystic Saint John of the Cross said that “silence is God’s first language.”  The silence I experienced in that meeting made Saint John’s declaration all the more true.

My experience at the meeting house reminded me that silence holds a deep significance for our spiritual well-being.  We live in a cacophony of cadence, a world full of business with things that all too easily distract us from our connection with what the Quakers rightly call the ‘Divine Light’ within all of us. It is in the quiet moments that we can truly listen to the whispers of our soul and hear the voice of God speaking to us. The collective silence I experienced in the meeting house was spiritually profound. Whether alone or in the company of others, silence offers the gift of a space where we can have communion with God, deepen our faith, find in our spiritual center, and gain strength and renewal for our spiritual journeys. Silence offered that tremendous gift to me in that Quaker meeting.  May we all embrace the gift of silence and allow it to nourish our souls for the journey ahead.