Quaker practice of silent worship

Quaker practice of silent worship is a communal discipline of waiting, in which silence is not an absence of prayer but a setting for inward attention and, when the worshipper is moved by the Holy Spirit, speech. Douglas Steere’s encounters with Quakers led him to recognize the indwelling presence of Christ, while his account of worship emphasizes how silence can bind people together and begin to repair divisions.

Practice and spiritual purpose

Steere encountered silent prayer before he became a Quaker. During his first year at Harvard, after philosophical study had unsettled his faith, he learned that students from the Episcopal Divinity School nearby gathered at noon for silent prayer. He did not become a regular participant, but the practice opened him to the reality of prayer. By the end of the year his faith had been renewed, an effect he attributed to silent prayer. His later description of contemplative life as a continual discovery of Christ in unexpected places echoes that early opening, though the prayer group itself was not a Quaker meeting.

At Oxford, Steere discovered the Quakers and found in their worship a more direct expression of what he had been seeking: he said that among them he discovered the power of Christ’s indwelling spirit within himself. He loved the meeting’s silence and its expectation that no one would speak unless moved by the Holy Spirit. The discipline therefore joined quiet with readiness: participants waited rather than treating speech as an automatic part of worship. Steere noted that not everyone followed the Quaker counsel, “When in doubt, wait.”

Silence as a form of community

Steere described the meeting not only as an inward experience but as a way of changing relations among those present. He wrote, “There is a melting down, a tendering in which each feels closely knit to the common Father and his fellows.” The image of melting down conveys a loosening of whatever keeps worshippers apart; the result is a felt bond with both God and the gathered community.

He had seen silent worship level a group divided by an ugly barrier between two members, and begin a movement toward asking forgiveness. The practice’s consequence, in his account, was therefore not confined to private devotion. Waiting together could make reconciliation possible, translating inward attentiveness into a changed relationship between people.

Beyond the meeting

The book also describes silence being used in settings beyond Quaker worship, without equating those settings with the Quaker practice. At Howard University, Howard Thurman drew on his study of the mystics to introduce periods of silence for meditation and prayer as part of his effort to make chapel compelling to students. In a service built around staged reproductions of six European Madonna paintings, periods of silence separated the displays. Thurman said the service fused congregation and participants in a moment of spiritual transcendence, and that unity among people could become more compelling than what divided them. His example shows a related use of silence in designed worship, distinct from Steere’s account of a meeting in which speech depended on inward prompting.

Significance

As Steere presents it, Quaker silent worship holds together inward discovery and communal consequence. The meeting gives space to recognize the indwelling spirit, but its test is not simply what an individual feels: silence may knit worshippers together and help people begin to ask forgiveness. The practice’s restraint is thus active. Waiting attends to spiritual prompting while creating conditions in which a divided community can move toward reconciliation.