Meeting Without Meeting

Well, life is different right now, isn’t it?

For context, just in case people stumble into this once life is back to normal (whatever that ends up looking like), this is written and published during significant social distancing restrictions in Britain due to the Covid-19 pandemic. For the benefit of the international audience reading this immediately, as well as a future audience, we’re currently (22^nd March 2020) being asked not to gather in any sort of group, not to socialise, to work from home if possible, not to go out except as necessary or if we can ensure a minimum 2m distance from anyone else (they want us to still get exercise seems to be the main reason for that). Workplaces are shutting down or going to remote working. Bars, restaurants, theatres, cinemas, cafes have all been asked to close, except for selling take-away food. The government is offering grants to employers to help cover salaries of people who might otherwise be laid off. Panic buying continues to empty supermarket shelves of toilet rolls, soap, some tinned goods, and bread (among other things).

Now, in the context of all of those other things, this next feature is fairly unimportant – but it’s the reason for this blog post, so it’s going to have some prominence.

Collective acts of worship have not been banned, nor have I heard that the government has explicitly called for them to end. They have, however, ended. Denominational authorities have generally told their congregations to stop services/meetings/whatever they are called in their tradition. Most specifically for me, Britain Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) – known to British Friends mostly as BYM – has advised Meetings to cease holding in-person Meeting for Worship. My meeting is going along with this, and quite right too. No more Sunday mornings of getting together, sharing in silence, waiting to see what someone might be moved to say.

Meeting for Worship

Meeting for Worship is important to a lot of Quakers. I would certainly say that it is essential to properly developing one’s sense of the Light, of recognising the promptings of the Spirit, though a person doesn’t stop being a Quaker if they stop finding it helpful for them – and certainly not if they are prevented from attending. Still, it is the foundation of Quaker spirituality. To most of us, I think, it is the sine qua non of the Quaker Way, and to many it is also the lynchpin of Quaker community. It is not surprising, therefore, that many people are looking at ways to do Meeting for Worship without actually meeting together. There are several approaches, but they mainly fall into two camps: being together in spirit by sitting in silence at the same time, and by joining a ‘virtual’ silence through technology. That might be a conference call on the telephone, or it could be an audio, audiovisual or even text-based online Meeting for Worship. Some people feel that truly joining one another in waiting on the Spirit requires physical co-presence, a position with which I disagree; in any case, those people will not feel that they can reproduce Meeting for Worship in any of these ways, and might find the ‘silence at the same time’ approach the most satisfactory.

This is understandable. Being in the same place, not doing anything else, can help to focus. It can also drive people away if they can’t physically do nothing for a period of time, or if they feel they will disrupt other people with significant involuntary movement, but that does not diminish its advantages for those who can do it. Certainly, if you need those cues to be able to focus, being in the same place might be essential.

If you don’t think being in the same place is essential, however, a virtual Meeting for Worship might be very welcome.

Here in the UK, Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre will be holding regular online Meetings for Worship, and other groups have been organising various solutions of their own. Woodbrooke uses audiovisual conferencing systems, while some much older platforms for online Meeting for Worship exist online that simply use text, no video or audio. All that I am aware of, though, are about mimicking the experience of our convention, in-person Meeting for Worship as closely as possible within whatever technical limits exist.

I think that’s missing something.

The amazing thing about modern computer and communications technology isn’t that it gives us new, connected ways to do the things we’ve always done in more-or-less the same way we always did them. It’s that it gives us the opportunity to do all-new things, or do things we’ve always done in different ways. Rapid communication that is still asynchronous is one of the oldest features of the internet, in fact predating the internet proper (though email is more reliably delivered quickly nowadays). The ability to communicate visually has been an amazing part of using the internet since computers became able to display decent images. The ability to co-produce content through an online interface, the heart of what some called “web 2.0”, is something that very few people really envisaged long before it happened.

So let’s think about online Meeting for Worship. Let’s think about what Quaker worship is, and how internet technology could let us do it in a way that is more internet-ish and yet true to the spirit of Quaker worship, rather than an online approximation of the usual way we worship. I’m going to share some thoughts (and due credit, my wife had a lot of input here), but it would be awesome to hear other people’s ideas. Let’s get a whole conversation going about this, and see if we find anything that we can implement between us and try them out – we have a great opportunity to do so at the moment.

A Quick Note on Terminology: What I Mean by Worship

There’s a lot that can be said about the Quaker term Meeting for Worship. A lot of people play etymological games trying to make the word worship mean something that works in the context of theological pluralism and the distinct lack of conventional praise-giving or supplication that is a major connotation of ‘worship’ in most people’s minds. Me, I take a pragmatic view.

Worship is what we do in Quaker Meeting for Worship. We also use the term to say that we do something worshipfully, usually meaning with silence and reflection and an intention to be open to the leadings of the Divine. That is the key to the word for me.

As Quakers, one age-old teaching is that we seek to put our whole lives “under the ordering of the spirit of Christ”. People often miss out the last two words, there, in order to be inclusive, and I wouldn’t use them for myself except when quoting, but the essential meaning is the same whether we consider the Light anything to do with Christ or not, and whether Christ is part of our own spiritual journey or not. We believe that there is something, whatever range of descriptions we might give it, that can guide our life if we are willing to let it. Our goal is to arrange our whole life in obedience to that guidance. How do we do that? Through worship.

Worship is a characteristic, rather than an activity. It denotes that we are seeking to make ourselves open to the Spirit, to let the Light illuminate our path. Meeting for Worship serves that purpose in two ways (and serves other purposes in other ways). It helps us develop our awareness of the Spirit through practice, and it allows us to share insights, as that which guides one may guide another – and that which guides one may come from the Light through another, even if it is not of particular relevance to the one who serves as the channel.

How any particular Quaker might think any of that works is irrelevant to the understanding of the goal itself and what steps we take together to serve it.

The Nature of Quaker Silence

Quaker silence is not a simple passive absence of sound. Indeed, absence of sound is not essential. As I’ve written before, there are a range of things Quakers do in silence in order to properly develop both our own state of mind into that most receptive to the movings of the Spirit, and to develop the shared silence. When a meeting reaches that particular pitch of collective attention that we refer to as gathered, or in terminology that some prefer, covered, it is not an accident. It is not that the Divine is somehow more present, or that it has favoured us with a blessing that day. It is because of what we have all done, together.

Silence in a Quaker meeting is collectively constructed from the myriad mental actions of worshippers bringing themselves into that receptive state. One of the reasons that I believe we find it easier to reach that pitch in person is a process of subconscious feedback, that we pick up on the physical parts of one another’s preparation, and they reinforce one another. That is, perhaps, something that is lost – or at least diminished – when we meet ‘virtually’. But perhaps there are other ways to collectively construct our silence.

In some residential Quaker events, a particular sort of Meeting for Worship is conducted at the end of the day, known as epilogue. There are, of course, many ways to do this. Some just have a short Meeting for Worship with a visual or auditory focus, some have readings, some have movement, some are interactive. In all cases that I have experienced, though, the additional features serve to aid the collective construction of the worshipful mind-set of Quaker silence.

Likewise, another practice among some liberal Friends (and perhaps other unprogrammed Friends, I do not know either way) is that of preparation for Meeting for Worship. Like epilogue, this can take many forms. Shared readings from appropriate texts, inspirational singing. Religious chanting, such as those of the Taizé community. Guided meditation. The purpose of all of these is to help our mind reach a worshipful state, and done right – and in a way that suits each worshipper – they can dramatically increase the degree to which a Meeting is gathered.

With virtual Meetings for Worship lacking in the most traditional way in which our silence is collectively constructed, we should look for ways to do it that the internet is particularly suited to. We’ll return to this question once we’ve had a look at what the internet is suited to.

Real-time and Asynchrony

Meeting for Worship in its traditional form is intensely real-time. Things happen and then are done. We shuffle, we close our eyes, we fidget, we cough, we speak, we sing, sometimes we even dance – but each thing is done, and then it has been done. It is an experience of transient events, but it impacts us in a deep and lasting way. We experience it, we are perhaps changed, and we remember what has happened.

Online Meeting for Worship often mirrors this very closely, using audiovisual conferencing to reproduce this as closely as possible. Even in text Meetings for Worship, while the text remains after it is typed, and may be reviewed and re-read, the assumption is that everyone is there at the same time and joining in some degree of silence. It is as real-time as the textual medium allows.

The internet is fantastic at asynchronous communication. We have emails, we have instant messaging, online chat (such as IRC or Discord), we have forums, back in the day we had Usenet (yes, it still exists, but it’s a shadow of what it was). We have collective authoring tools, which might operate in a synchronous way technologically (such as Google Docs) or not (like version control systems for programming teams), but which are generally used in an asynchronous way. People do things, and they don’t expect people to see them the moment they do it – they expect it to be seen (or heard, or otherwise experienced) later.

I post things to this blog and people read it and comment on it whenever they want, and then people see those comments whenever they see them and can reply whenever they want. People share things on social media and people see those links for days, weeks or months afterwards. It’s like playing chess by mail, as compared to playing against someone in the same room or someone on the other end of the phone – you don’t know when people will know what your move was, or when you’ll get the reaction.

But how can we have a shared silence if we don’t have it at the same time? Well, let’s think about that in a bit – now let’s think more about other capabilities of online interaction that might be helpful.

The Media Dimension

The internet isn’t just about text, nor just audio/video. We can do all sorts of things online, interactive content, games, all sorts. Online tools exist to produce visual art, music, and pretty much anything someone decided to make for some reason. There’s real-time collaborative paint programmes, and someone’s developing a collaborative online audio ‘tracker’ programme (used to create music by sequencing samples or synthesiser instructions into tracks, very popular in the 90s). There’s online jigsaw puzzles that several people can get together to play.

There’s no reason at all that we can’t have very easy-to-use tools like this to collaborate on a simpler creative task, like making a mosaic. We could have an easy-to-use simple tracker (like some I started seeing in the 90s with automatic rhythm alignment and key matching) where people collaborate to make a really rich musical audio loop. We could collaborate on a growing collage of digital images and materials. The possibilities are arguably endless.

Why does this matter? Well, people use all sorts of things to enrich and construct silence. Personal steps like silent mantras or rote prayers, physical exercises. As I’ve said above, we collaboratively build our silence in Meeting for Worship in different ways. Couldn’t we contemplatively, bit by bit, slowly build up some creative work as a form of collectively building our silence, in the sense of facilitating the worshipful state of mind?

So What Am I Suggesting?

Let’s look at what really matters in Meeting for Worship – the development of the worshipful state of mind, the receptivity to Spirit. Let’s build on the strengths of the internet, and have this as something that we don’t sit down and do in condensed time but we do it asynchronously and let it be part of our life for a more extended time. If our whole life is to be brought under the ordering of the Spirit, there may be a strength in not concentrating these activities just into a fairly short time at more or less regular intervals.

Let’s have a collaborative mosaic tool with configurable auto-symmetry, rotational or reflectional, and let contribution to that be how we build our collective virtual silence. Beautiful patterns like mandalas could emerge, or representational art of some theme that no-one expected. How about an idiot-proof tracker that ensures harmony and rhythm but leaves us able to make a collective, creative impact of a soundscape that represents our worshipful silence. If our ministry is generally in words, be they spoken or written, let our silence happen in other ways. Those are only two ideas, of course – I’m sure there are many more possibilities.

A Meeting for Worship with this tool could run for a day or a week, with people dropping in and out to contribute to the growing silence and contemplation. When people feel moved to ministry, they can type it in to appear in a side panel, so people can all appreciate that ministry when they next drop in, like a talking wall.

Meeting for Worship in person is necessarily concentrated in time, but that’s not to say that the essential nature of Meeting for Worship is inherently thus. We can experiment with what modern technology allows, and see what works. I have a feeling that, for some of us, this could work incredibly well – and that it might become an important part of our spiritual life even when most people are able to have conventional Meeting for Worship.

I already said this, but I’ll say it again – there’s possibly lots of ideas for different ways to do online Meeting for Worship. I want to hear about yours. Let’s get a conversation going. Does anyone have the ability to implement these ideas? What other ideas do you have? How might similar principles apply to observances of other faith traditions? Comment here, or let me know about it on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Patreon, wherever you might have found the link to this. Write your own blog posts or whatever about your ideas, share them, let’s take this unfortunate opportunity to really explore different ways of engaging in this central part of the Quaker faith.

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