from the Committee on Ministry and Counsel
This passage was our Reading for Reflection in February 2006. The Committee on Ministry and Counsel believes that it remains a timely portrayal of the potential for meeting for worship.
On one never-to-be-forgotten Sunday morning, I found myself one of a small company of silent worshipers, who were content to sit down together, without words, that each might feel after and draw near to the Divine Presence, unhindered, at least, if not helped, by any human utterance. Utterance, I knew was free, should the words be given; and before the meeting was over, a sentence or two were uttered in great simplicity by an old and apparently untaught man, rising in his place amongst the rest of us. I did not pay much attention to the words he spoke, and I have no recollection of their import. My whole soul was filled with unutterable peace of the undisturbed opportunity for communion with God, with the sense that at last I had found a place where I might, without the faintest suspicion of insincerity, join with others in simply seeking His presence. To sit down in silence could at least pledge me to nothing; it might open to me (as it did that morning) the very gate of heaven.
Caroline E. Stephen, 1890
As excerpted in Faith and Practice
Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, 1998, p. 102