Rationales for Guidelines
- Author(s):
- Eric Sabelman
- Issue:
- On Compassion (November 2024)
- Department:
- Letters
Dear Friends: I felt a bit of a shock reading the article, “Talk, For Heaven’s Sake” in the latest issue of Western Friend (September/October 2024).
The article begins: “I wish the practice of ‘worship sharing’ would take a smaller role in Quaker life.” This is certainly not the reaction we get on quarterly-meeting evaluation forms when attenders are asked how they liked worship-sharing, which is often cited as the best part of a Quarterly gathering.
The author posits that worship-sharing replaces conversation in Quaker gatherings. However, this is true only during the time that one spends in a worship-sharing group, typically no more than 90 minutes a day during most Quaker gatherings.
More significantly, the author criticizes the practice for stifling authentic communication. “The worship sharing format requires [individuals to avoid] . . . expressing their curiosity or perplexity. . .” “I am convinced that pure listening would never have let me see how integral [a person’s] viewpoint was to his actions, his compassion, his life itself. To see that, I needed the back and forth of conversation.” However, typical worship-sharing guidelines impose no prohibition on participants’ conversations outside the group, except for instructing that confidentiality should be maintained. Although typical guidelines do discourage direct responses between participants during the time assigned to worship-sharing, this guidance is necessary. It is too easy for Friends to respond to each other’s statements until they find themselves in an argument or a contest to prove whose oratorical ability is best.
The author also complains, “What troubles me most about worship sharing is the instruction to favor the heart over the head, experience over theory, feelings over thoughts.” There is a reason for this guideline: Too many Friends are educated to favor intellectual speculations (“theories”) over examining their emotions. With guidance and practice, we can achieve
a balance of heart and mind.
The convenor of a worship-sharing group actually has some leeway to emphasize different parts of the guidelines, depending on who is in the group. The convenor might know, for example, that certain participants tend to be argumentative or overly intellectual. As with ministry during worship, all participants are expected to fairly test how the messages contained in the guidelines apply to them.
One positive outcome of the discomfort that the author expressed in this article is that the fall session of College Park Quarterly Meeting included an experiment of providing “discussion of the queries” as an alternative during the time scheduled for worship-sharing. We await Friends’ evaluations.
– Eric Sabelman, College Park Quarterly Meeting (PacYM)