Quaker, TM & Eastern thought— integrated
Doug Hamilton
Fairfield, Iowa’s Meditator Quakers..
A history of Fairfield’s (contemporary) silent Quaker meeting.
Quaker, TM & Eastern thought— integrated
Published in 2003, in the..
Friends Journal
Dear Editors;
Your July 2003 'Welcome to Newcomers' article in Friends Journal
came in good timing as good food for thought. I live in a community
where several of us have sat on occasion and worshiped as Friends.
In our town we have several experienced Quakers. Some Earlham
College grads. Some Eastern birth-rights who went to Friends schools
out there. Some Midwest birth-rights. Some Scattergood Friends.
Also a few convinced Friends who were in Meetings elsewhere at other
times. In the last 25-30 years in our little town occasionally we
have met but nothing as far as having a regular Friends
Meeting.
Following after the vocations of our different lives we
are 'fallen between-the-cracks-friends' as Teddy Milne describes in
her Friends Journal article on membership. I believe that all of us
here, whether formerly affiliated as Quakers or not, would claim our
religious or spiritual affiliation as Quaker, regardless. Though none of us are
members of organized formal Friends Meetings otherwise.
Hence, when we do meet it is truly as friends pursuing a
corporate practice of sitting together in a powerful silence. When
we do meet it is in common as with the Quaker Practice
suggested by Esther Greenleaf Murer in the Friends Journal on 'Why
Come to Meeting' on time? Coming to Meeting, as in the corporate
nature of our peculiar Quaker worship.
For those of us as Friends living here in this little
Iowa town known for its thousands of Transcendental Meditators,
mostly our Quaker practice as Friends we have absorbed into a larger
testimony of a group practice of meditation with a larger activist
endeavor. In itself that is an endeavor of corporate practice of
sitting in cultivated silence towards a so called 'Field Effect' of a collective world spiritual
peace. Living in our 'meditating' community here as Friends we each
recognize it experientially as Quaker in form though it has been part
of another larger experiment incorporating aspects of Quaker method
of sitting in group, on large scale.
For years and now for decades in Fairfield, Iowa we have had group
meditations of many hundreds people everyday and sometimes thousands,
with many of us spending an hour and a half to three or four or five
hours a day silently meditating in group. It has been a very
powerful corporate experience spiritually for the many of those who
have pursued it. The 'weight' of it I think any of the founding
Quakers would have recognized as part of their own experience.
The experience, while I experience it as similar, does
not exactly transpose over in the terms of definitions that Quaker
authors like Davies or Knowles in their Journal article would like.
It is much more simple and powerful in nature; more like Marty Grundy
in her 'Sit Thee Here' article in the Journal . I know weighty
Friends in the same way that I know weighty 'meditators' from our
community here. Weighty in the 'throw-power' of their cultivated
silence. I really appreciate the way that Marty Grundy catches the
gravity of this weight in her words. It is a very abstract thing but
Marty catches it:
[snip] " …But the older Friend did much more. As she settled into
worship, slipping into that familiar deep openness to God's Spirit,
she silently drew the visitor with her.
Many Friends have had the precious experience of sitting
near a weighty Friend and being drawn by that Friend's experience
into a deeper, more prayerful place." And then the next two
paragraphs enlarging on this.
This weightiness comes in time from just doing it through
time in practice. It becomes its own standard of weight in
experience.
Now, recently as aspects of the larger Transcendental Meditation (TM) group
participation here in this town have become less inclusive, the
larger group meditation practice has dwindled in scope. The several
of us old-Quakers who have been active in the larger community group
meditations have been exploring a refuge in the tradition of our old
Quaker practice that is without the exclusive trappings of our
community 'meditation' TM organization.
Separations are nothing new even to Quaker Meetings also
along the same lines: cultivated experiential practitioners
(conservatives) on the one hand and then those dogmatic cultist mood-
makers of faith (evangelicals) on the other. I see this even still within
the range of so-called conservatives in your pages of the Friends Journal.
There seems an evident split of idea about Quakerism. Whether
Friends exclusively are those who must also believe in all the
testimonies or if they are first Quakers who worship in meeting and then
maybe are lead to testimonies, or not. Is it all or nothing to be a member
Quaker? Can there be a place for those who just come for worship and
possibly have an intense experience at that without having to also
become an activist on every social issue also? What is minimally
fundamental here? Myself, I look to the words of the primitive
Quakers for those answers, for original intent. That is always
clarifying and tempering.
Where I live, in a quiet reaction which seeks a refuge
from forming dogma, poor administration, and bad behavior in the TM
organization several of us as old Friends have begun to sit together again
more regularly in Quaker Meeting. As we have gathered month by month
for the last half year or more, we have come simply as worshipping
Friends, without agenda and without burden of other Quaker testimony
other than to sit together in worship as method, primitive in form.
We have gathered some appropriate quotes from founding Quakers for
reference to lead us in our practice. Then too we draw on our
experience as Friends.
Together in a corporate practice it has been very
satisfying spiritually in experience. We pick a Sunday every month
that works and meet in homes for Quaker worship without a clerk. The
meetings have easily happened between friends. For some time now,
The corporate practice has progressed in to weekly Friends Meeting as
Quakers.
Following your July 2003 Friend’s Journal Issue about membership, I felt you
might enjoy learning of these experiences. We live in an area of
Iowa where there were once many un-programmed Quaker Meetings in the
19th Century. As near as I can figure there probably have not been
un-programmed meetings in the Southeast corner of Iowa since around
the turn of the 20th Century.
I do not see that we will form a Meeting though we will
continue to meet in practice of worship as Quakers. In time there
may be the possibility of forming a Meeting. For now there is not a
large affinity with everything else that is Society of Friends that
might also not also be necessarily relevant to us as individuals for now.
In many ways we are already working on our own activisms of issues and testimony.
I would say that this generally is a pretty 'activist' group of
people, each in their own right. However, for now, First things
first. The first thing here seems to be more about turning on the
light.
Sincerely,
Doug Hamilton
Fairfield, Iowa