Quaker Worship In The Body

Quaker worship is about stillness. No, no, no, nope. Quaker worship is about falling on the ground. Quaker worship is about standing up. Quaker worship is about calling out. Quaker worship is about chanting. Quaker worship has always been about….Ecstasy!

My name is Katie Hawkins, and my meeting is Chestnut Hill Friends in Northwest Philadelphia. And I’m a lifelong Quaker and a public minister, and I’m so happy to get a chance to speak with you.

I call it whole self opening. What it’s trying to do is not isolate the body from the mind from the spirit. The soma is the whole self, and it’s like an organism of your being, and in that organism, the body holds seats of consciousness like our heart and our gut into it way faster than the brain and our head. But it is a form of knowing. So the idea of mind being here and body being here is just fallacy. That’s not how consciousness works.

This is Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer’s self-portrait as a tuning fork, and she says there is perhaps you’ve felt it a moment when the day falls away and your name falls away and everything you thought you knew falls away, and for a moment, you know yourself only as whatever it is that continues. Your whole body abuzz with the eternity of it, and you quiver, you quake, as if struck by the great hand of what is true, becoming pure tone, more vibration than flesh, a human-shaped resonator tuned to the frequency of life itself.

The Quakers were named for quaking!  Early friends fell down on the ground. They doubled over, mimicking the birth pangs of the new self. We’ll cry. We’ll move in certain kinds of ways. We’ll sing. We take what we know of the practice of the early Quakers that was body-based, so practices of worship, like falling down on the floor, like quaking, like lifting their arms, these worship practices, and taking a little seed of what we know historically, and then fleshing out the fruit, right? To play with the metaphor, or finding its sort of contemporary flowering.

One part is worship, part two is discernment. We know about how the early friends had a body-based way of discerning the leading, so we experiment with what that might look like for us, how we could channel that experience, and the third is hands-on healing. How it is that touch has been completely erased from our culture, and touch was at the heart of early Quakerism. So, it’s designed to allow seekers, not just Quakers. The center is designed for anyone interested in embodied spirituality, but who’s curious about what the Quaker tradition specifically has to offer to the world of embodied spirituality. 

One practice that I offer as a way of playing with this theme of embodied wayfinding is to borrow J. Brant Bill’s metaphor of the sacred compass, and then embody it by walking in a sacred circle, as though we’re trying to find true north on our inner compass. And when we feel centered, when we feel we know where the true north is pointing, then we pause, we wait, we feel for the leading, and then we pivot towards true north, and we follow faithfully.

We’re back in our natural self. We’re doing what we do in private. We’re dancing like no one’s watching. You know the way that we worship when we are fully open is sometimes corny, ridiculous. I sometimes laugh, or God gives me jokes or it doesn’t ever look the way I think it’s going to look. There’s no code, and that’s one of the beautiful things for me about it is that I can’t script how worship is calling me forward on a given day.

Give over thine own running. Give over thine known desiring. To know, and be, anything.