Meeting For Worship Poem by Michael Maxwell Steer

The buzz of greeting declines
as people detach themselves
From the outer world
and one by one dive into the silence -

there to float …

Entering this space
is like coming from the sunlit street
into a room with a single candle.
Once the senses have adjusted things become clear.

In that silence
otherness can take any voice:
the wisdom of age, the energy of youth,
the joys, griefs and struggles of life,
or justice and geo-politics.

The healing in stillness comes from
the surrender of each storm-tossed mind into this space,
together a subtly shaded consciousness,
in which the structures of Friendship interlock,
grounding towers of personal conviction.

Silence is like a symphony in which all sounds sing.

Each individual soulsumed into a whole.
All are discrete, yet all are magnetised
inwardly by a common humanity.

Humans long to surrender the burden of isolation -
voluntarily, in love,
or involuntarily, in hate -
those who criticise surrender to a greater mind
do not understand being human.

It is for this that we come in Friendship
to drink in the healing pool of silence.

Is it silence itself?
Is it what's inside us?
Is it the Big Guy upstairs?
Is it the Collective Unconscious?

Who knows?
What works works.

Quaker Meeting 24/3/13