Faith, Redemptive Grace, and Quaker Meeting for Worship

Traditional guidance on Quaker meeting for worship uses the phrase “expectant waiting” to describe an ideal approach to meeting for worship. This is a modest and understated way of speaking (like much Quaker speech) about the profound and original religious practice of faith that is Quakerism.

Quaker practice is in the faith tradition. By “faith,” I mean moment-to-moment, intentional openness to redemptive grace. Some folks speak of being open to God’s grace. Faith in this sense is an act of will; it is something you do, rather than something you believe or something you possess.

To do the work of faith, we must have the humility to admit that we need redemption and the boldness to affirm that we deserve redemption. Most of us, by the time we become adults, know that we need redemption. This knowledge might be the defining characteristic of being an adult. But the fact that we deserve redemption seems more difficult for many of us to believe. The development of our capacity to experience our innocence has to overcome pervasive (even if unintentional) social programming and deep-rooted accusatory voices within us. This is such a crucial problem that, for much of the world’s population, the central turning point in human history is the coming of Jesus Christ, whose essential message gives authority to the knowledge, already deep within us, that redemption is ours if we will only accept it. (Many cultures the world over affirm that truth even when they use other language to express it.)

Some folks do not like to speak of redemption because it seems to require abject self-blame, an admission that we deserve punishment even as we ask for mercy. But the redemption I am speaking of is the opposite of self-blame. It is a recognition that we have been innocent from the beginning. Redemption is an ongoing celebratory baptism in the waters of grace.

This redemptive grace is what we are trying to be open to in the work of faith.

Many of us can go for months or years without remembering to practice faith-as-prayer like this. I think some folks are forced into it only in an extended life crisis when their usual modes of intellectual problem-solving fail them and they have no choice but to try to listen for a deeper voice.

Quaker meeting for worship is a place to listen for that deeper voice, but this practice can feel at first like we are throwing our minds into reverse: trying to shut down all our normal productive modes of thinking in favor of listening for a voice we don’t even know is there. In meeting, we work at shifting from a busy, rational mode of thinking to deep, listening, nonverbal prayer. Our verbal habits of mind in daily life, geared toward production or problem solving, often do not lead us to this kind of prayer, which is instead nonverbal and geared toward receptivity to the holiness of existence at a level deeper than the conscious. The practice of faith in meeting for worship is not an intellectual process; it is a listening process. We need to listen with our whole heart, our whole soul, our whole mind, and our whole strength, to open ourselves to grace.

Faith brings us to a transparency that can be frightening. Even those of us who reject intellectually the idea of a punishing God can have some level of subconscious belief that we deserve destruction for our sins. Making ourselves open to grace means baring those parts of our psyche that are clenched in fear and expecting destruction. But when we make ourselves vulnerable and are not destroyed, the experience feels like forgiveness. Our faith has become an answered prayer.

Faith, the expectant waiting on and openness to redemptive grace, is the basic religious practice of Quaker meeting for worship. Sometimes in meeting, we experience what Quakers call a “covered meeting,” a sanctifying grace covering all who are present, an experience of the redemptive grace we are speaking of. The redemption we hope for is more lifelong than the sanctifying grace of a single covered meeting, but the grace we experience in meeting is a glimpse of that redemption and a reaffirmation that we are on the right path.