As I go through this process of inwardly going "belly up" -- that is to say, finally realizing my need to use all my creative skills to express my inner spiritual reality -- a related memory has surfaced which I don't remember fully unpacking here.
When I left New York City (and the corporate world) behind in 1990, I went to Pendle Hill, the Quaker study center outside Philadelphia. It was basically the first time I had experienced Quakerism's classic silent form of worship. I had stopped being involved with church music, and wasn't attending church or cathedral services except once in a blue moon. It had begun to be obvious to me that girls and women would never have a place in that musical tradition, and so I was probably carrying a fairly heavy load of -- what? -- resentment, anger, dismissiveness. Perhaps this factor entered into removing myself to a retreat space offering silent spiritual worship.
I remember the powerful onrush of feelings, sounds, and "sights" around my first few morning meetings. Participants sat in benches around a square open space, and the first ten or fifteen minutes tended to be completely silent. Then, one by one, a few people might stand and say a short message based on their internal leadings -- something they felt compelled by Spirit to say at that moment. Meeting for worship would eventually end when the clerk or another participant reached over to shake the hand of their closest neighbor, and the rest of us would do the same. There was no minister or music (except for the rare occasion when an individual sang a few lines of a song)...there were no processions or readings.
For several weeks, my morning meetings weren't silent, they were almost raucously loud. My brain filled in the silence with hymns, organ preludes and postludes (the louder the better, you know, the Widor Toccata kind of thing!) I would inwardly recite the 1928 Book of Common Prayer communion service ("Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid..." In fact, I could practically recite the priest's part of the entire service!) I could hear snippets of sermons I had heard over the course of my life, and little bits and pieces of other religious writings, readings, the Psalms, and so forth.
It would take weeks for this cacophony to settle down. Intellectually, I understood that early Quakers had started as a sharp deliberate contrast to the tradition I had grown up with, so I was experiencing in real time what that meant -- replacing outward forms of God and the worship of God with an inner sense of the divine, and inner worship, if you will. Perhaps even those first Quakers had a hard time not hearing organs, singing, and sermons. Sound rushes in to fill the silence at first, that's for sure.
I would finally begin to understand, intellectually, then actively experience, this new reality. It was like a photo negative of my spiritual life to date, but once it took hold, the notion of "that of God within" became firmly rooted. One day, sitting in the silence, I suddenly "heard" a message that needed expressing. My body literally shook ("quaked"), and so I stood up and spoke. I cannot remember what I said, but it was a powerful experience. I think this is when I finally started (started!) the path towards trusting my inner truth, a path that arguably has only now begun to solidify.
And as an example of the latest manifestation of the process: I am grateful for the left brain skill to be able to articulate in words so many of my experiences and observations. But even as I reach the end of this post, I find I have the urge to use a more "right brain" form of expression too, to find a more spontaneous way to express the feelings, the colors, the inner and outer music. This moment in history is shaking it all up, like a snow-globe, with the glitter that's been kind of pushed under the carpet demanding to fly through the air, and be seen.
