A Quaker wedding and the moment of a stammer
Thought and emotion focused on a moment…
We attended a Quaker wedding meeting last week, safely out of the drizzle in a galleried, high-roofed hall beside a beautiful city garden. It was as down-to-earth and as refreshing as all the Quaker meetings1 I have been to. The silent, democratic format would have been familiar to radical Quaker protesters in the 1650s, just updated so that people as far away as Wales and Iran could join us on Zoom.
As silent meetings go, it was very chatty. People talking about their experiences of marriage and what it meant to them. Topics ranged from hitchhiking to forbearance.
But there were silent moments, special moments. In the quiet of a meeting, Quakers are (it seems to me) not trying to empty the mind or “be in the moment” as happens with some meditation. They are more trying to focus the moment so that thought and feeling can merge into a deep contemplation of things important to you. Often, this contemplation centres on how you are connected to other people, even the world, and what you can do to improve those connections. I have not explained this well. Others do it better.
As part of that connection, anyone, anytime, can share their thoughts with the meeting. The talk, even in chatty meetings like this one, comes out of the silence.
I have never wanted to share my thoughts. When a child, I was dragged to a few Quaker meetings. Those experiences were as hard as the benches. It was bad enough sitting quietly surrounded by old people while real life happened outside, but the real horror was the uncertainty of who might speak. If I prayed at all, it was something on lines of “dear God, please don’t let the spirit move my mother”. Oh, the potential, and, on one scarifying occasion, real embarrassment…
But at that wedding meeting last week, I did want to share. I have been part of a marriage for thirty plus years — a marriage of opposites many told us would never last. We would have been married longer but she waited until I felt half confident of controlling my stammer enough to say the vows. I felt I could have developed both the hitchhiking and forbearance themes. I could have talked about supporting each other, doing the unexpected, letting stuff take its time.
I wanted to speak up but knew that I would not. I did not want to take up time in a short service, did not want my disfluency to intrude on another’s special day. — Nah, scratch that, I did not want to stammer openly, did not want to appear a fool before so many confident and clever people.
Much of the advice shared in this chatty-silent meeting had something to do with the idea that we cannot guarantee perfection in marriage, life, or anything really, but we can work at loving and sharing, joy and commitment.
I heard this and ignored it, choosing inaction over the risk of imperfection.
Not unusual. James Hollis in Living an Examined Life, 2 writes:
How often do we look back “longing for the freedom of our chains,” rather than stepping into the opening maw of uncertainty?
But I knew what I was (not) doing. I made my choice to be silent during moments of quiet focus and contemplation. An uncomfortable contrast to similar “easier-to-keep-quiet” decisions made many times on most days — decisions made so quickly I can skip over them and pretend they never happened.
If a tree falls and no one hears it, does it make a sound?
Self-censorship like this, I realised in that moment, is inherently authoritarian — and I do not like to think of myself as such. If you do not share, if you tell yourself you cannot, share your thinking, you may as well not think it. You have denied the right to free speech and free thought. The tree has departed without a sound. Noiseless.
Better to share the thought however rough and ready the noise than to lie like a tree, lonely and unknown. Never was.
And no matter how rough and ready, the moment of stammering can have its own power.3
The moment of a stammer that others see can be a moment of silent contemplation4 for both the person who would speak and those listening: all thought and emotion is focused on that moment — a moment of unusual communication and often therefore of intense connection.
“…thought and emotion focused on a moment…”
I have experienced similar moments outside the Meeting House and the stammer. To name a few: running on a trail, sparring in a boxing ring, summiting a hilltop and seeing land and sea spread below you.
Some moments are joyous, some not. All have features in common:
They involve physical effort — even if the effort of sitting still or stammering.
They are outside your control.
They fill your every fibre. Intense attention.
These moments are both internal, intensely private, and also when you are most connected to the outside world.
When you deny the connection, decline to share, the moment becomes selfish, rancid. It will decay.
When I say “you”, naturally, I mean “me”. It’s speak up, make connections time. To quote James Hollis again:
… understand that the power to say yes or no to a moment constitutes the essential freedom and dignity of every soul… we have to do what we are afraid of.
So, I have given myself a talking-to. I have worked out (duh) that sharing the moment of a stammer is an act of liberation, a potential moment of connection, and better than falling as a noiseless tree.
More about Quakers in the UK, here: https://www.quaker.org.uk/. Try a Quaker meeting on zoom? Info at: https://www.woodbrooke.org.uk/worship/faqs/ and timetable at https://www.woodbrooke.org.uk/worship/
Hollis, James. 2018. Living an Examined Life. Sounds True.
Especially if having the double courage of speaking truth to power.
Not always. They can also be moments unnoticed, of irritation, moments to be worked through, or something else. I am not pretending that stammering is a continual, joyous epiphany.
Picture credits:
Fallen Tree Luca Bravo Unsplash with JN edits.
Quaker garden and badly drawn rule both JN.