I’ve since been informed that this has a fairly different spirit than what Quakers actually do – in a Quaker meeting, basically the default outcome is “nobody says anything”, the primary focus is on a sort of meditation. People don’t share things if they feel like sharing things, they say things if they feel moved by the spirit of god to say things, which is a fairly different vibe. A “talkative” meeting might have like 3 people out of 20 sharing something.
(I’d come away with a wrong impression because of the three Quaker events I’ve been to, one was a wedding which is apparently pretty different, where sharing things is more common, and one was with rationalists, who weren’t really onboarded into the Quaker Way Of Being)
I still think “whatever this thing was” was a good experience, which felt more similar to Quaker meetings than most other experiences I could compare it to, but it’s apparently a pretty different experience.
It depends a lot on the meeting. In some “popcorn” meetings there’s a lot of talking with pauses between; in some the default is silence.
>”It seems to me the Quakers would also run into this problem at least sometimes. I’m curious how they deal” I once saw someone else stand up and say that we’d heard what they have to say and it was now time for some silence. (Context was that this was a person who habitually talked a lot in meeting, and was starting to repeat themselves during a long message.)
I’ve since been informed that this has a fairly different spirit than what Quakers actually do – in a Quaker meeting, basically the default outcome is “nobody says anything”, the primary focus is on a sort of meditation. People don’t share things if they feel like sharing things, they say things if they feel moved by the spirit of god to say things, which is a fairly different vibe. A “talkative” meeting might have like 3 people out of 20 sharing something.
(I’d come away with a wrong impression because of the three Quaker events I’ve been to, one was a wedding which is apparently pretty different, where sharing things is more common, and one was with rationalists, who weren’t really onboarded into the Quaker Way Of Being)
I still think “whatever this thing was” was a good experience, which felt more similar to Quaker meetings than most other experiences I could compare it to, but it’s apparently a pretty different experience.
It depends a lot on the meeting. In some “popcorn” meetings there’s a lot of talking with pauses between; in some the default is silence.
>”It seems to me the Quakers would also run into this problem at least sometimes. I’m curious how they deal”
I once saw someone else stand up and say that we’d heard what they have to say and it was now time for some silence. (Context was that this was a person who habitually talked a lot in meeting, and was starting to repeat themselves during a long message.)