I tried many times to describe silence in The Honey Locust Tree, but I always failed. So little happened in a Quaker meeting. Worshippers entered the meeting space, sat in a pew, closed their eyes, and only spoke if they felt moved.
In an effort to remedy this problem, I tried to describe the mechanics of a Quaker meeting.
For example, the setting of a meeting. On Sundays in Providence, I attended meetings for worship in the Friends Meeting House, a non-descript brick building on the East Side of the city. At the Moses Brown School, I attended all-school Quaker meetings, with close to a thousand students and faculty, in the field house; middle school Quaker meetings took place in the meeting house.
At the prison, Quaker meetings were held in the chapels of minimum and medium security. In maximum security, we met in a classroom.
At summer gatherings of the New England Yearly Meeting of Friends, we worshipped in college lecture halls.
How long was a Quaker meeting? With middle school students, a half-hour was enough. With the adults in Providence on Sunday, people worshipped for an hour. (The children in First Day School, the name for religious classes, came upstairs for the last fifteen minutes of the meeting.)
With inmates, the length of a meeting depended on how restless the group was. Quaker meeting in maximum security sometimes only lasted fifteen minutes. The most satisfying, and longest, meetings I attended were in medium security.
Who decided when a Quaker meeting was over? In Providence, we had convenors who sat near the center of the room and kept their eye on the clock. When they shook the hand of the person next to them, usually after about an hour, the meeting was over. At student Quaker meetings, a teacher or I would end the meeting.
A writer in Friends Journal noted that youthful Quaker meetings could become restive after thirty minutes and convenors needed to take the pulse of the group. After the fifth general fidget, the convenor was supposed to end the proceedings. This was called the “fifth major fidget effect.”
I was always happy when a few people stood and shared their thoughts at a Quaker meeting because then I had something to think about. I recall a silent meeting at Moses Brown where a teacher announced the death of a boy’s mother. After that, several students rose and shared their condolences.
The Honey Locust Tree contains three silences. The first is the silence I experienced in Quaker meeting. The second is the silence around the inmates’ crimes, which we prison ministry volunteers could never ask about. The third silence weaves around me. I talk about many things in the memoir, some quite personal, but I don’t discuss everything.
I’d like the reader to engage with these silences.