Messages from God

Alex Coolman

They sat in silence, waiting, not knowing what to expect. The minutes

stretched like creaking springs, until it seemed like they couldn’t

become any longer. But nobody said a word.

Finally, Peggy Toledano stood up and faced the congregation. All eyes

turned to her.

“I’m thinking this morning of unfinished business,” she began, her

voice contemplative and a little nervous. For a few moments she spoke

about the importance of emotional openness, movingly expressing her love

for her absent mother.

The level of attention in the room was unlike anything to be seen at

an ordinary church service. Nobody dozed or fidgeted, and even the

children seemed absorbed in Toledano’s speech.

This was a Quaker meeting, and as far as these people were concerned,

they were listening to God.

On Sunday mornings, when priests and pastors dispense their version of

wisdom at local churches, the Quakers gather at Whittier Law School in

Costa Mesa to hear each other, listening to words they believe are the

product of divine inspiration. In the view of Quakers, God continues to

speak to and through humans just as in biblical times. The only reason

more people aren’t aware of this is that humans have stopped trying to

discern that divine voice.

“God has a tendency to do a lot of whispering,” said Toledano, a Costa

Mesa resident and member of the Orange County Friends Meeting Group. “You

have to learn to be quiet and listen.”

The Friends, who currently hold their meeting in a rather plain

conference room at the law school, practice a form of worship designed to

facilitate this listening. Rather than structuring the event around a

sermon or a set of lessons, they simply assemble, form a circle, and sit

in silence. If members of the group feel moved to speak, they stand up

and do so. After an hour, even if nothing at all has been said, the

meeting ends.

The point of conducting -- or rather, not conducting -- a service this

way is that Quakers feel that the silent contemplation at such meetings

allows participants to experience God directly, said Friends member David

Lederman of Irvine. When members of the group speak out, he said, they --

in some sense -- bring forth the voice of the transcendent.

“Direct access to whatever you want to call it, divinity or whatever,

is crucial to all of us,” Lederman said.

“We’re essentially mystics,” Toledano said. But the voice of God

that is expressed in the Friends’ meetings is a strikingly human one.

Members who stood and spoke at a recent gathering addressed, in very

concrete terms, the suffering of the victims of the August earthquake in

Turkey and the importance of avoiding stereotypes. Lederman stood and

told a humorous anecdote about the comedian Lenny Bruce. The idea that

such earthy sentiments could be divinely inspired may seem unusual, but

Toledano finds the two facts entirely consistent.

“Sometimes a very powerful thing will come out in a very simple way,”

she said.

“The assumption is that ... when you are impelled to rise, that what

you have to say will have been put there by divine intervention.”

Moreover, Toledano said, the divinity that Quakers recognize in

themselves is something they believe is shared by all people. For this

reason, Quakers are -- and historically have been -- very concerned with

the way vulnerable members of society are treated. For a religion whose

essential core is intensely personal and private, Quakerism is a faith

with a very politically engaged public face.

Debby Rector of Costa Mesa noted that Quakers were pioneers of the

antislavery and civil rights movements in the United States and

instrumental in improving conditions for public education and the care of

the insane. Quakers helped push for better treatment of prisoners, Rector

joked, “because they were thrown in jail so much.”

The combination of the Friends’ mysticism and their engagement with

real-world problems is attractive to many who find more structured

religions rule-bound and unappealing.

“I’m much too rational a person for the theology of mainline

Christianity,” Rector said. “This is the only thing that makes sense for

me.”

For people unaccustomed to sitting in silence for extended periods of

time or talking in front of groups, though, the Friends’ form of worship

may seem odd or intimidating. At their recent meeting, many minutes were

filled by nothing but the ticking of the clock on the wall and the faint

humming of the fluorescent lights overhead. Members of the group sat

mostly with their eyes closed, pensive expressions turning down the

corners of their mouths. The sense, when a member eventually rose to

speak, was of a great dramatic expectation finally fulfilled.

The key to appreciating the service, Toledano said, is finding a way

to escape from the noisiness of the mind that occupies most people’s

waking moments.

“You let yourself slip away and make way for God’s presence,” she

said. “The hope and the ultimate aim is that the meeting is unified under

a single spirit.”

When the urge to speak finally comes, Toledano said, the experience is

both frightening and exhilarating.

“The actual physical reaction you have is like someone picks you up by

the back of your neck and says ‘Talk,”’ Toledano said. “It’s pretty scary

when it first starts happening.”

The impetus to talk proves impossible to resist for many participants,

even if they feel uncomfortable about speaking.

“When you have something to say, it will be so important that you are

physically driven to your feet,” Toledano said. “This is not like getting

up and addressing a Boy Scout troop. This is entirely out of your hands.

You might just as well get it over with.”