Quaker Meeting Offers Solace to Grieving Individual Through Silent Worship and Community Engagement

After my dad died, I tried to cope by keeping busy: a day job, a side hustle, socialising and working out. But I kept bursting into tears in public. At a Quaker meeting, it was as if someone had turned down the volume of the world.

It was 2022, and my dad had just died from a rare blood disease. In the aftermath, I quit my PhD and moved back to London from Brighton. I coped by keeping incredibly busy. I regularly informed friends “I’m fine, actually”, as I threw myself into a new job in communications, went clubbing every weekend, picked up a side hustle selling secondhand clothes and got suspiciously invested in my gym routine. If I could just keep busy, I thought, perhaps I could drown out the growing tidal wave of grief.

And it worked, until it just didn’t any more. I began to burst into tears randomly – during a work meeting, at the gym, on my commute – and everyone around me would politely pretend they didn’t notice the 28-year-old man weeping on the tube at 8.30am. I tried to push through it, but my ability to keep up with my own life was faltering, and all of it – the clubs, the job, the gym – suddenly felt unbearably loud and overwhelming.

Amid the chaos, I began to take walks during my lunch breaks, to decompress. It was while I was strolling down Euston Road in London that I stumbled on Friends House, the central meeting house of British Quakers. I barely knew anything about the Quakers, and had a suspicion of religion after leaving the Anglicanism I was raised with, but I began to visit the garden regularly to unwind. One day I noticed the words “truth”, “simplicity”, “equality”, and “peace” engraved on the footpath. I became curious about who the Quakers were and what they believed.

After weeks of sitting in the garden, I nervously ventured inside the meeting house where I found a bustling coffee shop and, next to it, a shop full of books on social justice, pacifism and faith. I furtively picked up a copy of Advices and Queries, a small booklet that acts as a kind of mini-guide for practising Quakers.

I learned that Quakers meet to worship in silence, sitting in a circle until someone is deeply moved to speak, and that while Quakerism is founded on Christianity, many Quakers are secular.

The booklet also said that Quakers should “Seek to know an inward stillness, even amid the activities of daily life”.

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