“Lo di lo” to you too, Brendan. Thanks so much for sharing your thinking and your stories. I was so glad for your title to come across my feed. I can relate.

I found out about Quakerism at Farm and Wilderness in 1989. Every morning, the Tamarack Farm community would sit together in the woods in silence and every once in a while someone would speak out of the silence. Staff meetings started with a check-in where I didn’t need to compete with the more talkative ones to tell my story. Before every meal, we held hands in silence in a circle. After every meal, we sang. As the midwestern son of a Presbyterian Preacher, I felt like I had finally come home. I’d been waiting my whole life for the Vermont Quaker culture.

When I came back to Ohio, I stumbled into a job as the music director of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Kent. For 25 years, I spent Sunday mornings spinning plates with the Unitarians — always thinking about what was coming next on the order of service. With total musical and spiritual freedom and a very musical congregation, the job fit me perfectly — but there were so many words (and a general resistance to the one word that I wanted more of — God. (She, He, They)

Poor health made me leave my UU job in 2021. Eventually I made it over to the Friends Meeting in Kent. On the first Sunday there, I felt a profound sense that I was home again. I felt that here in this silence is where I can find God.

My lungs don’t have the strength for much singing these days, but at our meeting a couple weeks ago, I sang Charlie Murphy’s “Light is Returning.” “Light is returning. Even though this is the darkest hour. No one can hold back the dawn.”

Thanks for the opportunity to reflect. I appreciate you. Hal