“Please hold the Clerk’s table in the Light. . .”

This was a request we heard often at our Annual Meeting’s business sessions in August. Several months before coming to Annual Meeting I had done a lot of reading about Meeting for Worship for the Purpose of Business in preparation for my facilitating that part of Quaker 101 for our meeting. Most of that reading had actually been about Meeting for Worship; for I truly feel that the way Friends do business must be grounded in worship. I confess, however, that I go to business meeting as part of a discipline. It is a duty that I often perform with resignation, rather than with anticipation such as I always feel going to Meeting of Worship.

In The Gathered Meeting, Thomas Kelly talks of the “favoring conditions and releasing stimuli” that foster a gathered meeting.

There is a real invisible work of kindling and of mutual assistance in worship which some of the worshippers must do, directing it upon others along with themselves. It is an internal work of prayer. Its language is not “I,’’ or ‘’You,” but “We.’’ . . . With work of soul the kindled praying worshipper holds the group, his comrades and himself, high above the sordid and the trivial, and prays in quiet, offering that the Light may drive away the shadows of self-will.

As I read this, I recollected those two folks who sit to the side of the Clerk’s table at Annual Meeting. I couldn’t remember what they are called—Listener’s, Presences—but I saw that they were there to do this necessary “work of soul” in our Meetings for Worship for the Purpose of Business.

Time passed. I went to Annual Meeting anticipating seeing again old Annual Meeting Friends, meeting new attenders, worship sharing, Bible study and, yes, resignedly sitting through hours of business meeting. Then at one of the early sessions, I found myself listening to some concerned attender who felt unready to give his approval to a minute, not apparently because he disapproved of it, but because it needed more seasoning. The Friend was reminded that the proposal had been discussed at length at one or two interim meetings.

I heaved a sigh and began to close my ears to what threatened to become one of those, to me, interminable discussions, when my attention was drawn to the two listeners sitting to the side of the Clerk’s table and I recollected that my task was, like theirs, to hold us in the Light. And suddenly my body relaxed, my mind became empty of judgment and pique and I felt, for perhaps the first time in a meeting for business, truly a member of one body. I felt myself filling with patience and kindness and peace. At the last business session I was asked to be one of the two listeners. I gladly agreed.

I can witness that this amazing sense of the meeting is not a final state. At Patapsco’s last business meeting I found myself agitated and out of order, but now and again I heard Lauri Perman asking “Please hold the Clerk’s table in the Light” and felt the kindling presence of others doing the invisible work of prayer for me, for us.

Submitted by Susan Rose, Patapsco Friends Meeting