The Young Quak­er Pod­cast in the UK recent­ly had an episode in which they had a mic run through 30 min­utes of silent wor­ship. I must admit I kind of laughed at the John Cage’­ness of it. But it’s gen­er­at­ed quite a bit of buzz. The Guardian declared it an ocean of calm, NPR thinks silence is gold­en. Not to be out­done, the BBC breath­less­ly announced that the pod­cast makes his­to­ry for record­ing Quak­er wor­ship (nev­er mind peo­ple have been wor­ship­ping via Skype and oth­er online media for many years now).

I love the inten­tion­al­i­ty of a room­ful of peo­ple agree­ing to set­tle into silence togeth­er as much as the next Friend, but I’m tempt­ed to won­der whether the cov­er­age would have quite so effu­sive if some­one had inter­rupt­ed part of the pod­cast’s silence to give a mes­sage. From daf­fodil min­istry to top-of-the-hour news­cast updates to dis­qui­si­tions on the gospel, pret­ty much any­thing would have popped the silence’s “moment of Zen,” to use NPR’s head-scratching description.

The best part of it all so far, in my opin­ion, is that one of the pod­cast­ers, host Jes­si­ca Hubbard-Bailey, got a chance to use the buzz to write her sto­ry of being a Quak­er for i (an online spin-off of the Inde­pen­dent): Life is tough for young peo­ple, but being a Quak­er has giv­en me hope.

When a friend came to me last year and sug­gest­ed the Young Quak­er Pod­cast record a silent Meet­ing for Wor­ship I was intrigued. But giv­en that most peo­ple are not quite so enam­oured with silence as Quak­ers, I couldn’t have antic­i­pat­ed the inter­est and response that followed.

https://​inews​.co​.uk/​i​n​e​w​s​-​l​i​f​e​s​t​y​l​e​/​w​o​m​e​n​/​l​i​f​e​-​i​s​-​t​o​u​g​h​-​f​o​r​-​y​o​u​n​g​-​p​e​o​p​l​e​-​b​u​t​-​b​e​i​n​g​-​a​-​q​u​a​k​e​r​-​h​a​s​-​g​i​v​e​n​-​m​e​-​h​o​pe/