33. Singers Hill Synagogue, Birmingham

Singers Hill Synagogue is home to the city’s Hebrew Congregation and has been the focal point for Jewish worship and community life in Birmingham for 159 years. I’ve been keen to visit this intriguing building since starting my blog.

The pictures of the interior show a beautiful setting steadfastly holding its place as high-rise blocks and thundering ring roads spring up all around it.

Sadly, the pictures on the website and a view of the entrance through high, black railings are all I’m likely to get. I won’t be going in.

The signs were not good from the start, it has to be said. I emailed on more than one occasion to ask about joining a service. I got no reply or acknowledgment. I rang the office but was told it was closed. 

The church family has - as a sweeping generalisation - not really mastered the full online communication experience yet. I’ve signed up with dozens of churches offering to keep me updated and received next to nothing so far. And as for contacting numerous churches, vicars, mosque offices and more than one Rabbi, through their websites - all I can say is that I hope God answers your prayers a lot more efficiently than you answer your emails.

On arriving this morning I find the building locked up and closed off only minutes from the published start of the service. I’m peering through the rails at the closed doors when a high-vis jacketed man I genuinely took to be one of the city’s army of traffic wardens, asks me what I’m doing.

I explain what I’m here for but he’s already decided I’m not going in. I should have emailed or telephoned, he says. I tell him I did but I don’t get the impression my answer fits what he wants to think. A succession of people pass through all shrugging sympathy but the gates stay locked with the only way in for everyone a keypad controlled gate under the control of the security man. 

The Rabbi arrives and, although he is polite and understanding, I am not to be allowed in. I try explaining why I’m here, how I’ve made an effort to get here, what my expectations were and so on. He goes so far as to say that I seem like a genuine person to him - well that’s a blessing of sorts - but that he is not able to help as nobody is allowed in unless they have registered and been cleared by the central authority. He tells me I should email him.

The security man offers the view that the very fact he needs to be there at all is a sad comment on the world we live in these days. He seems to want to offer a lots of comments. I make the observation that the impotency of a church leader to allow someone to come into his place of worship is a far sadder indictment. The Rabbi looks uncomfortable at this.

We’ve all come across the ‘It’s not my fault mate, it’s head office’ excuse before. I’ve encountered it from shop staff, call centre operatives, train companies and more. But never from a church. 

I would have liked to ask the Rabbi what would happen if someone knocked at the door of his Synagogue in genuine peril and desperate for his help. As a patient, and no doubt learned man, I’m sure he’d have an answer, but I’m left feeling my question would have had to get passed one high-vis sentinel and a distinctly unresponsive head office before it would reach him.

The purpose of my visits has never been to judge any particular religion or congregation. I try to come with an open mind, see what goes on and try to pick out what lessons I can learn. 

But in being shown that there is literally no place for me here, am I not being shown with abundant clarity a lesson in the difference between the generosity of welcoming the world with all its faults and risks, and the mean-spiritedness of literally closing the door in that world’s face? 

These are troubling times for many churches. They can attract criticism, abuse and occasional violent action. But on this pilgrimage I’ve been struck by the constant theme of opening up and welcoming all people regardless of their background. I’ve been made to feel at home almost everywhere I’ve been and, perhaps naively, allowed that to become my blanket expectation.

I may email the Rabbi and make a second attempt to join the worshippers here, but I’m not minded to do so at the moment.

Contenting myself with a stroll to the art gallery and the bookshop before getting back on the train, I’m drawn into a conversation with a Muslim man at a stall offering information to the crowded shopping streets of the city. I ask him if he’s worried about being picked on or attacked. He says it’s part of his faith to stand up to challenges in trying to further understanding and spread a message of peace. He gives me a handshake, a huge smile and a free copy of the Quran.

32. Coventry Elim Church, Belgrade Theatre

There are plenty of churches operating away from their home. Those that have homes can end up being displaced for one reason or another and forced to find a new place to meet. This can often be a real threat to existence.

It’s a subject the city of Coventry is having to address at the moment though not in terms of its churches. Coventry City, for a whole host of internecine reasons I’m delighted to say have no place in this blog, will be playing their home games in Birmingham when the new football season starts. They’ve had to do it before and it didn’t work well then. Clearly people want a familiar base, somewhere they can trust and feel at home. Somewhere they identify with.

Coventry’s Elim Church also plays its Sunday games away from home, but not as a result of any problems. Here the need is to find a space to grow. A hugely welcome problem for any church. So it’s through the glitzy foyer of the Belgrade Theatre that I stroll for this Sunday gathering, welcomed by quite the most enthusiastic of welcoming teams. The last time I was in the Belgrade was to see a musical based on the songs of Ian Dury; a fabulous evening of hummable songs, uplifting narrative and with a message of inclusion and togetherness for us all. By the time I’m heading back toward the car, I’m inevitably drawing parallels.

Like most modern Pentecostal services, this one starts with music. There’s a nine-piece band pumping through half an hour of fine, singalong anthems. The lyrics are not quite Charles Wesley and the music considerably less complex than Stanford, but these songs work by being simple to pick up and easy to build into an ecstatic finish. And the band are top-notch. By a joyful quirk of fate I’ve positioned myself a row in front of a woman with a tremendous voice matched only by her desire to share it with the masses. Once I’ve adjusted the hearing aids to cope with the mighty volume, it’s like experiencing the whole gig in surround sound. 

As the band take a well-earned rest we get prayers, parish news on the big screen and a line-up of very young children to be welcomed into the family. It’s certainly a big family. There’s hundreds here today - there will be plenty of touring shows at this venue envious of so few empty seats - and the return to the normal church building next week will mean two services just to cope with the hundreds.

The talk this morning stems from verses from Ezekiel - the passage describing a great river emerging from the ruins of a temple, broadening to become a source of food and life to the whole area. We get to follow the words on the huge, stage-wide screen and we get videos too. In this case it’s a splendid film of this morning’s pastor bravely immersing himself in a very uninviting lake to make the point about the biblical river being a metaphor for our own commitment to faith. We’re all, he says, quite happy to go ankle-deep, but greater rewards will be ours for having the courage and the steadfastness to get right in and swim. Which he then does. It’s a wonderfully visual point, brilliantly made. The fact that he probably froze half to death and risked any number of stomach-crunching diseases to make that point, merely serves to underline how far a committed person may go. I’m still just dipping my toes of course.

It doesn’t end there. The river’s ability to contain, support and sustain life should be, we are told, a reminder to us all to take that hope and love out into the community and help feed those who are hungry, homeless, confused, troubled or afraid. As finale songs go, it’s a strong one and it’s hard not to feel uplifted as the curtain finally falls and the houselights come up. I’m reminded of the comparative hopelessness of the ‘go out and spread the good word’ message which started this blog half a year ago. This, evidently, is how it’s done.

This being a theatre I’m tempted to praise this as an excellently-crafted production. A clear message presented in a richly entertaining way by a faultless, professional cast. And it was. But it’s more than that. In the enthusiasm and sharing of the hundreds who came this is as good an example of a church working perfectly with its members as you could expect to see. By the time Elim returns to the Belgrade after the theatre’s refurbishment, the queues will stretch out of the foyer and round the block. Like the river bursting from the temple, it’ll run and run.

31. Broadgate Spiritualist Church, Coventry

This Sunday being Father’s Day I thought it would be nice to have a chat with my dad. Spend some time together to catch up on news and compare notes on books and cricket. 

The problem with this idea is that my father died almost thirty years ago. By a quirk of fate, last weekend marked the point at which I have now lived more days than he did. I’m now older than my dad. Now that would be worth talking about.

Those of us in the living world have been communing with the dead since time immemorial. Many religions - Taoism for one - still hold it as an essential part of daily worship.

Spiritualism offers perhaps the most overt claims to be able to bridge the gap to the afterlife for you; it’s not just the religion’s USP it’s its entire reason for existence.

This is - so says the wording above the door - the Spiritualists National Church. Inside there are no ministers, no religious trappings and little in the way of church goings-on. There are plain chairs, a hand-written sign asking for our £2.50 donation and a raised podium instead of any altar. It’s less like a church than a church hall really and the turnout of barely a dozen people coated up against the June downpours doesn’t help to dispel a fairly gloomy atmosphere.

Before the service starts I’m given a pep-talk about the value and values of spiritualism. In the company of three other souls who have come here for the first time, I learn such diverse nuggets as how the church doesn’t believe in Jesus as there have been plenty of mediums before and after him, how the church committee is formed and that we all have a coloured aura which our guide is able to see. Mine, she tells me, is yellow and orange. She feels that means an open mind and a willingness to learn. She asks me what orange and yellow means to me. The MCC I tell her, probably scuppering her ‘open mind’ theory in an instant.

The service proper starts with two songs and I find myself singing Rod Stewart’s Sailing to a backing track. It’s a slightly absurd start but not wholly out of keeping with what’s to come. We get a prayer, but that’s the only faintly religious element present.

There is a rather tired stereotype of the spiritual medium experience; a smooth-talking fairground faker preying on the desperate hopes of the naive and terminally credulous. The experience which fills the next hour and a half, I have to say, does nothing to shatter that image.

In the hands of the visiting medium - Daniel, from Leicester, who looks like an estate agent - the information coming from the spirit world is invariably hazy and rather indistinct in its aim. He wonders if anyone knows someone called Mary in the spirit world. Or if anyone had a male figure in their life with brown hair. Woefully inaccurate stabs and generalised drivel follow at a steady pace always delivered as if searched from some indistinct middle distance just above all our heads. It strikes me that I’d back myself to be able to do this without a shred of training. Nobody from this world or the next tells me otherwise.

And then suddenly it is with a degree of dread I realise he’s looking straight at me. He has in mind, he says, a woman of small stature. Not tall. Quite old. With her arms crossed. My grandmother, he wonders? Stunning I say (to myself). I can’t trust myself to hide my lack of belief in this so I let him flounder on until he picks on someone else.

There’s no worship here, only a disappointingly meagre showmanship. I can’t even report that the experience was life-changing for anyone else. There were no truly enlightening moments. 

The dead are always with us all the time. They’re in our thoughts and our memories. They’re in the special places we go or the daft, sentimental traditions we keep. They’re in the way we think and act and, as we get older, they’re there in the face that stares back at us from the mirror. We can reconcile ourselves to their failings, thank them for their love and come to terms with their absence and our loss any time we like. We just have to think. Perhaps if everyone searching for lost communication had the support and help they needed to realise that, there would be no need for rubbish like this.

In the end a perfect vision of my father does appear. But it’s not in the words of Daniel as he acts his oily part on the stage. It stems from a memory I have of my dad and me standing side by side in a church desperately trying to stifle our laughter about something. I can’t remember the cause but it was one of those moments when you are linked by the complete inability to control your body-shaking laughter. You can’t even look at each other for fear of starting the hysterics again. And I know that if he were to appear in flesh beside me now that he’d find this whole pantomime as batty and risible as I do. So perhaps he is speaking to me after all.

30. Leamington Baptist Church

According to reliable sources there are 1,372 coffee shops in Leamington. I may be exaggerating, of course, but if there’s a town to rival Leamington when it comes to places to get your daily caffeine fix, I’ve not been there. Among the dozens of possibilities are the big high-street chain names plus a huge range of independents offering different themes, varying ambiences, contrasting furnishings and so on. And all claiming to offer the best coffee around.

Of course a coffee is a coffee is a coffee... At the risk of outraging the true connoisseur, the range of drinks is more or less the same wherever you go and the price won’t change by that much from shop to shop. So you have to wonder what makes people loyal enough to go back to the same one time and again.

My morning tea (somehow the over-brewed syrup which passes for coffee these days never sits well with me) is taken at the same place every day. I go there for a combination of reasons, the quality of the teabag tea not being among them. I like the comfy chairs, I appreciate the light classical music they play and I enjoy the fact that they recognise me and always welcome me. It’s also pretty much the closest to where I work and opens early enough for me to get an hour’s worth of reading done. 

Coffee shops are in my thoughts today because I’m wondering if there’s a similar selection and loyalty process at work with churches. This morning I’m at Leamington Baptist Church and, although there’s plenty to explore on my first ever visit, I’m tempted to wonder what’s different, what could you find here that you wouldn’t find somewhere else.

This church is modern and very large. Its rather forbidding brick mass hides a very light, very high central space which is currently painted the kind of orange that marks out the brave when it comes to choosing paint. It’s not an overwhelming turnout this morning given that it’s Pentecost and that’s a key date for the Baptists. But there’s a splendid range of music on offer.

The church has a splendid looking organ in an alcove and we start with a 19th century hymn suited to its chapel sound. The church also boasts a splendid band and we turn to them for three modern songs. Perhaps it’s an indication of the age of the congregation but the hymn is sung with considerably more volume.

Then it’s time for the talk, and it’s here, for me, that the morning’s spiritual beverage begins to taste a little bitter. 

Disjointed and bereft of clear purpose, the presentation leads us through a clutch of bible verses read out on the spot by people directed from the front. There’s a Powerpoint backing on the big screen - images and phrases not fully-connected to the message that’s coming across and, as is so often the case with these things, utterly disrupting whatever flow the speaker intends to achieve. There’s an unease to all of this.

It seems as if the speaker’s experience the previous evening of getting up before an open mic poetry evening is a challenge to be passed on to the rest of us whether we like it or not.

In this spirit we are then urged to turn to the complete stranger next to us and share a moment from our youth or childhood when we experienced some kind of trauma. I’ve had more than my fair share of this cod trust-therapy over the years. My drama years have been full of it. I still have no idea what makes some people believe that their bald, untutored instruction to ‘lose all your inhibitions’ will succeed where countless professionals have failed. I have no firm reason to trust or not trust people I meet in a church, nor they me. But I would no more expect the person next to me to open up about some ghastly formative episode than I would expect them to trust me to give financial advice or a haircut.

Nevertheless, the brave soul who comes to sit next to me attempts to relate a story about worry and uncertainty in younger years and for a moment I’m genuinely concerned I may be about to become party to an awful secret I shall have to take to the authorities. I’d like to think that, as far as my family and friends are concerned, I’m a decent listener and someone who might offer reasonably sound advice. But I’m nobody’s instant confessional and I’m inwardly thankful that the speaker’s unstoppable desire to make the point she’s been leading up to, cuts across any chance my confessor has to conclude her tale.

Left feeling uneasy and distrustful at all this, I take the only course of action I can really take. I quietly leave. 

In the end where and how you choose to perform whatever worship you wish to perform is all down to personal preference. A more enjoyable style of music here, a charismatic leader there and so on. Proximity and convenience play a huge part too, as does habit. As does trust.

Ultimately my less-than-satisfactory experience this morning doesn’t matter a jot. I shall simply move on to the next coffee shop, and I shall take with me the thought that your favourite is often arrived at simply by it NOT being that place you swear you’ll never go again.

29. HOPE@motofest2019, Coventry

Jesus, says the Bible, rode triumphantly into Jerusalem on a donkey. Seated upright and allowing the beast to pick its careful, ponderous way through the dusty streets. It’s an image which has long been central to the gospel stories of the young and provided many artists with inspiration. 

Just pause for a moment and replace that tired old donkey - willful and unreliable - with something a little more prestigious, something that will make a statement, tell everyone who you are. Sitting atop a painstakingly-polished Harley Davidson with its chrome catching the brilliant sun of the holy land perhaps. Or behind the wheel of this jet black Aston Martin maybe even with the hood down and the heads-up display offering real-time Jerusalem traffic updates.

You can be excused thoughts like these surrounded by very expensive pieces of metal at a motoring festival and, given the nature and theme of this morning’s service, perhaps even justified in thinking them.

Coventry Motofest has been running for six years or so, closing the streets and filling the city with noise, and Sunday morning sees quite a few churches close their doors. Not, as you’d imagine, because they can’t compete with the noise, but rather to join together and take their work right into the heart of the city and its festival. This is not just Sunday worship, this is HOPE@motofest2019.

This morning’s service is conducted from the main entertainment arena stage sandwiched between a couple of fast food stalls and a converted London double decker bus now advertising a splendid range of aspirational gins and over-priced artisan crisps. From behind the stage come the sounds and the flashing neon lights of the Wall of Death. Make of that what you will.

The congregation are variously ranged on the grass or taking advantage of a few handily-placed deckchairs. The humid weather has brought many in shorts but the gathering clouds mean a few umbrellas are also in evidence. 

The service sheet for today features songs and talks as well as prayers and a blessing all conducted against the background of the festival. And what a full-throttle background it is. Not twenty seconds can pass without the shrieking roar of a revved-up engine flying past on the ring road racetrack. In between the engines you can hear any of a hundred stalls blaring out pulsating music, the noise of fairground rides, overexcited PA announcements and, of course, the noise of tens of thousands of people shamelessly enjoying themselves.

Confronted by that, worship has to be loud and the band and speakers give as good as they get. The songs are anthemic, stadium numbers. Once you get beyond the edge of the arena they probably sound like all the other musical mush pumping out of the festival. Thankfully at this time of the morning the gin bus is not yet picking up passengers and the fast food vans are mainly supplying the obligatory morning caffeine burst.

Festival director James Noble provides the link between the petrol-head excesses all around and this particular part of the event’s high-octane programme. In a disarmingly honest testimony on the stage he talks of his faith and the trust he places in God to protect and nurture the city. He even quotes chapter and verse on one of the inspirations behind the whole thing. There is, he says, a parallel between creation and the creativity of a city which designed and built itself right to the forefront of the motoring world and still has a part to play. 

The prayers from the stage which follow are tailored to the city and its motoring industry. That industry has a lot to be thankful for over the years, but equally finds itself in a position where prayers can genuinely be offered for its continued recovery from some catastrophically low times. 

This is very much a meeting of the secular and the church. It could come across as a rather forlorn and doomed attempt by various churches to take their quiet message of hope into a very noisy, alien environment. Or a concession given by the organisers with one eye on filling up a slack part of the line-up. In fact it is neither. It’s a full-on celebration.

Perhaps the lesson here is that the people of the city are also churchgoers and are also workers in the car industry. There’s no hard borders between the things which make Coventry what it is and that’s what’s being celebrated. The Kingdom of Heaven, announces the man on the stage, is just like a motoring festival with everyone coming together whether they be car lovers, music lovers or just the inveterately sociable.

For me the relentless combination of screaming noise, engines, crowds, fried food and diesel is no vision of heaven. Quite the opposite. So I don’t linger long before heading back to my suddenly rather unexciting car.

I keep my eye out for some of the more unusual sights though. And if I were to see Jesus roaring round the ring road on the back of a ton of gleaming chrome and leather, I would take it as a sign that Coventry, and its churches, have got the balance for this morning just about right.

28. Church of Scientology, Birmingham

Every generation has its own cult religion to be lampooned and feared in equal measure. Simultaneously scorned for holding daft views based on crackpot thinking yet cast in the role of bogeyman for leading innocent victims away from their homes and their sanity. 

Anyone of my age would remember the Moonies. The Unification Church under Sun Myung Moon had all the right cult attributes. Or so I recall, although I’d have to head for Wikipedia to flesh out the few things I can generally claim to know. Not letting details get in the way of rampant scaremongering, any sort of contact with the Moonies would - to my impressionable teenage mind - inevitably mean losing all your possessions, never seeing your family again and being forced to take part in a mass-marriage on the pitch of some cavernous football stadium in the far east. 

I’m perfectly prepared to accept that there were genuine victims of such cults and their stories are undeniably harrowing. But the combination of religious ritual and the control of a strong leading personality always seems to add up to terror and snowballing mistrust on a crazy scale.

If you had to identify who today has picked up the Moonies’ baton it could well be the Scientologists. Many of those who I’ve told of my choice today have joked about never seeing me again. The church is founded on a set of defining texts created by a pulp fiction sci-fi writer, their celebrity following inspires plenty of controversy and - crucial to their critics in this country - they look and sound thoroughly American. Even the introduction to ‘Birming-Ham’ on the website is more Hollywood than Hall Green.

The Church of Scientology in Birmingham is a massive place in every sense of the word. It’s housed in a vast building with a fine columned entrance and impressively-manicured grounds. The car park is large and, although it’s fairly empty when I pull in on a Sunday morning, suggests numbers are confidently expected.

I’m here this morning, hopeful - though not confident - of attending a morning service, as a result of a phone call I made in the week. If you care to browse the organisation’s website you can find a wealth of information about what the church is proud of, what it supports, how it is relevant to you - but not a single mention of when you might be able to attend a church service. Not finding the information I wanted I picked up the phone and, following a rather stilted, evasive conversation, put it down very little the wiser. The church, according to the woman answering, likes people to come and take a tour round the information centre and talk with one of its welcomers, but she was not sure they held anything like a service I could attend. She was most keen to learn my name and couldn’t hide her unease at whatever she perceived my motives to be.

Nevertheless the welcome, at the very hotel-like reception lobby desk, was warm. I had to fill out a card with my details and a few profile questions including wanting to know how I’d heard of the church - odd that from an organisation which presses its global status in heady figures of members, countries of influence, churches established and so on. Why would I NOT have heard of them?

Still unsure if there will actually BE a service or not, and whether I would even get to see it, I spend time in the Information Centre where a battery of big touchscreens are on hand to play any one of hundreds of videos on any subject I might like to explore. Bit by bit these build up a picture of Scientology. It’s clearly a religion backed by a pulsating backing track and one in which everybody - and I mean everybody - has perfect teeth. I have nothing against the perfect world of corporate video-making but it can pall after a while. There’s only so many times you can watch sets of perfect teeth smiling at equally well-dentured children watching high-definition raindrops on perfect leaves, before the danger of cynicism becomes overwhelming.

I’m particularly struck by a video profiling the religion’s founder L Ron Hubbard. Any faults the man may have had in his life have been glossed over to present a man who is better-read, more highly-qualified, more resourceful and shining with moral worthiness and probity than anyone who has ever existed. Bigging up the figurehead is nothing new of course, but I find myself wondering what would have happened had he ever met that equally over-praised leader Kim Jong-Un on the squash court - omnipotence in the otherwise mortal can frequently lead to absurdity.

There’s still no sign of a service and the clock has gone past the time I expected something to happen, so it’s back to the screens for more on how L Ron Hubbard’s words have cut crime or defeated the scourge of drugs or cured the psychiatrically vulnerable depending on which set of perfect teeth is talking to you. I prepare my excuses for a departure.

But then suddenly a surprise. I’m informed that Sunday service is about to start and I’m guided through to the building’s impressive modern chapel. It’s a very strange atmosphere though as there are only a dozen other people there, all of whom seem to have arrived together and are on chatting terms with my telephone answerer and guide who is now clearly about to take her first service. She directs rather than invites her congregation to sit closer and then haltingly reads the creed followed by the sermon - an article by L Ron - before introducing (no surprises here) a video to watch on the big screen. A hasty prayer, a quick parish notice and it’s all over, barely ten minutes in duration. I watch as my fellow attendees head out of the chapel door and back up the stairs to whatever offices or places of study they have evidently been coaxed from. I’m absolutely certain this ‘service’ has been constructed and performed entirely for me. I’m not sure what to think of that. It’s touching in a way but also bewilderingly naff.

It’s all a bit awkward as I leave with my guide still offering to answer any questions I may have, but I’ve seen all the videos I need to see. It’s hard to see Scientology as I’ve experienced it today answering life’s great questions, or any questions come to that.

27. Friends Meeting House, Warwick. May 19, 2019

Why do we go to church? It’s not a rare question to ask, I know. I’ve pondered it many times over the years. It’s a question people have asked of me when they read this blog.

But today I’m asking it of myself in a slightly different way. I’m less concerned with the word ‘why’ and more interested in the ‘we’. To put it another way, WE generally go to church together and do church things together, and I’m wondering why that is.

It doesn’t happen in every single faith, of course. My admittedly limited experience of Chinese temples seems to show people going on their own, when they want and carrying out a very personal and completely individual communion with the Gods or with their ancestors. Many churches, Catholics ones in particular, have areas set aside for individual prayer or confession.

But for the most part, going to church is a collective activity. It’s observed at an appointed place and an agreed time. I guess one of the reasons for this is that we want to share with others. Hearing other people saying the same things we do helps to underline validity. By saying a traditional creed you are, in a sense, making others a witness to your beliefs while simultaneously serving as a witness to theirs. It’s as if collectively we’re all looking round reassuring each other that what we’re doing isn’t mad, isn’t absurd or unique and makes sense.

There’s very little such openly-expressed confirmation at a Quaker meeting; it’s as long way from the ‘all singing together’ feel of other denominations, hence my first question. I have been to a Quaker meeting once before, many years ago. Although it’s a distant memory I can recall enough to know what goes on. And if I can’t, there’s a very helpful leaflet written specially for those attending for the first time. It tells you what will happen - or, more to the point, what won’t be happening. Having sat in silence diligently reading my leaflet, it’s a full five minutes into the allotted time before I realise we have started. 

There are around people twenty at this morning’s meeting in Warwick. Eyes are mainly closed as far as I can tell, heads bowed. There are so many different layers of silence. This silence is stronger than respectful hush of a doctor’s waiting room, deeper than the quiet that falls after someone’s said something inappropriate. I’ve been among tens of thousands of people observing a minute’s silence in a football ground and always been struck by how such a potentially noisy gathering can suddenly be almost invisible through its silence. It’s the same here.

My leaflet helpfully suggests a few things I might like to ponder given the space and time to think by this collective silence. I try, never having found it a difficulty to fill my time with theoretical meanderings and slowly coalescing ideas. But,of course, my mind wanders too. Yesterday’s cup final, the ebullient excesses of last night’s Eurovision spectacular, this morning’s early car boot bargains and so on. I begin to wonder whether others are doing the same. Alone among creatures we have the ability to grasp the likelihood that other people have minds too, and all the random, extended virtual worlds that go with them. When it comes to their thoughts on this morning’s meeting and its wider significance I have absolutely no idea what they’re thinking. And with no creed to recite, no collective shared liturgy to rehearse I have no way of knowing.

Quaker meetings stay in silent contemplation until someone decides to share a thought he or she feels would enhance the understanding in the room and advance us further. We have three such interjections this morning; one encouraging us to use our thinking time wisely, one reporting on historical points from a recent meeting and the last paying proud tribute to the musical offerings at a concert. To me they might seem unfathomably random, having no conceivable connection. But to each of their utterers they stand as natural conclusions to whatever road their thoughts were travelling. This, in turn, gives me something to think about and, in doing so, makes me see this silent exchange as every bit as lucid and natural as any conversation I’ve ever had.

After more reflection we’re joined by the children, who have been involved in their own activities elsewhere. They arrive full of energy but settle instinctively into the silence of the room, giving themselves over to their own thoughts. I’m struck, as I often have been on these travels, by the way young minds are content to accept as a perfectly rational norm, traditions, practices and behaviour we adults frequently have difficulty taking on board. Thinking about that fills my mind for a while too.

The time passes quickly and we’re suddenly shaking hands as the meeting reaches an end. Notices are given, new visitors are invited to introduce themselves and news is swapped. It’s a very supportive, highly respectful community. Afterwards I have a moment to compare stories with a woman whose circuitous spiritual journey brought her to Quakerism over a decade ago. Not having a creed to say, she believes, allows her to stay true to her faith but leaves her the wiggle room to find her own way within it. 

I feel she’s right. You can’t really argue with a religion which offers you something to think about and then has the confidence and good grace to provide you with every opportunity to do that thinking.