Ordinary

The tradition of worship asks each person to invest themselves actively in this period of silence. In a practice-based study of British Quaker worship, however, the same meeting for worship might be described by one participant as profound, while for another it was merely ordinary. When the two evaluations appear side by side, they easily induce a misreading: the person who found it profound seems to have been more attentive, while the person who found it ordinary seems to have done less.

But “profound” first of all names the intensity with which a meeting for worship reached a particular person. A strong feeling may come from concentration, but it may also come from that day’s grief, anticipation, or a sentence he happened to hear; it does not itemize how this person passed through the silence. Conversely, “ordinary” likewise omits the process. It may be accompanied by distraction or boredom, but it may also happen to someone who kept trying to remain in the silence throughout and yet, in the end, received no strong feeling. We cannot announce on the latter person’s behalf that he was fully invested; but on the basis of “ordinary” alone, neither can we treat lesser investment as a known fact.

There is an unappealing gap here. Active investment sounds like an action, while profound and ordinary are the weather afterward. Keeping the same silence, one’s thoughts and feelings need not gather toward the same place; hearing the same spoken ministry, it may linger for a long time in one person and leave almost nothing in another. The demand falls on each person, but feeling is not distributed according to how much effort one exerts. If a powerful experience is treated as a medal, then those who did not receive it will appear suspect; yet if, in order to avoid this suspicion, every state is called investment, the demand becomes so soft that it can no longer fail to be met.

We are used to inferring effort backward from results. If the applause is warm, we guess that the performer must have been more invested; if a conversation is moving, we retroactively attribute sincerity to the speaker. Religious experience makes this conversion seem especially natural: since active investment is a demand, profundity looks like the trace left when the demand has been satisfied. But the intensity of a meeting for worship is not a scale measuring the participant’s degree of investment. It also passes through the speech of others, the relationships among those present, the state of mind brought from the preceding week, and many contingencies that cannot be controlled by personal effort.

The same study also says that silence may last for the entire meeting for worship, though it is more common for someone to speak. When there is no public speech throughout, others have even less material with which to interpret a particular person; the demand, however, does not disappear as a result. This does not turn investment into a good word that can never fail. It only lets evaluation remain where evaluation is: when a person says “ordinary,” others have no reason to append the sentence “insufficiently invested” on his behalf.