Accompanied by the Holy Spirit: Singing in Quaker Worship

by Stanford Searl
Santa Monica (CA) Meeting

When I first joined the Quakers at Buffalo Meeting in 1970, I spent the first few years accompanying hymn singing before worship. My second child, Diana, sat on my lap some of the time. Because Diana was profoundly disabled, it felt special to have this three-year-old as part of the playing and singing. Julia, my oldest daughter, sang along with everyone at five years old as did Julia’s mother, my wife, Parnel. We had met in music school as piano performance majors and sang in the Hendricks Chapel Choir at Syracuse University for four years.

I loved the Buffalo Quaker worship. I felt at home and sunk into worship, open and listening. Snatches of hymns flowed through me, pressing themselves upon my heart. Hymns came in and out of my consciousness. This music became channels into the Spirit; they entered body and heart, pulsating in the gathering silence.

I imagined being underwater, pumping along with breast strokes. I plunged beneath the freshwaters of the glacial Lake Resue in Ludlow, Vermont, my boyhood home. As I came up for air, gasping, spitting out moisture, breathing in great heaves, a hymn came into my mind. 

My breathing deepened and I listened to the 19th century hymn, “Breathe on Me, Breath of God,” emerge. I remembered Genesis 2:7: “And the Lord God formed man [and woman and others] of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul.” Genesis and the hymn spoke to me; I became a living soul. 

I immersed myself in the gathering silence and heard the hymn’s first verse, resonant, full-throated in my tenor voice. My body shifted and the breathing increased its tempo and I stood up and sang the opening verse: “Breathe on me, Breath of God,/ Fill me with life anew,/ That I may love what thou dost love,/ And do what thou wouldst do” (Worship in Song: A Friends Hymnal, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Friends General Conference, 1995, p.135, words by Edwin Hatch, 1878 and music by Robert Jackson, 1888). 

The song and its message flowed out into the room and I felt carried along in a soulful, heartfelt manner. My breath became infused with Spirit’s breathing, vibrating, quaking. My body shook with the release of air from the diaphragm. The music fused into a unity, lodged within my heart and lungs. I felt prayerful and whole. The allusion to Genesis touched me. I became filled with overflowing love and gratitude. 

This was a message that allowed and encouraged my body to become a resonant chamber, filled by the Spirit’s presence. As I sat down, the message said: not my will but thine oh Lord. I felt closer to God’s purifying, transforming breath. 

For more than fifty years since my becoming a Friend, I have longed to follow in the footsteps of prophetic, God-infused Quakers. I pray that this singing ministry may lead me closer to what George Fox offered in his Journal, that I might “mind the Light” and become “a child of the Light.”