Does punctuality matter? It is not merely a question of disturbing the peace and quiet of those already assembled… What is on my mind is more than that. If we were coming together to worship individually, each to enter into his or her own private meditation, then it wouldn’t much matter whether all arrived by the appointed time. In private meditation the worshippers could each ‘settle’ separately, training themselves not to be disturbed by latecomers. But if our goal is to achieve a group mystical experience, deepening and enriching our individual experience, then, it seems to me, we need to start the process at the same time.

A ‘gathered’ Quaker meeting is something more than a number of individuals sitting down together but meditating individually. So long as each sits in meditation in the way one does when worshipping by oneself, the worship will seldom reach that greater depth which a Quaker meeting at its best achieves. The goal of a truly ‘gathered’ meeting is to become fused into something bigger than the sum of the parts…

As a meeting ‘gathers’, as each individual ‘centres down’, there gradually develops a feeling of belonging to a group who are together seeking a sense of the Presence. The ‘I’ in us begins to feel like ‘we’. At some point – it may be early in the meeting or it may be later, or it may never occur at all – we suddenly feel a sense of unity, a sense of togetherness with one another and with that something outside ourselves that we call God.

Thomas R Bodine, 1980