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Sat with a friend and her new diagnosis this afternoon. No words came, so I held her in the Light for the length of a pot of tea. Sometimes that is the whole prayer.

Meeting for worship this morning: forty minutes of silence, one sentence of ministry, a wasp at the window. It was enough. Holding all of you in the Light this week.

The Salve Regina in the dark

At Compline we turn the lights down until there is only the one lamp by the icon of Our Lady. Then the Salve Regina, from memory, because nobody can see the book anyway. Brother Anselm is eighty-three and sings a quarter-tone flat. For my first month I found it maddening. Now I listen for him. If he isn't there, something is wrong. After the last note comes the Great Silence, until morning. No talking in the corridors, just shoes on stone and the bell. I'm learning that the silence is not an absence of prayer. It is where the prayer goes to finish itself.

Quakers famously have no rituals. Which is why every First Day I sit in the same creaky bench, by the same window, beside the same woman knitting, for exactly one hour of silence. Entirely unritualistic.

Someone asked what Quakers do in all that silence. Mostly we wait, and not for anything in particular. Some weeks the waiting is the answer.