This page offers a set of reflections and practices for Friends to draw on. Find new ways of entering or deepening your experience of worship.

Practices for Deepening Your Experience of Worship

Be with nature

Go outside for worship, take a walk while you worship, or bring a natural object in with you to view while you center yourself. Notice the gifts of creation and bring your awareness to what is there with you.

Check in with your mind, body, and spirit

Use these queries. You might focus your response into just one word, or go for three words or a short sentence, depending on what appeals to you.

  • How are you feeling physically?
  • How are you feeling emotionally?
  • What is something spiritually true for you right now?
Engage with your creativity

Take some time in worship with art materials. You might journal with your non-dominant hand, or you might be knitting, mending, doodling, or sketching. Give calm attention to your work.

Pray with your body

Experiment with movement as a way to ground yourself before or during worship. Many people benefit from gentle, repeating motion that helps their body to calm. You might try:

Explore images

You can use images and messages in picture books. These are great tools for adults as well as children! You might try:

  • The Picture Book Theology website is a great resource for book suggestions.
  • If you don’t have access to books through your meeting or a library, there are read aloud videos on YouTube. The FGC curriculum Sparking Still has excellent lists of books, organized by topic. Books listed in Sparkling Still are also listed as a collection on LibraryThing.
Find comfort

Wrapping yourself in a warm blanket, feeling yourself held. Lie in a hammock. If it is comfortable for you, lie down on a flat surface or a couch. Bring a heating pad or an ice pack to any parts of your body that need a little extra care.

Light a candle

Keep it close during worship. Perhaps use this candle prayer.

Listen to a chant

You might use the chant “Keep Within” by Paulette Meier.  For many ages, people have sung and chanted together to lift their spirits, to heal suffering, to unify souls, and to come closer to God. For Friends, chanting (or repetitive, simple singing), provides an opportunity to sing together without having to read words or notes from a hymnal. This is an embodied practice as well as a contemplative practice. Let yourself sink down into the vibrations and the message of the words and then ease into the silence which enfolds us.

Walk a labyrinth

You might search for a labyrinth near you (Labyrinth Locator) or using a finger labyrinth wherever you are. You can download/print a finger labyrinth here or here, and try a finger labyrinth meditation guide. 

Explore Images

You may enjoy Visio divina as a way of centering in worship.

Chant is singing our prayers. Chant is vocal meditation. Chant is the breath made audible in tone. Chant is discovering Spirit in sound.

Robert Gass, from Chant: Discovering Spirit in Sound.

Scripture passages to explore through lectio divina–  

They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.

Acts 2:42

Then you will call, and the Lord will answer;
you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I.
If you do away with the yoke of oppression,
with the pointing finger and malicious talk,
and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the oppressed,
then your light will rise in the darkness,
and your night will become like the noonday.
The Lord will guide you always;
he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land
and will strengthen your frame.
You will be like a well-watered garden,
like a spring whose waters never fail.

Isaiah 58:9-11

Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears.

1 Corinthians 13:8-10

Quotes and Resources about Worship from Friends

In worship we have our neighbours to right and left, before and behind, yet the Eternal Presence is over all and beneath all. Worship does not consist in achieving a mental state of concentrated isolation from one’s fellows. But in the depth of common worship it is as if we found our separate lives were all one life, within whom we live and move and have our being. 

Thomas Kelly

Facing Distractions in Worship

Reflection from William and Frances Taber, “Building the Life of the Meeting,” the 1994 Michener Lecture by William & Frances Taber

But these wonderful experiences [of meeting for worship] are not entirely within our control. Sometimes meeting may be so difficult that a person may ask, “What am I doing wrong?”  Actually these difficulties may be a sign that such a person is really on the right path, and simply entering a new phase of the journey. For example, there may be a sudden increase of distractions after weeks of peaceful meetings; now there are endless distractions which seem to keep the person from ever centering down and just resting in the Presence. This may actually be an opportunity for great spiritual progress as the person practices the art of watching each distraction emerge on the screen of the mind–and then, instead of fighting it, gently turning the attention to the Divine Center again and again and again, as often as necessary.

Centering While Walking

Reflection by Howard Thurman from Mysticism and the Experience of Love, Pendle Hill Pamphlet #115:

When I was a theological student in Rochester, New York, very late one night I was returning to the Seminary by way of Main Street, the central artery of traffic for the city.  The hour was so late that streetcars ran only infrequently and there was almost no traffic. As I walked along, I became aware of what seemed to be the sound of rushing water. I realized that I had been hearing this rumbling for quite some time, but had only suddenly become aware of it.

The next day I was talking about this with one of my professors who told me that for a certain distance under Main Street there was a part of the old Erie Canal. This was the sound of water that I had heard. The sound itself was continuous, but when there was the normal traffic in the daytime, the sound could not be heard. It was only when the surface noises had stopped that the sound came through. This is analogous to the mystic’s witness of God within, whose Presence may not become manifest until the traffic of the surface life is somehow stilled. This is what is meant by the experience of centering down.

 

How Does Worship Connect to Transformation?

Reflection from Mariellen Gilpin, Friends Journal, October 2005

I have come to believe that meeting for worship is about change, transformation, coming to wholeness. If I truly make an opportunity for God in worship, I will be changed. Sometimes change happens through grace. Sometimes it happens because I work very hard. But if I work hard, it’s because God first gave me the grace of wanting to change so I would work hard.

If worship is about change, it is also true that God takes me where I am. If I am caught up in an unsatisfying relationship, God will speak to me about my part in that relationship. If I am doing harm to another, I may reflect during worship on the damage I am doing. If I am caught up in the laundry lists of life, I may find myself yearning to choose meaning. If I come to worship to mull over a problem, I may learn my own responsibility for the existence of the problem. If I come to worship in mourning, I may find deep gratitude for what has been given. God takes me where I am.

Moments of Breakthrough and Realization

From Caroline Fox (1819–1871) who journaled about ‘the struggle through which a spark of true faith was lighted in my soul’:

The first gleam of light, ‘the first cold light of morning’ which gave promise of day with its noontide glories, dawned on me one day at meeting, when I had been meditating on my state in great depression. I seemed to hear the words articulated in my spirit, ‘Live up to the light thou hast, and more will be granted thee.’ Then I believed that God speaks to man by His Spirit. I strove to lead a more Christian life, in unison with what I knew to be right, and looked for brighter days, not forgetting the blessings that are granted to prayer.

What is Quaker Worship?

Reflection by Debbie Humphries, Friends Journal, August 2014

My experience is that Quaker worship, and particularly waiting worship, is a skill we are building both individually and corporately. That skill is fundamentally about listening to and being obedient to the Spirit, which for me are the core rules. I try to practice listening and obedience on a daily basis, and I fall short all the time. I am often not quite on the right channel; it feels like my dial is just a little bit off. When we gather in worship with others, we’re also practicing that tuning. And sometimes the learning process may involve allowing ourselves and others to get it wrong. When we think others have gotten it wrong, it requires careful listening for whether it is our place to tell them they misheard, to invite them to hold the question of whether they misheard, or perhaps to hold them in love and have faith that the Spirit, the Inward Teacher, is also at work in their lives. 


Compiled by Mary Linda McKinney, from the Faithful Meetings program of School of the Spirit, and Melinda Wenner Bradley, from Faith & Play Stories and the Quaker Religious Education Collaborative. You might also be interested in resources on YouTube from the Faith & Play Stories channel and the Godly Play channel. 

Last updated June 22, 2026.

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