After a series of crises, Carol Monchick found peace in a Quaker meeting house. (By Sarah L. Voisin for The Washington Post)

By Carol Monchick
Saturday, November 14, 1998; Page C08

When I walked into that meeting house, I felt as if I had come home.

"Home" took more than 40 years to find.

I grew up in Washington, in a house that scoffed at religion, except for my grandmother, who was a lapsed Congregationalist. We discussed religion, and she played hymns. We also talked music.

As a child, I went with a friend to a Unitarian Sunday school, wanting to find out about God. I found out about leaves and crystals instead. As a teenager, after seeing the movie "A Man Called Peter," about the Rev. Peter Marshall, I attended the downtown Presbyterian church where Marshall had preached. The church and the new minister did not fill my need. As a college student, I took a required course in Bible history, but it was so cut-and-dried, just something to be gotten through.

For the next 30 years, I lived my life, falling in (and out) of love, working, marrying, keeping house and working part time, going to opera and traveling. I saw many of the famous cathedrals of Europe. Chartres, in France, has always been special for me, from the moment I first saw it rising out of the fields. I didn't know why it held this strong attraction until much later.

In 1985, my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. I was her sole physical, mental and emotional support. My father was dead, and my brother, who lived in Cumberland, Md., was distant and couldn't be around much. I told her, "We'll go through this together," and we did.

Through increasingly frequent rounds of doctors' appointments, treatments and changes in household arrangements, I was with her, managing not to be cross or show my own exhaustion, frustration – and anger. Without my husband's physical and emotional support, I would have collapsed.

After her death the next year, I did collapse. My beloved cat almost died, and I tried to quit smoking. I was all jangled, unsleeping nerves. I got myself to a psychiatrist.

That was the beginning of the conscious search for myself and the Other. Within four months, I had the sense that something "spiritual" was coming into my life. In 1987, on Sept. 27 (my grandmother's birthday!), I felt God blow through/in me like a wind. There was no doubt – everything shifted.

It was scary – and exhilarating! I knew very quickly that I needed a faith community for support and the nurture of this new flower. I also knew that the standard religions wouldn't do. I had a friend who was a Friend, so I tried a Quaker meeting. The rest is my history.

When you walk into a Quaker meeting house, you are in a very plain room. There are long wooden benches arranged in a hollow square so that most people face each other. The walls are plain; no stained glass or pictures. There is no music, no pulpit, because there is no minister and no sacraments.

Quakerism also has no creed or doctrines. It is a mystical religion. It believes that God is Inner Light and that there is that-of-God in everyone. We are seekers, and what we seek is the Light. At worship, we gather to seek this Light together. It may come through silence or through messages spoken out of the silence. Sometimes, the silence becomes so profound that we all know we have become one, and one with God.

There is quiet, but it is welcoming. People smile. When I walked into that peaceful room set among great old trees and gravestones, the silence spoke to me. I felt a peace, at rest.

Without my Quaker community, I could not have survived what was to come. In therapy, I had to deal with some devastating, life-changing discoveries about myself and my family. I started smoking again. In March 1988, my husband had an aortic valve replacement and triple-bypass surgery.

Yet the peace of worship and the love I received began to be internalized. For the first time, I gave to the community – as a pastoral caregiver and crisis hot line worker. I started writing poetry again.

After all the years of seeking, I realized God had been seeking me. He is truly the "Hound of Heaven," as 19th-century poet Francis Thompson called Him. I now am found.

I have been a Quaker all my life. It just took me most of my life to find it out.

Carol Monchick, 59, is a senior admissions officer for George Washington University Medical School. She lives in Bethesda.