I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions.— Joel 2: 28
Has a dream ever changed the way you saw yourself or your life? In my twenties, I was seeking for deeper understanding of the meaning and purpose of life. Not finding this in my studies at graduate school, I turned to other ways of knowing, including paying attention to the mysterious realm of dreams. I discovered that within me were startling sources of wisdom, creativity, and spiritual guidance.
When the first Quakers made the startling discovery that divine guidance is available from within, they recognized that some dreams contain messages from God, useful not only in guiding individual decisions but also in guiding the Quaker community to envision new ways of living more in accordance with divine love, truth, and justice. The February 2024 issue of Friends Journal contains an essay I have written about how, for hundreds of years, dreams weve an important source of guidance for Quakers, and how collective dream work could help us find our way forward now. https://www.friendsjournal.org/quaker-dreams/
A few years ago I had the opportunity to interview an extraordinary Friend, Quaker hospice chaplain and traveling minister Carl Magruder. Today Carl is receiving intensive care in the hospital following a motorcycle accident. As he heals from a serious brain injury, Friends everywhere who have been blessed by his unique and wonderful presence and ministry are praying for his recovery. Whether or not you know Carl, I invite you to join in prayer. I also invite you to spend some time with him, either by watching the interview, below, or by viewing one or more of his thought-provoking Bible Study half hours recorded at the 2020 FGC virtual Gathering, with the theme of “Jesus as Trickster.” You can find the Tuesday half-hour session at this link: https://youtu.be/5fQz0ZzRXgk?si=OS1VEIpiUiJuHKAT He begins with a song and you can enjoy his lovely voice and smile. He is one of the contemporary Quakers who has felt led by the Spirit to dress plainly–in his unique way. He begins this opening Bible Half Hour session by talking about how focusing on our blessings can help us heal from trauma. Then he turns to the subject of facing the end of the world as we know it, and invites us to daily repentence, which he defines (from the original Greek metadoia) as “transform your knowing,” “expand your consciousness,” and “turn in a new direction,” expecially by continually turning toward God and the ways of the Spirit. Looking at Jesus as a trickster teacher and the seed of his message as a powerful truth that needs to be attended, Carl invites us to repentence in astonishing ways, ways that challenge some traditional “Christian” prejudices. His talk is at once scholarly and very contemporary, challenging and also loving, deeply serious but humorous, powerful and subtle. While his message is joyful, it also provokes tears.
At the time of my 2020 interview with Carl, more than 500 wildfires were raging in the state of California, where he lives. He spoke of his experience of the start of the fires, and addressed the challenging nature of our era—a time of the Great Unraveling that precedes the Great Turning. He explained why he is a Quaker, described his calls and leadings, and shared his experience as a hospice chaplain. He told me about seeking support for his spiritual gifts and described the help he has received from Quaker elders and his anchor committee, offering the example of how he was supported while preparing and offering the Bible Half Hours. At the end of the interview, Carl spoke of his sense of oneness with the world. An EarthQuaker, he finds God in the world around him.
Always curious to know more about how healing happens, I was happy to get my hands on the book Cured: The Life-Changing Science of Spontaneous Healing, by Dr. Jeffrey Rediger, who is on the faculty at Harvard Medical School. While a medical student, Rediger was trained not to pay attention to cases of spontaneous remission of life-threatening illnesses, to consider them unexplainable “flukes.” It wasn’t until years later that he began to wonder what could be learned from such cases. In this book, after seventeen years of studying numerous cases of “spontaneous remission,” he reports that there is a great deal that can be learned about how and why the body heals.
Rediger’s book caught my attention right from the beginning. In the introduction, he tells the story of Claire, a woman diagnosed with an aggressive pancreatic cancer. When caught at a late stage, pancreatic cancer is usually fatal within a year and has an abysmal five-year survival rate. Claire, however, became completely cancer-free within a year of her diagnosis and remained so for about ten years. I was eager to learn about her approach to healing.
After her diagnosis, Claire did a great deal of research. Then she declined the offered medical treatments, which in her late stage case promised lots of pain and only very slim chances of real recovery. Instead, she decided to make some major changes in her way of life, including her diet, lifestyle, emotions, and spirituality. In order to live more fully and authentically, Claire confronted fears and other barriers to living the way she really wanted. She moved to a part of the country where she had always wanted to live. Then she “just let nature take its course.” She explained: “I decided to live with as much zest and happiness as I could for however long I had left.”
For several months after walking out of her doctor’s office, Claire felt worse and worse. Then, slowly, she began to feel better. After a while she felt healthy again. Five years after her diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, during an CT scan for an unrelated abdominal issue, Claire’s doctors were astonished to see that the tumor that had once been in her pancreas was no longer there. She had become a different person than before, with a new understanding of what her life was about and why she was in the world.
Like Claire, the people profiled in Cured for their spectacular cures all wanted to live, and they were willing to make big changes in their lives in order to do so. But another important thing they had in common was that they also made peace with death. They accepted that their lives would end someday. Rather than focus on fighting death, they put their energy and attention into living the best way possible.
When Dr. Rediger began to look into the documented cases of spontaneous remission of “incurable” diseases, he learned that in the last century, “reports of spontaneous remission have slowly increased in both number and frequency, typically with a spike after significant conferences, books, or major media stories.” In the 1990s, the Institute of Noetic Sciences “documented 3,500 references to spontaneous healing across eight hundred journals.” Because the medical profession has generally been uninterested in exploring or documenting such cases, the documented ones are a small percentage of the actual number of such healings. At a large conference, Rediger polled his medical colleagues, asking how many had witnessed a recovery that had no medical explanation. All over the room, doctors raised their hands. When he asked how many had published an article documenting such cases, all hands went down.
Unlike Claire, most of these people profiled in Cured did not walk away from their doctors. As Rediger explains, “many instances of spontaneous remission … occur in concert with the extraordinary efforts of dedicated physicians working at the tops of their fields. Remarkable recoveries simply tell us that these interventions are not always enough and that they do not hold all the answers to healing.” As a doctor, Rediger was trained primarily to focus on ameliorating symptoms of illness. Studying spontaneous remissions taught him that the medical profession still has a great deal to learn about the root causes of illness and how to address them.
Diet, lifestyle, and stress were often the first areas of their lives in which the people who healed made major changes. All of them are areas with important impacts on the immune system, the body’s system of natural defense against illness. In addition to these things, Rediger also discovered that radical healing is deeply connected to, “our thoughts, beliefs, and even our most fundamental, unexamined sense of self.” Recovery of one’s deepest identity, he found, was the basis of much healing. And love, he wrote, “touches and heals something that medications can’t touch.”
One of the early chapters in Cured is entitled “Eat to Heal.” Radical changes in diet were made by the majority of the people he studied, but they did not all make the same changes. In recommending to readers the most health-promoting diet, Rediger pointed to recommendations recently made by thirty-seven leading experts for what they called a “planetary health diet.” Their recommendations were similar to the diets adapted by the people Rediger studied: “far more fruits and vegetables, whole grains, legumes and nuts, and far less meat, dairy, refined flours, and sugars.” These experts recommended that people in developed countries reduce meat consumption by 80%. Rediger advises readers to eat foods with higher nutritional value (“nutritional density”) and avoid unhealthy levels of sugar and salt, found in most processed foods. Sugar is addictive and causes inflammation. Based on what he was seeing in his studies, Rediger decided to stop eating processed foods and refined sugar; he lost forty pounds without making any other changes.
Dietary changes are important and often key to maintaining health or to healing illness, but they are not the only changes that contribute to spontaneous remission. In the second half of Cured, Rediger shares what he learned about reducing stress, in particular about staying in the relaxed and healing parasympathetic mode of our nervous system. Today a lot is being written about the vagus nerve and its role in turning on the parasympathetic mode, which is key to healing. We can engage the relaxation response and shift into the parasympathetic through meditation, prayer, yoga, and other relaxing modalities, but what keeps us in this healing mode, Rediger discovered, is love and connection. He writes, “We know now that the vagus nerve is activated by compassion for others, compassion for the self, and positive feelings in general. We know that what really lights up that circuit is not only relaxation response but also love—micro-moments of positive connection with those you are intimate with and even those you barely know.” I imagine that the deep, spiritual connection to God, others, and life itself that can happen in the Quaker meeting for worship is deeply healing in this way, too.
To illustrate the point that positive and loving connections with others can be even more important than eating healthy food, Rediger cites the famous case of the tight-knit community in Rosetan, Pennsylvania in the 1960s that had uncommonly low rates of heart disease in spite of a dietary culture high in fat and cholesterol. What preserved the heart health of the Rosetan community? They were “gathering together around meals, maintaining extraordinarily close family ties. They found joy and community around the sharing and experience of food.” Community ties, a healthy sense of identity, and joy have great healing effects.
Part Two of Cured is called “The Miraculous Mind” and begins with a visit to a doctor in Ohio, a devoutly Catholic medical doctor with a background in anesthesiology and surgery who is known not so much for the form of electo-acupuncture he practices but for the divine healing love that flows through him to his patients, some of whom have been healed of “incurable” illnesses. The doctor describes himself as an “energy healer” and believes that prayer is a form of energy. It’s the energy of God that flows through him, he says. We live in a quantum field and everybody has access to that same divine energy. He believes that he is called to bridge science and spirituality.
Rediger describes several of this Ohio doctor’s patients who have had extraordinary healings, including a girl born with cerebral palsy who had been wheeled into his office in a wheelchair and ran out after her first treatment. There is also a chapter about Dr. Patricia Kaine, a medical doctor and single mother who had been diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a progressive and ultimately fatal disease with no known cure. After several years of treatments using standard medicine and a steady decline in her lung function, Dr Kaine started treatments with the Ohio doctor known for healing prayer. Slowly she began to improve and gradually her lung condition reversed. Scar tissue in her lungs disappeared, something not known to happen through medical treatments.
When Rediger met the Ohio doctor, he asked to see the files of people who’d “had an incurable medical illness, as well as indisputable evidence of both accurate diagnosis and recovery.” He was given twenty-five such cases and offered more if he wanted them. His study of these patients led Rediger to a deeper study of the placebo effect and then to a study of quantum physics and the implications it has for healing in the human body.
Rediger had long been intrigued by a spontaneous healing that had happened in a Boston hospital where he was working. A patient diagnosed with multiple myeloma, considered to be “an incurable and eventually fatal” disease, came in because of severe pain in his back. A CT scan showed that a tumor in his spine was lodged between his vertebra. Surgery was scheduled to relieve the pressure on the spine. The day before the scheduled surgery, just a few days after the CT scan, the patient was put into an MRI machine, a standard pre-op procedure so that the surgeons could have better images of the tumor they hoped to remove. While inside the MRI, the patient had a visionary mystical experience– or a strange dream–that left him feeling “oddly calm.” Afterwards, the images taken by the MRI showed that the tumor was “nearly completely resolved.” Surgery was canceled, and the medical professionals at the hospital were left to ponder the mystery of what happened. When Rediger checked with the patient years later, he was still doing well. One of the quantum physicists whom Rediger consulted during his study of spontaneous healings told him that “quantum mechanics, as he understood it, absolutely supported the idea that the mind had a role to play with physical health—and even more broadly with the world around us.”
When it comes to health and healing, many things can play a role: diet, exercise, eliminating stress, quieting the mind of mental chatter, letting go of constricting beliefs, getting out of unhealthy situations and unsupportive relationships, and opening to more connection and to love itself. Rediger’s search led him to the conviction that there is something even more fundamental than all of these changes. Most of the patients who had spontaneous remissions had also healed their identities on fundamental levels. They paid attention to their inner life and shed roles, labels, and masks that were false. Rediger explains that, “we have a whole other identity that is deeper, more complete, more foundational. We aren’t what we do. We aren’t our past actions. We aren’t necessarily the people our loved ones believe us to be. And we certainly aren’t our illnesses. The true self exists, invisibly and mysteriously, beyond all these labels and masks.” Those who had miraculous healing were often those who had the courage to seek their purpose in life and their deepest, true identity.
In his final chapter, Rediger asks readers to discard anything in the book that makes them feel blamed or responsible for their illness, anything that doesn’t resonate or inspire. He wants people to feel empowered. He concludes by writing, “To move forward without feeling judged, blamed, or responsible, it’s important to remember that ultimately, it’s not about the illness. It’s not about right or wrong or about specific things that you do or don’t do that will heal you or not. It’s about getting a life that’s meaningful, where you understand and experience your own worth, and where you know what your purpose is and what you want from this life—however short or long it may be.”
Cured: How have you experienced of your own abilities to heal?
A Guide to Faithfulness Groups explains what faithfulness is and how it can be cultivated by small groups that practice ways to listen inwardly together for divine guidance, a practice that holds great potential for supporting individuals of any faith in allowing the work of the Spirit to become manifest through them and their communities.
Our Life is Love: The Quaker Spiritual Journey describes the transformational spiritual journey of the first Quakers, who were inwardly guided by God to work and witness for radical changes in their society. Focusing on ten elements of the spiritual journey, this book is a guide to a Spirit-filled life, designed to be a resource for both individuals and groups to explore their spiritual experiences. It describes the journey of faithfulness that leads people to actively engage in God’s work of making this world a better place for all. Our Life is Love has been reviewed by Marty Grundy in Friends Journal, by Carole Spencer in Quaker Religious Thought, and by Stuart Masters on A Quaker Stew. The first few chapters of this book are available for download as a pdf HERE.
Both books are available from Barclay Press in hardback and paperback.
For years I did reading and research about the English Puritan and Quaker settlers to New England in the 1600s. I learned about the Puritan context, Anabaptist influence, theological ferment, and social unrest out of which Quakerism emerged, and I gave special attention to the mystical revelations received by many of the first Quakers and the charismatic gifts with which their fledgling movement was blessed. As a Quaker who has experienced a call to share the liberating spiritual discoveries of the first Friends, I have strongly identified with the early Quakers who risked everything to share the good news. I’ve claimed those 17th century radicals as my spiritual ancestors. Only very recently did I discover that a few of them are biological ancestors, too. (I will tell about that in the next blog post.)
Looking back in English social and religious history, in an effort to understand the beginning of early Quaker movement, I learned about the Puritans who fled England and were the first English settlers in New England. I read all I could find about the life of Anne Hutchinson and the galvanizing role she played after her arrival in the newly founded town of Boston in 1635. A devout woman, she had moved her large family from England to the wilds of the “New World” because she felt that Jesus had directed her– inwardly–to do so.
U.S. history books celebrate the Pilgrims and Puritans who crossed the ocean and settled in New England. The first of them were the passengers of the Mayflower, who landed in 1620 in the territory of indigenous Wampanoag tribes and founded the colony of Plymouth. Half of the Mayflower’s 102 passengers died in the first year; the rest only survived because the native people taught them necessary skills. Other ships filled with Puritans soon arrived, settling towns around Plymouth, then Boston and the surrounding lands. U.S. history books teach that these “Pilgrims” came for religious freedom. Indeed, many left the world they knew and made the perilous voyage in order to exercise their faith more freely. But they did not come because they wanted to create a society in which everybody had religious freedom. They came only to exercise their own particular form of Christianity. They were harsh persecutors of anyone whose Christian faith differed from their own, and before long they massacred native tribes who had aided them in their time of desperate need.
Back in England, social and religious ferment led to the English Civil War in 1642, when the largely Puritan Parliament raised an army and fought the King’s soldiers. The King was killed, and a Puritan government was established. Many who had fought on the side of Parliament, however, were greatly disappointed when a new state church was established and those of other religious persuasions were persecuted.
For two decades, in the rural north of England, far from London, groups of Seekers had been meeting separately from the state church, longing and seeking for a more intimate and direct relationship with God and Christ. The beginning of Quakerism is dated to 1652, when a large group of these Seekers congregated around the prophetic message of George Fox. They were drawn together by the experience of the presence of the Light of Christ within. They discovered through direct experience, as Anne Hutchinson had done, that they could be taught and guided inwardly. They found in their hearts a divine seed that they could cultivate by attending to the still, small voice of God within and following the leadings of the Spirit. Within two years, the first Quakers began spreading the good news of what they had discovered, taking it first to the large cities in England, and afterwards beyond.
In 1655 Quakers Mary Fisher and Ann Austin boarded a ship to Massachusetts, feeling called to take the good news to Puritans in New England. The next year the Speedwell, a ship carrying eight Quakers, also arrived in Boston, where Quakers Mary Dyer and Anne Burden soon landed, as well. These first Quakers to arrive in the Massachusetts Bay colony were all immediately put in prison. Their books and pamphlets were burned and the prison windows were boarded so that their religious beliefs could not be shared with the public. The first two, Mary Fisher and Ann Austin, were strip-searched for any physical blemishes (such as a mole) which might be construed as a sign of witchcraft. Later arrivals were beaten. When brought to court, a young Quaker lawyer named Christopher Holder pointed out to the magistrates that there were no laws prohibiting Quakers from entering the colony. Except for Mary Dyer, whose home was in Rhode Island, these Quaker prisoners were put on ships and sent back across the ocean. And in the meantime, the Boston magistrates got to work making laws against them.
In England, eleven Quakers soon felt led by the Spirit to travel once again to what they now called “the Lion’s Den,” several of them for a return trip. Christopher Holder, from a wealthy family, financed the voyage of the Woodhouse after a Quaker shipbuilder followed his inner leading to offer his new boat for that purpose. When the punishments the Puritan magistrates devised did not stop Quakers from coming back to their colonies, New England Puritans made harsher and harsher laws. They cut off ears, whipped people brutally—even old men and women, branded flesh, left bleeding Quaker bodies in the snowy wilderness without food, and eventually hung four Quakers to death on Boston Common.
1657 declaration of faith written by Christopher Holder and two other Quakers in Boston prison.
Some have been critical of the radical early Quakers who brought the Quaker message where those in authority did not want it spread, but the letters and other writing they left behind reveal that they were motivated by a great spiritual love, a love which bound them to God and each other and also to those for whose sake they risked everything. Some of the most powerful love letters I’ve ever read were written by early Quakers writing to companions with whom they had traveled and sacrificed for the sake of bringing their spiritual message.
I am inspired by the story of how these Quaker spiritual ancestors were so strongly convinced of and inspired by the Light of God within them that they willingly walked into the “Lion’s Den” in order to tell others that the Light of Christ is alive within us, ready to guide our lives from within, if we will pay attention. The Quakers were instrumental in helping to establish religious freedom in numerous colonies, starting with Rhode Island, obtaining freedom not only for themselves, but for others. To me, these Quakers are not only my spiritual ancestors; they are also unsung heroes and heroines of American history.
The early Friends 370 years ago who left the shores of England to bring their message across the ocean spoke true revelations, many of which have been broadly accepted in our time, though those revelations still challenge us to further changes. But divine revelation does not stop. We are continually asked to attend to the newness that God is always bringing. Significant changes are underway in the world. Although humanity has often faced frightening and catastrophic threats and changes, today we are facing a future unlike anything human beings have experienced in the past. Given the urgency of our current moment, sometimes people question why I would give so much attention to people of the past. I question that myself. Yet I am convinced that we need to face the future with faith and all the spiritual gifts and guidance available to us. In doing so, we will be challenged to become more than human beings have been in the past; we will be called to exercise capacities that have been mostly dormant, and required to learn to love in bigger ways. We will have to learn to live in harmony with the earth and sacrifices will be required. There is still much we can learn from the early Quakers about how to do that, about how to speak truth that is different from the cultural norm, in order to bring about transformations of consciousness and society. They can still teach us about making God’s love manifest.
Spiritual Ancestors: Who do you claim as your spiritual ancestors?
A Guide to Faithfulness Groups explains what faithfulness is and how it can be cultivated by small groups that practice ways to listen inwardly together for divine guidance, a practice that holds great potential for supporting individuals of any faith in allowing the work of the Spirit to become manifest through them and their communities.
Our Life is Love: The Quaker Spiritual Journey describes the transformational spiritual journey of the first Quakers, who were inwardly guided by God to work and witness for radical changes in their society. Focusing on ten elements of the spiritual journey, this book is a guide to a Spirit-filled life, designed to be a resource for both individuals and groups to explore their spiritual experiences. It describes the journey of faithfulness that leads people to actively engage in God’s work of making this world a better place for all. Our Life is Love has been reviewed by Marty Grundy in Friends Journal, by Carole Spencer in Quaker Religious Thought, and by Stuart Masters on A Quaker Stew. The first few chapters of this book are available for download as a pdf HERE.
One of the most powerful ways to help people open up to divine guidance is to assist them in exploring key images that they receive inwardly. These images might come during a dream, but also while engaging in activity, or during quiet time, worship, or prayer. The soul communicates in innumerable ways, including words and even puns. In my book A Guide to Faithfulness Groups, I speak about images as a form of soul expression:
Images are a more primary language for the soul than words, and for many they are an important way to receive inward spiritual guidance. Some inner images that come in prayer, meditation, or dreams contain great wisdom and truth. If contemplated, they may assist in needed transformation or healing or provide guidance leading toward a new way of doing things, a service that may be required, or the best possible future. Simply focusing on an image and allowing it to affect all one’s inner senses can help a person receive the wisdom, healing, and transforming power the image conveys.
In the book I share an image that came to me more than once during some of my deepest experiences of meeting for worship in the years while I was living at Pendle Hill:
Primeval Forest
Several times, during moments of great inner stillness at the morning meeting for worship at Pendle Hill Retreat Center, I have had an impression of being in a primeval forest, unspoiled, wild, and natural. My deep interior silence was accompanied by a sense of awe. I felt surrounded, supported, and sustained by the ancient forest to the core of my being.
When I explored the image, I felt a holy power and a sense of great fertility, of unlimited possibilities. The image reminded me that the land on which Pendle Hill stands was once unspoiled forest inhabited by the Lenni Lenape people. But the primeval forest that I sensed was older even than any human inhabitants. It existed prior to human beings.
When I recollect this primeval forest, the image has the power to help me touch into the state I experience in a deeply gathered silent meeting for worship with others. The holy, original forest is a metaphor for the Ground of Being, the fertile matrix of all life that we call God. The Ground of Being is a pure state of consciousness, undisturbed by fear, greed, alienation, or attachment. Recalling this image helps me connect to a sacred state of oneness with God and with all things, a state that contains great healing power and unlimited potential.
Recalling this image and the state I was in while experiencing it still has the power to shift my awareness toward the sparkling source of all life. When someone shares such images in the context of a spiritual friendship, clearness committee, or faithfulness group, gentle questions can be asked to help the person notice and savor them. Receptive attention to these images may open them to reveal both wisdom and guidance.
More information about faithfulness groups can be found HERE, including links to videos and to a pdf of the 4-page guidelines.
A Guide to Faithfulness Groups explains what faithfulness is and how it can be cultivated by small groups that practice ways to listen inwardly together for divine guidance, a practice that holds great potential for supporting individuals of any faith in allowing the work of the Spirit to become manifest through them and their communities.
Early in the Quaker movement, Friends recognized that the living Spirit of God was guiding them directly without need of intermediaries. Members of the faith community were given particular gifts of the Spirit for the benefit of all. Not all gifts were the same, but it was one Spirit giving life to all of them, for the sake of God’s work in and through the community. This new order of life breaking into the world, empowered directly by the Light of Christ, was called Gospel Order. Some were given a prophetic gift, to speak and teach as moved by the Spirit. Others were given the gift to nurture the spiritual life of individuals and the community. In the first decades of the Quaker movement, some of those noted for their spiritual gifts were called “nursing mothers” or “nursing fathers,” noted for their ability to nurture those called to a new kind of spiritual life, and also for their skill in nurturing the spiritual communities created by the first Quakers. A group calling themselves the “Elders at Balby” wrote a document with suggested guidelines for Quaker meetings. By the 18th century, Friends specifically named the different gifts of ministers and elders, recognizing that although all people may be called to some form of ministry and all are called to participate in upholding the faith community, some are given a larger measure of one gift or another, for the sake of the meeting.
Among the branches of Quakerism that evolved through the centuries, some Quakers (including Conservative and Evangelical Friends), have continued to recognize as ministers those who are gifted in ministry, and as elders those who have the gift of spiritual nurture. Among others, recorded ministers are named, but not elders.
Early in the 1800s, divisions occurred in Quaker communities as Friends responded in different ways to religious currents in the world. The branch of Quakers now called “liberal” began to rebel against the sometimes oppressive authority exercised in that time by those recognized as ministers and elders. By the middle of the 20th century, most liberal Quaker meetings stopped the practice of recognizing and naming either ministers or elders.
“All Friends are ministers,” we said, and liberal Friends’ meetings no longer noted that some people are called to dedicate themselves to religious service in a special way. The word “eldering” became associated with criticism, especially of vocal ministry offered in meeting for worship. The positive and necessary functions of elders were forgotten, though the Spirit still continued to give these essential gifts to the meeting in particular people. A prophetic community guided directly by God requires dedication and tending, and when the community stops recognizing and valuing this, the spiritual vitality of meetings diminishes. Over time, liberal Friends have become more secular and intellectual, and prophetic vocal ministry has became more rare.
I began to participate in the Quaker community early in the 1990s, at a time when some liberal Friends meetings were realizing that very much is lost when we don’t recognize and support the gifts of ministry given to members of our meetings. Although most liberal Friends were continuing to feel resistant to naming individuals as “ministers,” by 1990 some meetings had began to recognize that certain people are called to particular kinds of ministry, both within and beyond the community, and that the community is called by the Spirit to support those with calls and leadings. Many meetings began to develop or renew practices for recognizing and supporting ministries.
Around 1999, I was present at a several-day gathering at Pendle Hill retreat center for Quakers called to ministry. Such a gathering had not been held among liberal Quakers in a long time. The co-facilitators were four esteemed Friends who had all been recognized by their monthly and yearly meetings for their gifts in the ministry. Many Friends with strong calls, leadings, and gifts for ministry were in attendance, including some Conservative Friends. Many had received recognition and support for some form of ministry from their Quaker community. The gathering was open to any who registered, however, and some also came whose gifts in ministry had not been recognized or encouraged by their meetings. Many of them were particularly eager for recognition from others.
About fifty of us gathered in the worship room in the Barn at Pendle Hill, and the Presence of the Spirit was strongly felt during the meetings for worship. Many experienced the power of the Spirit speaking to them, and they stood and offered vocal ministry. So many spoke that there was not enough silence in which to absorb the messages, some of them very powerful and prophetic. The sparsity of silence between these messages became more and more painful. Some of the spoken messages, it seemed, were really meant for the person to whom they had been given, not meant to be spoken aloud. Clear discernment was missing, not only in those who were very eager to received recognition for their gifts, but also in some who had already received such recognition.
During these meetings for worship, a few Friends felt moved to discreetly kneel on the floor in prayer, to try to hold the meeting for worship in the depth of Spirit to which the group was called. On the second or third day, a group of Friends identified themselves as elders and took seats on the bench behind the front (or “facing”) bench where the four co-facilitating ministers were seated. When given leave to explain themselves, these elders noted that since liberal Quakers had stopped identifying those with the gifts of eldership, and liberal meetings were no longer encouraging or supporting such Friends in their ministry of spiritual nurture, something essential had been lost. In this gathering, we were feeling the painful lack of the gifts of spiritual anchoring offered by those who called to serve as elders.
That event at Pendle Hill marked an important turning point among liberal Friends. It was a moment when those called to the ministry of spiritual nurture stepped forward and said clearly, “the gift of eldership is essential to the maintenance of a healthy and faithful spiritual community among Friends.”
Elaine Emily was one of the elders who took her place on the bench of elders at that gathering. Afterwards, she felt called to gather together groups of Friends who were experiencing the gift and call to serve as elders. They shared experiences and confirmed for each other the validity and importance of their call. More than twenty years later, Inner Light Books has just published a beautiful book, An Invitation to Quaker Eldering, in which Elaine Emily, Mary Kay Glazer, and numerous other Quaker elders describe the gift of eldering as it has been experienced by them in the first decades of the twenty-first century.
The book offers three metaphors for eldering: cultivating a garden, finding a path in the wilderness of an old growth forest, and connecting everything like the essential but invisible network of fungi which exchange information and nutrients under the surface of the earth. One chapter describes the qualities of elders. Another describes the formation of an elder and their growth in the gift of spiritual nurture. The various functions of elders are described, include nurturing the gifts of the vocal ministers and nurturing the spiritual life of communities. Elders help both individuals and communities to be accountable for the calls and leadings they receive. This book describes these functions of elders and offers frameworks for understanding the nature of this essential but often misunderstood gift.
In addition to the chapters giving an overview of the spiritual gift given to elders, An Invitation to Quaker Eldering contains numerous short accounts written by a wide range of Friends about their experiences of recognizing and exercising their eldering gifts. These personal accounts wonderfully illustrate the wide range of ways that these mysterious gifts manifest among Friends and hint at their function. Like the mycorrhizae under the surface of the earth, the essential nature of these gifts is still barely known, but this book goes a long way toward increasing awareness and understanding.
An online book launch event was held on November 6, 2022. The two primary authors, Elaine Emily and Mary Kay Glazer, and the two Friends who served as their primary elders in this project, Janet Gibian Hough and Bruce Neumann, read from the book and spoke about their process of working together. The publisher, Charles Martin, described why he was glad he postponed his retirement long enough to publish this book. To see the recording of the book launch, go HERE.
Invitation to Quaker Eldering: Have you received the gift of eldering or experienced spiritual nurture offered by another?
About a year after my friend Jim died, I began to sense–or imagine–that from the next life he was somehow nudging me to write about my experience of his dying and death–and what happened afterwards. It was as though he was telling me that if I wrote about this, it would be helpful to other people. That was like him: Jim was always trying to be helpful to other people. A couple times I wrote a few paragraphs, but then I set them aside. I had other things to do, more important, I thought. Recently, however, I watched a Quaker Speak video with Quaker hospice chaplain Carl Magruder, who urged Friends to “think deliberately about our death” and to share our thoughts with others. I felt that nudge again.
As I began to write about my experience with Jim, other memories came to me, too: the wake of my grandmother, and being called by a hospital about a friend, Janet, who had been brought in unconscious. The day before Janet’s death, I had given her a flyer for a gathering entitled “Hasten Unto God,” and she had given me a warning about plans I was contemplating. Her death helped me find my way.
What happens in the transition between this world and the next is still largely a mystery to me, but I have increasingly become convinced that our souls remain alive after our bodies die, and that we can touch each other across the gap between this life and the next.
The article I wrote has been published in the October issue of Friends Journal, complete with photographs of my grandmother and Jim. You can read it by clicking on the link HERE.
A Guide to Faithfulness Groups explains what faithfulness is and how it can be cultivated by small groups that practice ways to listen inwardly together for divine guidance, a practice that holds great potential for supporting individuals of any faith in allowing the work of the Spirit to become manifest through them and their communities.
Our Life is Love: The Quaker Spiritual Journey describes the transformational spiritual journey of the first Quakers, who were inwardly guided by God to work and witness for radical changes in their society. Focusing on ten elements of the spiritual journey, this book is a guide to a Spirit-filled life, designed to be a resource for both individuals and groups to explore their spiritual experiences. It describes the journey of faithfulness that leads people to actively engage in God’s work of making this world a better place for all. Our Life is Love has been reviewed by Marty Grundy in Friends Journal, by Carole Spencer in Quaker Religious Thought, and by Stuart Masters on A Quaker Stew. The first few chapters of this book are available for download as a pdf HERE.
I’m grieving the death of my brilliant young friend Rachel, a Quaker climate specialist and university teacher who has died suddenly.
I met Rachel almost twenty years ago when she was the young Friend sent by Britain Yearly Meeting (Quakers) for a ten-week term at Pendle Hill study and retreat center. She participated in the course I taught, “Discerning Our Calls,” which included learning related to clearness committees. Rachel often stayed after class to talk, and we became friends. As the ten weeks flowed toward their conclusion, Rachel’s fellow students were eager to have her stay another term. She wondered if it would be right to stay longer, so a group was convened to hold a clearness committee, to help her discover what inner guidance she was receiving about this possibility.
Though it happened almost two decades ago, I remember that clearness committee well. Both Rachel and her friends wanted her to stay a while longer. But as we asked her questions and listened to her responses, I also heard her give compelling reasons why going home to England might be the right thing to do now. When she was invited to stay more about this, Rachel became more radiant, describing a sense of calling and purpose that was connected to being at home. Soon it was clear that however much she had enjoyed her time at Pendle Hill and loved her fellow students, something in her heart was calling Rachel home. When a clearness committee reaches the place where the focus person is clearly articulating the truth in their heart, we enter Holy Ground.
Rachel went home at the end of the term. It took her a few more years before the shape of her calling became clear. In the meantime, before the age of thirty, she wrote a wonderful memoir about being a young person finding her way. Raised Catholic, she had been much influenced by spending time living in a Catholic Worker House which provided hospitality to immigrants seeking asylum. She wrote about that experience and also about seeking a theology and spirituality that seemed truthful to her experience. For her, faith was meant to lead to action.
For many years of her life, even after entering an academic career, she volunteered at a homeless shelter in London during the Christmas holidays. She became a Quaker, but took an annual time of retreat in a Catholic convent.
Motivated in part by her desire to protect those who are most vulnerable–the poor of the world, who will bear the hardest brunt of it–she became clear that she was called to help society mitigate the effects of climate change. She studied to earn a Ph.D. and become what she called an “interdisciplinary social scientist with a focus on social behaviors related to climate change.” She took an academic position first at the University of Aberystwyth, Wales, then at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, where she was Programme Directorof their interdisciplinary MA inSustainable Development. Her research interests included: lower-carbon lifestyles; pro-environmental behavior change; energy-related social practices and policies, social movements and education for sustainability; and communication about climate change. Especially interested in education, she was a well-loved faculty member in her department, drawing large classes. Recently she had done research on teaching styles that encourage students to become active in relationship to the fields they are studying, not just passive learners.
Marcelle and Rachel at Friends House in London in 2006.
As Rachel became aware of how significantly air travel contributes to carbon emissions and exacerbates climate change, and that flying is a luxury used most often by the wealthiest people in the world, she became increasingly uneasy when she took a plane. In 2003, shortly after returning home from Pendle Hill, Rachel decided she would never fly again. In part because of Rachel’s vow not to fly, I saw her only one more time, when I flew to England in 2006 and attended Britain Yearly Meeting’s annual sessions, held in London.
Rachel never had a long-term partner or children. Instead, she directed a lot of love and attention to the many members of her large family and to her friends, students, and members of the communities to which she belonged, including Quakers. She sent out regular newsy email reports to a list of Friends, of which I was one. Through this means I kept in touch with her over the years. She told us about her research and teaching; about speaking on government panels related to climate change; about leading or participating in singing programs for Quakers and others; about family events, including the births and milestones of nieces and nephews; about her annual walking vacations along the coasts of England, Scotland and Wales; about the people she met in the homeless shelter, and so much more. She sent photos and links to videos, and sometimes jokes or cartoons. She wrote back whenever I responded to one of her reports. She regularly read my blog and was one of the few who often left a comment. (For example, hers is the first in response to my blog about the Climate Strike event I attended in Philadelphia—she wrote about her experience at the Climate Strike event in Edinburgh. She also commented first on my review of the amazing novel The Overstory.)
Although our friendship was almost entirely long distance, there were two key moments when we were able to reach a hand of friendship across the ocean at times of need. In November 2016, I watched the U.S. election results at home with my husband. We were both unpleasantly surprised when the early results were different from what we expected. Sleepy, my husband went to bed around 11 pm, still hopeful that the candidate for whom we had campaigned door-to-door would win. I was left alone on the sofa with television news commentators to keep me company as the news got worse and worse. In terms of much-needed environmental protections and a wise response to the growing climate crisis—to name one crucial issue, but not the only one–I felt that the election of the candidate I did not favor would be a disaster for the world. Waiting for the results, I felt alone in those wee morning hours. I opened a laptop to see what my Friends on social media were saying as we waited. Eventually, my social media news feed became quiet, too.
And then an email came from the other side of the ocean: Rachel had woken up for the day and learned the uncertain news about the U.S. presidential election. She emailed me to ask what was going on, and we communicated back and forth, both while I waited for the final results of the election, and in the days that followed as we both contemplated what this would mean for the world. Rachel’s companionship and friendship then was very sustaining.
In August this year, she reached across the ocean to me in the middle of her night. For several weeks she had been experiencing physical pains. Medication prescribed by her doctor had failed to soothe the problem, so tests had been ordered. After reading the results of one of the tests, her GP told Rachel to go to the Emergency Room immediately. Rachel looked healthy, and hours after arriving, she still hadn’t been seen by a doctor. A nurse had scolded her for coming to the ER. Finally, more tests were done. It was 1:30 am on her side of the ocean, and Rachel was feeling lonely. She didn’t want to wake her friends by calling in the middle of the night, so she sent a text to me. We texted back and forth. I held her in the Light, as she had asked.
As the medical news in the coming days got worse and worse, Rachel emailed me as she tried to discern the best way to share the bad news with her family and friends of the cancer growing inside her. She felt that I had more distance than those who were closer to her, and was therefore better able to be a sounding board as she first absorbed the news that she did not have much longer to live. It was a privilege to reach a hand across the ocean to her when she needed it.
After that, Rachel sent two more emails to her list of friends. At the end of the first, she wrote to her readers, “I hope you’re OK.” Then family members came to visit her, and she celebrated her birthday. In her last email she reported that it had become clear that no benefits could be expected from chemo; she would therefore be moving into a hospice. At the end, she thanked everybody for the good times they had shared with her.
Two days later we received an email from her father reporting that she had died, peacefully at the end, with both her parents present. It’s not surprising that she asked for a green burial, in a cardboard coffin, environmentally the kindest way to dispose of her body. In reporting the funeral arrangements, her father said that the many cards and notes that had been mailed to Rachel in her last weeks would be placed beside her body when she was buried.
I am so sad to lose my wonderful friend. I am sad for the world, too, because we have lost someone with a powerful commitment to help change society to mitigate climate change.
But I also know that Rachel’s soul still shines brightly, and I expect she will continue to reach out a hand, now across spiritual realms rather than an ocean, to help humanity face the crisis that is here and coming.
Rachel was author or co-author of 29 publications. One that she co-authored, “People and Planet: Values, Motivations and Formative Influences of Individuals Acting to Mitigate Climate Change,” is available HERE.
Sonya Peres, an intern at The Alliance for Sustainability Leadership (EAUC-Scotland), interviewed Rachel in March 2020 for a blog post entitled Academics Who Travel Better: Dr. Rachel Howell, in which she explored the reasons for Rachel’s decision never to fly again. When governments were bailing out the faltering airlines at the beginning of the pandemic, Rachel argued that they should instead let the airlines fail. Funds should be used to re-train those in the airline industry to work in more sustainable fields.
Here is a video recording of a March 2021 online interview in which Rachel speaks about Personal and Political Action on Climate Change.
Wednesday 3 March 2021 with Dr Rachel Howell, University of Edinburgh.
Carbon Cutter or Climate Marcher? Personal and Political Action on Climate Change.
A large majority of people in Scotland (79%) think climate change is an “immediate and urgent problem” (Ipsos MORI survey, October 2020). Why doesn’t that concern translate into more action? If we want to take action, what’s going to make the biggest difference? Is it best to focus on political change, or personal behaviour change? Can an individual have any effect? And what about the current situation: has coronavirus actually been good news for the environment/climate change? These are some of the questions Rachel Howell considered, and which are discussed by the panel which includes John Dale, and Richard Frazer with moderation by Michael Fuller.
On a lovely spring day, Earth Day, we drove forty minutes from our home in Chester, one of the poorest cities in Pennsylvania, to the headquarters of Vanguard, a company that manages more than $7 trillion in financial assets. In the lovely blooming semi-rural areas we passed through on our way to Vanguard’s headquarters, the idea of catastrophic climate change seemed remote. Yet Chester, one of the poorest cities in Pennsylvania, is the location of one of the two largest incinerators in the U.S. Run by Covanta and financed by Vanguard investments, this massive incinerator, the dirtiest in the country, burns trash trucked in from numerous cities and states up and down the East Coast. In the past, Covanta has found it easier to pay fines for violating the law rather than to install all the legally required filters. They pump toxins such as lead, mercury, and arsenic into air over the city, where rates of asthma, heart disease and cancer are high, diseases with a known connection to breathing toxic particulate matter.
My husband and I are concerned not only about this dangerous pollution where we live, but also about the environmental racism involved in locating such an incinerator in a poor city that is 70% black. And more than that, we are seeking and praying to find our role in facing the challenges that threaten all life on Earth. How does God want us to live and act in this time of climate crisis? How can we help transform a culture that is headed toward disaster?
So we traveled to the Vanguard headquarters in lovely Malvern, PA, a place of multi-million-dollar homes, and joined 150 other people for an inter-faith demonstration to plead with the company to use its enormous financial power to help turn around the climate disaster being fueled by their support of the fossil fuel industry and other dangerous investments. The event was organized by Earth Quaker Action Team (EQAT). Many in attendance were Quakers, but there were also significant contingents from other faith-based groups, including POWER, a grassroots coalition of over 50 congregations committed to racial and economic justice on a livable planet, and Dayenu, a movement of American Jews “confronting the climate crisis with spiritual audacity and bold political action.” Many of those who gathered at the entrance to Vanguard’s headquarters had participated in a five-day walk that began on Monday at the Covanta incinerator in Chester. On Wednesday afternoon there had been an interfaith Passover “street Seder” in front of a local Chase bank branch, demanding a sustainable and thriving future for all of creation. Chase Bank is one of the world’s largest funders of fossil fuels, and Vanguard is Chase’s largest investor. The street Seder, focused on confronting the “Carbon Pharaohs” who fund climate change, was coordinated by a coalition including Exodus Alliance, Dayenu, Jewish Youth Climate Movement, and Pennsylvania Interfaith Power & Light. The Earth and Justice Freedom-Seder text they used was written by Rabbi Arthur Waskow, founder and director of The Shalom Center, who participated in the event. A total of 300 people took part in the walk or in one of the demonstrations during the week.
On Friday morning the crowd who gathered in front of Vanguard’s headquarters ranged from toddlers to elders, including parents with small children, all of us united in our concern for the future of this planet. The government of our country is not adequately admitting or addressing the extent of the climate crisis that’s unraveling Eco-systems on which all life on this planet depends. The interfaith groups that joined in this week-long walk of witness and protest are hoping to mobilize people of faith to address the biggest challenge of our time and transform the powerful financial investors who are currently propping up the fossil fuel industry, an industry which for decades has not only been spreading misinformation about the causes of the climate change in which they are playing a calamitous role but also blocking the necessary shift to sustainable forms of energy that could create a hopeful future for all.
Because this demonstration was based in faith, it recognized that the CEO and employees of Vanguard are people with children and grandchildren, people who also have a desire for a livable planet. The demonstration included not curses, but prayers and blessings for the wise management of the huge financial power that Vanguard wields.
My husband and I were very moved by the speech of a 19-year old Philadelphia college student, who told us that when she won an award in high school, she invested the money in Vanguard, for her retirement. With a microphone in hand, she asked Vanguard, what kind of world will we have when it’s time for her to retire? She pointed out that the investment giant should be protecting her future retirement and investing only in companies and projects that lead to a sustainable future, rather than investing in the continued destruction of systems of life. She has helped start a chapter of Dayenu on her campus to engage other students in faith-based climate action.
A similar demonstration was held the same day at the European headquarters of Vanguard, in London. And on the day before, a coalition of groups around the world had united in a campaign called “Vanguard S.O.S.” Vanguard’s founder, John Bogle, named the company after the HMS Vanguard, a 74-gun ship of the eighteenth century that was involved in a decisive battle against the French in 1798. Until very recently, an image of the ship was used as a logo for Vanguard. The new climate campaign “Vanguard S.O.S.” is an appeal to the financial giant to Save Our Ship, in this case the life systems of planet Earth, which are sinking in the rising waters of climate change.
On April 20th, Reclaim Finance, an international group that highlights the link between finance and climate change, issued its annual scorecard of companies that manage investments. Out of 30 major asset managers, Vanguard received the lowest score on their climate commitments and was at the bottom of the list. Lara Cuvellier, at Reclaim Finance, says that “Vanguard is one of the top two investors in companies developing new coal projects and holds $130 billion in the 12 biggest oil and gas expansionists, and there is not a single policy in sight from Vanguard to restrict investments in fossil fuel expansion or even use its shareholder voting power to hold the world’s biggest polluters accountable.”
Bill McKibben, author and founder of 350.org and Third Act, says that, “Vanguard is the quintessential example of an institution that could be doing so much good for the world, and is instead sticking to a business-as-usual mode that is ending in tragedy for the planet and its people. … Imagine how blinkered you’d have to be to be earth’s second-biggest asset manager and not using that power to help ward off the greatest emergency humans have ever faced. It’s tragic, but it’s also maddening — and that anger will propel action as people demand accountability.”
In response to the pressure and publicity targeting Vanguard, the day before Earth Day the company had issued a statement expressing its concern about climate change. Speakers at the demonstration in Malvern applauded Vanguard’s tiny initial step of recognizing the problem, but noted that making announcements or creating a special fund for sensitive investors has no impact at all if the overall funding actions of the company do not change. What is needed is for Vanguard and other giant investment companies, as well as the banks they fund, to set environmental standards for the companies in which they invest and refuse to fund projects that are environmentally destructive and contribute to further climate change. Choosing a life-affirming course may, in the short term, cause their profits to decrease. In the long term, however, none of their investors will have a good return on their investments if Vanguard does not turn around their ship and steer in the direction of keeping the planet livable.
The Earth Quaker Action Team (EQAT) worked hard and long to organize this week of walks, talks, actions, and demonstrations. They were led by a team now seasoned by years of strategic and creative non-violent direct action campaigns against large companies invested in extreme extraction methods and dirty energy. The current campaign director of EQAT, Eileen Flanagan, is the author of Renewable: One Woman’s Search for Simplicity, Faithfulness, and Hope, which describes EQAT’s successful non-violent direct-action campaign to get PNC Bank to stop investing in blowing up mountain tops to extract coal. “Whether we are living on the front lines of air pollution, students concerned about our future, or Vanguard customers concerned about the wisdom of these investments, we all have a stake in correcting Vanguard’s destructive course,”Flanagan says.
Many people who participated in the demonstration at Vanguard headquarters in Malvern, PA have investments with Vanguard. EQAT encourages those who have such investments to hold onto them and to use their leverage as shareholders to help change Vanguard’s policies. There are a variety of ways to support EQAT’s work and the ongoing Vanguard S.O.S. campaign. Flanagan teaches in her writing and online courses that there are many roles that people need to play to collectively transform consciousness and culture, and to work for a livable planet. In this time of peril and change, each of us is called to listen to the inward guide and find the roles and actions to which we are called in working with the Spirit for a hopeful future.
Earth Day S.O.S.: How is the Spirit calling, leading, or nudging you to help change consciousness and culture, or to live, serve, or witness for a sustainable life on Earth?
A Guide to Faithfulness Groups explains what faithfulness is and how it can be cultivated by small groups that practice ways to listen inwardly together for divine guidance, a practice that holds great potential for supporting individuals of any faith in allowing the work of the Spirit to become manifest through them and their communities.
Our Life is Love: The Quaker Spiritual Journey describes the transformational spiritual journey of the first Quakers, who were inwardly guided by God to work and witness for radical changes in their society. Focusing on ten elements of the spiritual journey, this book is a guide to a Spirit-filled life, designed to be a resource for both individuals and groups to explore their spiritual experiences. It describes the journey of faithfulness that leads people to actively engage in God’s work of making this world a better place for all. Our Life is Love has been reviewed by Marty Grundy in Friends Journal, by Carole Spencer in Quaker Religious Thought, and by Stuart Masters on A Quaker Stew. The first few chapters of this book are available for download as a pdf HERE.
Marcelle Martin, the author of Our Life is Love: The Quaker Spiritual Journey, and A Guide to Faithfulness Groups, is a core teacher of the upcoming 9-month in-person and online faith and leadership program, Nurturing Faithfulness. Co-sponsored by New England Yearly Meeting (Quakers), the program starts Sept. 2022 at Woolman Hill retreat center. Information can be found here or through the New England Yearly Meeting website. Here’s a video in which the core teachers, Marcelle Martin and Hilary Burgin, speak about the upcoming 2022-2023 program. In this video prior participants speak about their experience.
When I took a 9-day solitary retreat this winter, I brought three slim books with me to provide spiritual guidance and companionship, for those moments when I needed some help to turn again to the wisdom that comes from the Light within. The distilled wisdom offered by the wise contemporary Friends David Johnson, Marty Grundy, and Brian Drayton served me well. Each book contains potent descriptions of the Quaker way; usually one short section provided enough spiritual sustenance to chew on for a while.
In Surrendering Into Silence: Quaker Prayer Circles, David Johnson offers an overview of the inner cycles of transformation that occur when someone becoming serious about their spiritual life takes up regular spiritual practices. He explains that these cycles are universal, but describes them primarily with reference to the writing of Quakers through the centuries, with support from the teachings of other contemplatives. He beautifully describes these rhythms in simple, clear language. At the end, he emphasizes the important role of a committed faith community in enabling people to really enter fully into spiritual transformation.
Marty Grundy’s book A Call to Friends: Faithful Living in Desperate Times begins with an overview of why she characterizes these days in which we are living as a time of desperation. She describes the Quaker path as rooted in inner spiritual experience and manifesting in culture-changing action. In talking about the depth of spiritual life to which Friends are called, she quotes Thomas Kelly:
What is urged here are inward practices of the mind at deepest levels, letting it swing like the needle, to the polestar of the soul. And like the needle, the Inward Light becomes the truest guide of life, showing us new and unsuspected defects in ourselves and our fellows, showing us new and unsuspected possibilities in the power and life of good will among [humans].
Grundy insists that Friends are called to a deeper relationship with the Holy Spirit, and then into transformed social relationships, following the guidance of the Inner Light. Only when we give ourselves to be transformed by love in the crucible of relationships, especially in our Quaker meetings, can we offer the gifts we are called to give the world now. She writes in conclusion:
It has come to me over and over that Friends have the answer to what this hurting world needs so desperately. Or rather, I believe that our fundamental tradition is the antidote to today’s ills. This is nothing less than a radical invitation to live in the Kingdom of Heaven of which Jesus of Nazareth spoke. Right here and now, breaking into the corrupt, confused, frightened, sick United States Empire, we are invited to live in a new paradigm.
Like the other two authors, Brian Drayton is a faithful Quaker respected for the gift of ministry who has traveled broadly among Quakers. His book, Messages to Meetings, is a collection of letters, blog posts, and notes he sent to Meetings and other Quaker bodies after visiting them. They contain gentle guidance and reminders that are useful not only for the original recipients, but to the readers of this book. I was touched by a letter in which he explained how important it is to look for and affirm the presence of God at work in one another. When we see and affirm that the life of God is active in our fellow Quakers, we foster the work that the Spirit is doing among us. In another letter, he offered a beautiful description of the inner workshop in which we are gradually liberated and transformed by the Light.
A wordless, steady regard, in a time when one is quiet in reverence, is a powerful way of working–or rather of allowing oneself to be worked upon. When we are truly centered, even for a short space of time, we are tender, that is, vulnerable and teachable. … One of the results of this kind of contemplation is heightened awareness. In that receptive place where we are most able to hear (or see or feel) the truth, we are often given fresh understanding. … as we feel safe or grounded, we may be given to see barriers that need to come down if growth is to occur, or new things that must be learned, or rifts that must be mended. A deep fruit of this kind of work is an increase in inward spaciousness and freedom, a peace that is the peace of the ripening or opening seed, and a gift of thankfulness. It is quiet, but it is also the workshop of turbulent, organic creativity, as in the stillness and tenderness all the materials of ourselves, our works, and our world can be in fluid contact.
All of these books emphasize the collective nature of the way God works with people on the Quaker path. Each of the authors is rooted in Christian faith and practice, yet each invites everybody in, even those who think of faith in different terms and use names for what is divine other than God and Christ, including the Inward Light, Spirit, and Creative Energy. Although each book is short enough to be read in one or just a few sittings, they are rich enough to merit slow reading of short sections over a period of time. They helped me to listen more deeply.
A Guide to Faithfulness Groups explains what faithfulness is and how it can be cultivated by small groups that practice ways to listen inwardly together for divine guidance, a practice that holds great potential for supporting individuals of any faith in allowing the work of the Spirit to become manifest through them and their communities.
Our Life is Love: The Quaker Spiritual Journey describes the transformational spiritual journey of the first Quakers, who were inwardly guided by God to work and witness for radical changes in their society. Focusing on ten elements of the spiritual journey, this book is a guide to a Spirit-filled life, designed to be a resource for both individuals and groups to explore their spiritual experiences. It describes the journey of faithfulness that leads people to actively engage in God’s work of making this world a better place for all. Our Life is Love has been reviewed by Marty Grundy in Friends Journal, by Carole Spencer in Quaker Religious Thought, and by Stuart Masters on A Quaker Stew. The first few chapters of this book are available for download as a pdf HERE.
Marcelle Martin's book, Our Life is Love: The Quaker Spiritual Journey, explores ten elements of the spiritual experience of Quakers. It is a great resource for study groups to explore these elements of spiritual experience in our own lives. See the Publication page for more information. * * * * * * * *
Marcelle is available to lead workshops and retreats and to give talks. See the Teaching and Upcoming Workshops page.
A Whole Heart 