Being a Resident Student at Pendle Hill

I knew early in my acquaintance with Pendle Hill that I wanted to be a resident student someday. After years attending conferences and other events, I was joyful when the time finally came.

My two ten-week terms as a resident student provided the time, space, and loving community in which a great deal of healing happened, emotional and relational as well as spiritual. At Pendle Hill, the rhythm of life itself creates conditions for transformation. Daily morning worship, shared meals, manual work, classes, and unstructured time all conspire to soften the armor we’ve built around our hearts. The transformation I experienced arose naturally from being held in a community that lived, worked, studied, struggled, celebrated, and played togethe, a community where it was possible to be a deeply serious spiritual seeker, and at the same time a place to find companions with whom to to be silly, laugh together, and explore untapped modes of creative expression. When you wash dishes alongside someone who has just listened deeply to you in class, when you laugh over dinner with people who know your struggles and hopes, when you share your dreams and then sit in silence morning after morning with companions on the journey, deep healing happens. Not because anyone is trying to fix you, but because you’re finally in a place where you can be yourself, where the power in you can emerge more fully, bit by bit.

Daily Spiritual Practice in Community

Daily meeting for worship provided a rhythm of spiritual practice that anchored everything else. We gathered in silence, waiting, listening, opening ourselves to the Spirit’s movement. Consistent, communal spiritual practice is transformative in ways that solitary practice, however faithful, cannot fully replicate. Today you can join Pendle Hill’s morning worship online. That is a wonderful spiritual practice; but something richer often happens when you are together in in the body, in the community.

In the gathered silence, you learn to trust the group’s capacity to hold difficult emotions and profound insights. You discover that divine guidance doesn’t just come to individuals but moves through communities who listen deeply together day after day. The boundaries between “spiritual life” and “ordinary life” soften.

Deep Conversations and Freedom to Follow What Calls

Everything becomes potentially sacred: the conversations over breakfast, the conflict that arises while working together, the tears during class when you reveal a hidden truth, the laughter that erupts at an evening event. Someone down the hall is likely to become a special confidant, while someone else may feel a bit annoying. Getting out of our familiar environment and patterns, among new companions, provides an opportunity to gain fresh perspectives on our lives and to see more clearly what might need to change. Moments of friction or irritation show us things in ourselves that can be very helpful if we lift them up to the light for insight and transformation. Spending extended time in community teaches that we can love and feel compassion for even people we sometimes find annoying, and also for ourselves.

A spiritual field is created that helps everybody who participates become more aware of their inner life and the working of the Spirit in them and others. This invisible spiritual field facilitates profound healing on many levels. Knots in the psyche become untangled and the voice of the soul is heard more steadily. Sometimes physical strengthening happens, too.

The community of last year’s Spring Term resident program included several people who hold important ministerial positions in their respective denominations and congregations; they were taking sabbatical time at Pendle Hill. They shared and explored new spiritual practices, often during the evening epilogue. At meals and in classes and seminars, they engaged in lively theological dialogue and shared about their faith journeys. As the weeks passed, they were also increasingly able to relax, let their hair down, and reveal silliness or little quirks. At an informal evening sing-along event, one demonstrated a children’s song from their country that included a bunny hop, and one minister danced in such a way that another one wondered if she had been drinking “new wine.” And everybody’s hearts got a little softer.

Life in the Pendle Hill community offers a space for inner exploration that is hardly possible in any other context of ordinary life. Deep conversations happen not just in formal classes but over meals, during work assignments, in chance encounters in a hallway. When everyone around is engaged in their own spiritual search and when vulnerability is met with compassion rather than judgment, we find ourselves able to explore territories that usually remain hidden.

I came to Pendle Hill with certain questions and plans, but the supportive context of community life opened space for something else to emerge, something truer, more urgent, more alive. The project I had planned to work on was not the one I completed. While I was at Pendle Hill, the opportunity and supportive context arose for a different project, my pamphlet Holding One Another in the Light, which engaged my heart and mind in ways I hadn’t anticipated. I wasn’t just writing about holding one another in the Light; I was experiencing it, daily, in worship, work, and relationship.

This is one of the most precious gifts of the resident student program: the freedom to follow what’s actually calling you, rather than what you think should be calling you. Pendle Hill gives you permission to change direction, to let go of old plans, to trust what’s emerging. There are teachers and companions to help you discern what’s truly yours to do.

A Container for Discernment

For those who are searching their hearts to discover how they are led to make their best contribution to this world in such need, Pendle Hill offers an unparalleled container for discernment. The program doesn’t tell you what your calling is. Instead, it creates conditions in which you can hear more clearly what God is already speaking within you. It provides:

• Silence to listen beneath the noise of external and internal expectations
• Community to reflect back to you what they see and sense in you
• Companions who ask questions that open rather than close possibilities
• Practices that help you distinguish ego’s voice and cultural conditioning from the leadings of the Spirit
• Time to wait, to sit with uncertainty, to let clarity ripen
• Support to take small steps toward what you’re being called to do

I have watched this discernment process unfold not only in my own life but in the lives of many other resident students. Many arrive at Pendle Hill confused, burned out, or uncertain about their next chapter in life. Over weeks and months, something shifts. People leave clearer, more grounded, more confident in their sense of calling, and happier just to be who they were.

Learning to Live in the Questions

Pendle Hill taught me that we don’t always need answers. Sometimes what we need most is to learn how to live faithfully in the questions, trusting that clarity will come in its own time. This is counter-cultural a world that demands certainty, productivity, and measurable outcomes.

The resident student program gives you time to sit with big questions: What am I called to do with my life? How do I heal from past wounds? What does God desire to do in and through me? How can I contribute to healing this broken world? What does it mean to live faithfully in this time of crisis?

You’re invited to arrive with questions and to trust that the community, the practices, and the rhythm of life at Pendle Hill will help you find your way. You may discover new questions or deeper questions that help guide you into the next phase of your life.

The resident student program at Pendle Hill is a place to step back for a time from the relentless demands of ordinary life and our troubled society, in order to ask the deeper questions. It’s a place to come into an updated sense of who you really are and what your soul has to give, so that you can serve more from wholeness than woundedness. It’s a place to discern your calling so that you can offer your unique gifts rather than just reacting to one crisis and then the next. It’s a place to find renewal, so that you have energy and hope for the journey ahead.

An Invitation

If you’re reading this and feeling a nudge in your heart, a sense that maybe this is for you, I encourage you to listen to that stirring. Taking time out to discern your path is important. Your clarity matters. Your unique contribution to the healing of the world is needed. Pendle Hill can support you in becoming more fully who you really are.

The 2026 Spring Term at Pendle Hill begins March 1. Enrollment is possible for either four or ten weeks. The registration deadline is Jan 1. For more information about the Resident Student Program at Pendle Hill, visit https://pendlehill.org/calendar/the-spring-term-resident-student-program/.

***** HERE is a link to a videorecording of a talk byEmily Savin about her experience in residence at Pendle Hill. Emily will be serving as Friend in Residence during the coming Spring Term. Teachers in residence this spring include Valerie Brown, Marcelle Martin, and Dwight Dunston.

Upcoming Online Webinar with Marcelle Martin:

Divine Guidance in Dreams and Images

December 12 @ 3:00 pm – 5:00 pm EST

A webinar with Spring Term teacher Marcelle Martin on how divine guidance and calls have appeared both in scripture and in the dreams of Quakers.  Spirit often guides and communicates through dreams and inner images.  They can be especially helpful in finding healing and a path forward in uncertain times.  In this webinar, Marcelle Martin will illustrate how divine guidance and calls have appeared both in scripture and in the dreams of Quakers.  We will experience some different methods of exploring our dreams (and inner images) to find the guidance they contain.  There will be an opportunity to share in a small group and to witness a demonstration of working with a dream.

Registration is required but there is no cost for this webinar.  https://pendlehill.org/calendar/divine-guidance/

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.

Both books are available from Barclay Press in hardback and paperback.

Find a Quaker Meeting near you: Quaker Finder