by William Taber
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I find that I have little to say about techniques of ministry. Instead, I am led to speak, as I often have before, about the ground out of which all ministry flows. It is good to remember that all ministry is one, and should flow from the same source. This is true of what we call ministry in a meeting for worship just as it should be true of everything which happens in a meeting—for worship—for business, for in that meeting we are ministering through our decisions either to ourselves or to the world beyond us.
So I shall speak in the next few minutes about the ground out of which all such ministry flows, including that ministry, that prayer, which can help keep a meeting for business true to its purpose, which is to make decisions through the help and guidance of the Holy Spirit.
The first thing to say about this ground is that it is dangerous. It is dangerous to go—with an open heart and mind and will—into a business meeting! Sometimes when I think about the opening silence of a business meeting, that special pregnant time when the ground is being readied and prepared, I remember that sacred dance of the Hopis, when a few men dance with rattlesnakes held in their mouths. There is a variety of symbolism here, including the wisdom of the serpent to which we are called by Jesus, and the rich and creative vitality and energy of the life force and its awesome power. But there is also a danger, for these are rattlesnakes!
Now you may be thinking that this is not the best analogy of the business meeting, and I agree. I have called up this picture for one reason: the outward ceremonies of that sacred dance do not begin until the elders, down in the Kiva, with its mystical contact with the center of the earth, sense that the time has come for the dancers to carry the snakes in cooperation with the great mystery at the center of all life. These elders, and their whole nation, know the secret of waiting until the time is right. George Fox used that term “wait” dozens of times. We will come back to this term in a moment.
Yearly meeting is a sacred dance, like the Sun Dance of many native Americans. It is a time when we reaffirm our identity as individuals and as people. It is a time of purification, purgation, and deep commitment in our own version of the sweat lodge and the ritual dance. It is a time for receiving energy and vision and purpose for the year ahead. It is a time when we can be nourished by the physical nearness of our whole tribe and when we can feel that God is very real and close.
And so, as we settle into the opening worship before any session, we are in the presence of a great and awesome power: God as the Absolute Other, made somehow more real by the presence of all these earnest, expectant people. (For those who “minister,” or who are occupied by much business, there is a great value in this recognition of the “absolute other.”) Yet this God is also our friend, warm and personal and energizing.
As we relax into this awesome and yet friendly presence, we can become even more richly aware of the joy of another presence we had felt as we entered the room. This is the nourishing joy of being in the presence of our friends—a kind of extended family with a common language and values.
And so as we wait in this plasma, this fluid which is both human and divine, we can sense a living flow which unites us, and in that wonderful flow we are bathed and rested and nourished. At this point I am again reminded of George Fox, who wrote about the early yearly meetings he attended in the American colonies. Each of those meetings had two or three days of worship and two or three days of business. Of course, their circumstances and needs were different from ours, but, even so, we do well to remember the large space given to worship throughout most of our three centuries of Quaker business meetings.
It does take time to move into that place where heart and mind and will are united in God and with one another. And again, I remember George Fox saying, “Wait.” “Wait in the Lord.” “Wait for the Power of the Lord to be over all. ”
The waiting he spoke about meant much more than pausing for the mere passage of time. It was not a passive, empty waiting. It was an act—an act of going very deep. We wait until heart and mind and will are clear. We wait until the secular mists roll away—and we find the world still there—but we see it now as God would have us see it.
A part of this waiting can be done ahead of time, long before the meeting begins. Also, we can go early into the meeting room and sit in quiet worship as people gather. This waiting does not always need to take a long time. As Henry Leeds of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting once said, “Truth is Quick!” It can be very quick! Just as it happens in an emergency that an ordinary person discovers the strength to lift a car or a tree off an injured person, so we discover that the great depth of our need and our yearning can take us sometimes very quickly to that place for which we wait. Or we could say, “Intensity, not time, is the measure of prayer.”
Our greatest service to the meeting may lie in our going to this inward place instantly and staying there throughout the entire session. With practice, we can be there even before we enter the room.
As we continue to wait in this inward place, this altered state of consciousness, we can rest there until a peace comes, a peace which feels like being held in the everlasting arms. But this is not a solitary place, nor a private mystical experience, for we know we are in a room full of people about to be called into common work. And so the sense of bonding with these people increases, even as the peace increases.
Out of this peace and bonding grows a most necessary ingredient of this dangerous dance of Quaker process: trust in the divine process which now owns us as much as we own it. Only as we are given the grace to trust this process are we able to let go, even a little bit, of the personal and partisan obstacles to the working of God among us. Trust in the process—that is a willingness to let go and let God work among us, in us, in me, yes—to change me!
In all of this waiting, there is yet one more experience, which can come early or late in the waiting: the exciting sense of the utter unpredictability of the amazing divine work before us in the meeting.
But what happens to this spirit when the clerk, like the Hopi elders, says it is time to begin our sacred work? We can be sure that the Hopi dancers who move with living rattlesnakes between their lips do not forget that they are in the presence of the great mystery and that they keep heart and mind and will aligned with the Great Mystery that pulses through them and unites them with the tribe and with the earth even as they step in the sacred dance.
So can we, on our comfortable padded benches, stay in that centered place, knowing that the more of us who can stay faithfully grounded in God, the easier it will be for others to find it—and to stay in it also. In this state we can spend hours in a business meeting without tiring or losing our patience, resting in this sea of divine Light and love which washes through all people present. At such times, in the spirit of Thomas Kelly, we can experience a kind of double perception: On the one hand, an almost bodily sense of our invisible bonding, our underlying spiritual connection with these people through the spirit of God. And yet on the other hand, our mind competently follows the discussion of an issue, absorbing the words as well as hearing them, while at the same time we surround the speakers and the clerk with a wordless wash of prayer and blessing.
This, then, is the most important of our ministries—a double ministry of (1) beholding and living in the sea of God, or as some would say, beholding and living in the body of Christ (which is the meeting) and (2) absorbing the words of the speakers through a wash of wordless prayer and blessing.
Sometimes we are led to speak, to minister out of this ground we have been describing. And let us remember that in Quaker theory—and I hope in Quaker practice—all speaking in a business meeting arises out of this ground, and can therefore be called ministry. We know that the true inward motion to speak often lies far beneath our first instinct to respond to an issue. So it is well to wait, to go deeper.
Yet Truth is quick, and the longer we have been experienced in waiting, the more quickly we can learn to recognize the true motion even in an instant, so that we can respond to the Spirit’s timing and not our own.
So, to conclude, here are a few of the ways to minister to our yearly meeting:
- To hold the meeting in the Light long before the meeting begins.
- To get to meeting early and settle into worship as soon as possible.
- When we enter the meeting room, to do so with respect and awe in the presence of the unexpected, which is always there and can claim us and change our lives forever.
- To perceive the body—to visualize it—to feel its reality.
- To enter so deeply into this divine-human reality that we rest and trust in the process.
- To absorb as well as hear the words spoken and to bathe speakers and clerks in wordless prayer.
- To wait for the deep inward motion that is deeper than a surface emotion or idea.
- And then, before speaking, to wait to see if love is also there.
- And to be satisfied if the only ministry, the only contribution, is invisible and silent, a deep and constant wordless prayer on behalf of the body.
This talk was given to the Worship & Ministry Committee of Philadelphia YM on the eve of the 1987 annual sessions of that YM. It was first published in the March 1988 issue of Friends Journal.
When he wrote this article Bill Taber was in his seventh year at Pendle Hill, where he taught, among other things, a course called Traveling in the Ministry. He was a recorded minister of Ohio Yearly Meeting and was a sojourning member of Chester (Pa.) Meeting at the time.