by Marcelle Martin
This talk is the 39th Michener Lecture, given at the Winter Interim Business Meeting, of Southeastern YM, on January 18, 2009
Sinking deeply into our source is what gives us vitality and the ability to reach beyond ourselves towards others and the world.
I’m grateful to be here and thank you for your invitation. As I was talking with Friends from Southeastern Yearly Meeting in preparation for coming here, one thing I heard over and over again was that this is a very loving yearly meeting. I can see it’s true, and I’m glad to be with you. Reading your previous lectures, I saw that many lecturers told personal stories. I’ll be telling some from my own spiritual experience. If my way of talking about God and the Spirit is different from the language you use to describe your spiritual experience, I hope you’ll translate in your heart whatever I’m trying to say.
Laura Melly is here today serving as my elder, holding me and this gathering in prayer.
The Cry of Creation and the Necessary Transformation of Consciousness
I’m going to begin this talk in a place I didn’t expect to. It came to me about three o’clock in the morning that I needed to start with a story about a cat that lives with Rolf Hansen and Ann Sundberg and their daughters. Rolf and Ann were students at Pendle Hill for the fall term. Their family had a wonderful experience, and we loved having them with us. When they heard I was coming to Florida to give this talk, they invited me to visit. I stayed with their family and met their two cats.
One of the cats, Maurice, is very unusual. When he was young, he was abused and then abandoned, after which he became wild. A woman who occasionally cared for him had a dream in which Maurice appeared to her and communicated the plea, “Rescue me or I’m going to die.” This woman took him in and cared for him, then later passed him on to Ann and Rolf’s family. This fall while the family was away, Maurice got a cold, and the woman who had originally saved him had a dream in which Maurice told her he was sick.
I’m not that fond of cats, and perhaps because of that, they don’t pay much attention to me. Ann told me I probably wouldn’t even see Maurice because he is still somewhat wild and doesn’t like strangers. Surprisingly Maurice came right out to greet me and was quite affectionate with me, very sweet. He wanted to be near me. As Laura and I were driving back from Sarasota yesterday, this cat’s face kept coming into my mind. I thought maybe there was something about Maurice that had to do with the lecture, but couldn’t imagine what it could be.
Yesterday evening, Laura and I had some worship together and then I did a little more preparation for this morning’s talk before going to bed. As I was falling asleep, an image of Maurice came into my mind again. I was surprised that instead of looking very happy, the way I’d seen him at Ann and Rolf’s house, he was looking miserable, his face full of pain. He was calling to me in a silent way, communicating distress. In the middle of the night, a car alarm going off in the parking lot woke me, and I remembered Maurice and his silent cry and wondered again what it meant. [After hearing this talk, Ann Sundberg told me that Maurice had, indeed, been very ill the night before.]
It reminded me of an experience I had when I was seventeen. The year was 1976. I had just graduated from high school. My American history class had instilled in me a great love for my country and the ideals it stood for. My family went on a weekend camping trip. As we got into our sleeping bags on the night of the third of July, I was so excited. The next day was going to be the Fourth of July, 1976, the bicentennial of our country! But that night I had trouble going to sleep. It was as though, in some inner way, I kept hearing a cry. I had an impression that the creatures of the Earth were groaning, because we were a heavy burden on them.
My talk is not about the suffering of Creation. Last year Steve Smith spoke to you, and in 1992 Lisa Gould talked of that. My talk is about how to root ourselves deeply in the Spirit. I want to say, however, that I am speaking with the understanding that we are living in a world in crisis. Friends are called to play an important role in responding to that world crisis. What’s needed at this time is a global transformation of consciousness, and Quakers have something important to contribute. Everyone has a part to play, the whole planet, but Quakers have a particular role. In order to play that role, we have to be deeply rooted in the Spirit, deeply rooted in our source, deeply rooted in God. That’s what I’m going to be talking about.
It’s not for our own sake that we need to root ourselves as deeply as possible in God. In meeting for worship this morning, someone spoke about the emergency landing of a plane on the Hudson River in which all the passengers were rescued, and asked us, “Who are the passengers on planet Earth who need to be saved?” It’s not just human beings. All of creation is suffering and calling out to us to participate, even to be leaders, in this global transformation of consciousness.
Deep Roots into God
In preparation for this talk, I received a beautiful email from Wendy Geiger in which she identified seven key issues or concerns of the Yearly Meeting. I was invited to see how I was led to speak in relation to those issues. I have been praying about your concerns. Since that invitation a year ago, some wonderful Friends from your Yearly Meeting have come to Pendle Hill and talked to me about SEYM. I had dinner with Ruth Hyde Paine this week and she said, “Oh, you’re going to see my dear people.”
To prepare for this talk, I also met with my peer group, a group of Friends who travel in the ministry and are invited to speak at Quaker gatherings or facilitate workshops. In June, and again in December, I shared with them the ideas and nudges that were coming to me as I thought and prayed about your concerns. They asked me questions and helped me with discernment. A key question has been whether this was an invitation to write a lecture in advance, or to give a talk prompted by the Spirit in the moment. I knew that if I read you something I’d written in advance, I wouldn’t be speaking directly to you in the present moment. What I said wouldn’t be as fresh, and might not have included Maurice the cat.
In September I spent a week on the outer banks of North Carolina, with an intention to pray about and prepare for this lecture. I read copies of Michener and Walton lectures that I had brought with me. One morning I sat on the beach and prayed: “God, please help me with the lecture. Please help me to know what to say.” After praying for help for a while, something shifted, as it often does when I pray. At a certain point, I thought, “Well, you know, this invitation to speak to Southeastern Yearly Meeting is God’s work, and I’m just offering to help with whatever it is God wants to do.” Then my prayer changed: “God, how can I help you?” In the meeting for worship this morning, we heard about a shift that happens as we attend to our relationship with God. We want to know, “Does God love me?” It’s so important to deeply accept that the answer is always, “yes.” Eventually we hear God asking us, “Do you love me?” Then our prayer becomes an offering of our love and gratitude to God.
When I asked how I could help God, I felt I received encouragement to write down the thoughts that were coming to me. This talk has gone through many versions since then. Today I have notes with me, but I am trying to speak as guided in the moment.
I chose the title “Deeply Rooted: Alive in the Spirit” partly because the questions that Wendy sent me included so many references to the word “deep.” “How do we go deep in our spiritual community?” she asked on your behalf. “How do we go deep in our discernment?” Her questions also included images of being rooted. “How do we root ourselves in the experience of early Friends?”
I also chose the title because of some images I have been having repeatedly in Meeting for Worship at Pendle Hill. One image came several times during our Sunday evening Meetings for Prayer and Healing. While remembering God’s healing love, and praying for individuals and the world, I kept having an image of being in a primordial forest, an original forest that had never been cut. It was just the way God had created it, and there was a sacred and very holy feeling. It was healing to sense that our group in prayer was in some inward way entering into the forest of God’s original healing design for this planet.
Another image came several times during the daily morning meeting for worship that reminded me of an experience at Newtown Square Meeting when I was a member there. Some huge old Norway maples were starting to drop their branches and had become dangerous. A large tree in the burial ground was cut down, and we asked the tree cutters to leave the stump. I went out shortly afterwards and stood on that great freshly-cut stump. An amazing sensation of energy flowed up from the great roots of that tree, up into me. The roots were still alive.
In meeting for worship at Pendle Hill, I had an image of standing on the roots of a great tree whose trunk had been partially cut away. It felt as though I were trying to reconnect with the tree’s deep roots in order to help the tree become whole again. It was the Quaker tree. I have been trying to reconnect with partially forgotten ways that Quakers over the centuries had learned to root themselves deeply in God, in our Life and Source. What are those roots with which we need to reconnect? How do we do that?
Lost and Found
I want to share an experience of being lost, of recognizing and admitting that I was lost and then finding a deeper rooting because of that recognition. About four years ago I was camping in the Friends Wilderness Center with a group of women and a dog named Spencer. I had never been there before, and it had been a long time since I’d done any camping. We were in what was called a “tree house.” We laid out our sleeping bags on a platform raised one story up from the ground. It was late in September. As evening fell, it became quite chilly up there, with the wind blowing strongly through the trees. I piled my coat and a blanket on top of my sleeping bag. It was too cold outside of my little nest to get out and use the latrine before I went to sleep. So, of course I needed to do so later in the night, perhaps at one o’clock.
The latrine was a distance from the tree house. I brought my flashlight with me, but didn’t bring my big coat. When I came out of the latrine, I miscalculated how many times around the building I needed to go in order to head back to the tree house, so I ended up walking in the wrong direction. I hadn’t checked my batteries before I went on this camping trip; the batteries were getting dimmer and dimmer. Eventually I realized that I’d gone quite a ways and the tree house was still not in front of me. I turned to shine my flashlight on the latrine, but by then there was hardly any light left and I couldn’t figure out where I had come from either. With dread, I realized I was lost.
That night at dinner I had heard stories about the bears in this Wilderness Center. Even a mountain lion had been seen. I was afraid,but I knew that all I had to do was shout and the dog would bark. I would be able to find the way back, so I wasn’t terribly lost. But I was embarrassed that I had gotten lost, and didn’t want to wake up everyone else. I decided to sit down and pray about it.
The lines of a poem came to me, “Be still, the forest knows where you are.” [David Wagoner’s poem, “Lost,” is a translation of an old Native American elder’s story.] As I contemplated the idea that the forest knew where I was, it occurred to me that maybe God had brought me to the Friends Wilderness Center precisely in order for me to get lost in the middle of the night. That was an interesting idea, worth sitting with for a while and contemplating. I was at that time very afraid of two things. I had a small growth on my shoulder that my doctor said was growing. I didn’t have health insurance. I was worried about how that little bump might impact my future employment at Pendle Hill, since I had been hired to become a full-time resident teacher the following year. I was also terrified because in the next week, Laura Melly and I would start co-teaching the fall Quakerism course at Pendle Hill for the first time. I was afraid I didn’t know enough to teach Quakerism at Pendle Hill.
On top of being afraid of both of those things, now I was lost in some woods where a mountain lion might be nearby. When it occurred to me that maybe I was lost there for a reason, I remembered the early Quaker women and other women with a prophetic call whose stories I had been reading and writing about. Most of them had had to travel through the woods on their journeys, and they had sometimes slept on the ground. If they could do it, maybe I could, too.
I remembered a story about Peace Pilgrim. [Peace Pilgrim (1908 – 1981) was an American pacifist, vegetarian, and peace activist. In 1952, she became the first woman to walk the entire length of the Appalachian Trail in one season. In 1953, in Pasadena, California, she adopted the name “Peace Pilgrim” and walked across the United States for twenty-eight years to witness for inner and outer peace. Peace Pilgrim was a frequent speaker at churches, universities, and local and national radio and television. Her only possessions were the clothes on her back and the few items she carried in the pockets of her blue tunic which read “Peace Pilgrim” on the front and “25,000 Miles on foot for peace” on the back. She had no organizational backing, carried no money, and would not even ask for food or shelter. When she began her pilgrimage she had taken a vow to “remain a wanderer until mankind has learned the way of peace, walking until given shelter and fasting until given food.” From Wikipedia.] She was the first woman to walk the entire Appalachian Trail in one season. Later, after she began her pilgrimages across this country, she owned only the clothes she wore and a few items she carried in her pockets. But earlier, when she walked the Appalachian Trail, she brought a plastic bag. At night, she would fill the plastic bag with leaves and make a blanket or a bed out of it. Remembering that story, I piled up a bed of leaves beside a tree. I lay down on the bed I’d made and looked up at the dark sky and bright stars. It was actually a lot warmer on the floor of the forest in the leaves than it was in the tree house, where the wind was blowing high in the trees.
After a while I began to sense how sad it was that I was so disconnected from the Earth. I was part of a culture that is very disconnected from the natural life of the planet we live on. It was actually very comforting to be there on the floor of the woods in that bed of leaves. I thought about the things I was afraid of, and it seemed to me that my fears all boiled down to a lack of trust in God. God had brought me to where I was, and I had been faithful as far as I knew. If something happened that wasn’t what I wanted, I could still trust that God would be present with me. I felt fear just falling out of my body and sinking into the earth, like compost. I stayed in my bed of leaves looking at the waving tree tops and the stars until dawn, and then I found my way back to the tree house. I was a different person, because I had left behind a whole lot of fear. My friends in the tree house, seeing the mound of coat and blanket piled on top of my sleeping bag, had not missed me. The dog, Spencer, however, had kept vigil. Sometime in the middle of the night, Spencer had moved to the edge of the platform and stayed awake there, ears cocked, looking in the direction where I was lost in the woods.
Early Friends: Seekers Who Found
The people who became early Friends were people who recognized that they were lost. Because of that recognition, they sought for something more true than what was around them, and their seeking enabled them to connect more directly with God. Like others in England in the mid-seventeenth century, they felt they lived in an apocalyptic time. A lot of religious questioning, new ideas, and new religious practices contributed to a social unrest, a Civil War, and the decapitation of the king. Many believed that something so drastic surely must signal that the second coming of Christ would be soon.
There were many groups who knew that the new ideas and practices they had been following hadn’t yet taken them to the fullness of connection with God that they were seeking. In his early travels George Fox encountered a group he referred to as “shattered Baptists.” They had been fervent and zealous for quite a while about their new religious sect, and then their hopes had been disappointed. The new government didn’t include rights for them or establish the kind of social righteousness they anticipated. Some of them fell away. Those who remained found new life and a deeper connection to God and Christ after George Fox preached among them. They began to call themselves “Children of Light.” These were the first Quakers.
Other groups were known as Seekers. They had tried the radical churches and sects, the Independents and the Separatists, seeking a pure and true form of religion. But they had not found what they sought. They decided that what they were seeking hadn’t come yet. Many were waiting for God to send a prophetic person like the apostles of old. Our unprogrammed form of worship comes from the Seekers. They would wait together in silence until someone was moved to stand up and speak. In those days, vocal ministry was more like preaching than what we have today. The Seekers knew that they were lost. They knew that they hadn’t found what they were so deeply seeking, the authentic connection with God that they wanted.
George Fox himself knew he was lost. He wandered around England going to different preachers and priests seeking a living faith. He found that even these noted people who professed to be Christians did not possess what they professed. Eventually he realized that he wasn’t going to obtain help from any other human being. Only after he gave up on seeking outwardly did he begin to receive those revelations which are foundational to Quakerism. Then he discovered that Jesus Christ is available right now to directly teach his people himself. It was not a future event, a distant second coming, nor was it merely a past event to believe in. The active Presence of Christ as Inward Teacher was the great discovery of early Friends. It’s still true that the Spirit of Christ is present and alive right now to teach us.
There came a time in my own spiritual journey when I knew that I was deeply seeking. At that time I found a Bible passage I had written down on an index card when I was twelve years old and tucked into the Bible which had been given to me. I kept that Bible but didn’t open it again for fifteen years. Then, when I was seeking again, I opened it and the index card fell out. The passage I had written down was from Jeremiah: “For I know the thoughts I think toward you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a hopeful future. When you call upon me, and come and pray to me, I will hear you. When you seek me, you will find me, when you seek me with all your heart.” (Jer 29:11-13)
Early Friends were a whole generation of people who were seeking with all their hearts. I want to tell you the story of Mary and Isaac Penington. They were just one couple among many, many people who were seeking. They happened to be members of the upper class. Mary was the daughter of a knight as well as the widow of one who had died in the Civil War. Isaac, her second husband, was the son of the previous Lord Mayor of London. Like so many others in their day, these two wealthy people had earnestly been seeking for true religion. They had attended many different Independent and Separatist churches and engaged very fervently in Puritan spiritual disciplines.
Isaac had gone to seminary. As a trained theologian, he investigated the theology of the new sects and wrote tracts and books about his explorations. He was a minister of a church for about ten years. In their searches, Isaac and Mary kept coming to a point where they recognized that each form of religion they tried wasn’t connecting them with God in the way they desired. They both became Seekers, at the point of despair. Not having found what they sought, they didn’t even know if it existed.
Mary thought she wanted nothing more than to find the right way to be with God, and she believed she was willing to give up anything for it. Well, she got the opportunity when some people from the north of England came to London. In her mind the Quakers were rough, rude, coarse, undereducated people. She read a book by George Fox, but she was put off by his way of using “thee” and “thou” all the time. She made fun of the Children of Light.
One day she and Isaac were walking in the park when a young Quake—you could tell he was a Quaker by the plain way he was dressed—made fun of their fancy clothes. In her mind Mary thought insulting things about him, but Isaac was always interested in new theological ideas, so he engaged the man in conversation. Since Isaac quickly outdebated him, the young Quaker said he would send some more experienced Friends to visit the Peningtons.
The two Quakers who came the next day spoke powerfully to Isaac and Mary. In spite of her prejudices, Mary was convinced of the truth of what they said. They talked about how wearing fancy clothes and using social mannerisms, including flattering forms of speech, was all false. Mary felt something strike her heart, as if their words had the power of God. That was the beginning of many months of struggle. Joining with the plain Quakers would mean not only changing her speech and her clothes, it would basically mean leaving her social class. Mary struggled more than she expected. She had told God she would do anything to find true religion, but when it came to this, what it was that God was asking her to give up, she had a big and painful struggle.
Eventually it became clear to Mary Penington what God was asking of her. She had wanted to make a bargain: “First, God, show me that Quakers are really your people, and then I’ll do these things.” But it came to her that if she knew that these things were right, she needed to do them first without any other proofs from God. So she gave up the fancy clothes and flattering speech designed to maintain different social classes. She was mocked by her family, by others of her social class, and even by her servants.
Her husband Isaac wasn’t convinced quite so quickly. It was not until many months later, while listening to George Fox speak, that he had a powerful experience. He encountered the Presence of the Spirit he had been seeking for so long. It was within him as a tiny seed, the Seed of God. What was most difficult for Mary to give up was her social standing. Isaac, too, had to give up what he had held most precious: the primacy of his analytical mind. He continued to use his university-educated mind on behalf of Quakerism ever after, but he had to give up the supremacy of the intellect. He discovered that the experience of God he had been seeking, had always been with him, inside, but it was a small and humble thing. It was a thing he had to feel rather than something he could analyze. It was not a glorious outward second coming of Christ visible to all. Instead, to find the living presence of Christ, he had to pay attention to a small, subtle inner feeling which until then he had held in contempt. Like Mary, Isaac found that when he joined with the Quakers and adopted their way of life, he received what his heart was seeking. Their relatives were outraged that they had become Quakers and sued them. Being Quakers, they couldn’t swear in court, so it was easy for their relatives to take away their property. They lost much of their social standing and wealth. Isaac spent ten of the next twenty years of his life in prison. For the Peningtons, it was worth all of the sacrifices. They gained a living connection with God and a beloved community worth more than what they had given up.
What is God asking us to give up that we prize so much?
Perhaps we’ve already given up much in becoming Quakers and our lives have been changed. However, the spiritual journey is an ongoing process of surrender and transformation. There’s a continuous process of turning back to God or listening more deeply. What is the next thing that we’re asked to give up? How are we engaged in our culture in ways that we need to let go of? What do we need to change? How are we engaged with our minds in ways that are preventing us from really feeling the humble guidance of the still, small voice of the Spirit in our hearts? How are we lost?
When you seek me, you will find me, when you seek me with all your heart.
In 1984 I was a graduate student in Amherst, Massachusetts. I was in my mid-twenties and had been disillusioned enough to know that I wasn’t going to find fulfillment in academia. I wasn’t going to find fulfillment in publishing novels, which had been my idea of what I was going to do with my life. I had learned that travel was wonderful but that I wasn’t going to find fulfillment in my life that way, either. I wasn’t even going to find ultimate fulfillment in romantic relationships. I was in love with someone who had a brain tumor, so the question of what happens after death was a big question for me. Is human consciousness annihilated at death? Are we merely chemical and biological accidents of a random universe? These questions were preoccupying me. With all my heart I was seeking to understand ultimate truth. Often times I went out walking at night under the stars.
Sometimes I felt like I was sitting on the edge of the abyss—the edge of that annihilation of consciousness that I feared. Was there a God? What was the nature of reality? When I was a child, I sometimes had a fantasy that I had a connection with the stars. Usually this fantasy would come when I was very sad. I would feel that the stars had abandoned me. I didn’t analyze the underlying sense that there was some connection with the stars.
During this year of seeking with all my heart, I sat with the deepest questions that I knew, feeling the full intensity of my pain and fear. One night I was walking home from the University. I looked up at the stars with a feeling of futility, and I said to myself, “Face it, those stars are millions of light years away, and there is no connection.”
Then something happened. My perception changed. I don’t know why, it just happened. I suddenly experienced that the stars were inside of me and I was inside the stars and that we were part of a oneness. Then I experienced a sense of a light–golden light or energy– that was flowing through the stars and through me. This Light was a oneness, and it was connecting all of us. I realized that it flowed through all of Creation, through all that existed. This one Light connected all things. I felt the energy of the light flowing up my feet and legs, through my heart, and out of my arms and fingers. I experienced the incredible power of the Oneness, the divine Light. This Power came from connecting with what at the time I couldn’t call God. I couldn’t call it God because it was so much greater than any concept I’d ever had of what God was. But I had the knowing at that moment that this divine Power was greater than any problem on earth. No problem on earth was too big for this power to heal.
A Radical Christianity
That experience forever answered some of my questions. Will my consciousness be annihilated after death? I experienced eternity. Is there a God? I couldn’t, as I said, use the word “God” for a long time for that vast Oneness, but it was certainly divine. Yes, there is a spiritual reality. I couldn’t doubt that anymore. It permeates everything, and I am an inseparable part of it. I imagined that after that experience I wasn’t a Christian anymore, but then decided to read the gospels for myself. I was surprised to find things in the Bible that spoke about my experience in direct ways. It occurred to me that maybe Jesus was talking about this divine Light and Power I had experienced.
I was struck by a passage in Luke, when Jesus says that the eye is the light of the body: “When your eye is single, your whole body also is filled with light.” (Luke 11:34) What does it mean for your eye to be single? The word is sometimes translated as “whole.” I asked a Bible scholar about that word in the Greek, and he said the word means “braided.” When your eye is braided, it’s integrated: everything, all the pieces, all the strands, are brought together into wholeness, oneness. All of your sight is focused on God, on the Spirit. When your eye is single, your whole body also is filled with light.
When I came to Quakerism, I visited several meetings in the Philadelphia area; we have the luxury of lots of meetings to choose from. The first time I went to Newtown Square Meeting, in an old stone meeting house, there were only five people at worship. There was dark wooden paneling on the walls and the room seemed simple. The silence was profound. As I sat there, I thought, “This is like the room where Jesus taught his disciples.” It came to me that in that meeting house I would experience being taught inwardly by Jesus. Later I experienced Jesus asking me to read the Bible for myself and to take a year-long Bible seminar with a group of people who had a radical interpretation of the Bible, people whose focus was on living the gospels rather than just analyzing them.
I was surprised by my experience of Jesus at Newtown Square Meeting, but a sense of the inward teaching of Christ in meeting for worship has been a foundational experience of Quakers for centuries. My experience of the inward Christ led me to the Fairhill Friends Ministry in the inner city of Philadelphia to join Jorge Arauz, a Friend from Ecuador who was living in one of the poorest neighborhoods in this country. About half the neighbors were Latino, and half African American. Friend Jorge and others who participated in the Fairhill Friends Ministry had been led to reclaim the local park from the drug dealers and to join with the neighbors to make changes. I was terrified by my leading to live in that part of Philadelphia. People said, “Don’t move there, you’ll get mugged or killed!” Filled with fear, I started reading the gospels. Then I began to understand that God sends people to the places of brokenness, in order to bring God’s healing. During the years I lived in Fairhill, I experienced a neighborhood healing. It was a lesson in incarnating the light. I learned that the spiritual journey is not just a matter of being aware of the Light or receiving the guidance of the Light, but of learning to incarnate the Light so it fills your whole body.
I kept asking myself if I was still a Christian, since I understood Jesus and God as a part of a universal Oneness and Light. According to fundamentalists, I might not be a Christian. But Quakers have always offered an alternative, a radically different way of understanding Christianity. I felt empowered by my experience of Jesus to believe that I was being led into the fullness of Life. I didn’t have to deny or cut off parts of my spiritual awareness in order to fit into a conventional religious box. I could accept the guidance that came to me both through the gospels and through inward experience of Christ. I could understand myself as a Quaker and as a Universalist and as a Christian.
As Quakers, how do we root ourselves deeply in God? Rooting ourselves in a radical understanding of Christianity and in the early Quaker experience includes an understanding of the Hebrew prophets. George Fox called all to speak, act, and live prophetically, guided by God. He repeated the wish of Moses, “Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his spirit on them!” (Numbers 11:29). Both the earliest Christians and the first Quakers believed themselves to be living in the time proclaimed by God through the prophet Joel: Then afterward 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. Even on the male and female slaves, in those days I will pour out my spirit. (Joel 2: 28-29) Early Quakers rooted themselves in the tradition, experience, and ways of speaking of the Hebrew prophets. Their prophetic message contained mourning, critique and warning, as well as reminders of God’s everlasting love, and a vision of how God wanted people to live. [For more about these prophetic functions, see Walter Brueggemann’s book, The Prophetic Imagination.]
Reconnecting With Our Roots
I had meant to begin my talk with the prophets, but then the cat got my attention. Nature knows how to root itself in its source. One of the ways we root ourselves deeply in God is through the body. I’d like to demonstrate a simple way that uses the image of the tree, with its roots and branches. The thing to do is to have your feet firmly on the ground, and stand tall. Be aware of your feet and imagine them connecting with roots deep into the earth. Then you lift your arms and let your arms be branches. Allow your shoulders to relax and drop. Reach with your arms, but relax your shoulders. Your feet give you stability as you reach up and reach down at the same time. I invite you to try it. Allow your breathing to be something that helps you to be deeply rooted as well. We root ourselves in the body and in our breath. The roots coming down from our feet support us as we reach up and reach out, and we’re breathing deeply. Imagine that the roots supporting each of us are interconnected under the earth. We’re not only being supported by our own roots, but also by the connections of our roots to the roots of others. It’s very beautiful to finish by bringing our hands back into the prayer posture and just stay there for a moment, breathing. Notice if your body feels anything different after having done that.
The image of the taproot is powerful for me. That’s the root that goes deep down into the water table. Because it reaches down into the water table, it can draw up water into the tree even during a drought. The roots that spread wide give the tree stability even in turbulent winds. I feel that we’re called to let our spiritual roots go deep into the source and into a direct experience of the Spirit. We’re also called to root ourselves widely, into our connections with Quakerism, with Christianity, with the Hebrew tradition, with nature, with the body, with our families and with our communities. These wide roots connect and stabilize us. In times of crisis and turmoil in the world, we can be stable, we can be alive in the Spirit, we can be refreshed from our deep roots, and we can support one another through out interconnected roots.
Corporate Practices
I want to talk about some of the important ways we can be rooted in our Quaker communities, starting with our meetings for worship. Worshiping collectively helps many of us go more deeply into God than we often can do in our times of solitary prayer or meditation. When we arrive at meeting for worship, we may be preoccupied with our personal lives and immediate concerns, and it may take some time to let go and turn our focus to the Inward Teacher. It is helpful to remember that meeting for worship is a corporate practice, an opportunity to be gathered as a community into the Light. Some of us are called to pray for the meeting for worship in advance, and to be intentionally receptive to the Spirit not only on our own behalf but on behalf of our whole meeting. During many meetings for worship I have often found myself praying for whatever ministry, silent or spoken, that the meeting as a whole might need. I think that such prayers, especially if they come from many people, can help root the meeting in God’s living Spirit. There have been times when I sensed that someone’s speaking in meeting might be moving the gathering to a shallower place rather than taking us deeper into the Presence. At such moments, I have sometimes had an image of the whole meeting being rooted more solidly into the depths of the Spirit. That image was my prayer. In whatever way we are led to do it, allowing ourselves to join intentionally with the corporate experience instead of staying with a purely personal focus is an important shift that opens both us and the group more deeply to God’s grace.
The Meeting for Worship for the Conduct of Business is an incredible corporate spiritual practice. Our way of gathering to discern together the guidance of the Spirit–the will of God–is one of the greatest gifts Quakers have to share with others. We are called continually to learn how to discern that guidance and then help each other carry it out. Group discernment is a powerful and transforming spiritual discipline because we must confront our differences. We come up against our attachments and our strong opinions, which oppose someone else’s strong opinions. Surrendering the primacy of our individual will to the sense of the meeting is a profound practice that humanity needs to learn. Effectively addressing the crisis in our world today will require many groups of people discerning divine guidance together.
We can practice discernment in our monthly meetings, quarterly meetings, and yearly meetings, rooting ourselves in our Quaker community at all these levels. You who attend these Yearly Meeting sessions know how participating in a loving community helps to root us deeply in our source. When I come to my own Yearly Meeting annual sessions, I am sometimes surprised by the way my heart expands in joy when I encounter Yearly Meeting Friends I may see only once a year. I sometimes sense how we are drawn together in a shining web.
Quakers can also help each other become rooted in the Spirit through prayer and spiritual sharing groups. I imagine that many of your meetings have small groups of people who meet together on a regular basis for spiritual sharing, for reading and discussing Pendle Hill pamphlets or other Quaker literature, or for praying together. Participating in a small group for intimate spiritual learning and sharing is a really effective way of rooting ourselves in the Spirit. Intercessory prayer is also one of the prophetic functions that Bill Taber describes in his Pendle Hill pamphlet, The Prophetic Stream. Through prayer for the people, the prophet helps make Spirit available for others.
Spiritual friendships are precious. In a meeting for spiritual friendship with another person, time is dedicated to helping each one focus on how the Spirit is moving, how God is active in our lives. In mutual spiritual friendship, we give each other an equal amount of time to reflect and share about that with the other. Or we can meet one-on-one with a person who is gifted and perhaps trained in spiritual direction or spiritual nurture. Over many years I have had the blessing of meeting with several different spiritual nurturers on a weekly or monthly basis. Those relationships have helped me attend to how God is present in my life in ways that have been very important for me. God is always present, waiting for us to give our attention, waiting for us to become aware of the divine Presence and Power and Love. Giving our attention to that is something we learn with practice and a heart-felt desire.
Retreats are great opportunities to refresh and deepen our lives in God. There are lots of ways to make a retreat, alone or with others. It may be entirely in silence, or may include sharing with others. You could schedule different kinds of spiritual practices or might instead remain open to the guidance of the Spirit in each moment. You might go to a retreat center or organize a retreat in your meeting house. Sometimes, with one or more other people, I have gathered in my home or somebody else’s for a day of retreat together. Once I felt the need to leave my home and spend a month in silent retreat. I did not have the money to go to a retreat center, however, so I decided to arrange a retreat in my mother’s house. On the weekdays, when only my mother and I were there, I kept silent. On the weekends, when other members of the family came, I joined the family conversations. It was a little uncomfortable for my mother not to speak to me during the week, but she gave me a great gift in allowing me that silent time. That retreat was a time of profound deepening and prayer. I also recommend coming to Pendle Hill for a weekend, or a week, or a term. Next year we’re going to have a three-week term in January, an intensive on discernment for people who are able to come to Pendle Hill for three weeks.
My first pamphlet, Invitation to a Deeper Communion, is about another practice I have found to be very rooting, another way of spending a day in retreat together with others. The entire morning is given over to what we are calling “extended worship,” by which we mean an unprogrammed meeting for worship that extends beyond the usual hour. There’s a different experience if you sit in worship together for three hours or three and a half hours. Usually I find that after an hour I get a little bit restless and then I sink deeper. Time begins to melt away. There’s a sense that in that longer period of stillness, there’s an opportunity for the Spirit to do some work in us that it might not be able to do so easily in a one-hour period of worship. So that’s a practice I recommend for rooting ourselves in the Spirit. In Philadelphia Yearly Meeting we have been gathering three times a year, moving to different meeting houses. After the morning worship, we share a bag lunch and fellowship. Afterwards, we have worship sharing about our experience and the teaching, healing or guidance we received in the morning worship.
All of these are valuable ways in our Quaker community to help one another and to help ourselves become more deeply rooted in the Spirit. A lot can happen in a short meeting for worship, too. At Pendle Hill we have a half hour of worship every morning. In a half hour every day, we can root ourselves in the Spirit in a wonderful way. A group of Friends living in Philadelphia decided to have daily morning worship together in our own homes. Several of us were living on Evergreen Avenue, so we started there, holding a half hour meeting for worship five mornings a week. One day it would be at Laura’s house, the next day we would be next door at Meg’s house. On Wednesday we went down the street to Carolyn’s house, and then next we would go to Hollister’s house on the other side of Evergreen Ave. That’s how it started. Now this morning worship group is still called the Evergreens, but it meets in homes and apartments in several different neighborhoods. In addition to five morning meetings a week, meetings for worship are held on one or two evenings, as well, followed by potluck. About twenty people attend regularly, once a week or more often, and many others are occasional visitors. The half an hour of worship is supplemented with a half hour of studying and discussing the Bible or other readings, or praying together. Find a collection of people who live near you and can commit to worshiping together on a regular basis, one or more days a week, morning or evening. It is a wonderful, enriching addition to life in the Monthly Meeting.
In Philadelphia Yearly Meeting we’ve been enjoying a Spiritual Formation Program modeled after the one that began in Baltimore Yearly Meeting. The program has spread to many other Yearly Meetings. It begins with an opening retreat and closes with another retreat nine or ten months later, with a day of retreat in the middle of the program. Participants commit to engaging in a regular spiritual practice and then meet once a month in a small group to tell each other how it’s going with their spiritual practice and to remind each other of their mutual intentions. Regional groups meet once a month to discuss the assigned readings. Sometimes a monthly meeting undertakes to bring in facilitators and do this program as a meeting community. Either way, the Spiritual Formation program has proven to be a wonderful way for individuals, meetings, and yearly meetings to go deeper together. Another resource for Friends is the School of the Spirit Ministry which offers silent retreats in Powell House in New York. It also offers the two-year program, On Being a Spiritual Nurturer.
Supporting Ministry Among Us
In addition, Laura Melly and I are part of a new School of the Spirit Program called The Way of Ministry. It’s for Friends who are called to some form of ministry or who are following a leading. I’m speaking of ministry as we understand it in the unprogrammed tradition, not necessarily ordained ministry. All Friends are called to participate in God’s work, whether it be in our families, our meetings, or beyond. Some are called to forms of ministry that particularly benefit from the recognition and support of the monthly meeting. Before this talk began, you heard the minutes of religious service for Laura and me from Chestnut Hill Monthly Meeting. Each of us has gone through a process with our meeting over a long period of time, including a clearness committee, and one or more discussions in the business meeting. After a year and a half of learning, clearness processes, and discernment, my meeting approved my minute of religious service, coming to unity in recognizing that, “Yes, this person is called to a form of ministry outside our meeting and we want to recognize that and give her some support.” When the meeting unites on such a minute, they appoint an oversight committee, also called an anchor committee. This committee is composed of a few members of the meeting who meet regularly to help those with a call to ministry pay attention to whether we’re being faithful to what we’re being called to do. Are we faithful in paying attention to our leading and carrying it out, not overdoing it, and not outrunning our guide? With listening, questions, prayer, and discernment, they help us attend to the sometimes subtle inner promptings and guidance of the spirit. Committee members also serve as a link to the meeting, helping the meeting to understand the work of ministry as it unfolds.
Laura and I have been working for years on developing a peer group process for people who have a sense of a leading or a particular call to faithfulness. Unlike a clearness committee or oversight committee, the group is not just focused on one person but provides an opportunity for each person in turn to have the focus of the group. That’s another wonderful model you could explore. We have created some guidelines that are helpful for those who wish to participate in such a group. [For guidelines for such a group, email Marcelle Martin at FriendMarcelle@aol.com or Laura Melly at lauramelly@earthlink.net]
I see that you have a proposal for intervisitation in your yearly meeting. That’s a wonderful way to help keep Friends alive in the Spirit by sharing amongst each other, traveling to visit one another and sharing the gifts of individuals in different meetings. One of the reasons that Quakerism survived from the seventeenth century until today—when most of the other religious sects that sprang up in the seventeenth century are long gone—is because of the Quaker practice of traveling ministers. For centuries Quakers have continued the practice of sending Friends with gifts of vocal ministry and spiritual nurture to travel from meeting to meeting, sometimes leaving their homes for as much as two years at a time in order to do so. Even if one does not have particular gifts for ministry, it is a gift to visit Friends in other meetings. Bonds of love and friendship are precious gifts of the Spirit as well. The blessings of intervisitation can be great.
Clearness committees are an important way to root our witness and work in the world deeply in God’s spirit. In a clearness committee, we seek to help one another discern what God is asking Friends to do as opposed to what we or others think we should be doing. It’s very important to learn to distinguish the leading of the Spirit from all the other possible motivations. There are ways of helping one another to listening attentively to what the Spirit is calling for. We’ll do a little bit of practice later today on discernment. I invite you to come to Pendle Hill and take a course or a weekend workshop on deepening discernment skills in clearness committees.
Our goal is to learn to root our witness and work in the world in God’s renewing, healing, life-giving Spirit. I talked about how my own experience with Fairhill Friends’ Ministry was an experience of incarnating the Life- and the Light. It was a very real way of learning how to live what I believed. It required a lot of stretching. Finding God in places where I had never been before challenged my sense of comfort. Though people warned me against living in the inner city, I found there a greater sense of neighborhood than I’d ever had before. People lived outside as much as they could, sitting on their porches and stoops in front of their houses, or hanging out in the park we were reclaiming. I got to know the neighbors in a way I’d never done before. I realized that in going to that inner city neighborhood, I’d actually gone through a veil of illusion. There’s a cultural illusion in our media that says this is a dangerous place, these people are not fully human. I discovered that with the help of faith, I was able to go beyond that illusion and find a place where I met wonderful neighbors. Before moving to the inner city I met with a clearness committee who asked serious questions of discernment.
Prayer: Key to Playing Our Role in Global Transformation
I’ll end my talk today by telling a dream I had about a year or so after I started worshiping with Friends, before I became a member of a meeting. I had been speaking in meeting, sometimes in vocal ministry, about some of my spiritual experiences. When I learned that some people thought my experiences were a little too far-out, I wondered if there really was a place for me among Friends. Is this where I belong? Is this where God wants me to be?
It was another time of deep seeking and searching. Then I had a powerful dream. In the dream, I saw the planet Earth and saw that it was threatened with possible catastrophe. I saw that God knew all about this long in advance. Many, many people had been born all over the planet whose purpose was to help bring about a global transformation of consciousness, the only thing that could avert this possible catastrophe. I understood that I was one person among many, many people who are part of this larger divine plan for the planet. My particular role was to travel with a partner to visit groups and teach about prayer. This was at the very beginning of my time among Friends. It was only later that I understand that traveling in pairs is a traditional practice among Friends. In my dream, my partner and I come to a group of wonderful people. They are well-educated and socially liberal, but they are also a little cynical about God and prayer. I recognize them as liberal Quakers. In the dream I know that these Quakers have a key role to play in the process of global transformation. In order to play their role, they need to get more comfortable with prayer.
My partner and I take hands with a big circle of folks, and I say, “Let us pray.” This has worked with other groups of people, but nothing happens with this group. I feel the people’s uncertainty about whether there is any benefit that can come out of prayer. I feel the cynicism about whether or not God is really present.
I become afraid because I know that the ability of this group to pray is key for what will happen in the world. Then I realize that I have become cynical and doubtful, too, and that I no longer know how to pray. So inwardly I say, “God, please help me to pray. Teach me how to pray.” As I turn to God for help in that way, my heart begins to open. I begin to trust in God, as a child does a loving parent. I begin to feel something moving through my heart and moving around the circle.
Then a young person suddenly remembers a dream. The dream is about a rebellious adolescent who receives a letter from his or her parent saying that in spite of the rebellion, the child will inherit the kingdom. I understand this to be a metaphor or parable about humanity. We are the rebellious adolescent. Nonetheless, we can inherit God’s kingdom—we can wake up to the divine reality in which we live. We can be alive in the Spirit. Prayer is key to that. In my dream as I try to remember how to pray, I become like a little child as I admit to God that I don’t know how to pray and that I need help learning how to do it. I also become like a child in trusting that God is present, that God will respond, that help will come. The help that is needed in our time can only come through the power of God. We can become agents for that Power, but it’s not our power. It’s part of the divine Oneness that is so much vaster than we are.
So let us pray.
God, I give thanks for the glorious privilege
of being alive in this beautiful world.
I give thanks for these Friends.
I pray that you teach us how to trust in you,
how to stay close to you,
how to open ourselves to be agents
for your divine healing and love and transformation.
—Amen.