It was a great loss to Christianity when the idea developed that spiritual part of our being was somehow higher than and essentially separate from our bodies. Many Christians wrote as if our bodies were somehow evil and enemies of our spiritual nature. Our bodies are, in truth, temples of God’s spirit. God calls on us to love our neighbors “as ourselves”. This includes loving and caring for our bodies in every way we can. Thankfully many today are moving towards a holistic appreciation of the oneness of our bodies, minds, our feelings, and that of God that is alive within each of us.

Health and God’s Love

Willingness and Health is a paper Peter Blood wrote in 1987 while studying spiritual direction at the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation. It is a reflection on ways that holistic health can lead to blame or self-blame towards the person who is ill and suggests an alternative: “contemplative medicine”.

The Quakers in Pastoral Care & Counseling (QPCC) 2006 annual conference was titled We Shall All Be Changed: Experiencing God’s Love through Health Changes. It was planned and led by Peter Blood, Elaine Emily, Bill Ratliff, Elisabeth Dearborn & Maureen Flannery.

  • Queries used in conference small groups may be useful for Friends going deeper in their efforts to experience their own bodies as being held in God’s love.
  • Body Prayer is a guided meditation used at the conference in which one focuses on holding a part of one’s own body in God’s healing love & light.

Healing our bodies

Accounts of healing play a major role in the accounts we have of Jesus’ ministry in the gospels. Jesus admonished his followers to preach repentance and the coming of the Kingdom of God—and to heal the sick. Healings also play a significant role in accounts of the early Church in the book of Acts.

George Fox was also known as a healer, although this aspect of Fox’s ministry apparently was embarrassing to subsequent generations of Friends. Henry Cadbury edited George Fox’s Book of Miracles as a way of reacquainting modern Friends with early Friends’ healing work. The re-issue of this book by QuakerBooks in 2000 includes two new introductory essays by Paul Anderson & Jim Pym describing how Fox’s work as a healer was suppressed. Here is an article on George Fox’s healing ministry.

The Friends Fellowship of Healing based in Britain YM has over 1,000 members and offers a formal training program for Quaker spiritual healers who utilize hands-on healing methods.

Richard Lee, a member of Red Cedar Friends Meeting in E. Lansing, Michigan, pioneered work on Quaker healing prayer in the United States.

For a number of years, Powell House, a Quaker Conference Center located near Albany, NY, has held an annual gathering for Friends Involved in the Practice of Spiritual Healing (FIPSH).

Intercessory Prayer (“holding in the light”)

Many Friends meetings offer an opportunity for prayer for others at the end of worship. Many of these requests are for prayer around illness challenges being by Friends or loved ones. For information see the section on this subject under Prayer.

Meetings for Healing

A Meeting for Healing are a relatively new practice of focusing the prayers of a group of Friends on a given person or situation. It is a meeting for worship with attention to prayer. This may include prayers for bodily or psychological healing. For information see the section on this practice under Prayer.

 

Sexuality

George Fox and other early Friends felt that the faith they were living in, in God, freed Friends to experience a new kind of sexuality free from “animal lust”.

The dominant sexual ethic among Quakers at least until the end of the 20th century was that sexual relationships should only take please within the bounds of a heterosexual marriage relationship. Of course, as with those in many faith traditions, this ethic was not necessarily the only one practiced.

In the 20th century, Friends began to look in fresh ways at human sexuality and sexual relationships in new ways. Elizabeth Watson gave a talk in 1982 on Sexuality: A Part of Wholeness.

New England YM formed a Working Party on Spirituality & Sexual Ethics that had as its mission to discern a set of ethics rooted in our Quaker faith for Friends today. The working party met over eight years, culminating in a report entitled Faithful Sexuality which was published by NEYM’s Ministry & Counsel Committee in 2016.