Hope & Rest in Challenging Times

Faith Is the Substance of Things Unseen

Early in that worship a brief phrase from the Bible rose in me: “Faith in the substance of things unseen.” That was all. I didn’t know where it came from. I thought it was in one of Paul’s epistles. I finally found it: It’s the opening verse of the 11th chapter of the Letter to the Hebrews (a book I’d barely read.)

It goes on:

By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things not visible.

And then,

By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out for a place, and he set out not knowing where he was going…. For he looked forward to a city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God.
—Hebrews 11:1,3 and 11:8,10 (NRSV)

It says that that kind of faith requires not only believing that God exists, but that she’s the kind of God who cares enough to respond to those who seek her.

Chapter 11 ends with something I really liked. It says (in The Message translation) that:

Not one of these people, even though their lives of faith were exemplary, got their hands on what was promised. God had a better plan for us: that their faith, these people that were being talked about, and our faith would come together to make one complete whole — their faith, their lives of faith, not complete apart from our own.
—Hebrews: 11:39-40

This chapter has a long list of people, patriarchs & prophets, lots of people I’d never heard of. All of them are men except for Abraham’s wife, Sara. I don’t really relate to a lot of those people, so I thought I’d share my own list of some people who lived in hope, who walked towards a place that God had prepared for them, even though they never got there, never saw the end point they were heading toward — and had no way of knowing what the outcome would be of their acts of faithfulness.

Jesus felt called to go to Jerusalem on Passover. His disciples urged him not to go. They said if he did that he’d be killed — and they were right. Jesus’ response was “Get thee behind me Satan.” [Matt. 16:21-23] Many Christians believe that Jesus knew all along how things were gonna turn out, but his cry on the cross “My God, why have you forsaken me?” suggests otherwise. I feel he acted in hope & faith without knowing what would be the outcome. [Matt. 27:46. Jesus’ cry comes from Psalm 22:1.]

Francis of Assisi was raised into privilege. His father was a wealthy silk merchant who expected him to wear rich clothes & follow him into his business. At a turning point in his life Francis stripped off his fancy clothes & handed them to his father. He felt called to rebuild a ruined church, live in poverty, serving the poor & lepers. [article describing Francis’ action]

In 1658 the Quaker traveling minister Mary Fisher felt led with a group of Friends to meet with the sultan of the Ottoman empire in the Balkans where Christians & Muslims were at war. The English ambassador thought they were crazy to try & do this & tricked them into taking a ship the wrong way. But she persuaded the captain to let her off on shore. She walked alone across the Balkans ‘til she reached the place where the sultan was camped out on a battlefield. She somehow persuaded the Grand Vizier to give her an audience with the sultan. They had a long conversation about God and she said afterwards he had a “tender spirit”. She lived in hope having no idea of the outcome. [description of visit in Quakers in the World]

Another early Friend Mary Dyer kept walking back to Boston to testify to truth even after being banished on pain of death & after 2 of her Quaker friends were hung. She said that she felt in a place of deep joy & peace as the time of her execution approached. They had to gag her to keep her from preaching or singing as she was led to the gallows. She had no way of knowing that her act of faith would help lead to an act that ended religious persecution in England 28 years later. [Wikipedia article on Mary Dyer]

Dorothy Day, the cofounder of the Catholic Worker movement, started houses of hospitality in poor neighborhoods, feeding the hungry, clothing those without clothes, providing a home for the homeless, having no idea how those actions might eventually lead towards an end to hunger or homelessness. [biographical sketch on Dorothy Day Guild website]

In 1960, four students from an historically Black college in Greensboro NC decided to sit-in at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter & ask for service. They were beaten & spat upon. They could not know that their simple act would lead to thousands of such sit-ins & the Civil Rights Act being passed just 4 years later. [article on Greensboro Si-in on History.com]

In 2016 after 50 young people were murdered at a gay nightclub in Orlando, John Lewis & some other congresspeople were led to spend the night speaking to the empty House chamber. He said “There comes a time when you have to do something, when you have to make a little noise, when you have to move your feet. This is the time. Now is the time to get in the way.” He was acting in hope — not knowing if it could make any difference in ending gun violence. [There is an account of sit-in by John Lewis and others in House chamber after Orlando shooting in a post by U.S. Congresswoman Joyce Beatty.]

What I hear in Psalm 18 & Hebrews 11 is that God offers us a kind of freedom or path to letting go. It says that my only task is to try & hear what God is asking me to do, not to figure out or know whether it’s going to be effective or successful in reaching any particular goals.

Joseph Sturgis, an English Quaker working to abolish the practice of enslavement in the British colonies put it this way in 1830:

When Christians are convinced that the principle on which they act is correct, I believe it does not become them to examine too closely their probability of success. But rather to act in the assurance that if they faithfully do their part, as much success will attend their efforts as is consistent with the will of that Divine Leader under whose banner they are enlisted. [quoted by Howard Brinton in his Sources of the Quaker Peace Testimony — written just as World War II was beginning!]

What I hear God saying to me is that “I, God, have a place that I am longing for you to go (‘you’ plural not singular.) It’s a place that I’m designing & building. You can’t expect to get there in your lifetime. But if you listen to me, I can tell you the way to go that will bring you —and perhaps the world — closer to that place, maybe long after you’re gone.”

To Be Broken & Tender

Okay — big breath here. The first part of the talk has been fairly easy for me, that is, describing the path that I believe God is offering us. Yet like many of us, I’ve had enormous difficulty receiving this gift of a “spacious place”. I’ve found it very hard to put my trust & life in God’s hands, to trust others around me, to live in hope & faith.

It’s not easy for me to talk about being broken, being wounded, about the barriers to letting go & living in faith & hope, but I want to try.

I’ve been reading a wonderful book called To Be Broken & Tender by Margery Post Abbott. I just read a passage called “Turning Again”:

When the Light pushed me to be public about my failings & about the openings I have had , I found myself stepping forth blindly. The good mystics say I must be willing to give up all I cherish. Yet I may never actually be asked to do this. All I can do is be prepared, live with an open heart, and not be bound by fear. This is where hope lies.

My beloved partner, Annie Patterson, has been urging me to tell my own story in this lecture, even if it’s very hard. She said “Right now more than ever people need to hear white men talking vulnerably about their own wounds.” Something happened this week which confirmed for me the rightness of what Annie’s been saying. I was led during Pendle Hill’s morning worship recently to speak about how if I open myself to all the pain, suffering, injustice & violence in the world right now it breaks my heart. But if we don’t open our ears & hearts to the truth of that suffering around us, our hearts will turn to stone.

Ken Jacobsen heard my message online & sent me a reflection that had been given to him two weeks earlier, which he called “Deliver Us from Evil”: (Ken gave me permission to share this with you tonight.)

in my dream,
a time of great tribulation & suffering lies ahead,
as men at war with themselves inflict the world with their wars,
as inwardly wounded strong-men seem to overtake us,
driving away the very healing power from within
that can save them, save us,
that can turn us to the holy communal labor of Love again;
we will need to draw deeply on this healing power now
from You, Creator, in your creation & in your Christ,
and in thy guiding Spirit within;

Oh Creator, lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil,
lead us not into the temptation of paralysis or despair
in the face of such evil,
oh reach & heal our wounded, wounding men,
reach us all, men, women, children, our earth,
all creatures of this beautiful shared creation,
touch us & teach us to turn ever more deeply to
Your infinitely present healing flow of Love.
Why is this so damn hard for me… and for men?
—Deliver Us from Evil, by Ken Jacobsen, written on 2/13/25

Good News to the Poor
(the upside down world of prophecy)

The psalms, the Hebrew prophets, and the gospels all lift up a prophetic vision from God of a world turned upside down. That vision of the world is utterly different than the values and power structure of the society around us.

The first thing that Jesus does when he embarks on his ministry as a prophet is to open the scroll of Isaiah in the synagogue in Nazareth and read:

The spirit of the Lord God is upon me
because the Lord has anointed me;
God has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed,
to bind up the broken-hearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives
and release to the prisoners.
     —Luke 4: 18-19 (reading from Isaiah 61: 1-2)

And Jesus’ mother Mary is quoted as saying before he was born that:

God has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts,
Brought down the powerful from their thrones & lifted up the lowly,
Filled the hungry with good things & sent the rich away empty.
—Luke 1: 43-45

In the Matthew 5 version of the beatitudes Jesus says that the poor in spirit, the meek, those that mourn & peacemakers will be blessed. In the Luke version the message is much more stark: He says that the poor, the hungry, those who weep & those who are excluded or reviled will be blessed. That is the message that true prophets bring to the world. But he follows this by saying “Woe to the rich, woe to those who have plenty of food, woe to those who laugh, and are spoken well of”— for that is who false prophets serve.[Beatitudes in Matthew 5: 1-11 vs. the Beatitudes & Woes in Luke 6: 20-26]

It is too easy to think that this warning is only to the billionaires sitting in the front rows at the recent inauguration (and to the false prophets who serve them). The Hebrew prophets’ and Jesus’ message speaks to all of us who are privileged in the hierarchical planet-wide system that some of us call “Empire”. This is a revolutionary message not only about economic injustice but also about inward patterns of domination, hubris, and hard-heartedness that can permeate all relationships. [For the sharp contrast between God’s vision for humanity, which true prophets are called to witness to, and those of the domination systems of this world (which he calls “Empire”), see Walter Brueggermann’s book, The Prophetic Imagination.]

I believe that God has a prophetic word for each person in the world. A way God brings us into that broad and spacious place. But I believe that word is not the same for everyone. Perhaps it is spoken to each of us in a word that is adapted to our unique spiritual journey, life circumstances, and the place in Empire where each of us lives. Is it perhaps different for men and women, Blacks and Whites, straight and cis-gendered people & those who are queer, the system educated and the life-educated, those who are given power and voice by Empire and those who are denied power and a voice? I can’t claim to understand or talk about what that word is to the marginalized because I was born into privilege. I can try to talk about the word that I feel God is giving to me in this time and place as an older white cis man who is given enormous privileges in the oppressive Empire we live in.

I’ve been trying to find out why it seems so hard for many men like myself to let go and let God. To listen to others, to follow them, to let them lead. And Annie keeps saying: write and talk about yourself and your own journey, don’t hide behind ideas and the like. And she says that in this time of great wounding there’s a way in which hearing a white cisgendered man like me talk vulnerably about my own journey with brokenness might be helpful to hear. I’ll trust her advice!

Learning to Let Go of Power as a Man

My father’s father came from a long line of hard-working farmers and railroad men living in northern New England. My father never told me anything about his grandfather, but my father’s younger brother told me about him. He said my grandfather was overworked by his father in high school to the point of injuring his back and subsequently suffering pain all his life. When my grandfather wanted to go to medical school his father did everything he could to stop him because he felt he needed him on the farm. My grandfather never forgave his father for this harm. He would go visit him once a year for an hour where they would mutter at each other angrily. My grandfather eventually had his parents committed to the state hospital in Concord and never visited them there.

He was broken-hearted when his youngest child Emily died of cancer in high school. He was unable to feel and work through his grief for her. Instead he told my grandmother never to play classical music because it reminded him of Emily and made him cry. He always sounded gruff and unfeeling to my grandmother, muttering to her as well. When my grandmother died he was so filled with remorse that he had not shown her how much he loved her. My uncle says he spent a year weeping and then died, essentially of a broken, wounded heart.

My grandfather was wounded in his inability to heal the breach with his father and grieve for his daughter — and it wounded him his whole life. He ended up perhaps one of those wounded/wounding men.

My own father was a first generation Quaker, introduced to Quakerism by Douglas Steere who often travelled to college campuses during the years leading up to World War II. When all of his non-Quaker pacifist friends in the Student Christian Movement quickly abandoned their pacifism after Pearl Harbor, my father became a Friend.

I was born in Oskaloosa Iowa where my dad got his first teaching job at William Penn College when Cecil Hinshaw was president. Cecil had a vision of making this small Quaker college a holy experiment, a peace university out of the ashes of World War II. Idealistic young Quakers including Bill & Fran Taber flocked there to join in this experiment. But Oskaloosa couldn’t cope with Black and White students holding hands along Main Street. My dad imagined he’d spend his life teaching there. He was heart-broken when Cecil was forced to resign. [The best article on Cecil Hinshaw’s holy experiment at William Penn College is Bill R. Douglas, “Penn In Technicolor: Cecil Hinshaw’s Radical Pacifist-Perfectionist Experiment at William Penn College, 1944-1949“ Quaker History, vol. 96 no. 2, 2007, p. 54-68. Project MUSE.]

Dad was passionate about building up the Society of Friends in the 50s and 60s. He devoted himself to Ann Arbor Friends Meeting, the advancement committee of FGC, and helping create Lake Erie Yearly Meeting. As a sociologist of marriage and family he taught his students to have an egalitarian marriage and valued Civil Rights and feminism. However, the continued theme of brokenness passed down to me: he was unable to recognize how deeply patriarchy was ingrained in his thinking and way of life. Though many respected him for his Quaker work, my mother told me how angry some of the Friends he worked with on committees and projects would get with him for pushing too hard for his own viewpoints about what were the right decisions for the group to take. He had enormous difficulty recognizing how others felt about him. This is something I have struggled with for years. He was very hard on my brothers when they didn’t do well academically and was deeply critical of his sons for smoking, drinking, or gaining weight. My closest brother and I agree that even though he was an ethical person in many ways, he was not a compassionate one.

I learned too many patriarchal behaviors and other difficult things from him. I have been driven, like him, to get good grades and value academic success. I have often been unconsciously entitled to push for my own viewpoints. I have had a very hard time listening deeply to others, giving them space to lead, and recognizing ways in which I have disempowered others or pushed them away. Brokenness passed on and supported by our patriarchal system. Why has this understanding been so hard to unlearn?

I learned from my father that if I cared passionately about something, it was my job to make sure that the groups that were working on the things I believed in made the quote unquote “right” decisions.

I have been trying to take a deep dive into facing the truth of my own woundedness, to do what Ken was hearing in his dream. To allow God to heal the broken places in me.

My partner Annie says to me: “Go early.” When I was a year and a half my parents took me to an eye doctor since I seemed to be favoring one eye. The doctor told them that I had “lazy eye” and they must patch my favored eye to enable the lazy eye to grow stronger. When I kept pulling the eyepatch off, the doctor told them to splint my arms to prevent me from doing this. My parents worried that perhaps this was wrong. They asked my grandfather if they should get a second opinion. He said no: they should “trust the doctor”. 18 months later they did take me to another better trained doctor who immediately said that I did not have lazy eye. I was blind in one eye and it could never be strengthened.

What I think I learned from this and other childhood traumas was that I could not trust any of the adults around me to protect me from harm – I had to take charge and stop harm from happening. Perhaps this contributed to the wounds I handed down from my father.

Now I am working on these issues in therapy. Most surprising to me has been sessions I’ve done with my three younger brothers. They have shown great tenderness and self-reflection in working to untangle these wounds with me. My nearest brother and I have wept in these sessions. I never ever saw him weep before this. As a child I do have a memory of going into the closet in my bedroom and weeping where no one could see me. Now I can weep (although not easily!) with others.

That Which Is Lowly Gives the Entrance

I have done worthwhile things in my life and accomplished a lot of things that have been of great value. But I’ve also learned over the years that I have learned a way of living and being that is built upon lack of trust in the value of others’ ideas and capacities. I have often assumed that things could only be accomplished if I did them myself. This not only has exhausted me but has also undermined others’ sense of being valued and respected. And I have learned painfully that I have often lived in ways that are in contradiction to my own values about justice and compassion for others.

I’ve been working really hard for many, many decades to unlearn the ingrained behaviors of pushiness and decision-making and entitlement to take the lead or be heard. I have gotten stuck and then stuck again. I long to learn how to be humbler, to allow others to speak and lead. To let go of control and entitlement and the need to be “right”. Will the spaciousness spoken of in the psalm, God’s accompaniment, Spirit’s offerings, help me to continue living, working this into being?

I want to share with you some words that James Nayler wrote while he was in prison for blasphemy. They speak to me powerfully about the path of abandoning power and privilege and all the hallmarks that go with it:

A tree may grow high, and hard, and strong, yet fruitless and out of the power, got above the poor, above the innocent, and out of the feeling of the sufferer and man of sorrows where he is.

The end of this growth is not in the pure rest, for the higher any one grows here, the more doth that wither and die in them, which is soft and tender, and melting, which makes one [a true lamb] and is the true fold for lambs, where the lions must lie down in the end if they come to rest.

That eye…which looks to be great among men comes not into the rest, but hath strife in the mind, strife in words and secret smitings, which defile the rest, and lead into the division and separation — but the little child leads into the rest, and that which is lowly gives the entrance.
—from Nayler’s 6th Epistle, Not to Strive, but to Overcome by Suffering

In Repentance & Rest Is Your Salvation

I found new meaning in that passage, Hebrews 11, after the November election. It said to me that our task now is to discern and be faithful in hearing what God’s calling us to live and act and do — and not be responsible to know how it’ll turn out.

The Trickster Spirit brought me a second biblical passage that builds on the Hebrews one that I’d been carrying for over six months. A couple weeks ago at the memorial service for one of our dear meeting members, the daughter of the Friend who had died spoke about how hard it was for her father (a doctor, a child psychiatrist), to let go in the final weeks of his life and pass on. In the memorial service she quoted Isaiah 30, verse 15:

The Holy One of Israel says,
“In repentance and rest is your salvation.
In quietness and trust is your strength.”
But you would have none of it.

Isaiah goes on to say that:

You try to run away from your enemies on swift horses,
But you will be pursued with swifter horses.
You’ll be scared by one man and think it’s a thousand,
‘Til you are left like a lonely flagstaff flapping on a mountaintop.
But God is compassionate and will bless those who wait for Her,
Because She is a just God.
—Isaiah 30: 15-18 (NIV paraphrased)

In the country at large, the election results have brought on a season of doubt, recrimination, blame, fear, anger, disappointment. Some want to give up. There’s a sense that old models or agendas may no longer work.

I’m wondering, could these passages help us to live in faith and hope into this time we’re in? Could they help us to be more grounded, to be at more peace with what we’re living through and into?

Personally (I can only speak for myself) I deeply need this invitation God to stop doing and to allow God to bring us out into a broad space. To stop running, to stop fleeing on swift horses. To accept the invitation to rest in quietness, strength and trust. To take the time to hear what God is asking me and us to do — in faith, in hope, in patience — and without the urgency to know how it will all turn out.

Psalm 116 says:

The Lord protects the simple,
when I was brought low he saved me.
Return, o my soul to your rest,
for the Lord has dealt bountifully with you.
—Psalm 116: 6-7

As I said I’ve been reading the psalms a lot lately. There is one very short rather odd one, Psalm 87, that different translations handle really differently. It is about a city on a holy mountain that was founded by God. By listing these places (all outside Israel), it seems to me that this place of spaciousness that God has invited us into is not limited to any particular religion or people. It is, as Mary Fisher recognized, open to all. This psalm says:

1 On the holy mount stands the city God founded.
2 God loves the gates of Zion, more than all the dwellings of Jacob.
3 Glorious things are said of you, o city of God.
4 Among those who know me are Rahab & Babylon,
Philistia too & Tyre, with Ethiopia.
“This one was born there”, they say.
5 lIt shall be said “This one & that one was born in it”
for the Most High will establish it.
6 The Lord records, as he registers the peoples:
“This one was born there.”
7 Singers & dancers alike say:
“All my springs are in you.”
—Psalm 87 (NRSV)

May you know in your heart of hearts, Friends, that you were born there, that you belong in that city. That all our springs are there in the Love at the heart of All.

I want to close with an amazing song written by two English Quakers. It’s about expectant waiting worship, waiting on God in stillness. But I think it is also about how we are called into silence, into expectant waiting for guidance, and into rest in this time of violence, fear, and injustice. May you rest well.

References

Songs

“This Joy I Have” by Shirley Caesar. The 2020 video shown at opening of the talk is by Resistance Revival Chorus.

“Wait in the Light” (aka “Wait in the Stillness”) by Tony Biggin & Alec Davison, from their oratorio “The Fire & the Hammer” on the life & work of George Fox . The audio was from a recording of a performance of their oratorio at the Friends General Conference summer gathering held in Rhode Island in 2014.

“Healer of the Broken-Hearted” by Rena Branson, a young Jewish singer based in Brooklyn. The Hebrew and English lyrics are derived from Psalm 147:3-4. (at close of program after Q&A)

Annie Patterson & Peter Blood have built an online song and artist database/search engine called The Music Box where you can find information, videos, and often lyrics to over 5000 songs & the artists who created them and have recorded and performed them. You can also find out there about their ministry of creating hope & change through song.

Biblical Passages

Bible passages are from the New Revised Standard Version unless otherwise noted, a translation that works to try and eliminate or avoid sexist language such as using brothers or men to refer to both genders. It does keep to the traditional usages of referring to God with male pronouns. The speaker made changes to the pronouns for God and other minor changes as led. The links are to Bible Gateway, which not only is a free app that can be used on a phone anywhere but which allows users to compare many biblical translations.

A Spacious Place

• “God has brought me out into a broad place.”:
  Psalm 18: 2-6, 16-19 (NRSV paraphrased)

Faith Is the Substance of Things Unseen

• 11th chapter of the Letter to the Hebrews.
  Hebrews 11 :1, 3 and Hebrews 11: 8, 10 (NRSV)
  Hebrews: 11: 39-40 (“The Message” translation)
• Jesus’ leading to go to Jerusalem “Get thee behind me Satan.” Matt. 16:21-23
• His doubt on the cross Matt. 27:46. Jesus is reciting from Psalm 22:1.

Good News to the Poor

• Jesus is offered the scroll when he visits his home synagogue in Nazareth at the outset of his ministry. He open the scroll to Isaiah 61: 1-2 as recorded in Luke 4: 18-19.
• The Song of Mary: Luke 1: 43-45
• The Beatitudes in Matthew 5: 1-11 vs. the Beatitudes & Woes in Luke 6: 20-26

In Repentance & Rest Is Your Salvation

• Isaiah 30: 15-18 (NIV)
• “The Lord protects the simple, when I was brought low God saved me.” Psalm 116: 6-7
• “Singers & dancers alike say: ‘All my springs are in you’”:
  Psalm 87 (NRSV)

Other writings cited

A Spacious Place

• Walking with the Bible was a 2020-21 series sponsored by Beacon Hill Friends House & Woolman Hill. This link takes you to videos for each of the 12 sessions. You can read about the approach and the presentations by the first 3 guest leaders, including Colin Saxton’s reflection on spaciousness in Psalm 18, in the 2022 Pendle Hill pamphlet Walking with the Bible.
• Description of Extended Worship in Philadelphia YM.

Faith Is the Substance of Things Unseen

• Francis of Assisi was raised into privilege. His father was a wealthy silk merchant who expected him to wear rich clothes & follow him into his business. At a turning point in his life Francis stripped off his fancy clothes & handed them to his father. He felt called to rebuild a ruined church, live in poverty, serving the poor & lepers. See this article describing Francis’ action.
• For Mary Fisher‘s 1658 meeting with the sultan of the Ottoman empire, see the description of her leading and their meeting in Quakers in the World.
• For Mary Dyer life leading up to her execution in 1660, see the Wikipedia article on Mary Dyer.
• There is a biographical sketch of Dorothy Day of on the Dorothy Day Guild website.
• For details about the four students from an historically Black college who sat-in at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter in 1960, see the article on the Greensboro Sit-in at History.com.
• There is an account of sit-in by John Lewis and others in House chamber after Orlando shooting in a post by U.S. Congresswoman Joyce Beatty.
• Quotation on faithfulness vs. effectiveness is by the English abolitionist Joseph Sturgis in 1830. It was quoted by Howard Brinton in his 1941 Pendle Hill pamphlet Sources of the Quaker Peace Testimony.

To Be Broken and Tender

• “When the Light pushed me to be public about my failings & the openings I’ve had…” is a quote on p.168 from Margery Abbott’s To Be Broken & Tender: A Quaker Theology for Today, published by Western Friend Publishing.
• For the sharp contrast between God’s vision for humanity (that true prophets are called to witness to) and those of domination systems of this world (“Empire”), see Walter Brueggermann’s book The Prophetic Imagination available from Fortress Press. Also available online on the Internet Archive.
• Ken Jacobsen’s poem on “wounded men wounding the world”, Deliver Us from Evil, was written on 2/13/25.

Learning to Let Go of Power as a Man

• The best article on Cecil Hinshaw’s holy experiment at William Penn College is by Bill R. Douglas, “Penn In Technicolor: Cecil Hinshaw’s Radical Pacifist-Perfectionist Experiment at William Penn College, 1944-1949.” Quaker History, vol. 96 no. 2, 2007, p. 54-68. Available on Project MUSE.

That Which Is Lowly Gives the Entrance

• This quote is from James Nayler’s 6th Epistle, Not to Strike, but to Overcome by Suffering.

Additional Resources

• Tricia Hersey, Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto
• Marion McNaughton, An Orientation to Prophecy (an address given at the 2007 Friends World Committee for Consultation Triennial in Dublin)
• William Taber, The Prophetic Stream, Pendle Hill Pamphlet #256, 1984.
• Peter Blood, Healing the Male Heart: A Reflection on the Beatitudes.
• Selections from the Writings of James Nayler, ed. by Brian Drayton

Ed. note: Readings in bold are in this Inward Light online Quakerism library. The library is organized thematically to help readers find resources on specific important topics of Quaker faith and practices such as worship, eldership, the peace testimony, and prayer. 

About the Author

Peter Blood is a member of Mt Toby Friends Meeting in NEYM. This Monday Night Lecture was given in the Barn at Pendle Hill on March 3, 2025. Blood-Patterson was a Kenneth Carroll Resident Scholar at Pendle Hill at the time. Bible passages and other readings during the talk were read by students and Friends in Residence that were part of the 2025 Spring Term Cohort at Pendle Hill.