Spirituality: Journey I
SPIRITUALITY: JOURNEY I
113. An Opening Way (by Dan Wilson; 1961)
About the Author—Dan Wilson is Director of Pendle Hill, where he has been on staff since 1950. He studied at Kansas Wesleyan University and Pacific School of Religion. In college he was active in Christian and Methodist groups. He joined Whittier Friends Meeting in California, [and was active in serving the meeting, CA YM, and 5 Years Meeting]. He is serving on AFSC, Friends World Committee, and Friends Central School.
[Introduction]—One day last summer as I was sitting at the surf’s edge with the tide coming in, there was an instant when it seemed all right to let the waves sweep over & dissolve me into the sea. There was [fullness of life] & a fresh awareness of everyone & everything. In a way, I had been gone for a lifetime, keeping watch on my conscious life’s journey, waiting to let life disclose itself rather than attack it with notions & questions.
PART ONE: [Kansas, Depression, and College]—Homemade haircuts and patched overalls made our poverty conspicuous; everything was confided in Jesus. He was strongly with me when I was sent, just out of high school, to hold revival meetings in Traer. I pled with them to take Christ into their own hearts. They praised God for sending them “Christ in this boy.” I began to believe them. One night in self-righteous anger I [denounced them]; the words were not from Christ. I despised them and myself and could not go back. I walked out on the prairie, cut off from Christ and myself.
In our small western Kansas community, vocational opportunities tended to stratify; [son followed father in the father’s occupation]. With the drought and the depression there was no work. Carrying a razor, harmonica and Bible, wrapped in a change of clothing, I started walking to the nearest town, 20 miles away, feeling a sense of purpose. [I did not hitchhike, but accepted rides]. After a few nights in Kansas City, my purpose in life became flight from Kansas City. I walked through the city out into a dreamed-of-field with haystack standing like home in the moonlight. I burrowed into one of them and slept until the sun was high.
In all those months of wandering, I was seldom turned away from a farmhouse. I worked when they would let me. At each place when I felt that I was becoming an object of charity, I set off again. Once when I was sick, dear people took me, a total stranger, into their home and offered to pay my bus fare home, but I could not accept. I sometimes felt I was not alone; I became less lonely when the God-thought occurred.
I was able to save enough money to go home. I got a job teaching in a 1-room country school: 12 pupils; 8 grades. I saw something of myself in them. Loving them was like reaching out to find the way in the dark. I was aware of caring as much about what would happen to someone else as for what might become of me.
A high school classmate telephoned my pastor to get me to his denominational college as quickly as possible if I wanted to come. Then began the absorbing, exciting life in college. I loved the faculty, the students, everyone, and they responded. [Hard times hit the farm], and Dad was losing his job. There seemed nothing for them to do but go to California to “to work the fruit.” When college was out in the spring, I went home. We sold everything we couldn’t carry on the car. We got to California in about a month and found work near Fresno. From daylight to dark we stooped to pick up fallen dried figs.
College was different that year. There was less spontaneous energy. Each full moment was hollowed by pangs of anxiety. We caught a fast freight west; I was injured nearly falling off the train. That summer, between fruit-picking jobs, I spent whole nights lying awake under the stars, feeling close to them, feeling most real then. I could feel the distant horizons of the earth to which I was bound merge with the infinite expanse of the stars.
The goal of our lives had been to climb to the advantaged class. Now, my ideals were focused on wresting the advantage from those who had it & giving it to those who didn’t. [On the last night of the college church revival, I remained standing with those weren’t “saved.” I no longer felt comfortable in the church]. I wanted to sweep it all away, to start again with the Truth, or without it. I wanted to be myself, to start over with freedom.
Fearlessly, I set out develop a rational proof that he did or did not exist, wanting the truth more than his survival. Rationalization cannot create Myth. It can be a preparation for rediscovering the truth of myth. The [inner] experience of reality is the truth communicated by the God Myth, which is a social product by which the person is able to picture and communicate the Truth he feels about creation.
Later, in graduate study, my perspective on the church and the Bible was greatly changed, but I remained disillusioned about finding a visible existing church in which to feel completely at home. William Law wrote: “In the present divided state of the Church, truth itself is torn and divided asunder. The only true catholic [has to have] more truth and less error than is hedged in any by any [one] divided part …Uniting in heart and spirit with all that is holy and good in all Churches, we enter into the true communion of saints and become real members of the Holy Catholic Church, though we are confined to the outward worship of only one particular part of it.”
At college's finish, [dealing with the] war took precedence over graduate study, or the promise to myself to help migrant farm workers. I discovered the Society of Friends around this time, too. I volunteered to work in the emergency peace program. I accepted assignment to civilian work of national importance. This compromise resulted in years of diminished clarity with which to meet daily choices; there was a loss of motive power.
I tried to help John, a severely depressed Negro who had given up after years of therapy. I knew I had not reached him, but let him go alone for a pack of cigarettes; I never saw him again, alive. Critical study of the Bible had restored my devotion to this literature; it holds central importance for humankind. During the war, some of us moved our families to a cooperative farm project in an attempt to rebuild Christian community; after a year our economy broke down. [Then came a time of waiting]. Neither outward goal nor inward comfort was given, nothing but the necessity to wait.
I had been prepared for Europe’s devastation, not the horror, suffering, stupidity, evil, & hopelessness of humanity; I neither thought nor felt. Green shoots of hope began to grow again, [by watching rays of hope dis-played by others.] Could this seed of hope be God? I don’t remember feeling joy or sorrow, only relief, peace, & devotion. As I continued to feel & respond with feeling, faces frozen with hopelessness sometimes melted.
I cared tenderly for the gift of hope. Here was the One true source of my life and being, who had dwelt with me all the while, but only half-way and intermittently recognized when projected onto an outer image. I marveled at the necessity for projected images, such as Jesus, as preparation for seeing face to face. Jesus gives his character to the great gathering of the inwardly visible faces of everyone who has known the one God. Each of us holds the gift of the One who waits to be born into conscious life. Each one becomes the One in whom all ones are gathered. Discoveries during the 10 years at Pendle Hill have been increasingly in relationship with others. I sometimes feel Pendle Hill’s history in my own journey. Many journeys meet here. I think of it as a crucible in which we can be melted down to just what we are.
PART TWO—An enabling way prevails. I call it an opening way. The discipline of keeping open to truth wherever it is given begins not with evidence alone, but with the hypothesis that truth is no respecter of persons or people. An open way is to follow the way one is given for one’s own. He who faithfully seeks knowledge of God will become aware that it was precisely the unfulfilled longing for [a group relationship with complete integrity] that led one into exile in the 1st place. In the flux and interaction of cultures, many an individual is left only partially rooted, and sometimes uprooted; one must turn within for survival.
There seems always to be a warring between those who emphasize the necessity to find the way back to the primitive soil, and those who stress the need to break through the overlaying crust, all the while remaining divided against their common enemy who wants no change. An opening way maintains a humility that comes from knowing it must ever be melted down by the fires of inner renewal, that it demands full-time vigilance and obedience. It cuts across all established lines of human organization.
Courage is required to trust integrity of spontaneous response, whether in anger or in affection. Child-like response leaves us more open to be present to others before ever-ready stereotypes draw a curtain between us. The discipline of responding freely & of learning from the results is the way of openness. Contrary to the usual fear that commitment to spontaneity leads to rashness, the most spontaneous response becomes full attention.
Dedication to the moment purifies it and renews hope. The self-authenticating evidence the moments hold leads to a leap of faith that lights the path ahead. The sky’s-eye view sees our struggles as amazing, There! One has broken through for a moment. With what power the same fuel that has driven their fears and hate is transformed into the nuclear release of love. How tender is our maker to our times and condition. What perfect gifts of imagination and response, of being able to get up each day for a new beginning. How continuously we are sustained even though we so seldom and so half-heartedly acknowledge the fact.
What is real is God. I become real as God is born into consciousness. Presentations of reality in new consciousness have no words, only exclamations. We only come truly alive when we trust the winnowing power of our minds to bring the melding power of our feelings into open consciousness. The discipline of openness is one of the most difficult of all & the most demanding. It requires continuous attention. The self’s consciousness is the eyesight of the self that sees what is going on. It is the door way of God through which to see life. The self has many windows, all the ways of knowing and experiencing. The door opens when we are open. [Most often], we are confined to our illusion of openness, & are shut off until our closed state comes into consciousness.
The return each day to remembering & not remembering gives the day its tone. Being present is like sitting at night in the house, turning off lights in order to see out; the split second before sleep, but staying awake; the flashback of life in the moment of death. It is that moment when all the inward pours outward & meets all the outward pours inward. Contemplation moves conscious thoughts whole-ward. It joins the longing God-ward with longing human-ward. It keeps watch for humankind for new openings from love into faith & freedom.
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410. Confident Quakerism (by Ben Pink Dandelion; 2010)
About the Author—Ben Pink Dandelion came to Friends in the mid-1980’s. He worships with Sawley Friends. He currently directs the work of the Centre for Postgraduate Quaker Studies, and is Professor of Quaker Studies at the University of Birmingham. His more devotional work includes the recent Celebrating the Quaker Way. This essay is based on his talk “Quaking with Confidence,” (FGC 6/09 & PH 11/09)
[Introduction]/ A Little of My Journey—If the Quaker way is a vehicle for spiritual authenticity, we need to know tradition well & to let it feed our present day lives without imprisoning them. How can we work with insights of early Friends? Maybe Liberal Quakerism mirrors some of the denial I have been acknowledging. What questions does early Quaker spirituality ask us today in our aspirations to be faithful & authentic?
I grew up in a “strict and particular” atheist household. My father lost his father to war and his mother to suicide. My mother became pregnant outside of marriage and was disowned. They rejected Christianity which seemed to reject them. [Their lives were governed by ethics and] hedonism, or the degree of pleasure an action resulted in. I was sent to a Quaker rather than a Catholic one, as they thought it would do me the least harm.
In college I was a member of a whole variety of gay & bisexual, socialist, communist & Trotskyist groups. I left college & went to live at an anarchist peace camp, where I changed my name to Pink Dandelion. I left the camp & was unemployed for 5 years. I revisited Friends. Maybe Quakers would bring about a change in society I still dreamt of. I was still largely atheistic, and did not understand that Quakerism was “rooted in spirit.”
I went to the US to look at the different political contexts of US and English Quaker origins. [I took a 6-day roundtrip to San Francisco], my own Kerouac On the Road journey to the most obvious destination for the radical bisexual activist I then was. In the midst of this onward journey, just outside of St. Louis, I felt lifted up and cradled by what I have called God. It was a powerful experience that has never since left me, and I have since lived an accompanied life; amazing things happen and synchronicity abounds.
I felt God guiding me, but also reminding me, calling me to account. Just this past year, I made some terrible mistakes. It is horrible to get it wrong, especially when the consequences are widespread and not easy to mend. I revisited an emotionally abused childhood and saw for the 1st time the patterns of lifestyle which I adopted to cope; for years, I have not been myself. I have lived a life of chasing but withholding intimacy. I can see that I am not separate and pure, but instead a mess; I want to stop denying my denial. [People have told me things about myself in the past that I can only now accept].
Such revelation is shocking & liberating, painful & empowering. [After going through deep regret, shame, & loss of confidence, I now seek to make amends, & see that I am part of humanity. God loves me, & now Jesus has a place in my spiritual life, the example of a good life, well led & well followed. God has been ahead of me, Jesus too, in forgiving me. Even in crisis, God has given me what I have needed & no more than I can bear.
I have often suggested that greater seriousness on our part about the spiritual life can also lead to a greater sense of fun. I reflect now that I had been taking my relationship with God too lightly, too proudly, keeping God out of the shadow parts of my life by denying their existence. Con-fidence means with-trust, with-faith. I feel called now to transparency and integrity in a way I had known in my head but not realized in my heart. I need a more courageous and confident spiritual life [in my personal life and in my community]. What does [Quaker] faith look like and how does it still relate to 17th Century Quaker insights?
6 Stages of Early Quaker Experience:—[The 6 stages of early Quaker convincement are]: God breaks into everyday life; God’s Light shows Friends their lives as they really are; Light allows choice & change; Friend forges a new life; the new life pulls Friends into community; Friends are impelled to share what they have found.
1) God breaks into everyday life—George Fox writes: “As I had forsaken all the priests, so I left the separate preachers also, and those esteemed the most experienced people …When all my hopes in them … were gone … I heard a voice which said, ‘There is one, even Christ Jesus that can speak to thy condition’ … There were none upon the earth that could speak to my condition, for all are concluded under sin.”
In this 1st stage, God breaks into Fox’s life in God’s own time, an unmediated encounter with the Divine. We can't summon God up, but we can remain open & mindful so as not to miss particular moments of intimate encounter. Why does it take a crisis to surrender, “give back over” to God? The more we surrender, the more we are given & the easier it is to inhabit our spiritual aspirations. Isaac Penington wrote: “The pure progress & going on it is much more pleasant [than the beginning], as the Lord gives to feel the growth & sweet living freshness of it … all its ways are pleasantness, & its paths peace, yea the very yoke is easy and the burden light.” Quakerism involves us in an interiorized spirituality. Fox concluded that all were [and are] spiritually equal, all were [and are] an equal part of the priesthood of believers, all were [and are] equally ` responsible.
2-4) The Light shows Friends their lives as they really are, allowing choice & change, so that new life is forged—George Fox & Margaret Fell were transformed. Their former lives had been about profession not possession. Being “just a good Christian” was exposed as anachronistic & part of apostasy of all that wasn’t Quaker. Penington wrote: “You must part with religion which you have gathered in your own wisdom … which can’t endure the searching light of the Lord's day ... Flesh & self may be quite destroyed, & nothing but Christ found in you, & you found nowhere but in Christ.” To what extent are Friends now open to being changed by spirit? Does our ministry depend on our strength or on God’s strength coming
through us? If I am still cautious to mention sexuality because of how folk (including Quakers) may react, then it is all the more reason stand up & accept myself as a bisexual Quaker, as myself. Let me work in
` God’s power, not the energy of my fear.
Fox had a 2nd life-changing experience. He wrote: “Now I was come up in spirit through the flaming sword, into the paradise of God. All things were new; and all the creation gave unto me another smell than before, beyond what words can utter … I was taken up in spirit to see another or more steadfast state than Adam’s innocency, even into a state in Christ Jesus that should never fail.” Nothing annoyed their opponents more than this claim to be beyond Adam, beyond falling; [the opponents were accused of preaching up sin].
[Friends stood out]. It was clear who was & who wasn’t a Friend. The 1st Friends had a new sense that their lives were situated between heaven & earth & that they were to further God’s purposes over against “the world.” We have relaxed. We are no longer accountable to our meetings but decide for
Fox had a 2nd life-changing experience. He wrote: “Now I was come up in spirit through the flaming sword, into the paradise of God. All things were new; and all the creation gave unto me another smell than before, beyond what words can utter … I was taken up in spirit to see another or more steadfast state than Adam’s innocency, even into a state in Christ Jesus that should never fail.” Nothing annoyed their opponents more than this claim to be beyond Adam, beyond falling; [the opponents were accused of preaching up sin].
[Friends stood out]. It was clear who was & who wasn’t a Friend. The 1st Friends had a new sense that their lives were situated between heaven & earth & that they were to further God’s purposes over against “the world.” We have relaxed. We are no longer accountable to our meetings but decide for
ourselves what is & what isn’t Quaker for us. Where are we united in the consequences of our spirituality in everyday life now? The short-hand lists of “testimonies” are last century’s creations. We
seem to opt in & out of concepts such as “peace” & “simplicity” & interpret them individually. We often forget the spiritual basis of testimony; they are only values.
Early Friends felt they were experiencing inwardly the 2nd coming of Christ, as the gospels foretold. Friends believed that Christ had come again & Fox claimed outward communion was no longer necessary. Most church life was anachronistic. Once Friends were convinced, the sense of transformation continued & Quakers worshiped anywhere and anytime. We still believe everyday and place is equal in its potential to become sacramental. The “Now” of the 2nd coming, the future becoming the present, has been replaced by the “now” of the moment. What kind of hope for the future do we have and in whose time is it? What
Early Friends felt they were experiencing inwardly the 2nd coming of Christ, as the gospels foretold. Friends believed that Christ had come again & Fox claimed outward communion was no longer necessary. Most church life was anachronistic. Once Friends were convinced, the sense of transformation continued & Quakers worshiped anywhere and anytime. We still believe everyday and place is equal in its potential to become sacramental. The “Now” of the 2nd coming, the future becoming the present, has been replaced by the “now” of the moment. What kind of hope for the future do we have and in whose time is it? What
is our role in how tomorrow looks? How are we to lend our hands to God?
5) Friends are called into community—How is community realized? How do we take the experience of a “gathered” meeting into everyday life? How do we transcend the individualism of modern society? How do we create community in our meetings? If only we look for it, we can find
5) Friends are called into community—How is community realized? How do we take the experience of a “gathered” meeting into everyday life? How do we transcend the individualism of modern society? How do we create community in our meetings? If only we look for it, we can find
enchantment on our doorstep. Who am I not to go to business meeting because I don’t want to? Whatever decision I don’t like, I am part of the Quaker priesthood who discerned it. We aren’t Friends because we are good; we are Friends because we aren’t good, or not good enough. Penington writes: “Our
life is love, & peace, & tenderness; & not laying accusations one against another; but praying each other, & helping each other up with a tender hand.”
6) Friends are impelled to share what they have found—We live our faith in a secularizing society in which we present Quakerism as one faith option equal to many or none, rather than as the one true church. What is our corporate calling? What is our good news? Liberal Quakerism’s principles are: experience is primary; a faith relevant to current times; open to new light; revelation of God is progressive; new revelation
6) Friends are impelled to share what they have found—We live our faith in a secularizing society in which we present Quakerism as one faith option equal to many or none, rather than as the one true church. What is our corporate calling? What is our good news? Liberal Quakerism’s principles are: experience is primary; a faith relevant to current times; open to new light; revelation of God is progressive; new revelation
has authority over old. At least part of the Liberal Quaker world is post-Christian.
Belief isn't how we identify ourselves as Quaker; we are cautious about belief as a category. Many of our theological differences are masked by our form of worship and by mostly not sharing our current beliefs. This fits well with our historic opposition to creeds. We don't have a belief creed but a creedal attitude toward the forms of Quakerism, what I call a “behavioral creed”—the way we worship & do business & maintain areas of testimony. Even those may be unpicked by shifting theologies. [If Quaker theologies & methods are changeable], what is the Quaker glue and good news]? We have made doctrine out of being a community of seekers.
We are absolutely certain of being at least a little uncertain in our believing & are very cautious or even suspicious of any who claim the final revelation or whole truth. Being certain of partial uncertainty is a powerful & distinct aspect of our faith. The British advice says: “Listen patiently & seek the truth which other people’s opinions may contain for you … Think it possible that you may be mistaken.” This absolute perhaps is surely some of our good news. It conveys wonderfully our intention to be a faithful people, [rather than] a believing people.
Links with the wider Quaker family need to be built on the intention: to be faithful [to seek the truth] above all, even where other Quakers hold different theologies, different forms, & different modes of believing. Unprogrammed Friends are a minority (less than 15%) of the Quaker world. A lack of resources on their part & lack of will on ours keeps us from hearing the insights of African & South American sisters & brothers. I worship in programmed Friends churches without distress because I have felt the sincerity & intention that surpasses form.
We can go forward with confidence & infectious enthusiasm or we can be a gathered remnant. If we are serious & confident in faith, sharing spirituality [isn’t] a challenge, but a process of joy. Things uniting Quakers globally are: sensing direct encounter with Divine; worship & business that reflect & nurture that sense; similar testimonies; & the priesthood of all believers. Shouldn’t your piety be your confidence & your integrity be your hope? We need to go forward with faith, trusting that what is meant for us will be given & we will be faithful. [Perhaps we should be as Richard] in You, Me & Everyone We Know in saying: “I am prepared for amazing things. I can handle it.” Let us put realization of confidence, a going forward “with faith” & intention, 1st.
The Future—George Fox said of the New Jerusalem: “The spiritual reign of Christ Jesus in this great city … of the living God … is within the light [where] there is no place or language, but there his voice may be heard … here is light, here is life, here is the heavenly bread.” Here is an interiorized version of heaven on earth, needing no outward temples, no outward speech, open to everyone. They were talking about the end of society as they knew it and the beginning of eternity with God. Is our vision too small? My utopian vision has been inadequate, a secular interpretation that closes me off in my own well-provided-for world.
Quakerism is a sensual aesthetic faith that feels right in head and heart and gut. But we need to beware of thinking of the beauty of ideas as an end in themselves. Let us have an intellectual [&] incarnational engagement with our Quaker heritage. Let us remember that Quakerism is only the current vehicle, not the object of our worship. Let us know our Quakerism in both intellectual and heart terms. We should not be bound by tradition and hang on to things past the time they are useful. How many committees do we really need? Let us tell others more willingly and do more things together. Let us be more open and honest with each other about our spiritual failings as well as our successes. If I am too modest or worried about what people may think if I talk of intimacy with God how are others to be helped?
The challenge of the shared priesthood is to realize our messiness before God and to surrender to the Spirit as who we are. Let us feel God’s love and grace in our lives even when it outstrips our own self-care and sense of self-worth. Let us speak loudly for justice, for universal salvation, for loving our neighbors, whoever they are, as ourselves. Our history is blighted by our corporate shortcomings, but as we learn individually, we can do better together; we have done so. What key justice issues do I pass over? It should not be radical to love the world and base our faith on God’s universal love.
Benjamin Lloyd writes: “God is at work in this moment … Let us open ourselves to the revelation each day brings. Let us see the Society growing around us with a sense of awe at God’s work brought to life through us, young and old alike.” I can still feel the excitement. Early Quakerism set up grand claims within a faith of vibrancy and excitement. This experience is still there for our taking and living and communicating, our living and breathing and acting, [so long as we go forward authentically with absolute confidence].
Queries—Have you had the experience of being lifted up and cradled by God? What does it mean to live “an accompanied life?” How have you sought to deal with “terrible mistakes” you have made in your life? What are the consequences of “keeping God out of the shadow parts of our lives? To what extent are Friends today open to being changed by Spirit? What are the consequences of [asserting that there will be some uncertainty in every important theological question]?
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116. The Candle, the Lantern, the Daylight (by Mildred Binns Young; 1961)
About the Author—Mildred Binns Young was born in Ohio and attended Friends schools and Western Reserve University. She lived for some years at Westtown School, where Wilmer Young was Dean of Boys. The Youngs then lived in the South, working under American Friends Service Committee for 19 years; 4 pamphlets came out of the experience. The present pamphlet was given at the 1961 Mid-Winter Institute. From 1955-1960 they were in residence at Pendle Hill.
If the soul knows God in His creatures, that is only evening light; if it knows His creatures in God, that is morning light; but if it knows God as God who alone is Being, that is the clear light of midday.” Meister Eckhart
Grateful for the candle, grateful for the lantern, and grateful for daylight, I rejoice in the possibility of sunrise—yes in the hope—yes, in the expectation of it. Mildred Binns Young
[The Candle]—A woman rose before dawn; she used a candle to light a fire in the stove and prepare for breakfast. She lit a lantern to draw water. She moved about her tasks without noticing that dawn had come; suddenly she found she was working in the light. We can begin the days work by candlelight or lantern light, and go on with it in the daylight. In my life, the candle was tradition; the lantern was the vision of human need. The daylight is seeing everything in relationship, rather than just one thing lit by candle or lantern. It is seeing beyond the room, the space the candle or lantern is in.
I grew up in a primitive, mid-western, Wilburite [Quaker] meeting. My first conscious recollection of meeting is of being on “the men’s side” of the meeting when the partitions were being drawn down to divide the two sides during the separate men’s and women’s meeting for business. Even though I was a sometimes rambunctious child, I knew how to enjoy quiet from an early age.
All work was set aside for mid-week meeting; [the whole community gathered], with older Friends and the likely speakers seated in the gallery facing us. The silence was profound even with us children there, while the workaday, weekday world went about its business outside. Scriptures were repeated, not often interpreted, but enjoyed and revered as having meaning for our lives.
The speaking of a Psalm in a sermon was the nearest thing to set prayer we had. Our grace at home was silence; Scripture was read daily. We never discussed Scriptures either at home or at school; there was no 1st Day School. Scriptures meaning could only be opened [by the Inward Teacher not by a outward one]. True prayer can arise only from the inward pressure of the Divine on the soul; prayer was always called supplication. The addressing and supplicating voice would ascend, drawing down the Presence to hover close above our heads.
We were often exhorted in the Jesus’ words, and his parables and the incidents of his life and death. I don't recall any interpretation, any explanations about Jesus. We did not know hymns or use pictures much. We did not see the usual representations of Christ in stained glass or other images. [There may have been little instruction], but I still remember the way in which religion was put before us, and the central place it occupied. [I was a voracious reader of available literature, which was mainly religious but surprisingly did not include the Bible].
By 1918, I was ripe for all kinds of rebellion. I had access to a good library, and my reading branched in all directions. During a shaking of foundation, a tradition such as mine can make one capable of holding all new things in solution, and judgment in abeyance, until something that is real for oneself precipitates out of the mixture. Iqbal, a Muslim poet wrote: “Go thou thy father’s road, for therein lies/Tranquility; conforming connotes/ The holding fast of Community… Carefully preserve/ Thy own thin rivulet; for it may hap/ Some mountain torrent shall replenish thee/ … to be once more…upon the breast/ of the redeeming tempest.”
[The Lantern]—After tradition’s guiding & staying function, the lantern—vision of human need—came to hand. In my 3rd decade, my life was joined to one who understood his service to God as service to others. Such love was not a natural attitude for me. In the end it was the poor who were to be my teachers, & while I was beginning to learn, the knowledge of their need was a lantern in my hand. In Kentucky, in 1932, I got to know towns full of families whose houses the depression & unemployment had stripped of all but the last necessities.
By 1936, the depression, the work camp idea, and Gandhi’s ideas had flowed together into one current which brought us to leave our comfortable place in life and undertake the conditions of intentional poverty for almost 20 years. I learned that the hand that gives must touch the hand that receives. [Nowadays, most giving is such that] neither donor nor recipient is nourished at the heart. Whenever we deal with each other as objects, there arises an absence of relationship. [We have an ongoing] debt toward other life. We can never give enough to be rid of it. God must have given the suffering of this close interdependence so that we may learn that we are not alone. [I disliked visiting just to visit]. [A Dr. Johnson said in a book]: “It is showing them respect; that is doing them good.” It is easy to waste time but hard to be generous with it.
[The Daylight]—When daylight comes the different things in a room [are seen all together], fall into relationship and take on perspective. Rabbi of Kotsk said: “God is wherever man lets him in.” [We hesitate to open the door]. We are like child who hangs back from a stranger who offers an exotic gift.
I feel easier when we use the word “God” for that which we feel and know as present and operative in our own lives and throughout the Universe. [Like the Indian “OM,” I see our word GOD as a sacred syllable; any other word limits]. The essential thing is not to make for ourselves images of a small, constricted, insufficient, or national, or sectarian God. Many of us need a personal God; this need is met and yet God is not limited by it. Howard Brinton has said that the personal God is that face of God that is turned toward us. [Dionysus has said that It is many things to many people]: Cause; Origin; Being; Life; recalling Voice and raising Power; Power of Renewal and Reform; Sacred Grounding; upward Guidance; Illumination; Perfection; Deity; and Unity.
The beginning of prayer is praise and the beginning of worship is thanksgiving. How hard we find it to praise without petition, and give thanks without stipulation. [Even the Psalms cannot maintain] pure praise [and thanksgiving] for more than a few sentences. The notable exception is [the 5 verses of] Psalm 100. Yet we are entitled and bound to cry out for help out of our state of [spiritual poverty]. Why does God deal so gingerly with some [who need the discipline of suffering and deal blow after blow on those who seem to not need it]? I simply have to leave all questions [like this one] alone; they are beyond my ability to understand.
[The Lord’s Prayer, taught to us by Jesus,] is a great, stark, packed prayer, [so often said] in hurried & in-different concert. It is the central jewel on the Christian prayer-chain. It acknowledges & asks for [Side-by side relationship with a still-transcendent power, in hallowed hearts, on hallowed ground, which when lived in brings God’s reign, provides daily necessity, maneuvers us through temptation, & delivers us from over-powering evil].
[Conclusion]—The teachings of Jesus are the paving blocks of the way I must try to walk. I have not learned to identify this Jesus with the inward witness, [or with God]. But my whole being echoes with Peter in saying, “Lord to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life.” I know that the ideal is out of my reach, that the commands even so far as I understand them are beyond my capacity for obedience. I follow a long way off, because I know nothing better. [Whatever sin is], the sense of sin is transcended in those reaches of prayer where God is no longer besieged or beseeched by us, but is fully [and simply] met.
I found out there is one single thing that one can have without limit & not deprive anyone else— God’s love & Presence. The more insatiably I could take into myself, the more of it there would be available for all. The more I might dwell in God’s Presence, the more God would be present for others. [I believe] the set time is the practice of prayer; beyond it lies the unceasing gift of prayer. & by using prayers written or spoken by others and learned by heart we root them in ourselves; when the heart is unable to open toward God, these prayers can act as keys. Once the heart is open, it finds its own words until that moment comes when it needs none.
Grateful for the candle, grateful for the lantern, and grateful for daylight, I rejoice in the possibility of sunrise—yes in the hope—yes, in the expectation of it.
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200. Born Remembering (by Elise Boulding; 1975)
Belief isn't how we identify ourselves as Quaker; we are cautious about belief as a category. Many of our theological differences are masked by our form of worship and by mostly not sharing our current beliefs. This fits well with our historic opposition to creeds. We don't have a belief creed but a creedal attitude toward the forms of Quakerism, what I call a “behavioral creed”—the way we worship & do business & maintain areas of testimony. Even those may be unpicked by shifting theologies. [If Quaker theologies & methods are changeable], what is the Quaker glue and good news]? We have made doctrine out of being a community of seekers.
We are absolutely certain of being at least a little uncertain in our believing & are very cautious or even suspicious of any who claim the final revelation or whole truth. Being certain of partial uncertainty is a powerful & distinct aspect of our faith. The British advice says: “Listen patiently & seek the truth which other people’s opinions may contain for you … Think it possible that you may be mistaken.” This absolute perhaps is surely some of our good news. It conveys wonderfully our intention to be a faithful people, [rather than] a believing people.
Links with the wider Quaker family need to be built on the intention: to be faithful [to seek the truth] above all, even where other Quakers hold different theologies, different forms, & different modes of believing. Unprogrammed Friends are a minority (less than 15%) of the Quaker world. A lack of resources on their part & lack of will on ours keeps us from hearing the insights of African & South American sisters & brothers. I worship in programmed Friends churches without distress because I have felt the sincerity & intention that surpasses form.
We can go forward with confidence & infectious enthusiasm or we can be a gathered remnant. If we are serious & confident in faith, sharing spirituality [isn’t] a challenge, but a process of joy. Things uniting Quakers globally are: sensing direct encounter with Divine; worship & business that reflect & nurture that sense; similar testimonies; & the priesthood of all believers. Shouldn’t your piety be your confidence & your integrity be your hope? We need to go forward with faith, trusting that what is meant for us will be given & we will be faithful. [Perhaps we should be as Richard] in You, Me & Everyone We Know in saying: “I am prepared for amazing things. I can handle it.” Let us put realization of confidence, a going forward “with faith” & intention, 1st.
The Future—George Fox said of the New Jerusalem: “The spiritual reign of Christ Jesus in this great city … of the living God … is within the light [where] there is no place or language, but there his voice may be heard … here is light, here is life, here is the heavenly bread.” Here is an interiorized version of heaven on earth, needing no outward temples, no outward speech, open to everyone. They were talking about the end of society as they knew it and the beginning of eternity with God. Is our vision too small? My utopian vision has been inadequate, a secular interpretation that closes me off in my own well-provided-for world.
Quakerism is a sensual aesthetic faith that feels right in head and heart and gut. But we need to beware of thinking of the beauty of ideas as an end in themselves. Let us have an intellectual [&] incarnational engagement with our Quaker heritage. Let us remember that Quakerism is only the current vehicle, not the object of our worship. Let us know our Quakerism in both intellectual and heart terms. We should not be bound by tradition and hang on to things past the time they are useful. How many committees do we really need? Let us tell others more willingly and do more things together. Let us be more open and honest with each other about our spiritual failings as well as our successes. If I am too modest or worried about what people may think if I talk of intimacy with God how are others to be helped?
The challenge of the shared priesthood is to realize our messiness before God and to surrender to the Spirit as who we are. Let us feel God’s love and grace in our lives even when it outstrips our own self-care and sense of self-worth. Let us speak loudly for justice, for universal salvation, for loving our neighbors, whoever they are, as ourselves. Our history is blighted by our corporate shortcomings, but as we learn individually, we can do better together; we have done so. What key justice issues do I pass over? It should not be radical to love the world and base our faith on God’s universal love.
Benjamin Lloyd writes: “God is at work in this moment … Let us open ourselves to the revelation each day brings. Let us see the Society growing around us with a sense of awe at God’s work brought to life through us, young and old alike.” I can still feel the excitement. Early Quakerism set up grand claims within a faith of vibrancy and excitement. This experience is still there for our taking and living and communicating, our living and breathing and acting, [so long as we go forward authentically with absolute confidence].
Queries—Have you had the experience of being lifted up and cradled by God? What does it mean to live “an accompanied life?” How have you sought to deal with “terrible mistakes” you have made in your life? What are the consequences of “keeping God out of the shadow parts of our lives? To what extent are Friends today open to being changed by Spirit? What are the consequences of [asserting that there will be some uncertainty in every important theological question]?
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116. The Candle, the Lantern, the Daylight (by Mildred Binns Young; 1961)
About the Author—Mildred Binns Young was born in Ohio and attended Friends schools and Western Reserve University. She lived for some years at Westtown School, where Wilmer Young was Dean of Boys. The Youngs then lived in the South, working under American Friends Service Committee for 19 years; 4 pamphlets came out of the experience. The present pamphlet was given at the 1961 Mid-Winter Institute. From 1955-1960 they were in residence at Pendle Hill.
If the soul knows God in His creatures, that is only evening light; if it knows His creatures in God, that is morning light; but if it knows God as God who alone is Being, that is the clear light of midday.” Meister Eckhart
Grateful for the candle, grateful for the lantern, and grateful for daylight, I rejoice in the possibility of sunrise—yes in the hope—yes, in the expectation of it. Mildred Binns Young
[The Candle]—A woman rose before dawn; she used a candle to light a fire in the stove and prepare for breakfast. She lit a lantern to draw water. She moved about her tasks without noticing that dawn had come; suddenly she found she was working in the light. We can begin the days work by candlelight or lantern light, and go on with it in the daylight. In my life, the candle was tradition; the lantern was the vision of human need. The daylight is seeing everything in relationship, rather than just one thing lit by candle or lantern. It is seeing beyond the room, the space the candle or lantern is in.
I grew up in a primitive, mid-western, Wilburite [Quaker] meeting. My first conscious recollection of meeting is of being on “the men’s side” of the meeting when the partitions were being drawn down to divide the two sides during the separate men’s and women’s meeting for business. Even though I was a sometimes rambunctious child, I knew how to enjoy quiet from an early age.
All work was set aside for mid-week meeting; [the whole community gathered], with older Friends and the likely speakers seated in the gallery facing us. The silence was profound even with us children there, while the workaday, weekday world went about its business outside. Scriptures were repeated, not often interpreted, but enjoyed and revered as having meaning for our lives.
The speaking of a Psalm in a sermon was the nearest thing to set prayer we had. Our grace at home was silence; Scripture was read daily. We never discussed Scriptures either at home or at school; there was no 1st Day School. Scriptures meaning could only be opened [by the Inward Teacher not by a outward one]. True prayer can arise only from the inward pressure of the Divine on the soul; prayer was always called supplication. The addressing and supplicating voice would ascend, drawing down the Presence to hover close above our heads.
We were often exhorted in the Jesus’ words, and his parables and the incidents of his life and death. I don't recall any interpretation, any explanations about Jesus. We did not know hymns or use pictures much. We did not see the usual representations of Christ in stained glass or other images. [There may have been little instruction], but I still remember the way in which religion was put before us, and the central place it occupied. [I was a voracious reader of available literature, which was mainly religious but surprisingly did not include the Bible].
By 1918, I was ripe for all kinds of rebellion. I had access to a good library, and my reading branched in all directions. During a shaking of foundation, a tradition such as mine can make one capable of holding all new things in solution, and judgment in abeyance, until something that is real for oneself precipitates out of the mixture. Iqbal, a Muslim poet wrote: “Go thou thy father’s road, for therein lies/Tranquility; conforming connotes/ The holding fast of Community… Carefully preserve/ Thy own thin rivulet; for it may hap/ Some mountain torrent shall replenish thee/ … to be once more…upon the breast/ of the redeeming tempest.”
[The Lantern]—After tradition’s guiding & staying function, the lantern—vision of human need—came to hand. In my 3rd decade, my life was joined to one who understood his service to God as service to others. Such love was not a natural attitude for me. In the end it was the poor who were to be my teachers, & while I was beginning to learn, the knowledge of their need was a lantern in my hand. In Kentucky, in 1932, I got to know towns full of families whose houses the depression & unemployment had stripped of all but the last necessities.
By 1936, the depression, the work camp idea, and Gandhi’s ideas had flowed together into one current which brought us to leave our comfortable place in life and undertake the conditions of intentional poverty for almost 20 years. I learned that the hand that gives must touch the hand that receives. [Nowadays, most giving is such that] neither donor nor recipient is nourished at the heart. Whenever we deal with each other as objects, there arises an absence of relationship. [We have an ongoing] debt toward other life. We can never give enough to be rid of it. God must have given the suffering of this close interdependence so that we may learn that we are not alone. [I disliked visiting just to visit]. [A Dr. Johnson said in a book]: “It is showing them respect; that is doing them good.” It is easy to waste time but hard to be generous with it.
[The Daylight]—When daylight comes the different things in a room [are seen all together], fall into relationship and take on perspective. Rabbi of Kotsk said: “God is wherever man lets him in.” [We hesitate to open the door]. We are like child who hangs back from a stranger who offers an exotic gift.
I feel easier when we use the word “God” for that which we feel and know as present and operative in our own lives and throughout the Universe. [Like the Indian “OM,” I see our word GOD as a sacred syllable; any other word limits]. The essential thing is not to make for ourselves images of a small, constricted, insufficient, or national, or sectarian God. Many of us need a personal God; this need is met and yet God is not limited by it. Howard Brinton has said that the personal God is that face of God that is turned toward us. [Dionysus has said that It is many things to many people]: Cause; Origin; Being; Life; recalling Voice and raising Power; Power of Renewal and Reform; Sacred Grounding; upward Guidance; Illumination; Perfection; Deity; and Unity.
The beginning of prayer is praise and the beginning of worship is thanksgiving. How hard we find it to praise without petition, and give thanks without stipulation. [Even the Psalms cannot maintain] pure praise [and thanksgiving] for more than a few sentences. The notable exception is [the 5 verses of] Psalm 100. Yet we are entitled and bound to cry out for help out of our state of [spiritual poverty]. Why does God deal so gingerly with some [who need the discipline of suffering and deal blow after blow on those who seem to not need it]? I simply have to leave all questions [like this one] alone; they are beyond my ability to understand.
[The Lord’s Prayer, taught to us by Jesus,] is a great, stark, packed prayer, [so often said] in hurried & in-different concert. It is the central jewel on the Christian prayer-chain. It acknowledges & asks for [Side-by side relationship with a still-transcendent power, in hallowed hearts, on hallowed ground, which when lived in brings God’s reign, provides daily necessity, maneuvers us through temptation, & delivers us from over-powering evil].
[Conclusion]—The teachings of Jesus are the paving blocks of the way I must try to walk. I have not learned to identify this Jesus with the inward witness, [or with God]. But my whole being echoes with Peter in saying, “Lord to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life.” I know that the ideal is out of my reach, that the commands even so far as I understand them are beyond my capacity for obedience. I follow a long way off, because I know nothing better. [Whatever sin is], the sense of sin is transcended in those reaches of prayer where God is no longer besieged or beseeched by us, but is fully [and simply] met.
I found out there is one single thing that one can have without limit & not deprive anyone else— God’s love & Presence. The more insatiably I could take into myself, the more of it there would be available for all. The more I might dwell in God’s Presence, the more God would be present for others. [I believe] the set time is the practice of prayer; beyond it lies the unceasing gift of prayer. & by using prayers written or spoken by others and learned by heart we root them in ourselves; when the heart is unable to open toward God, these prayers can act as keys. Once the heart is open, it finds its own words until that moment comes when it needs none.
Grateful for the candle, grateful for the lantern, and grateful for daylight, I rejoice in the possibility of sunrise—yes in the hope—yes, in the expectation of it.
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200. Born Remembering (by Elise Boulding; 1975)
About the Author—Elise Boulding is professor of sociology at the Univ. of CO, & is a practicing Quaker, in the Boulder Friends Meeting 1st Day School & participating in the Meeting’s extended family project. She wrote Friends Testimony in the Home (’53) & The Fruits of Solitude for Children (#125; ’63). She was the Internat’l Peace Research Newletter's 1st editor, & chairperson of the Women’s Internat’l League for Peace & Freedom & the North American Consortium on Peace Research, Education, & Development. The present essay is a departure from social areas into personal devotion & the spirit, written after her 1st 2 months at her hermitage.
[Remembering Childhood]—Every one has had experience of early childhood remembering [being aware of] an otherness not to be explained by family experiences, stories heard, events witnessed. Why is it that we are born remembering, [aware], & live forgetting? [In my life I have remembered, forgotten & remembered again]. I grew up in a tiny [unchurched] immigrant Scandinavian community of 12 families outside Newark; no one went to church. There was underlying anxiety in that community around performance in jobs & in school. I, along with the other children of those families, had to justify the emigration by my life performance.
Mother & Father never talked about God, never used petitionary prayer, & only read the Bible on Christmas Eve; yet God was present. On Christmas Eve the family Bible came to the supper table, & father read Luke’s Christmas story by candlelight. Afterwards we danced around the candle-lit tree & sang carols & dancing songs. God was also present every evening, for grace, & [while I prayed & mother sat by my side].
Listening to God was one of my clearest childhood memories. There was always a quiet inner space I could go into, a listening place. I wasn’t listening for voices. [I found myself a church so I could study the Bible; it was 2 miles away]. Long before I was in high school, the pastor’s wife took me aside & asked if I would like to come into her high school class. To this day going into any church fills me with joyful anticipation.
The fact that I have been able in some way to reach back to the early rememberings, to the freshness of the feeling of God’s presence as I knew it when small, has been very important in keeping what wholeness there has been in my life. I grew into the Lord’s Prayer, & I’m still growing into it. Because Bibles have sometimes been used as straitjackets by adults who didn't understand, doesn’t mean that they are straitjackets. [I compared God’s oversight & being with Jesus’ teaching, speaking & doing]. Giving Jesus his “right” place has never been easy for me, perhaps because I loved God first. I came to love Jesus as a teacher. Many years later, I came to experience him inwardly as a teaching Presence; I felt taught without words; he comes in times of spiritual barrenness.
When did I discover Mary? I am not sure how old I was, but standing one day before her statue, I felt her presence, [as] Mother, sister, holy lady. She was with me beginning with the turbulent high school days, atheistic college days and ever since. In dark times I find a Catholic church and kneel before Mary. I accept my childlike spirituality when I need her strength. Having won a college scholarship, I would now have to redouble my efforts to justify that original migration. I suddenly saw my love of God as a sign of weakness.
[College; Marriage; Children; India]—My stiff impeccable deportment through college in things religious was modified by visits to the Christian Science church and the Quaker meeting. The Quakers unexpectedly touched me—“spoke to my condition.” The silence of the meeting was a reminder of my own childhood listening place; [I felt at home there]. The first year out of college, [I found myself working at 2 publishing houses].
While religion had not been verbally articulated very much in my home, pacifism had; my mother was an ardent pacifist [who] never connected with a peace movement. [The day I visited] the Baroness’ store-front center [for a Catholic hospitality house] was a turning point for me. The Baroness was a Russian émigré who saw social reality as at core a spiritual reality. Another lovely place the Lord led me to was the church of John Haynes Holmes, a pacifist preacher. And I heard of Dorothy Day, the Catholic Worker’s editor, but never met her.
The impact that these person made on my life was out of all proportion to my contact with them; I stayed in New York for 5 months. I almost lost my inner listening space because I could not cope with the city. [While on a campus near my family, I found a Friends meeting and a Catholic church with a statue of Mary. I met Kenneth Boulding at a Quaker meeting for worship; 17 days later we announced our intentions to marry. [Kenneth Boulding’s world was new to me, a combination of the Baroness and John Haynes Holmes, Quaker version. [Kenneth wrote from] his religious commitment to peace, and he also wrote There is a Spirit: The Naylor Sonnets. We read to each other, particularly Brother Lawrence’s The Practice of the Presence of God.
Kenneth & I took the founding of our little Quaker “Colony of Heaven” seriously & joyfully, [endeavoring] to make our home a center of tranquility & peace. Before our 3rd child I wrote Friends Testimonies in the Home. It seemed to me that it was in the mundane tasks that God’s love shone most clearly. A Quaker meeting is a fine place to raise children up when families do many things together. A group of about 6 families [pretty much] raised each other’s children. We were all equally active in the peace movement, and in local community projects. There was undue busyness. God was never absent, but often ignored; I did a lot of forgetting in those years.
At 51, I traded an emptying nest at home for a professorship at the University of Colorado. Part I of my upside down turning & the beginning of another remembering, came in India in January 1971. I gratefully accepted the invitation of the director of the Gandhi Museum to stay with him & his hospitable wife. It was January & I would read in the paper about the number of Indians who had frozen to death. All the usual distances between me & physical deprivation were erased. [When migrant workers built a school next door] I lived a triple life: partly back home in Colorado suburbia; partly shivering in my friends’ apartment; partly next door in a brush shelter on meager rations. As I read Gandhi’s passionate words about sarvodaya (welfare), I knew that these were my brothers & sisters too, & that I couldn't want what they could not have. Readiness for stripping is a very individual & personal thing. I could not communicate my experience to Kenneth & most of our children.
[Frog in a Well]—Part II of the remembering involved in my “conversion” came a few months later when a teenager, damaged by drugs & suffering a major emotional crisis, stayed with us. Watching his suffering, I suddenly saw myself as a small frog in the bottom of a deep well, trying to get out. The spirit had to break through [occasionally], but how tiny the eruptions, how heavy-handed our daily behavior. The tension of the preceding years uncoiled like a giant spring in the crouched figure at the well bottom. It was met by God’s grace & I sprang up free. [Feeling like] a newborn, I would whisper phrases asking for God's guidance. I tried not to do anything I could not put God into. Early morning rising & prayer also helped me stay centered. Increased sensitivity to others who were in an intense state of seeking brought new fellowship in unexpected places.
At this time I felt distant from the Friends immediately around me, with whom I could not share what was happening, but very close to the “Quaker saints” that had been part of my religious formation in the Society. 2 authors that gave me a vivid understanding of the incredible process of remaking, reforming the human material were Evelyn Underhill and Victor Turner. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross also helped. At one point in the Middle ages it really had seemed as if the Age of the Holy Spirit were dawning. But the intellectual and spiritual energy petered out. The possibility of rebirth was still a live possibility for the human race. How then was the petering out to be prevented? What did God require of me?
It seemed to be my task to explore that question, & I didn't know how to go about it. It was only at the end of that summer that I came to the comprehension that God is always at work in us even though there are times when we are too numbed by pain to realize it. By fall I had a certain feeling of resignation about the difficult path before me. Friends found a small Benedictine monastery at Cold Spring, NY that would take a woman guest for 2 days. To my joyful eye the 2 brothers who met me were radiant archangels. They had waited with Vespers till my coming. A great flood of love was released by singing the liturgy, & renewal surged through my being.
For me the rhythm of monastic life—matins, lauds, breakfast, reading, praying, lunch, chores, walking, reading, vespers, conversation, supper, compline, and prayer—was the long sought, long-lost rhythm of my own deepest inner spaces. “Jesus, I am one of your kind! You are what we are to become. Unbearable stretching of spirit—torn upwards, rooted below. Was that your crucifixion? [Brother Victor wrote out] a weekly rotation of Psalms for Lauds and Vespers, and the pattern for Compline; I have used them ever since.
I have been back to the Monastery many times since that October. There is a small community of the Brothers, 2 Sisters, & myself. Our spiritual bond is strong & we feel like a community, even though we will never live in the same community. I have also come to find community with the very tender Catholics, including the Brothers of the Christ in the Desert Monastery. [Brother Victor had a gift for making] tasty meals out of unpromising scraps. From that I got the idea for a cookbook called From a Monastery Kitchen; it was intended to be much more than a cookbook]. We have all thought a lot about what of monastic life can be shared in families.
There is food for spiritual nurture in the church year seasons. Yet the outer garments of celebration when taken over by the secular society prevent recognition of the underlying spiritual reality. In my own religious tradition of Quakerism the fear of participating in artificial reconstruction led to a witness against all sacraments and all celebrations. [While Quakers may have lost the sense of the sacramental, they have made the valid point that] the inward cycles of our souls do not correspond to the great cycles of the church.
[Hermitage]—During my summer of intense spiritual struggle I began to plan what was to be a hermitage in the woods behind our family cabin in the Rockies’ foothills. It was built with the help of a young friend, his builder brother, and a great deal of love. The hermitage was ready on Thanksgiving Day. I came up that weekend to the first solitude I had ever known in my life. That very first day that I climbed the steps and entered alone, uncertainty fell away and joy rushed in; a lifetime of longing had been fulfilled.
[During a disorienting 2 days following ear surgery] I was given communion by a Catholic priest and good friend, even though I was not a professed Catholic. Having felt the Presence so totally in the eucharist at the monastery, I felt the need very acutely in this crisis of the anchoring in Christ which communion gives. Although I expected to be called to profess Catholicism, I learned that my obedience consists in remaining a Quaker. Johannes Tauler wrote: “Spiritually good people, pure in heart, who long for the Blessed Sacrament but cannot go to Communion at that time . . . may even receive the grace of Communion more than those who receive sacramentally.” Adolphe Tanquerey writes that given one’s talents, one’s situation in life and its responsibilities, there are certain things one must do and other things one may not be able to do.
If there was ever to be reintegration of my life around my new understandings, it would take nothing less drastic than a year of solitude for this to happen. [I approached my year of solitude in the spirit of] “O Lord, my heart is not proud/nor haughty my eyes./ I have not gone after things too great nor marvels beyond me./ Truly I have set my soul in silence and peace.” The pressures from others to come down from the mountaintop with a vision are stronger than I would have believed. A mid-March journal entry said: “An underlying, slow-growing realization for me is that there is no Way, no magic Key that will Open the Door.”
Wisdom of solitude isn't easy to translate into world. It is my task this year to learn to be present to God & world, & yet stay shielded. I attend Meeting, & spend the day at home. Periodically I stop at the office to discuss work with my administrative assistant & friend, Dorothy Carson. Spiritual revolutionaries have a hard time in society. Structures of violence & habits of oppression must be destroyed, by means that we don't yet understand.
If much of my work in the future is done from the hermitage, that won't be a denial of society, but affirmation of what it can become. Solitude is the human spirit's most beautiful condition. In solitude I am learning to truly remember what I have lived forgetting. I hope to learn how to weave the golden threads of solitude into family & community living. I know of no other way for us to become what we are recreated to be.
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324. Traveling In (by Douglas V. Steere; 1995)
About the Author—Douglas Steere (1901-1995) was a Quaker scholar of philosophy at Haverford College from 1928 to 1963. He served as a representative to Vatican II and as co-founder of the Ecumenical Institute of Spirituality. His vision and faith helped establish Pendle Hill and Radnor Meeting in the 1930's. Douglas gave his heart and soul to many through his writings, lectures, and retreats he led with his wife, Dorothy.
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324. Traveling In (by Douglas V. Steere; 1995)
About the Author—Douglas Steere (1901-1995) was a Quaker scholar of philosophy at Haverford College from 1928 to 1963. He served as a representative to Vatican II and as co-founder of the Ecumenical Institute of Spirituality. His vision and faith helped establish Pendle Hill and Radnor Meeting in the 1930's. Douglas gave his heart and soul to many through his writings, lectures, and retreats he led with his wife, Dorothy.
Acknowledgement—We give thanks to for the gentle outpouring of love through Douglas and Dorothy. Their witness and devotion serve as beacons of light to guide Pendle Hill's striving to be a center for contemplation and study.
[Introduction]—I am having to read what I want to say to you. At my age this seems to be necessary. I am going to speak about "traveling in" and about my own personal journey. My early religious experience was typical of that of many young Protestants. At 14 I was deeply moved by a young evangelist and joined the Methodist Church; I transferred to a Presbyterian Church to save a mile of walking. Finally, I went to an Evangelical and Reformed Church to play my slide trombone in their Sunday School orchestra.
I studied agriculture with a potato specialty at what is now Michigan State University. My 3rd year I decided to take a year off. I taught at a high school and joined the county agriculture agent at night in trips to remote parts of the county. I got the growing sense that this was not the work I was put on earth for. I went to Harvard to study philosophy. Instead of giving a longed-for frame for my faith and experience, my study of philosophy at Harvard wiped out what little faith I had. I wished that I could have a decisive [conversion] experience such as a fellow student had, but it has never come to me. I participated with a silent prayer group; it was at noonday sessions of silence that I began to pray again. The renewal that came to me through silent prayer, and the sense of God's guidance grew as I tried to be faithful to what came during these [sessions] of prayer.
[Pursuing Philosophy: Study and Quakerism]—At 2 in the morning, I knelt in prayer and asked for guidance, whether I should take examinations to pursue philosophy. I was led to go into each of the 4 examinations with a quiet mind, write what I could and accept the outcome. Some weeks later, I was notified that I had passed the comprehensives and needed to choose an acceptable thesis and take language tests to fulfill requirements for the doctorate program.
At Oxford I met a Quaker doctor named Henry Gillet; he became & remained a friend for the rest of his life. With an Oxford reading group I encountered a silent Quaker meeting; for the 1st time I felt the power of Christ's indwelling spirit & experienced a "gathered" or "covered" meeting. Dr. Gillet set up a meeting with Rufus Jones at Haverford College, from which I became Jones' junior colleague & taught philosophy at Haverford for the rest of my professional life. I decided to write a doctoral thesis on the Catholic Baron von Hügel's writings.
I came to know Evelyn Underhill, an Anglican under Von Hügel's spiritual direction. She writes: "[In the breast of every person] ordinary contemplation is open to all men and women. Without it they are not wholly conscious or alive ... The spring of the amazing energy which enables the great mystic to rise to freedom and dominate his world is extant in all of us, an integral part of our humanity." She had not had the major experiences that marked the great mystics, but she did have a "slowing down." She wrote and led many retreats in an ancient retreat house in Pleshey, Essex during the closing 15 years of her life.
I came to Haverford College in 1928 not as one dramatically transformed, but rather as one who knew something about what a contemporary Quaker, Elizabeth Vining, calls "minor ecstasies." I hope that my life is one that goes on experiencing a continuous conversion. I married Dorothy Steere in 1929, and we then non-Quakers were included with a little group of Quakers who in 1930 established Pendle Hill (PH).
I found in Doctor Henry T. Hodgkin, a British Quaker doctor who spent 25 years in China, & PH's 1st director, the greatest Christian I had ever come to know intimately. Each morning Henry spent an hour divided between the silent time of inward listening & prayer, reading some devotional classic, & writing in a daybook the insights & concerns that had come to him. The social concern we acted on through the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) was feeding children in western Pennsylvania's & West Virginia's mining region.
Early on, Dorothy and I were reluctant to join the Quakers, until we read John Woolman's Journal, where we found someone who lived in the world as we did, who supported his family and his journey by his own labor as we meant to do, and someone in whom the Inner Guide had brought together and laid upon him both inward tendering and a concern for his fellows that he fully carried out in his life. We agreed that the time had come for us to throw in our lot with the Quakers. During the 1960's, we attended 3 sessions of Vatican Council and with Father Godfrey Diekmann founded the Ecumenical Institute of Spirituality, for Protestant and Catholic scholars.
I met Dr. Maria Schlüter-Hermkes in 1931, & she encouraged me to come to Germany to explore the world of German Roman Catholic spirituality. In due time I was taken to meet the famous Abbot Herwegen of the Benedictine Maria Laach monastery. The Abbot saw salvation in being part of a family or a community & not by any private nurturing. He sent me as a companion & spiritual guide Father Damasus Winzen, a young monk near my own age. Father Damasus was to become one of the most beloved friends of my life. He later came to the US to see where Maria Laach might be lodged should the Nazis drive them out of Germany; he stayed here. At the end of his life he said: "I see quite clearly that I owe my present inner happiness, my peace, my confidence and my joy ... [to being] certain that I am infinitely loved by God." Through Maria Schlüter-Hermkes, I met some of the great German spirits in the Roman Catholic Community in 1933-34: Alois Zempf; Theodore Hecker; Dr. Scheinung; Joseph Bernhardt; and Romano Guardini; I had evenings with the last one mentioned in his home.
[Writing Books on Prayer & How to Pray]—An old lady in Solebury, PA gave me board & room weekends & the use of a table in an ancient woodshed. There I wrote Prayer & Worship in 1937. Under the title Dimensions of Prayer I enlarged the 1st book in 1962. I am sympathetic with using meditation practices that still the mind & relax the body; they are "vestibule exercises." It makes a difference if I enter it in awareness that I am besieged by & immersed in love that is without qualification, instead of immediately projecting prayer. Mei-ster Eckhart says, "God is foolishly in love with me. He seems to have forgotten heaven & earth & deity. His entire business is with me alone, to give me everything, to comfort me, ... suddenly ... wholly ... perfectly ... to all creatures ... Why are you not aware of [God's giving]? Because you aren't at home in the soul's inmost center." Bernard of Clairvaux says, "You will always be rash if you attribute any priority or any predominant share to yourself. For [God] loves both more than you & before you love at all."
It makes a difference to enter prayer with a deep consciousness of the divine initiative. It continues during prayer & undergirds my very life when I turn from conscious prayer to other daily tasks. That love has been laid over the world for its healing long before I came; I simply enter into the ongoing stream. [In this stream] there is: adoration & thankfulness; contrition & yielding; petition & intercession; & [especially] listening for the biddings that are laid upon us by the Inward Guide. Paul Claudel says, "All prayer is simply thankfulness that God is."
[Meeting for Worship]—[I must say something about meeting for worship to] explain the Quaker union of God's guiding hand in our lives & the "holy nudges" & concerns laid on us for services beyond meeting doors. [Vocal ministry is always a possibility], although it is common for the hour to pass in complete silence. It has given me specific things to be done & the strength to do them ... or rimless concerns that are kept before me until they come to some degree of clarity ... It has changed my mind when I didn't mean to change. It has firmed me up when I might have yielded ... It has scarified me & broken down the hull of my life & shown me how I might live ... It isn't what I give that makes me suffer, but what I hold back. My mind has wandered like a hummingbird on holiday ... & I have felt moments of intensity and concentration and awareness of what life could be like."
Donald Court says, "There are times to reach down to a level where I can ... be taught how to respond instead of to react, how to open the road to a spirit blocked by busyness, self-importance, ... self-pity, & depression." Occasionally in meeting for worship, we seem to be taken beyond ourselves & instead of praying, once in a while we were to be prayed in. The London Russian Orthodox Archbishop Anthony Bloom describes these moments where effortful prayer is meant to stop & where the gift of the effortless sense of the Presence appears.
Bloom instructed an old lady who had never perceived God's presence to tidy up her room & then: "look around & try to see where you live because I am sure ... it's a long time since you have really seen your room. Then take your knitting & for 15 minutes knit before God's face ... without saying any prayer ... just knit & try to enjoy the peace of your room." The response he later got was: "I began to knit & I became more & more aware of the silence. Needles hit the arm of the chair & the clock was ticking peacefully, & there was nothing to bother about ... The silence around began to come & meet the silence in me & all of a sudden I perceived that the silence was a presence & at the heart of the silence there was one who is all stillness & all peace & all parts."
[Attentiveness and Obedience]—William James says: "All about our working consciousness, parted from it by filaments of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different ... If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is—infinite." Along with the gift of presence there seems to come, now to this person & now to that, "holy nudges"—tasks & concerns that need to be undertaken. Corporate meeting for worship is of special importance in initiating & in dealing with them. Since a shunned or neglected task forces God to adjust God's strategy, my response may have cosmic consequences. Thomas Mann said: "I would say that religiousness is attentiveness & obedience." Unless attentiveness is linked to obedience, a deeper bond is missing. Adrian von Spier writes: "Once open to the light one may ask God to claim one more essentially & profoundly, ... on condition that one doesn't refuse the 1st small act that God demands of one."
3 strong voices from the 17th century underline both the guides laying on us specific things to be done as well as the promptness required in carrying out these inward directions.
Francois de Sales: Devotion is the promptitude, fervor, affection, and agility which we show in the service of God, [who] requires a faithful fulfillment of the merest trifle given us ... rather than ... ardent aspiration to things to which we are not called.
` Isaac Penington: There is that near you which will guide. Wait for it and be sure to keep to it.
Augustine Baker: Mind your call. That's all in all.
[My example of answering a call to service is that of] Emma Noble, wife of a foreman in Oxford's locomotive works. In the 1920's, South Wales coal mining areas had appalling unemployment and misery. [In meeting for worship she felt called to] visit this area and see if there was anything Quakers could do. A clearness committee saw "right ordering" in her concern. The 1st valley seemed to have no opening for Quaker ministries. She didn't feel released to return. In the course of some days in Rhonda Valley a way began to open. The Nobles were released for what turned out be some years of service and a long-term program of work. It grew to involve members of Parliament, a royal visit, and a program of legislation.
Jesus promised those who would follow his leading 3 things. They would be absurdly happy, entirely fearless, & always in trouble. The one to whom the concern has come may often be quite unready to carry it out until he or she has been changed & reshaped in ways that call for greater flexibility & openness. Even the community supporting the concern may have to make painful changes. Some Friends have learned to wait to see how the concern, & his motives for that concern, look the next day or the next week. They know enough to allow one's detective agency to examine all aspects of one's concern, [& to submit it to the scrutiny of others]. How centered & flexible are the spirits of people involved in the concern? If an embarrassing waiting, or the prospect of it, succeeds in dissolving the concern, its rootlessness has been exposed & it withers away & can be buried.
Transformative Effect of "Failed Concerns"—Sometimes "failed concerns" emerge some years later in a different form that, in the end, actually carried out the original leading in an amazing fashion. My wife and I sought a suitable place for a modest Quaker ashram with Gurdial Malik, where Christian and other great world religions could be invited to live together for a season and hopefully to irradiate each other with the rich experiences of their different tradition. Our search failed.
In 1967, 2 residential seminars came into being—one of 5 days in Japan and the other of 7 days in India. In both places 10 carefully chosen Christians were matched with 10 Zen Masters in Japan and 10 outstanding Hindus and scholars in India. The Japanese colloquium has held its 18th annual meeting for some 3 days in Kyoto. A book appeared in 1977, called A Zen Christian Pilgrimage. There is still no physically established Quaker ashram in either country. As in the unforeseen unfolding of so many concerns, the waiting or the drastic reshaping or even the deferment to a future generation does not invalidate the significance of these leadings.
Harold Loukes writes: "An act of love that fails is just as much a part of the divine life as an act of love that succeeds. Love is measured by its fullness and not by its reception." John Woolman wrote of his dangerous trip to visit Wehaloosing and a friendly Indian tribe: "Love was the first motion." In this writing I have been witnessing to my faith and experience that love is the first motion. It is a love that will not let us go and a love that lures us to respond and to follow the biddings of the Inward Guide. To understand [the broad spectrum] of Christian religion with its mutual caring outreach to the world's needs, one must return to the love at the heart of things that undergirds it all and undergirds us all and above all, to realize that we are not not in this thing alone.
Tribute [to Mother and Father in the pamphlet's beginning] (by Helen Steere Horn; 1988)
It's striking how/ we have paid you tribute with / grape... red raspberry preserves speckled/ with golden seeds/ & tangy marmalade/ knobbled with citrus peel—// each an essence/ gathered in the sun, crushed,/ slivered, simmered down,/ stirred, tested./ Concentrated flavor/ holding ruddy light/ for you to savour/ on your tongues/ ... the young/ sense how you've done/ this slow essential work/ inside yourselves/ for years,/ conserving hope,/ preserving gaiety/ distilling tenderness—// such rare bright essences/ you glow with/ when we meet.
Poems About Popper (1988-1995) by Helen Steere Horn (Open Door was written in 1994)
Evening Ride—Even when names are gone/ & words you want are misting/ out of reach, these roads, / this maze of lefts & rights,/ is clear to you as day.// And in the amber evening/ you still carry us unerring/ through the woods, past beach/ and marsh and farmstead/ growing up with weeds,/ to a sure destination.//
Voices swarm these hills,/ a welter Mother can recall./ [Stories of places: extraordinary, tragic, and personal]// ... old Chris Johansen's—/ solitary since his wife passed on .../ 4 times Chris nearly died ...//
You turn in & stop the motor,/ In his easy chair, Chris/ doesn't hear us till I knock again,/ Beaming, he burst out,/ You wring each other's hands.// He [comments about &] limps toward his garden with us .../ You stoop together foraging/ ... I taste his raspberries ... as both of you ... bearing sweetness still. 1990
Climber (1991)—Nearing 90, words for time/ elude you. Hours so loose & wavering/ in & out of sleep, you startle up/ herd us off to Quaker meeting, with fierce punctuality.// We lift the latch before another soul/ arrives to hymn sing .../ around the old piano, choose/ familiar spirituals .../ Your hand beats time ... Your voice homes in on harmonies/ for "Jacob's Ladder," climbing/ resonant and true.//
Once, dozing during worship, you/ pitch forward, moan .../ Yet afterwards you walk me out/ the door straight up the slope/ ... to the giant sawed off stump/ that still commands the view./ Its growth rings swell out// You scan the far horizon./ Are you seeking over Jordan, seeing how the chariot swings low?/ ... [He knows how soon he will be 90] I can feel/ your fingers grip the ladder strongly,/ reaching, climbing still.
Old Writer (1992)—At 91 you still feel keenly/ where words come from, know/ their pressing up to be expressed,/ ... [you] start to scrawl// ... telling phrases falter,/ ... trail off from black to gray ... // It is so late. The slate inside/ your head is scribbled full./ ... You nod, your fingers loosen. Slipping between your knees, the pencil [falls]. // I wonder if you know and grieve,/ ... or if this losing of your senses lets you,/ after such a leap, sink down/ into another element, as slow and cool as fish sink,/ deeper down than words.
Open Door—Stripped of his wits,/ & power of speech,/ this ancient wiseman/ still can teach// when I ask him/ how he is, he only/ smiles & points/ behind me.// Wheeling, I am struck/ by blazing light/ beyond this dim,/ low-ceilinged room// where through a doorway/ branches flowering/ white as wings/ brush rosy bloom
For the Taking (1994)—It rained last night/ and threatens rain again./ Berries should be picked/ before they mold ... / that big poncho you wore fishing keeps me dry// ... I stand here surrounded/ by dripping canes/ ... a shrill of crickets/ [sounds] like the very engine/ that propels the world.// Grampie raised berries too./ I can still see them mounded/ in our dishes, ruddy, swimming/ in cream ... I wonder if you also felt/ the way his fingers helped/ you fill your buckets/ when you picked a patch.
Remember, tramping/ to the pasture near your/ fishing stream, all overgrown/ with blackberries?/ ... [On] the road ... to the abandoned farm,/ The roots of 1 great pine held to the sandy bank/ above it, gnarled/ & knobby as old hands.// How our hands turned purple/ ... I hear you telling stories as we/ foraged, sense the easy silence in between ... the sun lays warm on my shoulders.// Picking something wild,/ there for the ta- king,/ was what made me feel more like a child of God / than almost anything.// [I remember whenever I pick].
Sweet Chariot—You never were much for appearances./ Our scarecrow has been wearing/ your fishing hat for 2 years now ...// Once, combing through/ a dream forest for you,/ ... Far off [Mom] heard a clanking sound./ ... Then into the open lurched/ a Model T jalopy ... // You sat in the rear,/ surrounded by rakish characters./ ... You leaned back, beaming/ and carefree. Mother laughed/ out loud and woke up refreshed.// Oh [Old T], come soon./ Jump down, old jokers/ Help this raggedy man roll out/ and clamber in.// I bet we hear them toot the horn—/ Ah-oo-gah—jaunty as jaybirds,/ when they put off through the trees/ to take you fishing, who knows where? 1995
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329. There is a Fountain: A Quaker Life in Process (by Helen Steere Horn; 1996)
About the Author—Helen Horn's connection to Pendle Hill is since childhood when her father, Douglas Steere, directed summer school & her mother Dorothy Steere, was Head Resident. In the '90's she taught a Pendle Hill class on Spiritual & Work Autobiography, & co-led 2 classes using arts & meditation to spur spiritual growth. After working in Europe, Africa, & 3 American cities, she settled with her husband on an Appalachian farm, [& was socially active there]. She has been activist, professional, artist & homemaker. This essay was written for Lake Erie YM as a "pump primer" to encourage others to share stories from their spiritual journeys.
"... There is a fountain that living freshness brings./ Come to this water; there is vast supply ...
I AM: 3-5—[At 3], I sit on Grampie's lap in a wicker rocker on their glassed-in porch, [watching crackling, forking lightening, listening to the crash of thunder & his stories of storms]. Grampie's big lap, rumbling familiar voice & the easy rocking hold me safe. [At 4], I stare out the window at snowflakes falling into the pond. I point out how each one is kissing the water as it touches down; Mom hugs me joyfully, shares with Dad what I said, & starts reading me poems. [At 5 in Meeting] I move my head up & down, & the branches do a jerky, black-armed dance where glass is whorled. I wish I could see Jesus in Meeting. My Daddy ministers: "The wind of God is always blowing; we must hoist our sails." I like the thought of being a boat with God's wind filling my sails.
I AM: 6-7—[At 6], I test for entrance into Haverford Friends School, I look at a picture of Pilgrims & Indians fighting & say, "They should all be sitting down & working things out together." Mr. Cadbury catches birds to band & record them; he shows some to us up close & then lets them go. My heart nearly bursts with love and relief that he is free. [At 7], My 1st-Day School teacher shows us a photo album of snowflakes; there is not one like any other in the whole book. She shows us a diagram of the water cycle: water falls as rain; rises as mist or steam; forms clouds; when cold falls again as hail or snow. I get a sense of order, something that shifts shape and is transformed, but never ends. She has us draw mandalas which I doodle for years all over my notebooks.
I AM: 8-10—[At 8] We are on the sand dunes near Lake Michigan, picking blueberries, looking out at the lake, listening for the woodthrush. Its fluting comes, pure & haunting from an invisible perch; pause; again. Mother's eyes are shining. We hug each other. [At 9], Anne is throwing another fit, refusing to clean her room or play with "that dumb old boy"; she slams her door. I move quietly around my room, putting my clothes and books away. Anne is such a baby. When will she grow up and learn to be a helper? [At 10] I get to read out of one of the family Bibles about Joseph. I am thrilled how Joseph ends up giving food to the very brothers who wanted to kill him; sort of like Jesus. I sing out my heart for [my favorite hymns] as Mom plays the organ. I make a little cardboard box altar in my closet. I pray there for people I know, for the Jews, and that WWII will be over.
I AM: 11-13—[When I am 11] Daddy buys the best Christmas tree he can find on December 23rd. This year] it's lopsided. We trim it while a fire burns & Christmas music plays. I am mad at Daddy, & try to fix the tree; I break a branch. I try to tape the branch back together. It holds through the holiday, but I am eaten up with guilt. I confess to Mother & learn that Daddy feels uncomfortable spending money on temporary decoration. I understand, but I still hate whacko, crooked, skimpy Christmas trees; I am ashamed that it means so much to me.
[At 12], A French refugee comes to stay with us; 2 other girls come to Haverford from Germany. Mother & Daddy want us to be welcoming & play with them. [At 13], I am not wearing lipstick, & am not a good athlete. My breasts are swelling, I am getting acne & I have to wear glasses. A friend of mine & Daddy agree that Anne has "it"; I assume they mean I don't. I fantasize about [being in places of great isolation], taking great risks to rescue people, especially handsome boys. A conscientious objector my dad counsels, visits our family often, [& more importantly is] someone other than my folks who listens to me & honors me as somebody who matters,. He encourages me not to wear makeup. He likes "authentic" people. That word becomes powerful to me.
I AM: 14-16—[At14] I read of the lives of Elizabeth Fry & others. I am quickened in my determination to be a world-changing woman like these. Mother's life as homemaker, helpmate, & community volunteer doesn't fire my imagination. [At 15] I am spending Daddy's sabbatical year with Anne at a boarding school in Sweden. The Quaker headmaster I am living with dies suddenly of a heart attack. I have never seen this snuffing out of vital life before, or a silent, grieving widow. I am isolated by lack of language from family discussion. I take on the role of silent servant. I write many letters home & journal intensely in my diary. I realize I lose track of time & feel deeply myself when I am writing; I am vitally alive in spite of my isolation. I am traveling in war-torn Germany with Daddy; buildings are shell-pocked or bombed out. Beggars & amputees are everywhere. Even a 5-year old pet owner can say straightforwardly that his rabbit will be killed for stew; that is what war has done.
[At 16] I have gone out at dusk to watch the sunset. Summer Dusk—How still it is & yet/ the night is breathing out a song/ &, though the dusk/ sifted through a star hole/ to earth, there are/ a million colors left/ pulsating here. // The mellow sky is curving/ like a shell which dips/ fluted edge into the sea,/ close bound by rocks/ denying every wave's advances ... the night to me// [is] as intimate & tender/ as a hand,// yet some-how a hand/ apart from me, sheathed/ in blue & silver glove/ through whose fingers/ I glimpse eternity./// It is a joy sharing with my mother, [who has a passion for poetry & hymns]. I start reading Whitman & Sandburg.
I AM: 17-21—[At 17] I am a senior at Westtown Friends Boarding School. As part of weekend workcamps in inner Philadelphia, we go out in pairs to help elderly African-Americans plaster & paint rooms; we feel welcome & useful. We visit municipal court Sunday morning where the desperate & drunk are arraigned. We worship in local churches. On the way home in the street car, I am swept over with love & connectedness with every worn, expectant, or stolid-faced person sitting in that car; I'm not shy or afraid. We are a part of each other. [At 19] I am attending a weekly cell group for meditation and sharing. I am not maintaining a daily quiet time in the midst of academic pressures. A Quaker faculty wife shares that her inner life goes in cycles. She focuses intensely on activity and commitments for a time, and then withdraws to read and refuel.
[At 20] I am speaking at a Matins service during Oberlin exam week. There is a drawing of weeds & turf in front of me. I pray that, like the sod, we may be absorbent & resilient. [At 21] I am unclear about what comes after college. Vocational aptitude tests split me between social work & writing. I am aware of how focused & productive Dad is, & how confused I am about what I'm good for, how ambivalent about nearly everything. He said, "If only you could feel [God's love], [who] loves you for yourself, apart from anything you accomplish or become." Why can't I feel clear that there's someone there when I pray? Why can't I feel God's support? Why does God want us to worship God? Why did God let Jews burn & people in Hiroshima if He's so powerful & loving? He said, "God gives us freedom to choose good or evil ... God yearns for us when we're struggling ... we are infinitely loved by God." He has faith. I don't. At least I'm a seeker. I don't feel a lot of joy.
I AM: 22-28—[At 22] I need to tell a man that I am breaking it off with him; he doesn't appeal to me physically. It is painful. How do you break off a relationship gently & honestly? In creating a play about the Cana wedding, I compare the blustering steward & the servant filling water jars, the latter servant's willingness & trust with my bustling, spiritual doubts. [At 24] I get engaged to an architecture student. 6 months later he breaks it off because I have crowded his spirit & [pressured] him to design low-income housing, not corporate buildings. I doubt my ability to love. I go to the Harvard Education School to become a High School English teacher.
[At 27], I am interpreting a work camp photo display for UNESCO & communing with Communist delegates. [It was good], using French & German again, reaching out to young people on fire with Marxist idealism, finding common ground. Hildegard Goss-Mayr of Fellowship of Reconciliation has sought the Cold War's end & needs comrades in the struggle. I am walking in a meadow near the project site. I see a small 4-petaled blue flower. International peace organizing is too rootless, too wordy for me. I need to work small & stay true blue & solid. I am drawn into life's paradoxes. How can suffering & waste of life be explained if God is all-powerful & all-loving? [At 28], my heart has been open by another young man. I feel very vulnerable at the thought of losing him. I write a poem about it & show it to him. It connects him with terrible childhood loss; he withdraws, fearful of hurting & being hurt again. Sharing & loving go together, dark or light. I am helpless to do otherwise.
With Heart Opened—Knowing you like this/ in all your strength,/ your fierce and tender mystery,/ in all the sweetness of our joy/ I feel with sudden pain/ all loss as well—/ the salt of tears,/ the blunted waste of all the world,/ the baffled hopes,/ the freedom bludgeoned out of men,/ the cross, the bitter myrrh.
I AM: 29-30—[At 29] I have endured European Diplomatic History to prepare myself to teach World History as well as English. Mother is aware that history isn't really my meat & is laboring with me about the direction my life (i.e. taking and giving myself time to write poems). [After awhile of this] I blow up. Striding around the room, I tell her to start being somebody in her own right, and stop being a martyr. And let me live my life.
[At 30], I have been teaching high school English & history to college prep classes for 5 years. My career, not inner leadings, gives structure to my life. It has been satisfying to see students gain perspective on Cold War rhetoric through Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, & Pasternak, but I am overwhelmed with [broad teaching duties], & with heightened awareness of world power struggles, inequalities, & the UN's fragility. How are we responsible for tackling these problems? What are my self-expectations now that I see global injustice & waste of life?
Walking up the street in bewilderment, I catch sight of children smiling and playing. The smiling breaks open something inside me. I want to be with young children for a change. That summer, I take care of 2 adopted African-American sons, while their father goes overseas. At Pendle Hill in the fall, [I feel drawn to] Rainer Maria Rilke and Albert Camus; my term paper is about both/and. My soul's need is for a contemplative and a committed active life. In December, a poem emerges about the beckoning of my inner Godchild to take time.
What Then?—If I but gave/ the GodChild play within,/ if I but honored/ her ... shining in the dark/ cave of your eyes,/ if I meandered with her/ in the wilderness ... What then might well up wordlessly into healing?
I write an essay comparing writing a poem with [a message forming] in Meeting: "The poetic process can [cut through] the trite, the easy, the [wordy explanation]. It can help us to brave paradox, trust intuition, follow ... image [as long as we don't] offer images for their own sake ... One schooled in poetic discipline [can be pulled into and centered with a group, and be drawn] into a final, listening whole which lifts them without words."
I have come down into a deeper identification with mysticism. I do creative dramatics with ghetto children.
I AM: 32-38—[At 32] I am heading the English Department at Francis Parker in Chicago. I discuss deep questions in depth in small classes: When must an individual risk challenging authority? What moves people into committing crimes? How is racism oppressive to all? What are the pros & cons of having power? I am burdened by this prep school's privileged majority. My life isn't in tune with my deepest concerns; I have no partner to share them with me. I turn to therapy to sort things out.
[At 33] I am tramping with fellow Oberlinian, David Horn, through Chicago's Morton Arboretum, a wild place within a big city. He is listening to, identifying, imitating bird calls. He is not very subtly looking for a wife to live with him in some South Indian village, helping with agricultural development. Something inside me shifts and opens. [At 34], my husband David is sending out letter after letter seeking overseas work. We apply to an adoption agency in Manchester, NH. Meanwhile I am organizing and publicizing engagements for anti-Vietnam speakers. A number of the books Edith Hunter has written are about religious education from a child's perspective. She is a happy, productive homebody and mother. I may be able to let David carry the burden of social responsibility now with his hunger-fighting and give myself with clear conscience to family and writing.
[At 38], David is helping Senegalese villagers build a rice irrigation system, while I read a book on Southern sharecroppers. I am moved and know I also want to write about the lives of obscure folks who keep life going and lift each other up. I try to describe the people who touch me on our trips in the area. For the most part I am tied to the American compound with our daughter Becky. [At 39], I am raising vegetables and a lively pre-schooler in a house [near] an Ohio college town. I brood on my Africa story until a story emerges. What bears fruit besides the trees? I picture myself between my husband and his African counterpart, trying to come close to the real Africa through Etienne and finding his scorn of his [own culture] as barren as my husband's driven-ness. Through contact with neighbor women and the natural world, I glimpse something of real Africa's core vitality, but I know neither our family nor the educated Africans are meeting its need.
I AM: 42—We have been trying for 3 years to adopt a 2nd child; no white babies are available. We are open to a minority child; the farm we want is in an all-white school district. How am I too aware of pain, too sensitive to pitch in & make a go of this challenge? International development money is drying up for mid-level technicians like Dave; he stopped looking. This means I'm not off the hook anymore as the helpmate of a hunger fighter among the destitute. [There was little opportunity for social activism]. I am guided to propose a grant for a Community Learning Resources Project to enrich the underfunded schools in our Appalachian county.
The week I received a grant from the Jennings Foundation to direct the project, our local Children's Services changes its policy & offers us an 18-month old African-American son with an alcoholic parent; he will need considerable nurture. How can I best channel my love in the world, with my skills, or by parenting a 2nd child? I made the choice to mother 1 child & use the grant money. Through research, 3 of us created a directory of over 400 people, places & free stuff to improve learning. I am moved by healthy pride & warmth generated when we ask parents to help us make a 2-day local history museum; they bring local artifacts & photos. I made peace with my decision. My grant is renewed & I continue my work. I am constantly innovating, always moving.
I AM: 44-49—[At 44], In a Pendle Hill workshop called "Fairy Tales & Clay." I play the oldest son, [who offended a dwarf with the secret to getting water of life. I can't get water of life]; I can't meet expectations. I sculpt the youngest son in clay, sitting down in leisure to share with the dwarf. I hunger to strive less, to slow down, be more receptive, to glow with mutuality. [At 45], 8-year old Becky is feeding gulls at the beach, paying attention to the young, lame one. There is an emptiness in her we haven't filled. I am swept with helpless love.
[At 47], I help Dave with a cow we had to shoot, skin and quarter. I remember our Old Fashioned Recipe Book, which gives directions on butchering. It is an awesome thing to cut open the miracle of her body, to handle her steaming, intricate parts. I bond with David and the farm. [At 48], I have been teaching English in a rural high school for 2½ years and have just resigned. I haven't been sleeping because of too many course preparations, grading papers, discipline problems, on top of child-raising, housekeeping, food preserving, and farming. I am the daughter of a leader and sought-after speaker; I have a Masters from Harvard and am trying to lift up a downtrodden Appalachia; I can't make the grade. I call a nearby, Philadelphian and co-counselor, who listens, refers me to another counselor, and gives me the sense that everyone has dark nights of the soul.
I write a teaching story. Instead of finding rural students with special reverence for Nature, I find guys & gals who buck compulsory education, survive & even prevail in the system without reading or writing. I become newsletter editor & program coordinator at the local senior center. I work only ½-time to avoid being too encumbered to hear the spirit. I am more spacious inside; vocal ministry increases. I dialogue with inner voices & center through co-counseling & journaling. They keep me in touch with continuing revelations. [At 49], I am evaluated as having problems delegating & communicating with staff. [Years of independent activity must give way] to a team operation. [I am helped in this by a soulmate joining the team who is a breeze to communicate with].
I AM: 50-54—[At 50], my daughter is 14. I am close with women in the Feminism & Faith group. Many of us juggle too many roles, as spouses, parents, workers, teachers, caregivers, as well as self-care. I help plan a ritual in which we name & throw into the circle's center things obstructing spiritual growth. As "Kali," destroyer/ protector goddess, I trample obstructions underfoot. I am amazed at my strength of feeling in my dance, [& in] my writing of this experience for the new Quaker Friendly Woman magazine: "Kali's fierce image has become important to me as a Quaker woman ... When I gather myself to destroy calm, utter dark feelings to my husband or co-counselor ... & struggle through them ... new ways of [seeing] problems emerge ... I need to resist things threatening my inner leadings ... We need strong woman images to ... change [our fixed personal patterns]."
[At 51], our Meeting has grown & moved. I tend to prepare things for spoken sharing; I struggle to stop this. [At 52], my meeting promotes the issue of conscientious objector & alternative service. There is strong, negative reaction; brochures on that subject are barred from school. [At 53], I am in our pine woods to get cow pies to manure asparagus beds. As I bend & straighten, my body connects with East Indian & Native American women. We are part of the cycle & sacred dance, where everything has purpose & richness. [At 54], I look at needle as symbol in a workshop's guided meditation. In the 1st 3 Gospels, Jesus tells people it is as hard for a camel to go through a needle's eye as it is for a rich person to enter God's Kingdom. We live simply, but we have land, 2 rental houses & tax-free bonds. David is researching democratizing governmental processes & not worrying about breaking even. We budget to see how much we can give away. How much security do we deserve?
I AM 55—The local campus ministry is organizing a conference on women's spirituality. Women are coming from all over the Midwest. I revisit the Wedding at Cana that I presented 33 years ago, this time from a feminist perspective. Mary is the catalyst who sees the need for more wine and moves Jesus from reticence to engagement. Her voice affirms that the Spirit working through him can find a new way to fill their need. The servant voice is the body speaking, willing to be up and doing once direction is clear. [A prayer is formed: May we see how plain well water of our lives is full of the essence of celebration and can fill our emptiness. It suggests the line from the old hymn: There is a fountain that living freshness brings. We sing the hymn and drink toasts to groups in our communities that we believe can find the power of the Spirit and develop new rituals.
I meet with the local ministerial association. I suggest they raise with & educate their adult Sunday school classes in the issues of the nuclear war threat & military spending; they have never met a pacifist before. Their queries are: How would you react to Hitler or Communists who don't believe in God & seek to take over the world? How would you address the fact that the National Council of Churches are totally out of touch with the grass roots? [How would you honor men who were drafted & shed their blood to protect freedom of worship]? They don't believe that Jesus forgave those who don't believe in God; they talked of "deterrence," "a big stick," & "the only language Communists understand." One pastor says he is stretched too thin with every-day pastoral duties. The priests say parishioners are only there for mass; no one commits themselves to anything. What is each clergyman's personal [story]? I have joined the fray & am using all my powers.
I AM: Still 55—I go on a Women's Peace March to protest nuclear build up. Military spending is sapping funds for 3rd World agricultural development. [Images of] African women pounding down their next season's seed corn into meal to survive & a banner showing an ear of corn with a fetus inside [come together in a poem]:
Seed Corn—It is the evening/ to freeze corn./ Dark silk, ears/ angling from the stalks,/ the kernels full/ of thin, sweet milk./ I strip the husks/ by lamplight on the stoop, the treetoads trilling.// In my mind's eye,/ one of the banners/ made to honor life/ and ring the Pentagon/ on Hiroshima Day/ is a fetus as brown as earth/ stitched snug inside/ an ear of yellow corn.// My sister, with your needle,/ piercing heavy cloth,/ bearer of seed/ the bombs could blast away,/ your image swells/ inside me, making me strong.///
In my mind's eye/ children whimper on a mat/ while black hands grasp/ a pestle,/ frail arms raise it.// high above a heap of seed corn/ in a mortar,/ falter, lower it,/ swiftly scoop out/ 1 small handful,/ pound the rest,/ the precious kernels into meal.// My sister, with your pestle/ striking hollow sounds,/ keeper of lives/ the ruthless race for weapons/ steals away,/ your small, swift/ saving gesture/ burns inside me,/ making us one.// The moon climbs high,/ the water boils./ I blanch the yellow ears,/ cut off kernels,/ scoop them into sacks/ and carry out the cobs/ to feed the cows.///
My sisters,/ round in circles/ turn the years/ of sowing, weeding,/ storing, feeding./ Always empty stomach/ needing us, the loving/ life sustainers,/ us the kernels/ ground and eaten.// Still, we bear/ the seed of knowing./ We know danger./ We are seers./ We are heeders./ Stitching, linking,/ sparing, sharing./ We must not grow weary./ We must not fall silent.// We bear seed corn/ meant for planting./ Down in darkness/ we will sprout/ and spring up. We will not be daunted./ We will not be pounded/ into meal.////
People point me to J. Macy's Despair & Personal Power in the Nuclear Age. I use her group exercises & join Interhelp, her peace workers' support group, with its] press releases, newsletters, talk shows & phone calls.
I AM 56—In a dream, I am driving through Carbondale, [where I heard a real-life story] of a mother with 12 children and an alcoholic, mostly unemployed husband. [My dream reveals] my old bike in a trashy vacant lot, with a foundling baby in its basket. My dream symbolizes Vaundell Johnson's stories of coal town women that need my attention, and need to be raised up and honored. It haunts me for 2 years before I heed it.
I attend an Arts for Peace workshop at the Ohio Nuclear Weapons Freeze Conference. An artist there says, "You need to hammer home the main points, interpreting them again & again. I go dead inside with this repetition, even though I believe in the cause." At a "Demon Party," a friend & I come dressed as Over-responsibility. The friend wears long lists & I carry a huge sack. There is value in being responsive, but I have trouble setting limits. We save small pieces of our costumes and burn the rest.
My sister sends me a calligraphed quote from Thomas Merton: "[Activism & overwork] is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist fighting for peace non-violently most easily succumbs ... it kills inner wisdom." I admit to activist/ therapist Sandra Boston de Silva the pressure I feel to be a "key person" in the peace movement, & feelings of staleness. She helps me redefine "key person" as one who can unlock people's hearts with writing & listening. I seek to: reach to where the world is breathing; speak from the core; have small, slow loyalties; rocking & rejoicing. I need time to write, to spend time with Becky, my parents, & in-laws.
I AM 57—I fear that in peace work I will lose my capacity for creative writing. I fear poets are self-centered, unbalanced, elitist, irrelevant. 30 years ago, I affirmed the leading that an angry Jewish refugee woman had to reconnect with her Gentile mother, who had disowned her. My efforts to support her searched me to the core. My mother's gifts [to her meeting] are listening to struggles, asking loving questions, and affirming the deepest thing in another. I decide to go into training to be a therapist.
I am meeting regularly with a spiritual partner and taking community counseling classes at Ohio U. I find myself coming up against the assumption that the goal is to be "in charge" of your life. I find my self committed to listening for guidance from the Inner Light, not "taking charge." [Now] when I speak of being "in charge," I mean walking in the Light with my deep center in charge, not outward demands.
I AM 57 & Interlocked—I sit with Dave's mother Flora on their back porch. Dad Horn is dying of Parkinson's; she is his sole caregiver. She celebrates small triumphs & groans about complicated bills to pay. Our similarities snap into focus. We forge a new comradeship that sees us through Dad's long dying. I write poems.
Interlocked—I like to rest my eyes/ on the chair you salvaged/ ... from neighbor's trash/ & caned to give to me.// It looks like you,/ straightforward sturdy,/ stripped to essentials./ Grain stands out .../ layered like years/ of living stratified in rock.// Fibers of the seat/ are tough & tightly woven/ as your hold on life,/ determined as you are/ it not be wasted.// I remember you learned/ to cane so you could save/ this chair, learned/ to soak strips/ 'til they would bend,/ bending stiff fingers,/ bending your will to do/ what you with effort/ still could do.
and in the process/ bonding with the rooted tree,/ the cane that carried sap,/ the craftsman turning spindles/ on his lathe and rounding/ the knobs that grace the top/ like 2 plump apples.// It was a way you found/ to save yourself,/ weaving your life/ into the lives of those/ who once sat down ... on this chair// and those of us to come/ who will sit here/ to lace our shoes up,/ peel potatoes, weep,/ watch sunsets burning,/ hold a child/ and feast together.// You ... see shapeliness/ of things and rescue them,/ are interlocked with us/ in saving patterns/ we hold onto/ sure as loving, true/ as going with the grain.////
I AM: 58-60—[While I am 58] Dad is writing a bare bones chronology for his autobiography. We want his story of inner growing, not realizing he has Alzheimer's. Mom needs to write her spiritual autobiography, but hasn't the strength to write it. She agrees to tell it to me on tape from the central questions I will ask; it is a time of deep sharing. There is power in her remembered dreams, golden Bible texts, role models, efforts in community, & late-blooming self-confidence & feistiness. The spirit speaking to me from a 2-year old dream gives me energy to draft a grant proposal to research & share life stories of women from local mining towns ["... Reminiscences of Athens County Coaltown Women: 1900-50"]; it is a dramatic narrative & a dedicated team effort.
[At 60], I am floored that I am doing a "mental health assessment" on a 72-year old suicidal, alcoholic stroke victim who has had her leg [& life] amputated. She has lost husband, son, & grandson in the past decade. She wants to go to a river bottom & never come up. I tell her how moved I am that she is still here, being herself, not masking anything. The truth that she is still herself although her body is different, leaps from my center to her center. By the time I emerge, her spirit has moved her from lostness to reconnection with her "Christ-angel."
I AM: 61-62—[At 61], I am a visiting teacher of writing at Pendle Hill, numb, exhausted, & monotone from helping my daughter Anne deal with her husband Paul's death from a heart attack. I remember her late night agony about what else she should have done to save him. [I have memories of the 4 days with Anne, & of Paul with his daughter Becky years before]. Finally I can cry. My student/ friend tells me the community has suggested a Meeting for Healing to share my loss with me. During the gathering in Upmeads' living room, I am strangely fixed on a slice of pumpernickel Anne cut for Paul when they thought it was just heartburn. A strong conviction comes to me that Paul felt her caring as he died, that the reaching out we do matters, whether or not it does what we want it to do; I wrote a poem about it. I felt the Pendle Hill community channeling Spirit that night.
David has been diagnosed with Parkinson's. David becomes urgent to complete a book on eliminating the gerrymandering of political districts; he withdraws into his work, but emerges for quiet evenings, weeding together, or hiking together to enjoy birds and wild flowers. Our tenderness toward the earth and toward each other quickens. We are finding our way together into unknown territory.
[At 62], I have a Masters now in Community Counseling. I work hours of supervised experience in order to earn my counseling license. My doctor tells me I have bladder cancer. The Helen planning for a meaningful professional future in counseling, who visualized caring for a husband with Parkinson's, who could take body, diet, & energy for granted, is in need of care herself, as I go through immunotherapy & drink carrot juice. Creatures which seem like totems come in poems [with wisdom like] "Submit," "Honor the beast of burden (body) who has carried your mind & spirit so far," "Give over leaping upstream," "Rest like a pupa until wings grow."
Agape—Have I given out?/ Bucked current,/ fought upstream,/ leapt falls, released/ my roe, and now/ gone slack/ in some back water/ near the source?// Is that the way I'll go?/ Frayed fins and faded/ glow, pale ragged tail/ that barely wavers,/ body slowing drifting, bumping roots/ and rocks, awash?// I am not bound./ I have no cycle/ like the salmon/ where I have to/ head for home/ and spawn and die.///
I am not spent./ I am too lithe/ & limber yet/ to let some clumsy/ bear wade in/ & catch me/ as I flop.// But maybe I/ must flip/ into some new and nameless shape,/ and let the current/ carry me downstream/ again to the ocean.// There I see myself/ in school with many,/ all agape and slowly/ heaving, turning,/ feeding, learning/ how to sink and rise/ with tides,/ and rock and rest/ within the very bosom/ of the deep.////
My 60-member Meeting holds me in the Light; 2 members with cancer share things to read & perspective. My separateness is blurring. I am merging with fellow strugglers, searching for leadings, pooling our wisdom to keep afloat and reach out to the world. I keep on counseling as a volunteer for Hospice, a women's support group, elderly clients. I am drawn to younger people who stir memories of struggling. Cancer frees me to be a free child of God. [For a while] I avoid my old spiritual partner, but I finally call her to plan a walk. The fathers of 4 of us in meeting have died this winter. I am energized to plan a goofy April Fool's Day retreat, co-led by a dozen of us with a gift for play. My cancer goes into remission, and [I have hopes of more writing and marketing it]. I am unemployed. Lake Erie YM invites me to do a life review, to be pump primer for others' recollections of their spiritual journeys. Ecclesiastes writes, "Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might."
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332 The Burning One-ness Binding Everything: A Spiritual Journey (by Bruce Birchard; 1997)
About the Author—Bruce Birchard has served Friends on the Peace Committee of Philadelphia YM, National Coordinator of the Disarmament Program (American Foreign Service Committee; AFSC), as Friends General Conference (FGC) General Secretary. He got involved in the anti-war movement, [became a conscientious objector (CO)] and did alternate service. This pamphlet is based upon addresses given to Baltimore YM ('94), Philadelphia YM ('95), Southeastern YM (96), as a witness to the movement of the Spirit in his life.
There is a Spirit Which I Feel (by Kenneth Boulding)—Can I, imprisoned, body-bound, touch/ The starry garment of the Over-soul,/ Reach from my tiny part to the great Whole,/ And spread my Little to the Infinite Much,/ When Truth forever slips from out my clutch,/ And what I take indeed, I do but dole/ In cupfuls from a rimless ocean-bowl/ That holds a million million million such? ... some Thing [of] the cosmos [and] Law/ Moves too in me: a hunger, a quick thaw/ Of soul ... As I ... of creation, sing/ The burning one-ness binding everything.
INTRODUCTION—I grew up in a small-town Presbyterian church, went to college in '63, lost my Christian faith, felt openings to the Spirit, & found Quakers. I joined Friends, became a pacifist, a CO, worked for Philadelphia YM, & AFSC, in support of peace & disarmament; I learned from 2 bouts of cancer. The religious Society of Friends is at risk of becoming a social Society of Friends. [Besides] personal growth, & testimonies, we must strengthen & deepen spiritual lives, personally & corporately. Our meetings can only be vital if we find, & seek to understand, experiences of the Spirit. Childhood beliefs about God & Jesus no longer made sense.
My journey has been both experiential & intellectual. I am in the Christian tradition, though by Christian creedal definition, I'm not one. I know there are many paths to God, but I haven't explored them; Christianity and universalism are not mutually exclusive. [My] 3 paths to the Spirit are: beauty; love; and worship. I find [certain] contemporary theological writings relevant to the spiritual and moral struggles of our time, and of my own soul.
My images of God are not the traditional western images of God. [The poem above] comes very close to expressing my "cupful of Truth" about the Spirit. "The burning one-ness binding everything" is an important name for the Spirit. Some say unprogrammed Friends base our faith so thoroughly on [individual], direct experience of the Spirit that [we can't] understand one another. A wise Friend said: "Our experiences of God's Spirit differ, but any true experience of God includes a convincement of the unity of all in that Spirit." [The name of God I shared] gives me faith that we indeed have a basic unity only by sharing our religious experience. If we keep them to ourselves, we shall diminish our religious society to the vanishing point.
EXPERIENCING THE SPIRIT: Beauty—In 1967, I had been snowshoeing through the White Mountains of New Hampshire. We climbed Mt. Garfield, traversed a long ridge and dropped into a narrow valley. That night I walked alone to the stream which tumbled down a rocky face under ice and snow. High above the surrounding peaks, the wind tore at the clouds, pulling them to shreds, blowing them fiercely off to the east. A full moon rose over the eastern ridge, backlighting the cloud-shreds to a luminescent white. Awe and comfort both overwhelmed me. I am one with this marvelous, Spirit-filled, beauty throbbing creation.
I have often felt estranged from my concept of "God." My hunger to return to the mountains, rivers & streams, to the tree and meadows, is a hunger for the Spirit. The forests are temples for me. On mountaintops, I feel closer to the Spirit when surrounded by Beauty. I am often moved by experiences so many kinds of art and music (jazz and both Western and Asian classical). We have all been moved by beauty. When this happens, we're responding to God's Spirit-filled creation. Beauty in any of its multitudinous forms is only a short step from the contemplation of beauty to the expansion of spiritual consciousness.
Love—I experience love in very specific terms: with friends, for strangers, and even at times, "enemies." Demie Kurz & I share so much with each other, but we are still distinct individuals; we aren't "2 peas in a pod." Good times are a part of love, but it's the trials & struggles that forge the closest bonds. We've always felt a commitment not to walk away, to hang in there until the intense heat subsides. We have each helped the other make profound changes, but only while being reassured of the basic acceptance, the foundation of love, that underlies it. [Every crisis worked through left behind] good feelings, and a stronger relationship. Among our strengths was our interest in [constant dialog about our children and even the other's parental behavior]; this wasn't always easy to hear. Now, we are working with our teenage sons to help them build respectful relationships of equals.
[Demie's] love helped me deal with the most terrible fear I have ever known. I will never forget the 1,000 volts of fear which seared me when my doctor said he could not rule out malignancy of the lumps I found on my neck. Demie said that I should call Stephanie, who was a neighbor and a skilled co-counselor that I had used before. I shared my fears with her about losing my grasp on myself, so overwhelmed was I with the fear of cancer. After I broke down & sobbed for 45 minutes, Stephanie made herself totally available to me. The next morning, I know that I had to acknowledge and experience my fear, and go all the way into it. [Friends from all over supported and prayed for me]. After chemotherapy and remission, I began to recognize the grace I had found. I had learned so much and my spirit was stronger. I have experienced such love over and over, throughout my life; such love is a manifestation of the Spirit mediated through those closest to me. If you have never experienced true love for the world, or for other people, or for something outside yourself, you can't love God.
Worship—I had to work at worshiping. It doesn't come for me with bells & whistles or visions of God. [I did a lot of thinking in meetings for worship, about] events and people in my life, the suffering in the world and my problems; I was not going deeply into a direct encounter with the living Spirit. John Punshon said that it takes work and continued with: "Get a good coach. Work at it. And know that you'll fail frequently and never be as good as you want to be." [I did that] and I began to understand that the Spirit is all around me, within me.
Traditional Javanese music theory holds that music is always in the air, around us. That's how it is with the Spirit. I am always in the Presence; I need spiritual disciplines to help me hear it. In a centered, peaceful place, I'm beginning to feel an acceptance of what is. I'm genuinely holding people in the Light. I often imagine the Spirit as a stream, flowing constantly around & through me. I'm learning to launch myself into the stream of Spirit, to flow with it, to feel it supporting me as I ride the rapids & face life's dangers, fears, beauty & wonder.
How do I know that this experience of the Spirit is real? The inward and outward lives make a whole, with the Spirit transforming my actions; they are 2 aspects of the same experience. It led me to 2 years of struggle with Selective Service, alternate service as a CO, and giving up graduate school and an academic career. As I learn more skillfully to sense the Spirit within and without me, I find myself more often in a place of calm and peace and joy. I'm easier to live with when I'm centered; I live easier with myself. [Transformation of ourselves and the world around us] is how we all judge whether or not others, and we ourselves are living in the Spirit.
UNDERSTANDING THE SPIRIT—In my spiritual life, I had to go beyond the immediate experience. I feel compelled to understand this Spirit's nature, which is a spiritual & an intellectual effort; there is no clear line between the 2. [I share the fruits of my efforts to understand, because failure to understand, to share our experiences & understandings of the Spirit, can only impoverish us. Within theologically diverse meetings, we require radical openness to divergent experiences & views. I hope to contribute to our collective experience and wisdom.
I am careful about using the word "God," because of the traditional Christian concept of God. Elizabeth Watson said: "God is vaster and deeper than anything we conceive of, and it is presumptuous of us to try to name God." The God Moses encountered refused to be defined by a name. I too cannot define God. The term "Spirit" is more flexible, open-ended than "God." We can only think and talk about God metaphorically, with images which are meaningful pointers to God's true nature. [We need to be] flexible in our metaphors for God, just as Friends have been, and continually develop new images and models of God which are appropriate to our times and understanding of the universe. They should be relevant to the great moral and social issues of our day.
When I worship, when I go to the center in meditation, I feel the Spiritual Stream's power as it washes over through me, & I am filled with inner peace & joy. The Stream courses through all creation; it is a loving & creative power that can dramatically affect our lives. I don't dialog, argue with, supplicate, or "pray to" God. We must take ourselves to the stream, kneel down & cup our hands to drink it. Marcus Borg describes the traditional Christian concepts based on Enlightenment thinking of God as a disinterested deity or an occasionally intervening supernatural God as: "Both are products of the Enlightenment, which removed God from the world. Both ... image God as separate from the world ... [&] stress belief in & affirmation of an [unavailable] God." Borg describes a mystical understanding of God as: "God becomes an experiential reality. In the Jewish tradition, God can be known in that direct & intimate way, not merely believed in ... God isn't ... remote & transcendent creator, but [rather] all around us, "the one in whom we live & move & have our being" [Acts 17:28].
A Creation-Centered Theology—Sallie McFague disagrees with the traditional Christian model & metaphors, with the world as a mechanical apparatus, & God as a fixer under the metaphors of "King," "Lord," "Master," "Almighty Father"; these are inappropriate for today. Obedience & homage is expected, rather than love & joy. [Mechanical, hierarchical, & dualistic language is inappropriate today. We wonderful humans are: [co-stewards, co-caretakers, co-trustees], co-creators and partners with God. [Everyone and everything else] depends on us for survival, and the creation of a holy blessed community, traditionally called "the kingdom of God."
The relationship between God and the created universe is an intimate one "in which all things have their origins in God and nothing exists outside of God." We err in seeing the world as sinful; many abuse the earth and its creatures as a result of this error. We err in focusing on salvation rather than creation. Annie Dillard writes: "From 1/106 of a gram of matter, unimaginable unity [before the Big Bang], has evolved unimaginable [numbers] and diversity, not only in the vast galactic realms of the universe ... but also, in equally inconceivable ways, on our planet." All of us, life and inanimate things, are all made from "the ashes of dead stars." God, in some manner unknowable to us exists "beyond" the universe which we know. God is "embodied" to us in the universe. Here we can, in part, know God. [The Spirit by itself is too abstract]. The world, with its beauty and love, as the Spirit's incarnation or embodiment stirs in me the feeling of immanence which I seek.
Suffering & Evil—Any thinking about God must include consideration of evil & the terrible reality of [all creation's] suffering. In the peace & justice movement with Philadelphia YM & the AFSC, I had to face a global reality of hatred & violence; Demie & I visited Auschwitz in 1979. The death camp in Auschwitz, (Birkenau), was a mile-square factory designed & operated by educated engineers, architects & administrators to kill people quickly. Within 18 months, some 2,000,000 people, more than Philadelphia's population, were ["processed"].
How could God stand by and permit such suffering, or the long history of suffering? Of the 3 who had cancer the same time I did, why did only 1 other survive? Job was right to keep asking, "How could you do this to me, a righteous man? People of faith have been doing their best to answer these questions for millennia.
God simply does not intervene directly in human history. God is the power in the universe's creation, evolution, worship, love, and beauty. I align myself with the God stream's current, and I emerge from it cleansed and calmed; it is not in the nature of a stream to relieve suffering. None of the traditional explanations for how God could allow Rabbi Harold Kushner's son to die from a rare and terrible disease, spoke to Kushner in his grief and anger. He was convinced God could not intervene as suggested by traditional Christian-Jewish theology.
[God's Martyrs & the Devil's Martyrs]—Some terrible suffering destroys people, making it impossible for them to find the Spirit. Others, in the midst of terrible anguish & suffering, find incredible strength, courage, & love. Dorothea Soelle asks: "How does our suffering serve God or serve the devil, the cause of becoming alive or of being morally paralyzed? Where does my suffering lead?" The forces of despair & disbelief have their martyrs, the "devil's martyrs," where a death weakens other people's faith in God & God's world. It isn't the circumstances of their death that makes a sufferer witness for or against God. It is our reaction to their death.
The facts of life & death are neutral. We, by our responses give suffering a positive or a negative meaning. [The witness to suffering transforms the sufferer into God's or the devil's martyr, making witness & sufferer either bitter, jealous, joyless, against all religion, or stronger, more loving & joyful. Evil is a separation from the Spirit. It is a terrible, tragic ignorance of the love, beauty & power that is the Spirit. The Spirit is always available; it does not act on its own in response to tragedies; it cannot intervene directly to make everything all right.
JESUS & CHRISTIANITY—The notion that a loving father would deliberately send his son to excruciating torture & death, doesn't make sense to me. The Religious Society of Friends & I are both solidly within the Christian tradition. I know of Christians who are filled with the Spirit, whose inner peace is outwardly evident, and that I must return to my roots & give Jesus a new try. I now recognize Jesus as [flesh & blood], a great rabbi, prophet, & teacher, who was grounded in the Spirit, who expressed God's fundamental reality. It is a great tragedy that Christ becomes elevated to such a high extent, that he is now inaccessible except as an object of worship.
For Marcus Borg, Jesus was a man who knew God intimately, through a deep, direct experience of God, whom he called "Abba." The "Prodigal Son" contradicts conventional wisdom of the day, which rewards duty & diligence. The father rejoices & celebrates with the lost son who has returned home in a display of God's love for the lowest of the low. The dominant message of 1st-century Judaism was like Hinduism of the caste system, with holiness based on purity & avoiding the unclean, [be it food or folk]. Jesus fought the interpretation of what it meant to be a good Jew & confronted the established church's hypocrisy [Mark 7:6-7; 18-22 cited].
Jesus knew that Israel's salvation could only come if the Israelites returned to God, whom he had experienced as a God of compassion, of love. Jesus loved all people. The scandalous nature of his associations [would today include] drug dealers, child abusers, arms merchants, the Posse Comitas. Jesus said these were the people who needed him, and that God loved them. Jesus believed that the only way for Israel to avert the catastrophe he saw looming on the horizon was to create the loving, compassionate "kingdom of God."
Jesus accepted the terrible torture of crucifixion out of love and compassion, demonstrating to everyone that he was prepared to suffer even the agony of the cross out of love for them, and for all people. Albert Nolan writes: "To save one's life means to hold onto it, to live it and be attached to it and therefore to fear death. To lose one's life is to let go of it, to be detached from it & therefore to be willing to die [for people rather than a cause]. Jesus did not go to his terrible death in order to start Christianity, or to fulfill some prophecy, or to save the world from sin. He accepted it because it was simply a terrible consequence of the compassionate way he lived with the people and world he loved, a demonstration of how selfless divine love can be. It was not love for some abstract or future world, but for the world and the people he knew and cared for.
Jesus' Life & Creation-Centered Theology—What might "loving things in particular, [in order to] love the world" have to do with today's understanding of the world as interdependent? Sallie McFague extends Jesus' inclusive love for all to all creation. Nature is "the new poor," abused & exploited by modern men & women. Suffering & oppression includes animals, plants & the earth itself in her understanding of Jesus' life & message. Extending Jesus' example of concern for physical healing as well as "spiritual" salvation to all creation, his ministry of healing should lead to work for healing all. We should understand that all creation, even the least of it is included in divine love. McFague believes that God doesn't cause tragedies, isn't directly responsible for suffering, but that "God is with us in the consequences." God is with us in suffering, because all parts of creation, are parts of God's body. The good of some will occur at others' expense; God cares about all victims.
Marcus Borg suggests a transformist understanding of the Christian life: "... a journey of transformation ... that leads from life under the lordship of culture to the life of companionship ... relationship with God. That relationship ... transforms us into more and more compassionate beings, into the likeness of Christ." This understanding truly speaks to my condition. I can be transformed. Recognizing the essential unity of all creation, I can extend my love in practical ways to the entire earth and everything within and upon it, [without exception].
THE BURNING ONE-NESS—Where does the potential for transformation leave me on my journey? I understand the Spirit to be the power within the creation and evolution of the universe, and as creative, responsive love, binding together all that exists within the universe, into one blessed "kingdom of God." We are all one in creation. I sense our spiritual unity, as human sisters and brothers, and in the entire creation, when I worship. In the deepest sense, my individuality is an illusion. When we feel separated from the Spirit, when we feel separated from each other, and from the earth and the universe, we are living in sin. Only when we feel separate from the earth and all life on it can we go on destroying it. When we experience the Spirit, we feel a marvelous sense of oneness, of connectedness with everyone and everything else. Even facing suffering, death, and evil, if we can open ourselves to the Spirit, we will be reconnected through the Spirit's love.
When we truly live in the Spirit, we must work for the relief of suffering, for liberation from all oppressions, for justice, peace, and the integrity of creation. God needs our hands and hearts to carry on this work, to save each other, and the earth itself. The ultimate test of our response to the Inward Work of Christ lies in how we relate after worship to our fellow human beings and to all things in God's creation; it is how we live it. [As we join together in our different understandings of God's nature], in love to ride the turbulent currents of life, to witness the living Spirit's love and power, we will truly experience "The burning one-ness binding everything."
APPENDIX: "Get a Good Coach—In order to "get a good coach," I have 3 suggestions: get involved in the wider world of Quakerism; read books & pamphlets; involve Friends around you in new worship experiences, in reflections, & in study. Attend sessions of your yearly meetings, & the Friends General Conference (FGC) Gathering, take workshops, get to know more Friends. Invite seasoned Friends to lead a workshop or retreat at your monthly or quarterly meeting. FGC & Pendle Hill have programs that provide speakers and retreat leaders.
Much of my coaching has come through books and pamphlets. Most of these books and pamphlets are available through the FGC Bookstore. Pamphlets are available from Pendle Hill, FGC, the Quaker Universalist Group (England), Quaker Universalist Fellowship (USA) & other Quaker publishers. Among the authors important to my journey are Parker Palmer, John Punshon, Daniel Seeger, William Taber, and Elizabeth Watson.
Seek out a "spiritual Friend" in your meeting with whom you can regularly share your spiritual journey (See "Sharing Our Journey," from Philadelphia YM's Quaker Studies Program). Start a special worship group or Bible study class for people with a particular interest or concern. Arrange for a workshop or leader for your meeting from FGC Religious Education Program or "Pendle Hill on the Road."
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[Introduction]—I am having to read what I want to say to you. At my age this seems to be necessary. I am going to speak about "traveling in" and about my own personal journey. My early religious experience was typical of that of many young Protestants. At 14 I was deeply moved by a young evangelist and joined the Methodist Church; I transferred to a Presbyterian Church to save a mile of walking. Finally, I went to an Evangelical and Reformed Church to play my slide trombone in their Sunday School orchestra.
I studied agriculture with a potato specialty at what is now Michigan State University. My 3rd year I decided to take a year off. I taught at a high school and joined the county agriculture agent at night in trips to remote parts of the county. I got the growing sense that this was not the work I was put on earth for. I went to Harvard to study philosophy. Instead of giving a longed-for frame for my faith and experience, my study of philosophy at Harvard wiped out what little faith I had. I wished that I could have a decisive [conversion] experience such as a fellow student had, but it has never come to me. I participated with a silent prayer group; it was at noonday sessions of silence that I began to pray again. The renewal that came to me through silent prayer, and the sense of God's guidance grew as I tried to be faithful to what came during these [sessions] of prayer.
[Pursuing Philosophy: Study and Quakerism]—At 2 in the morning, I knelt in prayer and asked for guidance, whether I should take examinations to pursue philosophy. I was led to go into each of the 4 examinations with a quiet mind, write what I could and accept the outcome. Some weeks later, I was notified that I had passed the comprehensives and needed to choose an acceptable thesis and take language tests to fulfill requirements for the doctorate program.
At Oxford I met a Quaker doctor named Henry Gillet; he became & remained a friend for the rest of his life. With an Oxford reading group I encountered a silent Quaker meeting; for the 1st time I felt the power of Christ's indwelling spirit & experienced a "gathered" or "covered" meeting. Dr. Gillet set up a meeting with Rufus Jones at Haverford College, from which I became Jones' junior colleague & taught philosophy at Haverford for the rest of my professional life. I decided to write a doctoral thesis on the Catholic Baron von Hügel's writings.
I came to know Evelyn Underhill, an Anglican under Von Hügel's spiritual direction. She writes: "[In the breast of every person] ordinary contemplation is open to all men and women. Without it they are not wholly conscious or alive ... The spring of the amazing energy which enables the great mystic to rise to freedom and dominate his world is extant in all of us, an integral part of our humanity." She had not had the major experiences that marked the great mystics, but she did have a "slowing down." She wrote and led many retreats in an ancient retreat house in Pleshey, Essex during the closing 15 years of her life.
I came to Haverford College in 1928 not as one dramatically transformed, but rather as one who knew something about what a contemporary Quaker, Elizabeth Vining, calls "minor ecstasies." I hope that my life is one that goes on experiencing a continuous conversion. I married Dorothy Steere in 1929, and we then non-Quakers were included with a little group of Quakers who in 1930 established Pendle Hill (PH).
I found in Doctor Henry T. Hodgkin, a British Quaker doctor who spent 25 years in China, & PH's 1st director, the greatest Christian I had ever come to know intimately. Each morning Henry spent an hour divided between the silent time of inward listening & prayer, reading some devotional classic, & writing in a daybook the insights & concerns that had come to him. The social concern we acted on through the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) was feeding children in western Pennsylvania's & West Virginia's mining region.
Early on, Dorothy and I were reluctant to join the Quakers, until we read John Woolman's Journal, where we found someone who lived in the world as we did, who supported his family and his journey by his own labor as we meant to do, and someone in whom the Inner Guide had brought together and laid upon him both inward tendering and a concern for his fellows that he fully carried out in his life. We agreed that the time had come for us to throw in our lot with the Quakers. During the 1960's, we attended 3 sessions of Vatican Council and with Father Godfrey Diekmann founded the Ecumenical Institute of Spirituality, for Protestant and Catholic scholars.
I met Dr. Maria Schlüter-Hermkes in 1931, & she encouraged me to come to Germany to explore the world of German Roman Catholic spirituality. In due time I was taken to meet the famous Abbot Herwegen of the Benedictine Maria Laach monastery. The Abbot saw salvation in being part of a family or a community & not by any private nurturing. He sent me as a companion & spiritual guide Father Damasus Winzen, a young monk near my own age. Father Damasus was to become one of the most beloved friends of my life. He later came to the US to see where Maria Laach might be lodged should the Nazis drive them out of Germany; he stayed here. At the end of his life he said: "I see quite clearly that I owe my present inner happiness, my peace, my confidence and my joy ... [to being] certain that I am infinitely loved by God." Through Maria Schlüter-Hermkes, I met some of the great German spirits in the Roman Catholic Community in 1933-34: Alois Zempf; Theodore Hecker; Dr. Scheinung; Joseph Bernhardt; and Romano Guardini; I had evenings with the last one mentioned in his home.
[Writing Books on Prayer & How to Pray]—An old lady in Solebury, PA gave me board & room weekends & the use of a table in an ancient woodshed. There I wrote Prayer & Worship in 1937. Under the title Dimensions of Prayer I enlarged the 1st book in 1962. I am sympathetic with using meditation practices that still the mind & relax the body; they are "vestibule exercises." It makes a difference if I enter it in awareness that I am besieged by & immersed in love that is without qualification, instead of immediately projecting prayer. Mei-ster Eckhart says, "God is foolishly in love with me. He seems to have forgotten heaven & earth & deity. His entire business is with me alone, to give me everything, to comfort me, ... suddenly ... wholly ... perfectly ... to all creatures ... Why are you not aware of [God's giving]? Because you aren't at home in the soul's inmost center." Bernard of Clairvaux says, "You will always be rash if you attribute any priority or any predominant share to yourself. For [God] loves both more than you & before you love at all."
It makes a difference to enter prayer with a deep consciousness of the divine initiative. It continues during prayer & undergirds my very life when I turn from conscious prayer to other daily tasks. That love has been laid over the world for its healing long before I came; I simply enter into the ongoing stream. [In this stream] there is: adoration & thankfulness; contrition & yielding; petition & intercession; & [especially] listening for the biddings that are laid upon us by the Inward Guide. Paul Claudel says, "All prayer is simply thankfulness that God is."
[Meeting for Worship]—[I must say something about meeting for worship to] explain the Quaker union of God's guiding hand in our lives & the "holy nudges" & concerns laid on us for services beyond meeting doors. [Vocal ministry is always a possibility], although it is common for the hour to pass in complete silence. It has given me specific things to be done & the strength to do them ... or rimless concerns that are kept before me until they come to some degree of clarity ... It has changed my mind when I didn't mean to change. It has firmed me up when I might have yielded ... It has scarified me & broken down the hull of my life & shown me how I might live ... It isn't what I give that makes me suffer, but what I hold back. My mind has wandered like a hummingbird on holiday ... & I have felt moments of intensity and concentration and awareness of what life could be like."
Donald Court says, "There are times to reach down to a level where I can ... be taught how to respond instead of to react, how to open the road to a spirit blocked by busyness, self-importance, ... self-pity, & depression." Occasionally in meeting for worship, we seem to be taken beyond ourselves & instead of praying, once in a while we were to be prayed in. The London Russian Orthodox Archbishop Anthony Bloom describes these moments where effortful prayer is meant to stop & where the gift of the effortless sense of the Presence appears.
Bloom instructed an old lady who had never perceived God's presence to tidy up her room & then: "look around & try to see where you live because I am sure ... it's a long time since you have really seen your room. Then take your knitting & for 15 minutes knit before God's face ... without saying any prayer ... just knit & try to enjoy the peace of your room." The response he later got was: "I began to knit & I became more & more aware of the silence. Needles hit the arm of the chair & the clock was ticking peacefully, & there was nothing to bother about ... The silence around began to come & meet the silence in me & all of a sudden I perceived that the silence was a presence & at the heart of the silence there was one who is all stillness & all peace & all parts."
[Attentiveness and Obedience]—William James says: "All about our working consciousness, parted from it by filaments of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different ... If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is—infinite." Along with the gift of presence there seems to come, now to this person & now to that, "holy nudges"—tasks & concerns that need to be undertaken. Corporate meeting for worship is of special importance in initiating & in dealing with them. Since a shunned or neglected task forces God to adjust God's strategy, my response may have cosmic consequences. Thomas Mann said: "I would say that religiousness is attentiveness & obedience." Unless attentiveness is linked to obedience, a deeper bond is missing. Adrian von Spier writes: "Once open to the light one may ask God to claim one more essentially & profoundly, ... on condition that one doesn't refuse the 1st small act that God demands of one."
3 strong voices from the 17th century underline both the guides laying on us specific things to be done as well as the promptness required in carrying out these inward directions.
Francois de Sales: Devotion is the promptitude, fervor, affection, and agility which we show in the service of God, [who] requires a faithful fulfillment of the merest trifle given us ... rather than ... ardent aspiration to things to which we are not called.
` Isaac Penington: There is that near you which will guide. Wait for it and be sure to keep to it.
Augustine Baker: Mind your call. That's all in all.
[My example of answering a call to service is that of] Emma Noble, wife of a foreman in Oxford's locomotive works. In the 1920's, South Wales coal mining areas had appalling unemployment and misery. [In meeting for worship she felt called to] visit this area and see if there was anything Quakers could do. A clearness committee saw "right ordering" in her concern. The 1st valley seemed to have no opening for Quaker ministries. She didn't feel released to return. In the course of some days in Rhonda Valley a way began to open. The Nobles were released for what turned out be some years of service and a long-term program of work. It grew to involve members of Parliament, a royal visit, and a program of legislation.
Jesus promised those who would follow his leading 3 things. They would be absurdly happy, entirely fearless, & always in trouble. The one to whom the concern has come may often be quite unready to carry it out until he or she has been changed & reshaped in ways that call for greater flexibility & openness. Even the community supporting the concern may have to make painful changes. Some Friends have learned to wait to see how the concern, & his motives for that concern, look the next day or the next week. They know enough to allow one's detective agency to examine all aspects of one's concern, [& to submit it to the scrutiny of others]. How centered & flexible are the spirits of people involved in the concern? If an embarrassing waiting, or the prospect of it, succeeds in dissolving the concern, its rootlessness has been exposed & it withers away & can be buried.
Transformative Effect of "Failed Concerns"—Sometimes "failed concerns" emerge some years later in a different form that, in the end, actually carried out the original leading in an amazing fashion. My wife and I sought a suitable place for a modest Quaker ashram with Gurdial Malik, where Christian and other great world religions could be invited to live together for a season and hopefully to irradiate each other with the rich experiences of their different tradition. Our search failed.
In 1967, 2 residential seminars came into being—one of 5 days in Japan and the other of 7 days in India. In both places 10 carefully chosen Christians were matched with 10 Zen Masters in Japan and 10 outstanding Hindus and scholars in India. The Japanese colloquium has held its 18th annual meeting for some 3 days in Kyoto. A book appeared in 1977, called A Zen Christian Pilgrimage. There is still no physically established Quaker ashram in either country. As in the unforeseen unfolding of so many concerns, the waiting or the drastic reshaping or even the deferment to a future generation does not invalidate the significance of these leadings.
Harold Loukes writes: "An act of love that fails is just as much a part of the divine life as an act of love that succeeds. Love is measured by its fullness and not by its reception." John Woolman wrote of his dangerous trip to visit Wehaloosing and a friendly Indian tribe: "Love was the first motion." In this writing I have been witnessing to my faith and experience that love is the first motion. It is a love that will not let us go and a love that lures us to respond and to follow the biddings of the Inward Guide. To understand [the broad spectrum] of Christian religion with its mutual caring outreach to the world's needs, one must return to the love at the heart of things that undergirds it all and undergirds us all and above all, to realize that we are not not in this thing alone.
Tribute [to Mother and Father in the pamphlet's beginning] (by Helen Steere Horn; 1988)
It's striking how/ we have paid you tribute with / grape... red raspberry preserves speckled/ with golden seeds/ & tangy marmalade/ knobbled with citrus peel—// each an essence/ gathered in the sun, crushed,/ slivered, simmered down,/ stirred, tested./ Concentrated flavor/ holding ruddy light/ for you to savour/ on your tongues/ ... the young/ sense how you've done/ this slow essential work/ inside yourselves/ for years,/ conserving hope,/ preserving gaiety/ distilling tenderness—// such rare bright essences/ you glow with/ when we meet.
Poems About Popper (1988-1995) by Helen Steere Horn (Open Door was written in 1994)
Evening Ride—Even when names are gone/ & words you want are misting/ out of reach, these roads, / this maze of lefts & rights,/ is clear to you as day.// And in the amber evening/ you still carry us unerring/ through the woods, past beach/ and marsh and farmstead/ growing up with weeds,/ to a sure destination.//
Voices swarm these hills,/ a welter Mother can recall./ [Stories of places: extraordinary, tragic, and personal]// ... old Chris Johansen's—/ solitary since his wife passed on .../ 4 times Chris nearly died ...//
You turn in & stop the motor,/ In his easy chair, Chris/ doesn't hear us till I knock again,/ Beaming, he burst out,/ You wring each other's hands.// He [comments about &] limps toward his garden with us .../ You stoop together foraging/ ... I taste his raspberries ... as both of you ... bearing sweetness still. 1990
Climber (1991)—Nearing 90, words for time/ elude you. Hours so loose & wavering/ in & out of sleep, you startle up/ herd us off to Quaker meeting, with fierce punctuality.// We lift the latch before another soul/ arrives to hymn sing .../ around the old piano, choose/ familiar spirituals .../ Your hand beats time ... Your voice homes in on harmonies/ for "Jacob's Ladder," climbing/ resonant and true.//
Once, dozing during worship, you/ pitch forward, moan .../ Yet afterwards you walk me out/ the door straight up the slope/ ... to the giant sawed off stump/ that still commands the view./ Its growth rings swell out// You scan the far horizon./ Are you seeking over Jordan, seeing how the chariot swings low?/ ... [He knows how soon he will be 90] I can feel/ your fingers grip the ladder strongly,/ reaching, climbing still.
Old Writer (1992)—At 91 you still feel keenly/ where words come from, know/ their pressing up to be expressed,/ ... [you] start to scrawl// ... telling phrases falter,/ ... trail off from black to gray ... // It is so late. The slate inside/ your head is scribbled full./ ... You nod, your fingers loosen. Slipping between your knees, the pencil [falls]. // I wonder if you know and grieve,/ ... or if this losing of your senses lets you,/ after such a leap, sink down/ into another element, as slow and cool as fish sink,/ deeper down than words.
Open Door—Stripped of his wits,/ & power of speech,/ this ancient wiseman/ still can teach// when I ask him/ how he is, he only/ smiles & points/ behind me.// Wheeling, I am struck/ by blazing light/ beyond this dim,/ low-ceilinged room// where through a doorway/ branches flowering/ white as wings/ brush rosy bloom
For the Taking (1994)—It rained last night/ and threatens rain again./ Berries should be picked/ before they mold ... / that big poncho you wore fishing keeps me dry// ... I stand here surrounded/ by dripping canes/ ... a shrill of crickets/ [sounds] like the very engine/ that propels the world.// Grampie raised berries too./ I can still see them mounded/ in our dishes, ruddy, swimming/ in cream ... I wonder if you also felt/ the way his fingers helped/ you fill your buckets/ when you picked a patch.
Remember, tramping/ to the pasture near your/ fishing stream, all overgrown/ with blackberries?/ ... [On] the road ... to the abandoned farm,/ The roots of 1 great pine held to the sandy bank/ above it, gnarled/ & knobby as old hands.// How our hands turned purple/ ... I hear you telling stories as we/ foraged, sense the easy silence in between ... the sun lays warm on my shoulders.// Picking something wild,/ there for the ta- king,/ was what made me feel more like a child of God / than almost anything.// [I remember whenever I pick].
Sweet Chariot—You never were much for appearances./ Our scarecrow has been wearing/ your fishing hat for 2 years now ...// Once, combing through/ a dream forest for you,/ ... Far off [Mom] heard a clanking sound./ ... Then into the open lurched/ a Model T jalopy ... // You sat in the rear,/ surrounded by rakish characters./ ... You leaned back, beaming/ and carefree. Mother laughed/ out loud and woke up refreshed.// Oh [Old T], come soon./ Jump down, old jokers/ Help this raggedy man roll out/ and clamber in.// I bet we hear them toot the horn—/ Ah-oo-gah—jaunty as jaybirds,/ when they put off through the trees/ to take you fishing, who knows where? 1995
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329. There is a Fountain: A Quaker Life in Process (by Helen Steere Horn; 1996)
About the Author—Helen Horn's connection to Pendle Hill is since childhood when her father, Douglas Steere, directed summer school & her mother Dorothy Steere, was Head Resident. In the '90's she taught a Pendle Hill class on Spiritual & Work Autobiography, & co-led 2 classes using arts & meditation to spur spiritual growth. After working in Europe, Africa, & 3 American cities, she settled with her husband on an Appalachian farm, [& was socially active there]. She has been activist, professional, artist & homemaker. This essay was written for Lake Erie YM as a "pump primer" to encourage others to share stories from their spiritual journeys.
"... There is a fountain that living freshness brings./ Come to this water; there is vast supply ...
I AM: 3-5—[At 3], I sit on Grampie's lap in a wicker rocker on their glassed-in porch, [watching crackling, forking lightening, listening to the crash of thunder & his stories of storms]. Grampie's big lap, rumbling familiar voice & the easy rocking hold me safe. [At 4], I stare out the window at snowflakes falling into the pond. I point out how each one is kissing the water as it touches down; Mom hugs me joyfully, shares with Dad what I said, & starts reading me poems. [At 5 in Meeting] I move my head up & down, & the branches do a jerky, black-armed dance where glass is whorled. I wish I could see Jesus in Meeting. My Daddy ministers: "The wind of God is always blowing; we must hoist our sails." I like the thought of being a boat with God's wind filling my sails.
I AM: 6-7—[At 6], I test for entrance into Haverford Friends School, I look at a picture of Pilgrims & Indians fighting & say, "They should all be sitting down & working things out together." Mr. Cadbury catches birds to band & record them; he shows some to us up close & then lets them go. My heart nearly bursts with love and relief that he is free. [At 7], My 1st-Day School teacher shows us a photo album of snowflakes; there is not one like any other in the whole book. She shows us a diagram of the water cycle: water falls as rain; rises as mist or steam; forms clouds; when cold falls again as hail or snow. I get a sense of order, something that shifts shape and is transformed, but never ends. She has us draw mandalas which I doodle for years all over my notebooks.
I AM: 8-10—[At 8] We are on the sand dunes near Lake Michigan, picking blueberries, looking out at the lake, listening for the woodthrush. Its fluting comes, pure & haunting from an invisible perch; pause; again. Mother's eyes are shining. We hug each other. [At 9], Anne is throwing another fit, refusing to clean her room or play with "that dumb old boy"; she slams her door. I move quietly around my room, putting my clothes and books away. Anne is such a baby. When will she grow up and learn to be a helper? [At 10] I get to read out of one of the family Bibles about Joseph. I am thrilled how Joseph ends up giving food to the very brothers who wanted to kill him; sort of like Jesus. I sing out my heart for [my favorite hymns] as Mom plays the organ. I make a little cardboard box altar in my closet. I pray there for people I know, for the Jews, and that WWII will be over.
I AM: 11-13—[When I am 11] Daddy buys the best Christmas tree he can find on December 23rd. This year] it's lopsided. We trim it while a fire burns & Christmas music plays. I am mad at Daddy, & try to fix the tree; I break a branch. I try to tape the branch back together. It holds through the holiday, but I am eaten up with guilt. I confess to Mother & learn that Daddy feels uncomfortable spending money on temporary decoration. I understand, but I still hate whacko, crooked, skimpy Christmas trees; I am ashamed that it means so much to me.
[At 12], A French refugee comes to stay with us; 2 other girls come to Haverford from Germany. Mother & Daddy want us to be welcoming & play with them. [At 13], I am not wearing lipstick, & am not a good athlete. My breasts are swelling, I am getting acne & I have to wear glasses. A friend of mine & Daddy agree that Anne has "it"; I assume they mean I don't. I fantasize about [being in places of great isolation], taking great risks to rescue people, especially handsome boys. A conscientious objector my dad counsels, visits our family often, [& more importantly is] someone other than my folks who listens to me & honors me as somebody who matters,. He encourages me not to wear makeup. He likes "authentic" people. That word becomes powerful to me.
I AM: 14-16—[At14] I read of the lives of Elizabeth Fry & others. I am quickened in my determination to be a world-changing woman like these. Mother's life as homemaker, helpmate, & community volunteer doesn't fire my imagination. [At 15] I am spending Daddy's sabbatical year with Anne at a boarding school in Sweden. The Quaker headmaster I am living with dies suddenly of a heart attack. I have never seen this snuffing out of vital life before, or a silent, grieving widow. I am isolated by lack of language from family discussion. I take on the role of silent servant. I write many letters home & journal intensely in my diary. I realize I lose track of time & feel deeply myself when I am writing; I am vitally alive in spite of my isolation. I am traveling in war-torn Germany with Daddy; buildings are shell-pocked or bombed out. Beggars & amputees are everywhere. Even a 5-year old pet owner can say straightforwardly that his rabbit will be killed for stew; that is what war has done.
[At 16] I have gone out at dusk to watch the sunset. Summer Dusk—How still it is & yet/ the night is breathing out a song/ &, though the dusk/ sifted through a star hole/ to earth, there are/ a million colors left/ pulsating here. // The mellow sky is curving/ like a shell which dips/ fluted edge into the sea,/ close bound by rocks/ denying every wave's advances ... the night to me// [is] as intimate & tender/ as a hand,// yet some-how a hand/ apart from me, sheathed/ in blue & silver glove/ through whose fingers/ I glimpse eternity./// It is a joy sharing with my mother, [who has a passion for poetry & hymns]. I start reading Whitman & Sandburg.
I AM: 17-21—[At 17] I am a senior at Westtown Friends Boarding School. As part of weekend workcamps in inner Philadelphia, we go out in pairs to help elderly African-Americans plaster & paint rooms; we feel welcome & useful. We visit municipal court Sunday morning where the desperate & drunk are arraigned. We worship in local churches. On the way home in the street car, I am swept over with love & connectedness with every worn, expectant, or stolid-faced person sitting in that car; I'm not shy or afraid. We are a part of each other. [At 19] I am attending a weekly cell group for meditation and sharing. I am not maintaining a daily quiet time in the midst of academic pressures. A Quaker faculty wife shares that her inner life goes in cycles. She focuses intensely on activity and commitments for a time, and then withdraws to read and refuel.
[At 20] I am speaking at a Matins service during Oberlin exam week. There is a drawing of weeds & turf in front of me. I pray that, like the sod, we may be absorbent & resilient. [At 21] I am unclear about what comes after college. Vocational aptitude tests split me between social work & writing. I am aware of how focused & productive Dad is, & how confused I am about what I'm good for, how ambivalent about nearly everything. He said, "If only you could feel [God's love], [who] loves you for yourself, apart from anything you accomplish or become." Why can't I feel clear that there's someone there when I pray? Why can't I feel God's support? Why does God want us to worship God? Why did God let Jews burn & people in Hiroshima if He's so powerful & loving? He said, "God gives us freedom to choose good or evil ... God yearns for us when we're struggling ... we are infinitely loved by God." He has faith. I don't. At least I'm a seeker. I don't feel a lot of joy.
I AM: 22-28—[At 22] I need to tell a man that I am breaking it off with him; he doesn't appeal to me physically. It is painful. How do you break off a relationship gently & honestly? In creating a play about the Cana wedding, I compare the blustering steward & the servant filling water jars, the latter servant's willingness & trust with my bustling, spiritual doubts. [At 24] I get engaged to an architecture student. 6 months later he breaks it off because I have crowded his spirit & [pressured] him to design low-income housing, not corporate buildings. I doubt my ability to love. I go to the Harvard Education School to become a High School English teacher.
[At 27], I am interpreting a work camp photo display for UNESCO & communing with Communist delegates. [It was good], using French & German again, reaching out to young people on fire with Marxist idealism, finding common ground. Hildegard Goss-Mayr of Fellowship of Reconciliation has sought the Cold War's end & needs comrades in the struggle. I am walking in a meadow near the project site. I see a small 4-petaled blue flower. International peace organizing is too rootless, too wordy for me. I need to work small & stay true blue & solid. I am drawn into life's paradoxes. How can suffering & waste of life be explained if God is all-powerful & all-loving? [At 28], my heart has been open by another young man. I feel very vulnerable at the thought of losing him. I write a poem about it & show it to him. It connects him with terrible childhood loss; he withdraws, fearful of hurting & being hurt again. Sharing & loving go together, dark or light. I am helpless to do otherwise.
With Heart Opened—Knowing you like this/ in all your strength,/ your fierce and tender mystery,/ in all the sweetness of our joy/ I feel with sudden pain/ all loss as well—/ the salt of tears,/ the blunted waste of all the world,/ the baffled hopes,/ the freedom bludgeoned out of men,/ the cross, the bitter myrrh.
I AM: 29-30—[At 29] I have endured European Diplomatic History to prepare myself to teach World History as well as English. Mother is aware that history isn't really my meat & is laboring with me about the direction my life (i.e. taking and giving myself time to write poems). [After awhile of this] I blow up. Striding around the room, I tell her to start being somebody in her own right, and stop being a martyr. And let me live my life.
[At 30], I have been teaching high school English & history to college prep classes for 5 years. My career, not inner leadings, gives structure to my life. It has been satisfying to see students gain perspective on Cold War rhetoric through Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, & Pasternak, but I am overwhelmed with [broad teaching duties], & with heightened awareness of world power struggles, inequalities, & the UN's fragility. How are we responsible for tackling these problems? What are my self-expectations now that I see global injustice & waste of life?
Walking up the street in bewilderment, I catch sight of children smiling and playing. The smiling breaks open something inside me. I want to be with young children for a change. That summer, I take care of 2 adopted African-American sons, while their father goes overseas. At Pendle Hill in the fall, [I feel drawn to] Rainer Maria Rilke and Albert Camus; my term paper is about both/and. My soul's need is for a contemplative and a committed active life. In December, a poem emerges about the beckoning of my inner Godchild to take time.
What Then?—If I but gave/ the GodChild play within,/ if I but honored/ her ... shining in the dark/ cave of your eyes,/ if I meandered with her/ in the wilderness ... What then might well up wordlessly into healing?
I write an essay comparing writing a poem with [a message forming] in Meeting: "The poetic process can [cut through] the trite, the easy, the [wordy explanation]. It can help us to brave paradox, trust intuition, follow ... image [as long as we don't] offer images for their own sake ... One schooled in poetic discipline [can be pulled into and centered with a group, and be drawn] into a final, listening whole which lifts them without words."
I have come down into a deeper identification with mysticism. I do creative dramatics with ghetto children.
I AM: 32-38—[At 32] I am heading the English Department at Francis Parker in Chicago. I discuss deep questions in depth in small classes: When must an individual risk challenging authority? What moves people into committing crimes? How is racism oppressive to all? What are the pros & cons of having power? I am burdened by this prep school's privileged majority. My life isn't in tune with my deepest concerns; I have no partner to share them with me. I turn to therapy to sort things out.
[At 33] I am tramping with fellow Oberlinian, David Horn, through Chicago's Morton Arboretum, a wild place within a big city. He is listening to, identifying, imitating bird calls. He is not very subtly looking for a wife to live with him in some South Indian village, helping with agricultural development. Something inside me shifts and opens. [At 34], my husband David is sending out letter after letter seeking overseas work. We apply to an adoption agency in Manchester, NH. Meanwhile I am organizing and publicizing engagements for anti-Vietnam speakers. A number of the books Edith Hunter has written are about religious education from a child's perspective. She is a happy, productive homebody and mother. I may be able to let David carry the burden of social responsibility now with his hunger-fighting and give myself with clear conscience to family and writing.
[At 38], David is helping Senegalese villagers build a rice irrigation system, while I read a book on Southern sharecroppers. I am moved and know I also want to write about the lives of obscure folks who keep life going and lift each other up. I try to describe the people who touch me on our trips in the area. For the most part I am tied to the American compound with our daughter Becky. [At 39], I am raising vegetables and a lively pre-schooler in a house [near] an Ohio college town. I brood on my Africa story until a story emerges. What bears fruit besides the trees? I picture myself between my husband and his African counterpart, trying to come close to the real Africa through Etienne and finding his scorn of his [own culture] as barren as my husband's driven-ness. Through contact with neighbor women and the natural world, I glimpse something of real Africa's core vitality, but I know neither our family nor the educated Africans are meeting its need.
I AM: 42—We have been trying for 3 years to adopt a 2nd child; no white babies are available. We are open to a minority child; the farm we want is in an all-white school district. How am I too aware of pain, too sensitive to pitch in & make a go of this challenge? International development money is drying up for mid-level technicians like Dave; he stopped looking. This means I'm not off the hook anymore as the helpmate of a hunger fighter among the destitute. [There was little opportunity for social activism]. I am guided to propose a grant for a Community Learning Resources Project to enrich the underfunded schools in our Appalachian county.
The week I received a grant from the Jennings Foundation to direct the project, our local Children's Services changes its policy & offers us an 18-month old African-American son with an alcoholic parent; he will need considerable nurture. How can I best channel my love in the world, with my skills, or by parenting a 2nd child? I made the choice to mother 1 child & use the grant money. Through research, 3 of us created a directory of over 400 people, places & free stuff to improve learning. I am moved by healthy pride & warmth generated when we ask parents to help us make a 2-day local history museum; they bring local artifacts & photos. I made peace with my decision. My grant is renewed & I continue my work. I am constantly innovating, always moving.
I AM: 44-49—[At 44], In a Pendle Hill workshop called "Fairy Tales & Clay." I play the oldest son, [who offended a dwarf with the secret to getting water of life. I can't get water of life]; I can't meet expectations. I sculpt the youngest son in clay, sitting down in leisure to share with the dwarf. I hunger to strive less, to slow down, be more receptive, to glow with mutuality. [At 45], 8-year old Becky is feeding gulls at the beach, paying attention to the young, lame one. There is an emptiness in her we haven't filled. I am swept with helpless love.
[At 47], I help Dave with a cow we had to shoot, skin and quarter. I remember our Old Fashioned Recipe Book, which gives directions on butchering. It is an awesome thing to cut open the miracle of her body, to handle her steaming, intricate parts. I bond with David and the farm. [At 48], I have been teaching English in a rural high school for 2½ years and have just resigned. I haven't been sleeping because of too many course preparations, grading papers, discipline problems, on top of child-raising, housekeeping, food preserving, and farming. I am the daughter of a leader and sought-after speaker; I have a Masters from Harvard and am trying to lift up a downtrodden Appalachia; I can't make the grade. I call a nearby, Philadelphian and co-counselor, who listens, refers me to another counselor, and gives me the sense that everyone has dark nights of the soul.
I write a teaching story. Instead of finding rural students with special reverence for Nature, I find guys & gals who buck compulsory education, survive & even prevail in the system without reading or writing. I become newsletter editor & program coordinator at the local senior center. I work only ½-time to avoid being too encumbered to hear the spirit. I am more spacious inside; vocal ministry increases. I dialogue with inner voices & center through co-counseling & journaling. They keep me in touch with continuing revelations. [At 49], I am evaluated as having problems delegating & communicating with staff. [Years of independent activity must give way] to a team operation. [I am helped in this by a soulmate joining the team who is a breeze to communicate with].
I AM: 50-54—[At 50], my daughter is 14. I am close with women in the Feminism & Faith group. Many of us juggle too many roles, as spouses, parents, workers, teachers, caregivers, as well as self-care. I help plan a ritual in which we name & throw into the circle's center things obstructing spiritual growth. As "Kali," destroyer/ protector goddess, I trample obstructions underfoot. I am amazed at my strength of feeling in my dance, [& in] my writing of this experience for the new Quaker Friendly Woman magazine: "Kali's fierce image has become important to me as a Quaker woman ... When I gather myself to destroy calm, utter dark feelings to my husband or co-counselor ... & struggle through them ... new ways of [seeing] problems emerge ... I need to resist things threatening my inner leadings ... We need strong woman images to ... change [our fixed personal patterns]."
[At 51], our Meeting has grown & moved. I tend to prepare things for spoken sharing; I struggle to stop this. [At 52], my meeting promotes the issue of conscientious objector & alternative service. There is strong, negative reaction; brochures on that subject are barred from school. [At 53], I am in our pine woods to get cow pies to manure asparagus beds. As I bend & straighten, my body connects with East Indian & Native American women. We are part of the cycle & sacred dance, where everything has purpose & richness. [At 54], I look at needle as symbol in a workshop's guided meditation. In the 1st 3 Gospels, Jesus tells people it is as hard for a camel to go through a needle's eye as it is for a rich person to enter God's Kingdom. We live simply, but we have land, 2 rental houses & tax-free bonds. David is researching democratizing governmental processes & not worrying about breaking even. We budget to see how much we can give away. How much security do we deserve?
I AM 55—The local campus ministry is organizing a conference on women's spirituality. Women are coming from all over the Midwest. I revisit the Wedding at Cana that I presented 33 years ago, this time from a feminist perspective. Mary is the catalyst who sees the need for more wine and moves Jesus from reticence to engagement. Her voice affirms that the Spirit working through him can find a new way to fill their need. The servant voice is the body speaking, willing to be up and doing once direction is clear. [A prayer is formed: May we see how plain well water of our lives is full of the essence of celebration and can fill our emptiness. It suggests the line from the old hymn: There is a fountain that living freshness brings. We sing the hymn and drink toasts to groups in our communities that we believe can find the power of the Spirit and develop new rituals.
I meet with the local ministerial association. I suggest they raise with & educate their adult Sunday school classes in the issues of the nuclear war threat & military spending; they have never met a pacifist before. Their queries are: How would you react to Hitler or Communists who don't believe in God & seek to take over the world? How would you address the fact that the National Council of Churches are totally out of touch with the grass roots? [How would you honor men who were drafted & shed their blood to protect freedom of worship]? They don't believe that Jesus forgave those who don't believe in God; they talked of "deterrence," "a big stick," & "the only language Communists understand." One pastor says he is stretched too thin with every-day pastoral duties. The priests say parishioners are only there for mass; no one commits themselves to anything. What is each clergyman's personal [story]? I have joined the fray & am using all my powers.
I AM: Still 55—I go on a Women's Peace March to protest nuclear build up. Military spending is sapping funds for 3rd World agricultural development. [Images of] African women pounding down their next season's seed corn into meal to survive & a banner showing an ear of corn with a fetus inside [come together in a poem]:
Seed Corn—It is the evening/ to freeze corn./ Dark silk, ears/ angling from the stalks,/ the kernels full/ of thin, sweet milk./ I strip the husks/ by lamplight on the stoop, the treetoads trilling.// In my mind's eye,/ one of the banners/ made to honor life/ and ring the Pentagon/ on Hiroshima Day/ is a fetus as brown as earth/ stitched snug inside/ an ear of yellow corn.// My sister, with your needle,/ piercing heavy cloth,/ bearer of seed/ the bombs could blast away,/ your image swells/ inside me, making me strong.///
In my mind's eye/ children whimper on a mat/ while black hands grasp/ a pestle,/ frail arms raise it.// high above a heap of seed corn/ in a mortar,/ falter, lower it,/ swiftly scoop out/ 1 small handful,/ pound the rest,/ the precious kernels into meal.// My sister, with your pestle/ striking hollow sounds,/ keeper of lives/ the ruthless race for weapons/ steals away,/ your small, swift/ saving gesture/ burns inside me,/ making us one.// The moon climbs high,/ the water boils./ I blanch the yellow ears,/ cut off kernels,/ scoop them into sacks/ and carry out the cobs/ to feed the cows.///
My sisters,/ round in circles/ turn the years/ of sowing, weeding,/ storing, feeding./ Always empty stomach/ needing us, the loving/ life sustainers,/ us the kernels/ ground and eaten.// Still, we bear/ the seed of knowing./ We know danger./ We are seers./ We are heeders./ Stitching, linking,/ sparing, sharing./ We must not grow weary./ We must not fall silent.// We bear seed corn/ meant for planting./ Down in darkness/ we will sprout/ and spring up. We will not be daunted./ We will not be pounded/ into meal.////
People point me to J. Macy's Despair & Personal Power in the Nuclear Age. I use her group exercises & join Interhelp, her peace workers' support group, with its] press releases, newsletters, talk shows & phone calls.
I AM 56—In a dream, I am driving through Carbondale, [where I heard a real-life story] of a mother with 12 children and an alcoholic, mostly unemployed husband. [My dream reveals] my old bike in a trashy vacant lot, with a foundling baby in its basket. My dream symbolizes Vaundell Johnson's stories of coal town women that need my attention, and need to be raised up and honored. It haunts me for 2 years before I heed it.
I attend an Arts for Peace workshop at the Ohio Nuclear Weapons Freeze Conference. An artist there says, "You need to hammer home the main points, interpreting them again & again. I go dead inside with this repetition, even though I believe in the cause." At a "Demon Party," a friend & I come dressed as Over-responsibility. The friend wears long lists & I carry a huge sack. There is value in being responsive, but I have trouble setting limits. We save small pieces of our costumes and burn the rest.
My sister sends me a calligraphed quote from Thomas Merton: "[Activism & overwork] is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist fighting for peace non-violently most easily succumbs ... it kills inner wisdom." I admit to activist/ therapist Sandra Boston de Silva the pressure I feel to be a "key person" in the peace movement, & feelings of staleness. She helps me redefine "key person" as one who can unlock people's hearts with writing & listening. I seek to: reach to where the world is breathing; speak from the core; have small, slow loyalties; rocking & rejoicing. I need time to write, to spend time with Becky, my parents, & in-laws.
I AM 57—I fear that in peace work I will lose my capacity for creative writing. I fear poets are self-centered, unbalanced, elitist, irrelevant. 30 years ago, I affirmed the leading that an angry Jewish refugee woman had to reconnect with her Gentile mother, who had disowned her. My efforts to support her searched me to the core. My mother's gifts [to her meeting] are listening to struggles, asking loving questions, and affirming the deepest thing in another. I decide to go into training to be a therapist.
I am meeting regularly with a spiritual partner and taking community counseling classes at Ohio U. I find myself coming up against the assumption that the goal is to be "in charge" of your life. I find my self committed to listening for guidance from the Inner Light, not "taking charge." [Now] when I speak of being "in charge," I mean walking in the Light with my deep center in charge, not outward demands.
I AM 57 & Interlocked—I sit with Dave's mother Flora on their back porch. Dad Horn is dying of Parkinson's; she is his sole caregiver. She celebrates small triumphs & groans about complicated bills to pay. Our similarities snap into focus. We forge a new comradeship that sees us through Dad's long dying. I write poems.
Interlocked—I like to rest my eyes/ on the chair you salvaged/ ... from neighbor's trash/ & caned to give to me.// It looks like you,/ straightforward sturdy,/ stripped to essentials./ Grain stands out .../ layered like years/ of living stratified in rock.// Fibers of the seat/ are tough & tightly woven/ as your hold on life,/ determined as you are/ it not be wasted.// I remember you learned/ to cane so you could save/ this chair, learned/ to soak strips/ 'til they would bend,/ bending stiff fingers,/ bending your will to do/ what you with effort/ still could do.
and in the process/ bonding with the rooted tree,/ the cane that carried sap,/ the craftsman turning spindles/ on his lathe and rounding/ the knobs that grace the top/ like 2 plump apples.// It was a way you found/ to save yourself,/ weaving your life/ into the lives of those/ who once sat down ... on this chair// and those of us to come/ who will sit here/ to lace our shoes up,/ peel potatoes, weep,/ watch sunsets burning,/ hold a child/ and feast together.// You ... see shapeliness/ of things and rescue them,/ are interlocked with us/ in saving patterns/ we hold onto/ sure as loving, true/ as going with the grain.////
I AM: 58-60—[While I am 58] Dad is writing a bare bones chronology for his autobiography. We want his story of inner growing, not realizing he has Alzheimer's. Mom needs to write her spiritual autobiography, but hasn't the strength to write it. She agrees to tell it to me on tape from the central questions I will ask; it is a time of deep sharing. There is power in her remembered dreams, golden Bible texts, role models, efforts in community, & late-blooming self-confidence & feistiness. The spirit speaking to me from a 2-year old dream gives me energy to draft a grant proposal to research & share life stories of women from local mining towns ["... Reminiscences of Athens County Coaltown Women: 1900-50"]; it is a dramatic narrative & a dedicated team effort.
[At 60], I am floored that I am doing a "mental health assessment" on a 72-year old suicidal, alcoholic stroke victim who has had her leg [& life] amputated. She has lost husband, son, & grandson in the past decade. She wants to go to a river bottom & never come up. I tell her how moved I am that she is still here, being herself, not masking anything. The truth that she is still herself although her body is different, leaps from my center to her center. By the time I emerge, her spirit has moved her from lostness to reconnection with her "Christ-angel."
I AM: 61-62—[At 61], I am a visiting teacher of writing at Pendle Hill, numb, exhausted, & monotone from helping my daughter Anne deal with her husband Paul's death from a heart attack. I remember her late night agony about what else she should have done to save him. [I have memories of the 4 days with Anne, & of Paul with his daughter Becky years before]. Finally I can cry. My student/ friend tells me the community has suggested a Meeting for Healing to share my loss with me. During the gathering in Upmeads' living room, I am strangely fixed on a slice of pumpernickel Anne cut for Paul when they thought it was just heartburn. A strong conviction comes to me that Paul felt her caring as he died, that the reaching out we do matters, whether or not it does what we want it to do; I wrote a poem about it. I felt the Pendle Hill community channeling Spirit that night.
David has been diagnosed with Parkinson's. David becomes urgent to complete a book on eliminating the gerrymandering of political districts; he withdraws into his work, but emerges for quiet evenings, weeding together, or hiking together to enjoy birds and wild flowers. Our tenderness toward the earth and toward each other quickens. We are finding our way together into unknown territory.
[At 62], I have a Masters now in Community Counseling. I work hours of supervised experience in order to earn my counseling license. My doctor tells me I have bladder cancer. The Helen planning for a meaningful professional future in counseling, who visualized caring for a husband with Parkinson's, who could take body, diet, & energy for granted, is in need of care herself, as I go through immunotherapy & drink carrot juice. Creatures which seem like totems come in poems [with wisdom like] "Submit," "Honor the beast of burden (body) who has carried your mind & spirit so far," "Give over leaping upstream," "Rest like a pupa until wings grow."
Agape—Have I given out?/ Bucked current,/ fought upstream,/ leapt falls, released/ my roe, and now/ gone slack/ in some back water/ near the source?// Is that the way I'll go?/ Frayed fins and faded/ glow, pale ragged tail/ that barely wavers,/ body slowing drifting, bumping roots/ and rocks, awash?// I am not bound./ I have no cycle/ like the salmon/ where I have to/ head for home/ and spawn and die.///
I am not spent./ I am too lithe/ & limber yet/ to let some clumsy/ bear wade in/ & catch me/ as I flop.// But maybe I/ must flip/ into some new and nameless shape,/ and let the current/ carry me downstream/ again to the ocean.// There I see myself/ in school with many,/ all agape and slowly/ heaving, turning,/ feeding, learning/ how to sink and rise/ with tides,/ and rock and rest/ within the very bosom/ of the deep.////
My 60-member Meeting holds me in the Light; 2 members with cancer share things to read & perspective. My separateness is blurring. I am merging with fellow strugglers, searching for leadings, pooling our wisdom to keep afloat and reach out to the world. I keep on counseling as a volunteer for Hospice, a women's support group, elderly clients. I am drawn to younger people who stir memories of struggling. Cancer frees me to be a free child of God. [For a while] I avoid my old spiritual partner, but I finally call her to plan a walk. The fathers of 4 of us in meeting have died this winter. I am energized to plan a goofy April Fool's Day retreat, co-led by a dozen of us with a gift for play. My cancer goes into remission, and [I have hopes of more writing and marketing it]. I am unemployed. Lake Erie YM invites me to do a life review, to be pump primer for others' recollections of their spiritual journeys. Ecclesiastes writes, "Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might."
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332 The Burning One-ness Binding Everything: A Spiritual Journey (by Bruce Birchard; 1997)
About the Author—Bruce Birchard has served Friends on the Peace Committee of Philadelphia YM, National Coordinator of the Disarmament Program (American Foreign Service Committee; AFSC), as Friends General Conference (FGC) General Secretary. He got involved in the anti-war movement, [became a conscientious objector (CO)] and did alternate service. This pamphlet is based upon addresses given to Baltimore YM ('94), Philadelphia YM ('95), Southeastern YM (96), as a witness to the movement of the Spirit in his life.
There is a Spirit Which I Feel (by Kenneth Boulding)—Can I, imprisoned, body-bound, touch/ The starry garment of the Over-soul,/ Reach from my tiny part to the great Whole,/ And spread my Little to the Infinite Much,/ When Truth forever slips from out my clutch,/ And what I take indeed, I do but dole/ In cupfuls from a rimless ocean-bowl/ That holds a million million million such? ... some Thing [of] the cosmos [and] Law/ Moves too in me: a hunger, a quick thaw/ Of soul ... As I ... of creation, sing/ The burning one-ness binding everything.
INTRODUCTION—I grew up in a small-town Presbyterian church, went to college in '63, lost my Christian faith, felt openings to the Spirit, & found Quakers. I joined Friends, became a pacifist, a CO, worked for Philadelphia YM, & AFSC, in support of peace & disarmament; I learned from 2 bouts of cancer. The religious Society of Friends is at risk of becoming a social Society of Friends. [Besides] personal growth, & testimonies, we must strengthen & deepen spiritual lives, personally & corporately. Our meetings can only be vital if we find, & seek to understand, experiences of the Spirit. Childhood beliefs about God & Jesus no longer made sense.
My journey has been both experiential & intellectual. I am in the Christian tradition, though by Christian creedal definition, I'm not one. I know there are many paths to God, but I haven't explored them; Christianity and universalism are not mutually exclusive. [My] 3 paths to the Spirit are: beauty; love; and worship. I find [certain] contemporary theological writings relevant to the spiritual and moral struggles of our time, and of my own soul.
My images of God are not the traditional western images of God. [The poem above] comes very close to expressing my "cupful of Truth" about the Spirit. "The burning one-ness binding everything" is an important name for the Spirit. Some say unprogrammed Friends base our faith so thoroughly on [individual], direct experience of the Spirit that [we can't] understand one another. A wise Friend said: "Our experiences of God's Spirit differ, but any true experience of God includes a convincement of the unity of all in that Spirit." [The name of God I shared] gives me faith that we indeed have a basic unity only by sharing our religious experience. If we keep them to ourselves, we shall diminish our religious society to the vanishing point.
EXPERIENCING THE SPIRIT: Beauty—In 1967, I had been snowshoeing through the White Mountains of New Hampshire. We climbed Mt. Garfield, traversed a long ridge and dropped into a narrow valley. That night I walked alone to the stream which tumbled down a rocky face under ice and snow. High above the surrounding peaks, the wind tore at the clouds, pulling them to shreds, blowing them fiercely off to the east. A full moon rose over the eastern ridge, backlighting the cloud-shreds to a luminescent white. Awe and comfort both overwhelmed me. I am one with this marvelous, Spirit-filled, beauty throbbing creation.
I have often felt estranged from my concept of "God." My hunger to return to the mountains, rivers & streams, to the tree and meadows, is a hunger for the Spirit. The forests are temples for me. On mountaintops, I feel closer to the Spirit when surrounded by Beauty. I am often moved by experiences so many kinds of art and music (jazz and both Western and Asian classical). We have all been moved by beauty. When this happens, we're responding to God's Spirit-filled creation. Beauty in any of its multitudinous forms is only a short step from the contemplation of beauty to the expansion of spiritual consciousness.
Love—I experience love in very specific terms: with friends, for strangers, and even at times, "enemies." Demie Kurz & I share so much with each other, but we are still distinct individuals; we aren't "2 peas in a pod." Good times are a part of love, but it's the trials & struggles that forge the closest bonds. We've always felt a commitment not to walk away, to hang in there until the intense heat subsides. We have each helped the other make profound changes, but only while being reassured of the basic acceptance, the foundation of love, that underlies it. [Every crisis worked through left behind] good feelings, and a stronger relationship. Among our strengths was our interest in [constant dialog about our children and even the other's parental behavior]; this wasn't always easy to hear. Now, we are working with our teenage sons to help them build respectful relationships of equals.
[Demie's] love helped me deal with the most terrible fear I have ever known. I will never forget the 1,000 volts of fear which seared me when my doctor said he could not rule out malignancy of the lumps I found on my neck. Demie said that I should call Stephanie, who was a neighbor and a skilled co-counselor that I had used before. I shared my fears with her about losing my grasp on myself, so overwhelmed was I with the fear of cancer. After I broke down & sobbed for 45 minutes, Stephanie made herself totally available to me. The next morning, I know that I had to acknowledge and experience my fear, and go all the way into it. [Friends from all over supported and prayed for me]. After chemotherapy and remission, I began to recognize the grace I had found. I had learned so much and my spirit was stronger. I have experienced such love over and over, throughout my life; such love is a manifestation of the Spirit mediated through those closest to me. If you have never experienced true love for the world, or for other people, or for something outside yourself, you can't love God.
Worship—I had to work at worshiping. It doesn't come for me with bells & whistles or visions of God. [I did a lot of thinking in meetings for worship, about] events and people in my life, the suffering in the world and my problems; I was not going deeply into a direct encounter with the living Spirit. John Punshon said that it takes work and continued with: "Get a good coach. Work at it. And know that you'll fail frequently and never be as good as you want to be." [I did that] and I began to understand that the Spirit is all around me, within me.
Traditional Javanese music theory holds that music is always in the air, around us. That's how it is with the Spirit. I am always in the Presence; I need spiritual disciplines to help me hear it. In a centered, peaceful place, I'm beginning to feel an acceptance of what is. I'm genuinely holding people in the Light. I often imagine the Spirit as a stream, flowing constantly around & through me. I'm learning to launch myself into the stream of Spirit, to flow with it, to feel it supporting me as I ride the rapids & face life's dangers, fears, beauty & wonder.
How do I know that this experience of the Spirit is real? The inward and outward lives make a whole, with the Spirit transforming my actions; they are 2 aspects of the same experience. It led me to 2 years of struggle with Selective Service, alternate service as a CO, and giving up graduate school and an academic career. As I learn more skillfully to sense the Spirit within and without me, I find myself more often in a place of calm and peace and joy. I'm easier to live with when I'm centered; I live easier with myself. [Transformation of ourselves and the world around us] is how we all judge whether or not others, and we ourselves are living in the Spirit.
UNDERSTANDING THE SPIRIT—In my spiritual life, I had to go beyond the immediate experience. I feel compelled to understand this Spirit's nature, which is a spiritual & an intellectual effort; there is no clear line between the 2. [I share the fruits of my efforts to understand, because failure to understand, to share our experiences & understandings of the Spirit, can only impoverish us. Within theologically diverse meetings, we require radical openness to divergent experiences & views. I hope to contribute to our collective experience and wisdom.
I am careful about using the word "God," because of the traditional Christian concept of God. Elizabeth Watson said: "God is vaster and deeper than anything we conceive of, and it is presumptuous of us to try to name God." The God Moses encountered refused to be defined by a name. I too cannot define God. The term "Spirit" is more flexible, open-ended than "God." We can only think and talk about God metaphorically, with images which are meaningful pointers to God's true nature. [We need to be] flexible in our metaphors for God, just as Friends have been, and continually develop new images and models of God which are appropriate to our times and understanding of the universe. They should be relevant to the great moral and social issues of our day.
When I worship, when I go to the center in meditation, I feel the Spiritual Stream's power as it washes over through me, & I am filled with inner peace & joy. The Stream courses through all creation; it is a loving & creative power that can dramatically affect our lives. I don't dialog, argue with, supplicate, or "pray to" God. We must take ourselves to the stream, kneel down & cup our hands to drink it. Marcus Borg describes the traditional Christian concepts based on Enlightenment thinking of God as a disinterested deity or an occasionally intervening supernatural God as: "Both are products of the Enlightenment, which removed God from the world. Both ... image God as separate from the world ... [&] stress belief in & affirmation of an [unavailable] God." Borg describes a mystical understanding of God as: "God becomes an experiential reality. In the Jewish tradition, God can be known in that direct & intimate way, not merely believed in ... God isn't ... remote & transcendent creator, but [rather] all around us, "the one in whom we live & move & have our being" [Acts 17:28].
A Creation-Centered Theology—Sallie McFague disagrees with the traditional Christian model & metaphors, with the world as a mechanical apparatus, & God as a fixer under the metaphors of "King," "Lord," "Master," "Almighty Father"; these are inappropriate for today. Obedience & homage is expected, rather than love & joy. [Mechanical, hierarchical, & dualistic language is inappropriate today. We wonderful humans are: [co-stewards, co-caretakers, co-trustees], co-creators and partners with God. [Everyone and everything else] depends on us for survival, and the creation of a holy blessed community, traditionally called "the kingdom of God."
The relationship between God and the created universe is an intimate one "in which all things have their origins in God and nothing exists outside of God." We err in seeing the world as sinful; many abuse the earth and its creatures as a result of this error. We err in focusing on salvation rather than creation. Annie Dillard writes: "From 1/106 of a gram of matter, unimaginable unity [before the Big Bang], has evolved unimaginable [numbers] and diversity, not only in the vast galactic realms of the universe ... but also, in equally inconceivable ways, on our planet." All of us, life and inanimate things, are all made from "the ashes of dead stars." God, in some manner unknowable to us exists "beyond" the universe which we know. God is "embodied" to us in the universe. Here we can, in part, know God. [The Spirit by itself is too abstract]. The world, with its beauty and love, as the Spirit's incarnation or embodiment stirs in me the feeling of immanence which I seek.
Suffering & Evil—Any thinking about God must include consideration of evil & the terrible reality of [all creation's] suffering. In the peace & justice movement with Philadelphia YM & the AFSC, I had to face a global reality of hatred & violence; Demie & I visited Auschwitz in 1979. The death camp in Auschwitz, (Birkenau), was a mile-square factory designed & operated by educated engineers, architects & administrators to kill people quickly. Within 18 months, some 2,000,000 people, more than Philadelphia's population, were ["processed"].
How could God stand by and permit such suffering, or the long history of suffering? Of the 3 who had cancer the same time I did, why did only 1 other survive? Job was right to keep asking, "How could you do this to me, a righteous man? People of faith have been doing their best to answer these questions for millennia.
God simply does not intervene directly in human history. God is the power in the universe's creation, evolution, worship, love, and beauty. I align myself with the God stream's current, and I emerge from it cleansed and calmed; it is not in the nature of a stream to relieve suffering. None of the traditional explanations for how God could allow Rabbi Harold Kushner's son to die from a rare and terrible disease, spoke to Kushner in his grief and anger. He was convinced God could not intervene as suggested by traditional Christian-Jewish theology.
[God's Martyrs & the Devil's Martyrs]—Some terrible suffering destroys people, making it impossible for them to find the Spirit. Others, in the midst of terrible anguish & suffering, find incredible strength, courage, & love. Dorothea Soelle asks: "How does our suffering serve God or serve the devil, the cause of becoming alive or of being morally paralyzed? Where does my suffering lead?" The forces of despair & disbelief have their martyrs, the "devil's martyrs," where a death weakens other people's faith in God & God's world. It isn't the circumstances of their death that makes a sufferer witness for or against God. It is our reaction to their death.
The facts of life & death are neutral. We, by our responses give suffering a positive or a negative meaning. [The witness to suffering transforms the sufferer into God's or the devil's martyr, making witness & sufferer either bitter, jealous, joyless, against all religion, or stronger, more loving & joyful. Evil is a separation from the Spirit. It is a terrible, tragic ignorance of the love, beauty & power that is the Spirit. The Spirit is always available; it does not act on its own in response to tragedies; it cannot intervene directly to make everything all right.
JESUS & CHRISTIANITY—The notion that a loving father would deliberately send his son to excruciating torture & death, doesn't make sense to me. The Religious Society of Friends & I are both solidly within the Christian tradition. I know of Christians who are filled with the Spirit, whose inner peace is outwardly evident, and that I must return to my roots & give Jesus a new try. I now recognize Jesus as [flesh & blood], a great rabbi, prophet, & teacher, who was grounded in the Spirit, who expressed God's fundamental reality. It is a great tragedy that Christ becomes elevated to such a high extent, that he is now inaccessible except as an object of worship.
For Marcus Borg, Jesus was a man who knew God intimately, through a deep, direct experience of God, whom he called "Abba." The "Prodigal Son" contradicts conventional wisdom of the day, which rewards duty & diligence. The father rejoices & celebrates with the lost son who has returned home in a display of God's love for the lowest of the low. The dominant message of 1st-century Judaism was like Hinduism of the caste system, with holiness based on purity & avoiding the unclean, [be it food or folk]. Jesus fought the interpretation of what it meant to be a good Jew & confronted the established church's hypocrisy [Mark 7:6-7; 18-22 cited].
Jesus knew that Israel's salvation could only come if the Israelites returned to God, whom he had experienced as a God of compassion, of love. Jesus loved all people. The scandalous nature of his associations [would today include] drug dealers, child abusers, arms merchants, the Posse Comitas. Jesus said these were the people who needed him, and that God loved them. Jesus believed that the only way for Israel to avert the catastrophe he saw looming on the horizon was to create the loving, compassionate "kingdom of God."
Jesus accepted the terrible torture of crucifixion out of love and compassion, demonstrating to everyone that he was prepared to suffer even the agony of the cross out of love for them, and for all people. Albert Nolan writes: "To save one's life means to hold onto it, to live it and be attached to it and therefore to fear death. To lose one's life is to let go of it, to be detached from it & therefore to be willing to die [for people rather than a cause]. Jesus did not go to his terrible death in order to start Christianity, or to fulfill some prophecy, or to save the world from sin. He accepted it because it was simply a terrible consequence of the compassionate way he lived with the people and world he loved, a demonstration of how selfless divine love can be. It was not love for some abstract or future world, but for the world and the people he knew and cared for.
Jesus' Life & Creation-Centered Theology—What might "loving things in particular, [in order to] love the world" have to do with today's understanding of the world as interdependent? Sallie McFague extends Jesus' inclusive love for all to all creation. Nature is "the new poor," abused & exploited by modern men & women. Suffering & oppression includes animals, plants & the earth itself in her understanding of Jesus' life & message. Extending Jesus' example of concern for physical healing as well as "spiritual" salvation to all creation, his ministry of healing should lead to work for healing all. We should understand that all creation, even the least of it is included in divine love. McFague believes that God doesn't cause tragedies, isn't directly responsible for suffering, but that "God is with us in the consequences." God is with us in suffering, because all parts of creation, are parts of God's body. The good of some will occur at others' expense; God cares about all victims.
Marcus Borg suggests a transformist understanding of the Christian life: "... a journey of transformation ... that leads from life under the lordship of culture to the life of companionship ... relationship with God. That relationship ... transforms us into more and more compassionate beings, into the likeness of Christ." This understanding truly speaks to my condition. I can be transformed. Recognizing the essential unity of all creation, I can extend my love in practical ways to the entire earth and everything within and upon it, [without exception].
THE BURNING ONE-NESS—Where does the potential for transformation leave me on my journey? I understand the Spirit to be the power within the creation and evolution of the universe, and as creative, responsive love, binding together all that exists within the universe, into one blessed "kingdom of God." We are all one in creation. I sense our spiritual unity, as human sisters and brothers, and in the entire creation, when I worship. In the deepest sense, my individuality is an illusion. When we feel separated from the Spirit, when we feel separated from each other, and from the earth and the universe, we are living in sin. Only when we feel separate from the earth and all life on it can we go on destroying it. When we experience the Spirit, we feel a marvelous sense of oneness, of connectedness with everyone and everything else. Even facing suffering, death, and evil, if we can open ourselves to the Spirit, we will be reconnected through the Spirit's love.
When we truly live in the Spirit, we must work for the relief of suffering, for liberation from all oppressions, for justice, peace, and the integrity of creation. God needs our hands and hearts to carry on this work, to save each other, and the earth itself. The ultimate test of our response to the Inward Work of Christ lies in how we relate after worship to our fellow human beings and to all things in God's creation; it is how we live it. [As we join together in our different understandings of God's nature], in love to ride the turbulent currents of life, to witness the living Spirit's love and power, we will truly experience "The burning one-ness binding everything."
APPENDIX: "Get a Good Coach—In order to "get a good coach," I have 3 suggestions: get involved in the wider world of Quakerism; read books & pamphlets; involve Friends around you in new worship experiences, in reflections, & in study. Attend sessions of your yearly meetings, & the Friends General Conference (FGC) Gathering, take workshops, get to know more Friends. Invite seasoned Friends to lead a workshop or retreat at your monthly or quarterly meeting. FGC & Pendle Hill have programs that provide speakers and retreat leaders.
Much of my coaching has come through books and pamphlets. Most of these books and pamphlets are available through the FGC Bookstore. Pamphlets are available from Pendle Hill, FGC, the Quaker Universalist Group (England), Quaker Universalist Fellowship (USA) & other Quaker publishers. Among the authors important to my journey are Parker Palmer, John Punshon, Daniel Seeger, William Taber, and Elizabeth Watson.
Seek out a "spiritual Friend" in your meeting with whom you can regularly share your spiritual journey (See "Sharing Our Journey," from Philadelphia YM's Quaker Studies Program). Start a special worship group or Bible study class for people with a particular interest or concern. Arrange for a workshop or leader for your meeting from FGC Religious Education Program or "Pendle Hill on the Road."
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