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Quakers and Community

Friends Journal - Tue, 2024-03-12 06:00

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Miracles of the Light

Friends Journal - Fri, 2024-03-01 03:35

Quaker interest in prayer and healing goes back to our earliest days, to George Fox, the founder of the Friends movement. An early manuscript called Book of Miracles cataloged some 150 cures he was reported to have performed in his lifetime, including healings from diseases and accidents. His Journal includes a gripping account of his bringing a traveling companion back to life after a fall from a horse broke their neck.

Our queasiness over healing is almost as old. The manuscript of Fox’s Book of Miracles was lost, probably suppressed by later Friends who were wary of its supernatural claims (we only know of it because a partial index was discovered by Henry Cadbury in the Friends Library in London in 1932). Most modern Friends prefer to trust the calm and rational waters of science and medicine.

Still, a tradition of healing has continued. Friends’ memoirs and journals are full of stories of Friends who seemed to be able to sense unanswered prayers and respond to spiritually threatening situations out of a kind of instinct. Many Friends work in healing professions: we treat bodies as doctors and nurses, treat minds as therapists, and treat souls in pastoral work or as hospice workers.

Even much of Friends’ activism and work in the world can be seen as a form of healing. For this issue of Friends Journal, we asked Friends to tell us about healing in their lives and communities.

Marcelle Martin starts us off with some of the stories of George Fox’s miracle-making. Much as she did in January’s article on Quaker dreams, she examines these early accounts as a way to understand how these almost-forgotten folkways and practices shaped Quaker understanding of how faith breaks through into the human realm. Many of us struggle to reconcile those times when healing doesn’t come and we watch as loved ones slip away. Early Friends understood this too, of course, and I was most struck by the account of how Fox reassured his stepdaughter that her child was ready to die. In a vision he knew the child had experienced “a glorious life.”

A well-known healer among Friends, John Calvi, shares his remarkable experiences of both prayer and healing. I appreciate his observation that prayer is a discipline that can be grown over time, and I’m humbled that even he has experienced dry spells.

The Colorado mountains were the setting in which Moon Beiferman-Haines first felt a powerful experience of God—a voice inside proclaiming “I am here.” That experience prompted a spiritual search that eventually brought her into a Quaker meetinghouse, where that reassuring presence returned. Further exploration brought her to healing groups, first at an FGC Gathering, and then, later, one begun in her meeting and over Zoom.

Peter Blood-Patterson explores what modern Friends mean when we promise to hold a situation or person “in the Light.” These prayers need not be private or personal but can involve the whole meeting. Peter asks, “How can we make our meetings into the kind of faith family where we trust each other enough to do this?” It’s a powerful question, one which I’ll be bringing back to my own meeting community in weeks ahead.

Our staff writer, Sharlee DiMenichi, interviews Friends working in hospice care. Perhaps Friends’ practice of silence and our experience of everyday holiness lends itself to this transitional time.

There is a lot to be said about prayer and healing. All of our articles are online at Friendsjournal.org, and all have active comment sections. Come share your stories of how prayer and healing have worked in your life.

The post Miracles of the Light appeared first on Friends Journal.

The Glory of God Was Revealed

Friends Journal - Fri, 2024-03-01 03:30
Healing Miracles among Early Friends

Many Quakers are skeptical of the possibility that prayer, faith, and healing touch can contribute significantly to physical and mental healings. In recent decades, an increasing number of respected medical doctors, including Bernie Siegel, Larry Dossey, Joan Borysenko, Andrew Weil, Jeffrey Rediger, and Lissa Rankin, have promoted both the research and case studies that show that the body, mind, and spirit work together to create health. Prayer, faith, authenticity, and spiritual community have all been identified as potent elements of health and healing. Many miraculous healings happened among the first Quakers, and I hope Friends today will  re-examine the history of healings in our tradition and invite the Spirit to work in us more fully to bring healing to ourselves and others.

Jesus was known for performing healing miracles, and when he sent his disciples out two by two to share the good news of the gospel, he commissioned them also to perform healings. Though their efforts were not always successful, the four gospels and the Acts of the Apostles recount numerous healing miracles attributed to apostles. Likewise, when Quakerism arose in seventeenth-century England, many early Friends testified that healings happened among them. They and others saw this as a sign that they were, indeed, a fresh manifestation of original Christianity.

William Dewsbury, like many of those who became the first Quakers, was a spiritual seeker from childhood. In York, he became connected to a group of fellow seekers that was one of the first communities to be convinced by the message of faith that had been brought to them by George Fox in 1651. Other members of this group joined Fox in taking the good news farther north, but Dewsbury wasn’t sure if he should join them. He had been disappointed by other zealous religious groups, and he asked himself, was God truly at work among these people? According to an account by Edward Smith, author of William Dewsbury c.1621–1688, Dewsbury prayed to God for clarity: “I cried mightily unto the Lord in secret, that He would signally manifest Himself at that time amongst us, and give witness to His power and presence with us.” Afterward Dewsbury witnessed some miraculous healings, and this provided him the assurance he had sought:

I can never forget the day of his great power and blessed appearance, when he first sent me to preach his everlasting Gospel. . . . And he confirmed the same by signs and wonders; and particularly by a lame woman who went on crutches. . . . Richard Farnsworth, in the name of the Lord, took her by the hand, and George Fox after, spoke to her in the power of God, and bid her stand up, and she did, and immediately walked straight, having no need of crutches any more.

This healing and others witnessed by Dewsbury were for him outward signs of God’s blessing on the Quaker message and ministry. They corresponded to the inner confirmation he had already received, and this provided a joy and courage that stayed with him even during subsequent long years of imprisonment.

William Dewsbury was not the only person to see the seal of God’s favor on the Quaker movement in the healings that happened. Elizabeth Hooton was one of the first to become a convinced Quaker, after George Fox joined in the religious gatherings she held in her home. This group soon called themselves “Children of the Light.” In a testimony he later wrote of Hooton, Fox said, “She had Meetings at her house where the Lord by his power wrought many Miracles to the Astonishing of the world and Confirming People of the Truth which she there Received about 1646.” One particular healing had the effect of convincing many skeptics. A woman who had suffered for 32 years from what seemed to be an evil spirit sought help from Fox. She was very disruptive in one Quaker gathering, and Fox felt inspired to hold a meeting at Hooton’s house. During the second meeting at the Hooton home with this woman, a transformation came over her; she became calm and sane. The Children of the Light kept her with them for two more weeks before sending her home, demonstrating that her cure was lasting. Many local skeptics were convinced.

Most of the healings and miracles associated with Quakers in the early years were connected with George Fox. When he spoke, he had an ability to bring listeners into contact with the Divine Power that was inspiring him. William Penn later wrote, in a testimonial published along with Fox’s Journal: “The most awful, living, reverent frame I ever felt or beheld, I must say, was his in prayer. And truly it was a testimony he knew and lived nearer to the Lord than other men; for they that know him most will see most reason to approach him with reverence.” The Divine Power working though Fox sometimes caused healings. Many of these happened after Fox spoke to an injured or ailing person, touched them, prayed for them, or did some combination of these three things.

In 1653, a man brought his wife to Fox in hopes that she might be cured. It had been a long time since she had been able to eat or speak, and she was not able to sit without assistance. The husband had tied her behind him on his horse, to keep her from falling off. After she was brought inside, Fox spoke some words to her, as moved by God. Before she left, she was able to eat and speak and to climb onto the horse without help. On another occasion in a house of Baptists, Fox and his traveling companion found a group of people gathered around a sickbed. They invited Fox to talk to the dying woman, if he could say something consoling about the world to come. In his Journal, Fox recounted: “I was moved of the Lord God to speak to her, and the Lord raised her up that she was well, to the astonishment of the town and country.” Afterward the husband and wife both became Friends and opened their home for Quaker gatherings attended by hundreds of people.

Another healing occurred in Hawkshead, also in 1653, while Fox was traveling with Margaret Fell Jr. and teenaged William Caton. The three of them came to spend the night with a local Friend, and found a dirty 11-year-old boy in an advanced state of illness, being rocked in a cradle. His parents had taken their only son to see doctors in the large towns nearby, but the doctors said nothing could be done for him. Fox asked the servant girl to wash the boy clean.

“[T]hen I was moved of the Lord God to lay my hands upon him and speak to him,” Fox wrote in his Journal. Soon afterward, the boy was playing in the streets. When Fox passed through the town three years later, the boy’s mother urged him to stay and hold a meeting. She said everyone in town was convinced that her son’s healing was a miracle.

A later healing in 1677 comes from the Journal of John Banks and is mentioned in George Fox’s “Book of Miracles”; it involved Banks, a farmer and teacher who developed a pain and then paralysis in one arm and hand, making him unable even to pull clothes on nor off himself. The arm withered and the pain increased. The local physicians were not able to help him. Then he dreamed of a cure, which he documented in his journal:

[A]s I was asleep upon my bed, in the night time, I saw in a vision, that I was with dear George Fox; and I thought I said to him, “George, my faith is such, that if thou seest it thy way to lay thy hand upon my shoulder, my arm and hand shall be whole throughout.”

When he woke from the dream, Banks had a persistent feeling that the vision had been true and that he should go see Fox. Finally, he felt it was a test of his faith to travel to Swarthmoor Hall to ask Fox for this help. Banks made the journey, and after a meeting for worship, he pulled Fox aside and the two men took a walk together. Banks showed Fox his paralyzed, withered arm, and described his dream or vision. Fox stopped walking, looked at his friend, and lay a hand on Banks’s shoulder. “The Lord strengthen thee both within and without,” Fox said.

There was no immediate change in the arm. That evening, however, as Banks ate dinner at Thomas Lower’s house, without thinking about what he was doing, he picked up his silverware with the arm that had been paralyzed, something he had not been able to do for many months, “which struck me into a great admiration, and my heart was broke into true tenderness before the Lord; and the next day I went home, with my hand and arm restored to its former use and strength, without any pain.” When he next encountered Fox, he told him that the arm had mended. “Well, give God the glory,” Fox responded.

Illustration of Valentine Greatrakes, a seventeenth-century “touch doctor,” as shown in the 1948 edition of George Fox’s “Book of Miracles” (Cambridge Library Collection).

In his 1658 introduction to The Great Mystery, a book by George Fox, Edward Burrough gives an account of the beginning of Quakerism, writing that it was an extraordinary time: “[T]hings unutterable were known and made manifest; and the glory of the Father was revealed.” Burrough does not specify what these events included, because he says he would not be believed: “much more might be declared hereof, that which could not be believed if it were spoken, of the several and particular operations and manifestations of the everlasting spirit that was given us, and revealed in us.” In 1671, Fox extolled the charismatic healing powers of Quaker women: “I believe there is a thousand women that are beyond the wisdom of this world all: yea, and the power of God hath wrought miracles among them.” He may be referring to healings that happened in the women’s meetings, but he does not give specifics.

Reports of miracles also arose when Fox traveled in the North American colonies in 1672. One remarkable event, recorded in George Fox’s “Book of Miracles, occurred that year in New Jersey. One of Fox’s traveling companions, John Jay, was thrown from a horse onto his head, breaking his neck. Witnesses, including Fox, thought Jay was dead. However, Fox knelt down beside him and lifted up Jay’s head by the hair. The neck turned loosely. Fox then put aside his riding stick and gloves, braced his feet against a tree, took Jay’s head, and with one hand under the chin and the other behind the head, lifted it with all his strength three times and then “brought it in.” Jay began to rattle, then breathe. The astonished witnesses carried Jay and set him beside a fire to get warm. Later they fed him and put him to bed. The next day John Jay was able to get back on a horse, and he rode 16 miles with his traveling companions to the next meeting.

Fox’s efforts to bring about physical healing were not always successful, nor was such healing always his intention when he prayed with or for someone who was ill. While staying with Margaret Fell Jr., who was now Margaret Rous after marrying Barbadian Friend John Rous in 1662, Fox sat with her sick child. The next day, at the request of Margaret, he visited the child again and felt satisfied that “the child was full of the power of the Lord and it rested upon it and rested in it.” The child died that night and appeared to Fox in a vision, with “a mighty substance of a glorious life.” Fox encouraged Margaret to be content that her child was well in the Lord.

In a 1654 letter from Francis Howgill to George Fox, Howgill reported that he and Edward Burrough were moved to visit a Friend’s house in the city, where they encountered a lame boy. After about two hours both Howgill and Burrough were feeling a burden associated with the boy’s condition, which they both interpreted as a call to pray for healing for him. Howgill prayed for the boy to be “made whole.” The boy stood up but was unable to walk.

The intercessory prayers of Fox, Howgill, Burrough, and other Quakers did not always result in physical healing. The critics of Quakerism mocked several cases of Quakers who prayed for healings that did not happen. However, the validity of the Quaker faith did not rest on the manifestation of miracles; these were, at best, signs of the activity of the Spirit; an encouragement to faith; and a gift that helped build and bind together the new community, as was the case of the miracles manifested at the beginning of Christianity. Perhaps it is both because miracles were not central to Quakerism and because unsuccessful attempts at healing subjected them to mockery that Quakers did not preserve the manuscript of George Fox’s “Book of Miracles,” in which Fox recorded about 150 miraculous healings to which he was a witness. Only the index for this book was preserved, which contained the first lines of the descriptions of each healing. In the twentieth century, Quaker scholar Henry J. Cadbury reconstructed much of the book, using accounts of healings in the journals and other writings of early Friends.

In our day, many people give up praying for healing for themselves or others after doing so has failed to bring about a desired effect. “Oh ye of little faith!” Jesus sometimes exclaimed when the efforts of his disciples failed to bring about a healing. At the same time, Jesus often told a person who was healed by his touch, prayer, or words of blessing, “Your faith has made you well” (or “healed you” or “made you whole.”) This suggests that receptivity to the work of the Spirit and belief in its power—in both the person who prays and the one who seeks healing—may play a role in the mysterious process by which seemingly miraculous physical, mental, and spiritual healings sometimes happen. More miracles may be associated with George Fox than with other early Quakers because of the depth of his faith, which was more than just a mental assent to radical spiritual beliefs. As William Penn testified, Fox embodied his faith. His relationship with the Eternal and his trust in the power of God were real and deep, forged through much struggle and hardship as well as through long faithfulness to divine leadings.

Can Friends today learn to embody our faith in deeper ways, so that our presence, words, touch, and prayers can become increasingly powerful conduits for the divine healing that is always ready to manifest in this world?

The post The Glory of God Was Revealed appeared first on Friends Journal.

Carrying Light to Need

Friends Journal - Fri, 2024-03-01 03:25
What Healing Taught Me about Prayer

At 16, I came to my first Quaker meeting and fell in love with the deep, extended quiet in which only a few spoke in that long hour. I felt deeply at home at last.

I had been informally raised Catholic, by which I mean I did only one ritual and that was called “first communion.” It was supposed to be done in first grade at six years old. I was seven, and the two Catholic moms teaching that beginner class had looks of horror when they heard that I knew no prayers. Three prayers in particular were assumed to be known at this age. Here I was, seven years old and already judged as a lost child in a dysfunctional family of heathens.

I struggled with the idea of prayer being the beseeching of this guy God, who seemed to be the biggest landlord ever, owned everything, and was such a grouch that anything could dangerously set him off, and then—as they say—God help you!

I began to understand that for me this approach felt like whining and laying down as a victim. Oh, Big Daddy God, please, I don’t know anything and have no power. You are all powerful; please let my team win this football game! This may well be the most common understanding of prayer: begging for outcomes and supposing the most sincerely expressed need wins.

Over time, the better position seemed to me to ask, what are you showing me, and what is it you’d like me to learn? I do this speaking generally to the universe, as the word and idea of “God” seems to be copyrighted by clergy whose ideas of congregational dependency and full employment taint every word. That’s the sort of posture I came to when I thought of prayers and God in general. There certainly is a power: something large and beyond human conception. It’s not the big, old White guy on the cloud; it’s something else: something that doesn’t want passive obedience but rather a worker ready to roll up sleeves. This view began to sort itself out in me while I was a young Montessori teacher of small children.

Later, as my life descended into hands-on work in the rape crisis and the AIDS wars, I felt myself get common with God on a verbal level. Shaking my fists at the sky, I yelled, “What the hell is going on here? Why are these women and children suffering so? You’re going to kill all these men? And for what? So I can be in the School of Life learning compassion? Are you kidding me? Who the hell is scheduling up there? Graduate students?”

And by and by—if one studies hard—there comes a set of disciplines that help with growth and restoration from the battlefield of compassionate work. What do I know about rest, concentration, listening, mercy, and all my own obstacles?

An important discipline is learning the essence of a thing. Discover what the essence of good touch is, and then fashion a massage for trauma. A study of the essence of prayer is also important. What is prayer, and how is it done without surrendering all our gifts and knowledge to fear and whining? What is prayer at its essence?

For me, there was something about learning to lean into a gut feeling about how to proceed: a kind of surrender but also a strong sense of rightness. The preparation for reaching this place was to lay down the noise of the world and the noise of my own mind rattling on about mere stuff. Humility comes first, like wiping your feet at the door and then coming in.

I learned to be aware of humorous signs along the way. Spiritual post-graduate work includes keeping a necessary sense of humor and noticing when the universe is being a trickster coyote with you. Is this an obstacle, or is it just a challenge that I should first laugh at and then move gracefully forward or sideways?

Years ago, an elder mentor of mine strongly suggested that I have several spirits guiding me and that I must invite them to work together within me and listen very carefully with each sense so as to be well-guided. (This is not a great discipline for those of us with learning disabilities whose focus is squirrely and on the move.) It’s been a struggle for me to always be prepared: the work you do to get ready before beginning to work. As a healer, I bring a certain reverential tone to each task, before and after inviting help from all my spiritual tutors who gave me great guidance in fieldwork for four decades.

Another part of prayer for me became the spiritual practice of gratitude: I am so happy for this work and this gift. Gratitude is a shortcut to mercy. If you can feel grateful that one thing is working well in your life, that eases the way to feel merciful with yourself and others. I think a good prayer always starts with gratitude then moves on to asking to learn.

Listening and observing carefully allows me to discern what is my work and what isn’t. Don’t expect to do all the good works that one can see need doing. Choosing well serves everyone better, including oneself.

Another piece of this complexity that I’m trying to explain is this: I come to the end of a work and ask to be washed of all the despair I’ve seen. Why not? You showed up and did your best; after saying thank you, the least that you can ask for is a shower of Light.

My sense of prayer includes an openness to learning whatever is being shown to me: this is the polite way of my past yelling, “What the hell is going on here?!”

I’ve been asked to pray for many people. Here’s what that experience has grown into and become for me. I gather some deep quiet and stillness. Then, with all my tenderness, I bring into my awareness and consciousness a sense of the person’s essence, feel it deeply, and share my essence of calm and reverence, always listening for any messages. It’s a joining of beings, sensing another’s experience and bringing a gift of peace. It is carrying Light to need, not joining in suffering (which honors no one).

The simple work of spiritual care is easily spoken, but the concentration and maintenance of an open posture is exhausting, especially while living in a noisy, popular culture of commerce rather than community. This discipline is to be grown over time.

Like sitting in meeting for worship, we can strengthen the muscles that let us be still and not hear ourselves. One’s capacity to listen without thinking comes to that quiet place of wonder and awe. That’s when prayer is most organic: it’s lots of power that only needs witness, and the meaning becomes clearer later.

Photo by xy

I became very ill a while back, and all my gifts and all my guidance seemed to disappear. It got very quiet and tiny—too small to use. A new experience, compassion, caused an ache in my chest. I was to stop all work and focus on my own wellness. Now, many months down the road, there is some recovery of messages and slightly warm hands, but clearly I’m in a new place of learning. The tone of my life remains while the motions and intentions have shifted.

To be without enough energy to summon angels, to bring someone to heart and mind until you can feel them, and then to share a gift of peace and care to help someone toward healing— to be without these things and have them gone was shocking. For me, this meant no prayer. It also meant no moments of grace for me to be washed.

I wasn’t going to revert to my old victim posture of “Big Daddy God knows all, and I am helpless; please save me.” Once one sees the limits of that practice, stepping outside the confines looks good, if scary. Of course, panic and helplessness may be logical first responses; we’ve all had these feelings, but they’re just stepping stones, not homesteads.

Is it possible for me to say all this without being misunderstood? Probably not. We are aspects of the Divine, the fingers and breath of the Divine. Teaching this in divinity programs took some explaining. Since we are aspects of the Divine, our main task is maintaining connection to it. How do we stay on the spiritually conscious plane of awareness even in the noise of day-to-day life?

The repeating of words and phrases have been useful to many over many generations and cultures: making prayer simple, accessible, and portable. This is especially so if experienced somatically; Quakers are known to feel changes in their bodies as reverence takes hold and there is a surrender toward Light, away from common day-to-day thought. This is what happens to us in meeting for worship, right? As long as we’re open to it.

Conversations with the Divine tend to be of two flavors: thanks and help. If prayers ever rise above “oh poor me,” these can inform if there is patience and listening on our part. Mostly I experience the release of tension, conflict, or fear within myself. I open to what might be learned and what mercy can be had. What overview am I capable of that will reduce the pain and confusion that controls so much of the world and each of our perceptions?

Healing is more mysterious than prayer. It’s bigger and occurs in dimensions that we cannot be sure of. Healing is an old word that originally meant “bringing all the pieces back together again.” My experience of healing is limited to helping people with trauma: the worst things that happen to people and change their feelings for the worse about being in the world. In the case of trauma, all the pieces do not come back together. One heals enough so that pain and confusion from trauma are less, maybe much less.

This kind of work meant learning at all levels and went on for 40 years. The learning was monstrous: huge and constant. Are you a disciplined person? I spent the first third of my life laying down restrictions and other people’s orders of how to be in the world. Early violence can turn a child into a stubborn warrior. Then comes grown-up time in which to choose which disciplines are necessary.

There is the discipline of rest; there is the discipline of nutrition and stimulants. There is the constant watching to see if something or someone is about to present themselves, and if so, is it my work to engage: not my choice, but is it my work? Sometimes when someone approached, I would cast out sensors to feel what the nature of the hurt might be. In my understanding, my angels or spiritual tutors were always ready to message me. Is this mine? What is the nature of the wounding? If I could feel correctly where the pain was before they spoke, then I knew it was my work to release what hurt was possible at the moment. This is a constant state of mind.

There is the dynamic that one’s own healing will inform the work we do with others. And the healing work one does in the world also informs us about our own healing. This should be pondered, not prodded or pushed, but open to wonder.

There was another more mysterious and common event. I would walk into a room to teach 25 to 70 people. As I surveyed the crowd, certain faces would appear to me to be dear ones I’ve never met. It was not unusual to feel a giant, tender weeping at finding this long lost stranger so that I could help. Being prepared meant big work got done. Not being alert for any reason meant missing the mark and someone’s relief.

Some people would come forward for hands-on work. They would tell the most horrible story of malice. All the while, I would be smiling and nodding, knowing that much of it was about to be stripped away in a moment of grace. More than that I cannot explain: it just happened over and over. As day jobs go, I had to be strong, awake, and able to escape or pace myself in order to rest deeply all the time. It meant learning compassion for the rapist and the murderer. It meant making as beautiful a life as possible so that I could wade into the worst humans had to offer.

Prayer and healing are very individual and personal experiences. My words may not have meaning for you. Or maybe there’s a hint of something akin to my experience, but all the details are different. Spiritual life means laying down all the assumptions, especially what you’ve been told by “experts.” And this is why Quaker silent meeting for worship is a grand garden not to be entered into unless one wants to travel far from wherever you are.

FJ Author Chat

The post Carrying Light to Need appeared first on Friends Journal.

We Treat, He Heals

Friends Journal - Fri, 2024-03-01 03:20
A Kenyan Ministry Experience

In the 1920s, a woman named Martiat Kebebe in the Kenyan village of Bukuga became so ill that those around her expected her to die. When information reached missionary Emory Rees at the Vihiga Friends Mission around two miles away, he went to Kebebe’s home and prayed for her. After two days, she was back to life with a revelation song, which she sang repeatedly. Rees became so interested in the song’s lyrics that he included it in the Luhya-language hymnal Tsinyimbu Tsya Nyasaye. Titled “Yesu Mwami Wange” (Jesus My Lord), it is one of the very few hymns written from an African viewpoint.

I heard this story from pastor emeritus Joash Ambale of Chavakali Yearly Meeting. It is insightful testimony about healing and prayer.

While on mission work in Serengeti, Tanzania, in 2012, Daniel M’masi and I received inspiring testimony about healing ministry from Paul Mtatiro, the former presiding clerk of Tanzania Yearly Meeting. He testified that while on their visit to Mwanza, one lady came and begged them to visit her house and pray for her sick girl. The girl had been bedridden for three years. During this time, the family had spent a lot to make her well. The parents had taken the girl to many specialists, prominent servants of God in Tanzania, and even to magicians, but there was no positive response. When Mtatiro’s group visited the girl’s home, they found Pentecostal Christians who ridiculed them, saying that God would never listen to the prayers of quiet people like the Quakers. Mtatiro took hold of the girl’s hand, and they remained silent for a long while before concluding with prayer. They assured the family that the girl was going to be healed in Jesus’s name. Surprisingly the following day the girl was able to walk; glory and honor was directed to the Lord.

These two examples connect the underlying truth about experience of healing and prayer among the East African Friends. This gift of healing and prayer is not new to African Friends. Healing ministry has been with Friends since the time of George Fox, who is said to have performed many miracles to the glory of God. In 1964, Edmund Goerke, a Friend from New Jersey, wrote an essay about the miracles that Fox performed (it’s reprinted on Quakerinfo.com), excerpting passages from Fox’s writings. While visiting the Carolinas in 1672, Fox recounted:

And many people of the world did receive us gladly and they came to us at one Nathaniel Batts, formerly governor of Roanoke, who goeth by the name of Captain Batts; who hath been a rude desperate man. He came to us and said that a captain told him that in Cumberland, George Fox bid one of his friends to go to a woman that had been sick a long time, and all the physicians had left her, and could not heal her. And George Fox bid his friend to lay his hands upon her and pray for her, and that George Fox’s friend did go to the woman, and did as he bade him, and the woman was healed at that time. And thus Captain Batts told me, and spread it up and down the country among the people. And he asked of it, and I said many things had been done by the power of Christ.

Healing and prayer play a central role in establishing faith in Christ.

Our Lord Jesus Christ embraced healing as part of his ministry, and so did the apostles. Healing brought joy and hope to the believers. In the book of Matthew 4:23–25, as Jesus went about in Galilee preaching and teaching, he also healed all sorts of sickness. In Matthew 8:14–17, when Jesus entered the house of Peter, he found Peter’s mother-in-law lying down sick; he laid his hand on her and prayed, and she was healed immediately. In the book of Acts of Apostles 8:4–8, Philip preached in Samaria where unclean spirits were cast out from many, and the paralyzed and the lame were healed. There are so many incidents of healing that took place during the time of Jesus and the apostles. The blind were able to see; the lame were able to walk; the sick were healed of various ailments; and many more. In the same manner, God is using his servants to heal many who are in need. This is what is taking place among East African Friends.

Sabatia Eye Hospital in Vihiga County, Kenya, was founded in 1996 through the efforts of the local community, including the Friends Church. Photo by Samuel Tsimbwela. Commercial Healing in Africa

In Kenya, many of the prosperity gospel ministers have made healing ministry the source of personal power, and commercialized it. People’s daily lives are full of accounts of the blind receiving sight, the lame walking, the mute speaking, and even the dead being risen back to life by bishops, apostles, or prophets. Many who are weak in the spirit seek those servants who make claims of healing. Many of those who claim to heal use it as a money-making business, requiring consultation fees for their services and payments for the miracles performed. This situation has led to the rise of many televangelists whose aim is to be rich at the expense of the weak in spirit.

The issue of magicians is a well-known phenomenon in Africa. Magicians are believed to give solutions to the immediate problems of humanity. Those who feel hopeless turn to the magicians for help, as do those so ill that doctors say they can no longer be helped by medical care. Getting magicians’ help is not that easy, as they demand a lot in return for healing; if their demands are not met, the healing process will not be completed. As you walk on the streets, you are greeted with placards written with mganga (“healer”) and a town name and phone contact. Many professing Christians turn to these magicians when they feel they are not receiving help from the religious and medical fields.

The Prayer Ministry of Kenyan Friends

The book of Acts of the Apostles 19:11–23 tells of God’s use of the apostle Paul to perform miracles so that the sick were healed, the evil spirits were cast out, and the magicians were able to surrender their lives to God.

Kenyan Quakers acknowledge the importance of healing and prayer ministry; it is a gift from God that needs to be used in accordance to the leading of the Spirit. The example of Emory Rees being used by God to heal Marita Kebebe is a manifestation of God’s presence to his people: God used His own way to bring hope to the hopeless. The fame and the spread of the Word was the result of Friends’ ability to perform miracles through God’s Spirit.

This phenomenon is still going on at present, although it seems to be not as active. Many Kenyan Friends don’t really anticipate the ministry of healing, and they don’t feel it is to the glory of God to parade a humanly manifested gift, as do the Pentecostals and those in charismatic movements.

When a Friend is sick, either at home or hospitalized, Quakers from the meeting visit their home, offering prayers and encouragement to the family. If one is hospitalized, others visit the hospital and pray with the sick person and offer encouragement and hope. The pastor and the clerk of the meeting are the first to visit and offer support to the sick and their family. Through such visits, many healings are witnessed.

During worship services on Sundays, there is a time for testimonies and prayer requests. Among Friends of Tanzania, the worship service includes a time for reporting on the whereabouts of Friends who are not attending the worship service. During this session, those Friends who have sick relatives at home or in hospitals let the church know. Prayers led by the pastor for the sick are given, and miraculously many are healed though they are away from the pulpit. One of the motivational writings at Friends Sabatia Eye Hospital in Vihiga County is this: “We treat; He heals.” This brief statement shows the medical caregivers trust in the Lord, that He is the healer, more than human professionalism. It is a connection to the Spirit and an acknowledgement of the miraculous workings of God. Many who read this statement as they enter the hospital come out of the hospital believing they have been healed by God’s glory.

I have been reflecting on how healing and prayer ministry is experienced among Quakers in East Africa. The Friends Church is not generally known for encompassing the charismatic healing gifts, yet the gift has been there and is here with us. Many are surprised to learn that George Fox performed miracles and healed many. Healing and prayer is directed by the Spirit and not by humans, as many professing Christians believe.

The post We Treat, He Heals appeared first on Friends Journal.

Welcome Home

Friends Journal - Fri, 2024-03-01 03:15
Discovering the Healing Spirit of Christ

It was not always this way for me: of health, vigor, and being free of illness. From infancy, illness was a part of my life. Until I was a teenager, there were weekly trips over the bridge to Philadelphia to receive allergy shots. There were many bouts with bronchitis, otitis, and tonsillitis. It was accepted that this was “the way it is.”

Praying for recovery or for diminishment of allergies and illnesses was not on my radar. I enjoyed singing and created songs that blessed anyone I had heard about who was suffering.

I prayed for my dad to get better and not die. He suffered from a brain tumor. At the time, we did not know it was the unspoken word “cancer.” He lived another eight years in torment from pain, nausea, vomiting, double vision, and several craniotomies. Looking back, it was all useless: metastases were taking over his brain.

My father lived long enough to know that I had graduated from high school. Now I was the head of the household who took care of my grieving mother. I worked part-time and stayed home with Mom on the other days.

Some of the girls from our town kept calling to get me to drive them to a bar where they danced for free: no drinking, just dancing. I did not want to go; I was depressed after losing my father. After several calls from friends, I gave in. I enjoyed dancing, especially in a bar where the age limit was 21.

It was fun and I drove my friends several times. Then one of the employees at the bar asked if I would like to take a motorcycle ride. It was late and cold, but I went for it. The man who asked me was ten years older than me. He had ideas about life that were far and away unknown to me. He had been married before, he said. The red flags were waving, and yet, my need for attention exceeded the signs. I began seeing him.

In a few months, I became pregnant, and a few months after that, we married. Our first child, a little boy, died at birth. I was too ill to attend his buriaI and slipped into a deep depression. I stopped going to church, and did not talk to anyone.

For the next ten years, I filled my life with being a good mother, homemaker, and volunteer at the children’s school. Two children and housekeeping kept me busy. I lost my faith.

I had yet to meet any of my in-laws. So I saved enough for a family trip to Denver, Colorado, in August. We planned to stay with my sister-in-law and her family. They were not religious in any way. They were farming folks from the Midwest, and we fit right in.

A couple of days into our visit, it was announced we would be going camping in the Rockies. August was the hottest month, yet we needed winter clothes! It could drop down below freezing in the mountains in August. We would be at least 8,000 feet up! We went to the local thrift shop and bought warm winter wear for our adventure.

That evening after dinner, we piled into a pickup with a camper and headed to Estes Park. We slept in the back of the pickup with the tailgate open and looked up at the meteors that were dancing across the dark night sky.

We awoke to a clear, blue sky and hummingbirds buzzing around our heads. Breakfast was enjoyed at a picnic table with a view of granite mountains rising up into the sky. After we ate, we packed up and drove to the park.

There was a place where we could climb up to Hanging Lake. The path was just a mile and a half long and practically straight up the side of the mountain. All of us began to climb the rocky path. We came to a cool, clear stream and took a sip from it. It began snowing, and we were glad we had winter coats. We resumed our climb; it was very steep. Finally, there it was: Hanging Lake. Looking around we realized we were above the treeline.

It was completely still. The lake was in a low-lying area. It was shallow and clear with some moss at the rim. There was a reflection of the clear, blue sky in the water. Now we were on a more level area.

A Voice in the Wilderness

We broke up into small groups. I was alone and walked slowly to the edge of the mountain to see what I could. Deep-green pines grew on the side of the mountain. Then—wham—I felt a big thump straight into my chest! What was that? In the next moment, a voice spoke: “I am here.” I took a deep breath and realized it was God. It had to be. This experience cracked my heart open. Then all was still again. Looking around, I was still alone. I started to look for my family. They had been off exploring, and now they were ready to climb back down. I joined them, and we began our descent. There was no mention by anyone of an experience similar to mine.

I kept the revelation to myself. Now my soul knows the Great Spirit is everywhere. What a feeling it is: as if I had a big secret! I kept it in my heart.

Where to Take My Secret?

This simple act of recognizing the Spirit of Christ (or the Great Spirit) filled my thoughts. This was a challenging task to process. What was the answer? Returning to a church was the last thing I wanted.

Perhaps my step-father, a weighty Friend, could help. He lived a life that exemplified his beliefs. He was kind, funny, generous, and a leader in the community. He loved my mother, and they enjoyed traveling and socializing. Calling my mother was the next step.

A few days later I was given the name of a meeting close by. I called, and a member of the meeting called a few days later. She told me about another meeting that had Sunday school for children. It felt right that my daughters could benefit from this way of life. Another call and a friendly woman explained the Sunday school would begin after school started. This October will come soon enough. Perhaps going to their service a week before would give me a feel for what to expect.

Testing the Experience

Finally the time arrived. The meetinghouse was off of the main street, and there was a private school across the driveway. I began to walk up the old brick porch to enter the open door, and a man stopped me and asked me where I was going. He introduced himself and invited me to the pancake breakfast. It was being held in the school cafeteria. We walked across the drive and into the brick building. I found a seat, sat down, and enjoyed pancakes. Other parents were there and introduced themselves. We exchanged information about our children.

Meeting for worship began at 11:00 a.m. I had arrived in time to join the early 9:00 a.m. worship, which was intended for families with children. It lasted 30 minutes.

I finally entered the meetinghouse. The benches were filling up. A person called “the greeter” directed me to an empty bench in the rear area. The room was so still. No one was whispering to their neighbor.

I sat down alone on the bench. Suddenly, a soft, orange light surrounded me, and I heard the familiar voice I had heard in the Rocky Mountains: “Welcome home.” Did anyone else hear that voice? I felt warm and secure. I sat in the silence and closed my eyes. After a while, a woman stood and spoke; then she sat down. Time passed, and then a man stood up, spoke, and sat back down. Time passed. Then a man turned to his neighbor and offered his hand, which she shook. Had it been an hour already? No clock was available. People were smiling and everyone was saying “good morning” to their neighbor. Finally, a person in the front of the room asked if there were any visitors. I stood and gave my name.

Anxious to get home, I got in my car and departed. I had so much to think about. What a wonderful feeling! No minister telling me how to pray, what to think, or how to act. My spirit was being nurtured and fed in a way that began to mend the hole in my soul.

My children and I began attending weekly Sunday school and worship. I was making friends and learning the practices of Friends. There was so much to learn: Advices, Faith and Practice, unprogrammed vs. programmed meetings.

After the experience of living with my dad and watching him slowly die, all the while without complaint, while the rest of the family carried on in denial, I vowed to change my lifestyle. Losing weight was my top priority, next was to quit smoking and begin a yoga practice. I went to night county college to learn about nutrition and chemistry. Someone suggested I would make a good nurse. A family in my meeting invited me to have dinner with them to speak to their daughter, a recent nursing graduate from the county college. It was very informative and inspiring. I decided to do it! I enrolled; received a scholarship; and two years later, I earned my degree and a nursing license.

After a break in the summer to be with my daughters, I began working in a hospital. It was challenging, and I liked it. My supervisor knew of my dedication to a natural lifestyle. She shared a course coming up at a holistic center on healing. A nurse who was a student of the founder of this practice was teaching the course. I was ready to learn a method that was drug-free and created by a nurse. I enrolled.

The healing practice is called therapeutic touch. I left the center knowing I had found the answer to my quest. I talked to my supervisor about practicing it on the unit and was told not now. Then I proposed it to the sister who was beginning to offer tai chi classes in the Catholic hospital. Not yet, I was told. (Ironically, 20 years later, the same hospital opened a holistic practice and school.)

Healing Christ

I heard that George Fox had performed healings. George, our founder, believed in the restorative power of Christ. I began to focus on this and how it fit into my life and belief system. The healing energy of Jesus Christ can be used today in all healing work. In my practice, I ask Christ, the Healer, to assist me in this healing.

At Friends General Conference’s annual Gathering, there is a healing group that practices healing arts. They offer their services to anyone who is led to come and get a healing session. My husband is also a holistic practitioner. He and I participated in these healing groups with great results for the people we’ve worked with.

A healing support group was formed at our local meeting. Several other healing support groups have begun since attending one of our healings. There is a meeting for healing held monthly on Zoom. As our aging population prefers to stay home, Zoom seems to answer the need for connection.

What is the best way of healing to serve the world and all its inhabitants? I am open to the still, small voice that guides me. Healing can begin in our hearts and minds if we intend. Also, to paraphrase George Fox, let us walk peacefully on the earth answering that of the Great Spirit in all we meet.

The post Welcome Home appeared first on Friends Journal.

We Are All Held in Love

Friends Journal - Fri, 2024-03-01 03:10
Reflections on the Practice of Holding in the Light

In recent years, many meetings have begun offering a time for those present to name others they would like to “hold in the Light.” This is usually done toward the end of or following worship. When the practice first began, I was a little annoyed by this term: its meaning seemed ambiguous, and it felt like another example of Friends having our own jargon for what others practiced by a different name. I was glad, however, that Friends were being given a chance to name publicly their deepest concerns and needs, and that Friends in theologically diverse meetings, like mine, had found a way to join together in what I consider communal intercessory prayer.

I have since had a shift in my thinking. I now wonder whether the undefined meaning of this practice is actually a gift. It helps avoid serious problems with intercessory prayer as it is often practiced and can free us from expectations and limitations that may inhibit the rich potential shared, focused prayer can bring to Friends.

We Are Not Alone

Over the centuries, countless Jews, Christians, and Muslims have been comforted by the words of the psalmist: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for Thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.” We are not alone as we face the many challenges of living, even the great separation we call “death.” Prayer, alone or with others, enables us to experience in our bodies and our hearts the love of God and the love of others. This is transformative. It enables us to overcome depression, despair, and loss of hope. Any practice in our meetings that gives us a sense of accompaniment, whether divine or human, in facing such challenges is a gift beyond measure.

For our first 150 years, Friends had a practice of writing down the words of dying Friends. (Until recently this was how most Friends understood the term “testimony.”) These were collected and published in a series of volumes called Piety Promoted. A number of these statements can be read in the Pendle Hill pamphlet A Song of Death, Our Spiritual Birth: A Quaker Way of Dying by Lucy Screechfield McIver. They convey these Friends’ sense of peace, and even freedom, as they approached death: springing, I think, from their feeling of being held in love.

When We Love Others, We Dwell in God

What do we mean when we ask others “to hold” someone or a situation “in the Light?” If you asked first Friends what this means, they would probably cite the opening chapter of the Gospel of John, which describes the Light as Christ—“the light of all people” (1:4), “the true light, which enlightens everyone” (1:9), that gives us the capacity “to become children of God” (1:12). In John 8:12, Jesus calls himself “the light of the world.” Early Friends saw Christ as present from the beginning of time, working in the world long before and after Christ’s entry into human history through Jesus’s teaching, healing, and faithfulness unto death. Many Friends then and now use the word “Christ” to refer to this ongoing work of Spirit in human hearts and communities of faith.

The First Epistle of John is mainly about love. “No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us” (1 John 4:12). When we pray for each other, we help each other experience and receive God’s love in its fullness. When we invite Friends to name our own or others’ needs to each other and hold those needs in our hearts, we open ourselves, and them, to the transformative power of God’s ever-present love for us all. I believe this is true whether or not the person being held in love believes in a Higher Power or interprets that love as having anything to do with religion.

What Is Prayer?

I think many Friends feel unable to pray because of uncertainty about what prayer is. Many think of prayer as talking to God or asking for specific things. I do talk to God and ask for results at times, but I’m not really sure what happens when I pray in that way. If I believe, as I do, that God knows everything about me, why name my needs to God? I believe this is because somehow God needs me to name my deepest needs in this way.

There are serious problems, however, with asking God for a specific outcome that we desire or feel we need. If we ask God for something specific and our prayer is not answered, does that mean we or those we pray for or even God have somehow failed or done something wrong? Many Jews have written about struggling with continuing to believe in a God who “allowed” the Holocaust to happen. I’ve had friends in other churches tell me that when many people have prayed for someone to heal from a life-threatening illness and the person died anyway, the suggestion often made is that either people didn’t pray hard enough or that the person being prayed for was not living in harmony with God.

When we hold someone in the Light, we are asking God to be with them and with us in our caring for them. We are asking God to help our love reach those we are praying for. God can and does respond to prayers of this kind. I don’t know whether offering such prayers changes God, but such prayers change me. This is very different from asking God—or the universe—for a specific outcome.

I have never been able to believe that God chooses to let children die or be abused for mysterious reasons unknown to us. The UK Quaker astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell, in her plenary talk at the 2000 Friends General Conference Gathering, described her evolving belief about God. When she decided she was unable as a scientist to believe in a God who was both omnipotent and all-loving, she chose to believe that God is all-loving but does not have the capacity to control all things that happen. Hearing her, I felt led to the same choice.

Photos by Elianna Gill on Unsplash There Are No Limits to the Power of Love

If we cannot count on love resulting in a healing outcome, neither should we preclude that possibility. The gospels are full of stories about healing from blindness, lameness, and physical illness. Others describe casting out devils, which we today may view as healing from severe mental illness. There are many similar accounts of miraculous healings by George Fox and other early Friends.

These accounts often focus on an individual with great spiritual power and healing gifts. In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in healing among Friends but with the emphasis shifting to healing through communal prayer. A more focused kind of communal prayer happens when Friends gather specifically to do this work. Some Friends are holding meetings for healing where one or more are held in additional extended prayer around specific needs or hopes. Communal healing prayer also happens when we settle into worship during a meeting for business if we are in disunity or see a rift rising within the body of our faith community.

Whether the healing we hope for happens or not (at least in the time frame or in the form that we hoped for) is a deep mystery that we cannot fully understand and certainly cannot predict. This is true whether our longing is for the survival of a deeply ill friend or the end of a brutal war. Whatever happens we are held in God’s loving hands.

Prayer Can Be a Way to Give up Control

As our prayers for others entrust them into God’s hands, these prayers can also change how we relate to those we pray for. As a straight, White male from a privileged background, I was raised to have an answer to every question and a solution to every problem, even those not mine to fix. For example, as a child growing up in a Quaker meeting in the 1950s, I was terrified of the danger of nuclear holocaust, wondering if I would even reach adulthood. Even as a child, I felt personally responsible for preventing the destruction of the earth.

One of the hardest and most misguided “projects” I ever took on was trying to save my father from dying of prostate cancer. When he died, I blamed myself for failing this self-assigned task—and blamed him for not making the changes I’d urged him to make to survive. I lost the opportunity to spend the last years of his life simply loving him and being present with him in his spiritual struggles as he approached death.

I know many Quakers who appear to feel a similar, if less severe, pull to overfunctioning and caretaking. Entrusting each other to God’s love is an important way to slow down, breathe, and do what Spirit is really giving us to do, rather than what our anxieties and addictions pressure us to take on.

My addiction to control harms my relationship with those I work with and love. Al-Anon has helped me recognize and begin shedding my addictive pull to control others and fix problems. In 12-step groups, we help each other learn what is our work and what is not. We learn to “Let go and let God.” I am still learning and working on letting go.

Communal Prayer Opens Us to Receive Others’ Love

It takes trust to receive others’ love, including God’s. If we have been hurt badly or let down or abused, especially in childhood, it’s hard to trust others enough to let their love reach us. It can also make it hard to believe in a loving God or open our hearts to receiving God’s love, but it is worth the risk. The more love we receive across our lifespan, the easier it becomes to trust each other and the universe enough to continue letting love in. As we name our needs to each other, we increase our capacity both to give and receive each other’s love. As we experience others in the meeting praying for us and holding us in love, it builds trust within our faith family. I believe that we increase others’ capacity to receive healing love, even when they do not know we are praying for them.

Can We Trust Each Other Enough to Know Each Other More Deeply?

It also takes trust and the capacity for vulnerability to allow others to see the wounds and needs we all bear to a lesser or greater degree, and to ask for others’ love and support. As a faith community, we cannot hold each other in love around specific wounds and needs if we do not know each other and the specific places where each needs help. If we are unable to name our needs and wounds to each other and to God, we cut ourselves off from the full transformative power of love.

How can we make our meetings into the kind of faith family where we trust each other enough to do this? Naming our needs to each other as a meeting opens our capacity to be vulnerable and grow closer. As we experience the meeting holding what we know about each other in tenderness and compassion, trust will grow.

In the past, specific needs and wounds were often known only to an assigned committee or individuals in our meetings. Pastoral care is usually done in secret to respect the privacy of those needing support. Confidentiality (which derives from ethical and legal concepts) is not, however, always the best approach in a faith community. We need to be careful of each other’s trust but also need to balance the need for confidentiality against the benefits of openness, transparency, and mutual knowledge among us as we seek to dwell together in love and trust.

All Are Equally Deserving of Love

Shame is a powerful barrier to sharing our broken places with each other. Friends are more likely to feel comfortable sharing—and receiving others’ requests—around physical illness or losses than issues of addictions, mental health, sexuality, or marital breakdown. Can the meeting hold in love all kinds of hurt, even those that make us uncomfortable or that “the world” says are too embarrassing to talk about?

I have been fortunate to be part of two Quaker men’s groups, each of which ran for many years. We have shared things there that we could not share with the meeting. Even in these groups, there were issues I and others have felt unable to share about. One member killed himself soon after a meeting of one of these groups. We wondered if we could have been a safer container for him to trust us to hold him in love around the enormous pain he was carrying at that time, even while we tried not to blame ourselves for another person’s decision.

God makes no distinction between those wounds and needs that deserve love and support and those that do not. The world’s definitions of shame and propriety lie to us when they tell us we are undeserving of others’ love because of the types of wounds we are bearing.

Praying with Each Other for the Healing of the World

In her song “Turning of the World,” Ruth Pelham writes: “Let us sing this song for the healing of the world / That we may heal as one. / With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along, / And our lives will feel the echo of our healing.”

Although most holding-in-the-Light requests in my meeting deal with personal situations, Friends also make requests about situations in the wider world. One faithful Friend in my meeting asks us each week to hold “Our Mother Earth in the Light.” During the Trump presidency, she also asked us each Sunday to hold Donald Trump in the Light. Although Friends in some periods seemed to withdraw from the world’s troubles outside our own faith community, we have always to some degree carried a concern to alleviate suffering wherever it occurs.

On a frigid November day in 1960 on the 300th anniversary of the Declaration to King Charles II (“We utterly deny all outward wars and strife . . .”), I joined a thousand Friends in silent vigil around the mile-long perimeter of the Pentagon. Together we held that war building and the world in prayer for peace. Our prayers did not prevent the Cuban Missile Crisis, the massacres and deaths of the Vietnam War, or the many times the United States has used arms to police the world since then, but we cannot know what good may have come from that long day of prayer for world healing.

My meeting recently held two specially called meetings for worship to pray together for peace in Palestine and Israel. Each week, meeting members join others in an interfaith vigil for peace and justice in the center of town. Such public prayers keep our own hope and resilience strong, and spread that hope to others who see us praying publicly in this way. Prayer for the world also opens our hearts to hear God’s voice calling us to new ways to be faithful in our work of alleviating the great wrongs facing our country and world.

We are all held. Years ago, I encountered a thin volume titled Dreaming Is Now by the late Quaker poet Winifred Rawlins, which was published in 1963, the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis when the world tottered on the brink of nuclear extinction and the year President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. I was especially struck by the closing lines of her poem “Are We Held?”: “And are we / held, and cannot fall / Through holes within the web of love?”

There is much that I do not know, but my life is built around my belief and experience that all of us, the earth itself, and this great universe we are part of are held in a great mystery that is love. May Friends continue to find fresh ways to lift up each other’s needs and those of the world to God and to that web of love.

Further Resources:

The post We Are All Held in Love appeared first on Friends Journal.

Dear God, Help Me Here

Friends Journal - Fri, 2024-03-01 03:05
Prayer and Healing at the End of Life

Healing takes on a particular meaning when one thinks of it in relation to patients with terminal diagnoses. Prayer both fortifies those who accompany people facing imminent death and enables them to offer deep love to those with whom they work. Quakers with experience working as chaplains in hospitals or hospices as well as those who offer palliative care for dying patients shared their thoughts on prayer and healing with Friends Journal.

Prayers for healing coming from people who are facing death often seek connection with God and repair of broken relationships. Sometimes healing requires overcoming the tendency to hide the reality of patients’ quickly approaching death.

Retired hospice chaplain Mickey Edgerton recalled that the daughter of a terminally ill patient told Edgerton to hide the dire prognosis from the mother. When Edgerton went into the patient’s room, the mother said, “‘Close the door. My daughter doesn’t know I’m dying.” Each woman was crying over the impending death. Edgerton gained their trust and suggested that they cry together.

“They were able to love each other better,” said Edgerton, who is a member of Gwynedd (Pa.) Meeting and regularly worships virtually with First Friends Meeting in Indianapolis, Indiana.

In earlier years, secrecy surrounded patients’ imminent deaths. Decades ago, many doctors did not believe in telling patients that they were dying, according to Geoffrey Knowlton, a former hospice chaplain and volunteer coordinator who now works as a psychotherapist and attends Yarmouth (Mass.) Meeting. As part of his hospice work, which he did about 30 years ago, Knowlton used to visit patients and find that doctors would instruct him not to let the patients know that they were dying.

As an undergraduate in 1976, Knowlton took a class in the psychology of death and dying in which he learned about the profound isolation people feel once they learn their demise is imminent. While working for the hospice, Knowlton was struck by how lonely people were who were dying of cancer. Many such patients said that once they received the diagnosis, everyone stopped talking to them. According to Knowlton, theories of why people responded that way include fear of saying the wrong thing and that the patient’s illness reminded healthy people of their own mortality. The loneliness of patients facing death drew Knowlton to accompany people in their last days.

“You know, to come to the end of your days alone. That just sounded awful to me, and I wanted to do what I could to make sure that didn’t happen,” Knowlton said.

Accompanying patients in their final days requires significant spiritual and emotional labor. Prayer helps Quaker hospice workers continue to support the dying. Spiritual care coordinator and hospice chaplain Lari Keeler takes in a lot emotionally at work, and if they hold onto it, it makes them sick. Prayer releases some of Keeler’s heart’s burdens. When starting to work with dying patients six years ago, Keeler realized they needed divine assistance to do hospice work.

“There’s no way that I’m going to be able to hold this by myself,” said Keeler, who works for Suncrest Hospice, which serves patients in Oakland, Berkeley, and Alameda, California.

Keeler, a member of Strawberry Creek Meeting in Berkeley, loves Quakerism’s openness to many paths of faith. They believe in receiving support from angels and ancestors. Their late grandfather was a Methodist minister from whom they currently request spiritual guidance.

Other Friends who have worked to ameliorate the suffering of patients, whom medical professionals did not expect to recover, used conversations with God to fortify themselves for the work. When she used to work in palliative care, Patti Nesbitt took a 25-minute walk with God every morning.

“It gave me a sense of wonderment and connection to the universe,” said Nesbitt, a member of Sandy Spring (Md.) Meeting who serves as clerk of Baltimore Yearly Meeting’s End of Life Working Group.

During the daily walks, she poured out any angst and sadness she was feeling. She cleared her mind and did yoga to open herself to patients. Nesbitt is in constant prayer throughout the day, often saying, “Dear God, help me here.”

Before entering the hospital room of a dying patient, Vonnie Lynn Calland prays for spiritual guidance. She does not know for sure whether there is a supernatural element at work when she prays. Lynn Calland is a certified hospital chaplain who works for Sentara Martha Jefferson Hospital in Charlottesville, Virginia. The bulk of her service involves supporting dying patients and comforting bereaved families.

“I pray all the time,” Lynn Calland said.

August Kalinosky, a hospice chaplain who works with late-stage dementia patients in Minnesota, draws personal strength from spiritual practices they would not classify as prayer.

“I pray a lot with patients, but I don’t tend to pray for myself,” Kalinosky said.

Kalinosky’s fortifying spiritual practices include silent waiting worship and participating in Rex Ambler’s Experiment with Light practice. Kalinosky draws inspiration from early Friends’ mystical experiences. Ambler categorized mystical experiences and created step by step meditations on them. Kalinosky is part of an Experiment with Light group of queer, neurodivergent millennials. They are a member of, and endorsed by, Bear Creek Meeting of Iowa Yearly Meeting (Conservative).

Prayer helps keep up the emotional stamina and spiritual hope of Quakers who work with dying patients. In addition to supporting end-of-life workers, prayer comforts patients and their loved ones as they face their last days.

Keeler shared a story about a patient with throat cancer who was extremely angry and frustrated. The patient was Christian but disconnected from his faith. He asked if he would be forgiven for not being a good person. Keeler has a relationship with Christ and sees Christ as forgiving and empathetic; they also believe Jesus deeply understands the human experience. The patient mentioned feeling shame about not being able to better help his daughter who was blind and lived with schizophrenia. Keeler’s prayer for this patient helped connect him to divine love.

Keeler works with advanced dementia patients. Sitting and holding someone’s hand and holding them in the Light is an essential function of being a Quaker and being a chaplain. Such stillness and silence counters the frenetic pace of the medical system. Sometimes families of people with advanced dementia have a hard time sitting with loved ones because they miss the capacities their dear ones have lost. According to Keeler, part of the purpose of praying for patients with advanced dementia is to comfort family members and offer them peace.

Keeler’s style of prayer is still evolving. It centers on love and their own connection with God. To open oneself to receiving a message from God, one must align oneself with Spirit before praying, according to Keeler. People can sense when one is praying from a place of integrity.

“The most important thing is coming from your heart and being in your own spiritual alignment and letting God work through you,” Keeler said.

Photo by palidachan

Other Friends who pray with the dying also emphasize the importance of serving as vessels for God and avoiding self-aggrandizement. When Lynn Calland prays, she wants to speak sincerely: without acting or putting on airs. She asks God to fill in the gaps caused by her shortcomings, while “bending, yielding, and staying low” before the Divine.

Lynn Calland, who is a member of Charlottesville (Va.) Meeting, has been a Quaker steeped in the tradition of silent waiting worship since the age of seven. When she first started her chaplaincy training, she did not know how to pray aloud. She adapted to vocal prayer because she realized that chaplains have to be ready to support dying people from a variety of faith traditions.

Listening to the patient and their dear ones is a key part of praying for them, according to Lynn Calland. She encourages families to create a peaceful space for the dying patient and promotes a narrative of hope and agency for bereaved loved ones. In prayers, she expresses gratitude for the dying person’s gifts and gives voice to any hard feelings that might exist between that person and their loved ones. Prayer helps people cry and release their emotions, according to Lynn Calland. When she prays, she wants patients to feel the presence of God. She asks God to provide safety and care as well as to turn each hospital room into a sanctuary. When people are in a liminal space between life and death, they need a lot of spiritual protection.

“The last thing any of us need at that moment is for something malign to happen,” Lynn Calland said.

Prayer for people in the liminal space between life and death can be especially unpredictable. Letting go of expectations is an important part of a chaplain’s prayer, according to Judd Hu, a hospice chaplain who is a member of Redwood Forest Meeting in Santa Rosa, California. Chaplains pray to reflect and understand patients. Awkward pauses can happen during prayer, but chaplains can accept them because they seek to avoid being performative when they pray.

“Sometimes prayer can be very messy,” Hu said.

Based on his training, Hu turns to prayer and presence to create moments for patients that are evocative, companionable, comforting, and hopeful. Feeling hopeful can help facilitate self-transcendence. Patients often reconcile with loved ones from whom they had been estranged. They may also reconcile with the church, according to Hu.

In northern California, where Hu works, many patients describe themselves as spiritual but not religious. Some patients do not see themselves as connecting with God but rather connecting with greater meaning, healing, or nature, according to Hu. Obstacles to connection include ego and intellect. Hu encourages dying patients to experience a sense of connection.

“I also help people to figure out: what are you going to connect with at this moment?” Hu said.

Other hospice workers echo Hu’s belief that prayer brings dying people a sense of connectedness. Susan Greenler, who served as a spiritual care coordinator for hospice patients from 2013 to 2021, invites loved ones to join in prayer to bless the dying person. The surrounding dear ones say a message, such as “You will always be part of our hearts. Go in peace,” said Greenler, who is a member of Madison (Wis.) Meeting.

The practice of praying evolves over the course of end-of-life workers’ careers. Friends who work in the field find that their Quaker outlooks and traditions enrich their work. Geoffrey Knowlton says that prayers he prayed during his early days working at the hospice or during pauses in a visit were to ask God to help him help the person before him. The prayers evolved to become requests to help him listen to the dying person and learn from them. This type of prayer enabled him to become more “present and authentic.” Prayer functioned as a way to center on the presence of God. Knowlton attempted to nurture the patients’ own processing of emotions—depression, anger, or anxiety around death—without directing the processing. Prayer helps him foster these emotional developments.

Raised in the contemplative Quaker tradition of silent meeting, Knowlton appreciated sitting silently with dying people. One dying woman told him that silent accompaniment was more important to her than encouraging words.

“I appreciated the experiences and my sort of growing up in the Quaker tradition because I think I’m far more comfortable being quiet with people than others might be,” Knowlton said.

August Kalinosky believes that God is love and seeks to share that love when visiting patients who are nonverbal due to end-stage dementia. Kalinosky visualizes God’s love as Light enveloping patients. They also visualize a bubble of love emanating from them to the patient and from the patient to them. The visualizations remind them of the connection between them and God.

Such a state of spiritual connection is one way of defining healing. Many who work with the dying differentiate healing from curing: curing refers to physical recovery. A chaplain cannot bring about physical cures but can help patients attend to unfinished business and make post-death arrangements, according to Susan Greenler.

When contemplating healing for people with terminal illnesses, Greenler asks patients such questions as “Do you feel complete in your life?” and encourages hospice patients to heal broken relationships. She noted instances of dying patients finally having phone calls with their children after not having spoken to them in a long time.

“I look at healing as having a lot to do with love,” Greenler said.

For hospice patients, healing means accepting death, diminishing fears, and acknowledging the reality of their mortality, according to Mickey Edgerton. As a hospice chaplain, Edgerton facilitated healing by asking patients questions about their spiritual beliefs. When she was ministering to atheists, she would ask them what gets them through hard times and comforts them when they are grieving. She believes that Spirit works even through secular conversations.

“The basic energy and wisdom for it came through me, not from me,” said Edgerton, who worked for 25 years as a hospice chaplain before retiring at age 85. Edgerton worked for several agencies before completing her career with work at Foulkeways, a Quaker retirement community in Gwynedd, Pennsylvania, where she now lives.

Energy and wisdom are the uplifting aspects of prayer, but Friends who serve the dying also open themselves to grief when they pray. Because suffering is so scary, patients and chaplains alike can feel sad, vulnerable, and powerless, according to Judd Hu. At times when Hu has been deeply emotional and at a loss for words, practicing silent waiting has helped him a lot.

The Spirit is alive and moves in different ways, according to Vonnie Lynn Calland. Quaker practices such as quieting the self and listening carefully to dying people and the bereaved as well as to hospital staff are strengths Friends can bring to the work.

As a Quaker, Hu acknowledges the Inward Light of every person and sees Quaker chaplains as especially concerned with equality. Dying patients suffering mental health crises or those without homes may have trouble finding hospice placements, according to Hu. Drawing on Quakerism’s commitment to justice makes Hu sensitive to the “layers of injustice in hospice.”

Realizing that medical experiences can be steeped in fear and that love and fear are opposites, Patti Nesbitt hopes to help patients hold onto love. The Quaker practice of silent listening helps her do so. Nesbitt’s commitment to attend meeting has been a wellspring that has fed her work.

“The most important thing is to show up in worship even if you’re going through a dry period,” Nesbitt said.

The post Dear God, Help Me Here appeared first on Friends Journal.

Pray Without Ceasing

Friends Journal - Fri, 2024-03-01 03:00
Tapping into the Spiritual Resources of the Universe

My favorite quotation about prayer is from Meister Eckhart. He says: “If a man had no more to do with God than to be thankful, that would suffice.” 

So what is prayer? For me, prayer is a spiritual experience whereby we tap into the spiritual resources of the universe. Praying is a lifestyle choice. It is the way we live our lives, the way we work with others, and the way we think of others. In other words, it is the way we live. This is how I interpret the Scripture that says “pray without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17). I used to ask myself, How can you do that? But when you live a prayerful life, that is how it is accomplished.

When the thought of someone comes in my mind, while I am working or even washing dishes, that focus of energy on that particular person is my prayer. It could be a friend, a relative, or an acquaintance. At that point, I am focusing on raising my energy level to send positive and uplifting thoughts to and for that person.

I want to take you back to my childhood. I grew up in North Carolina in a small coastal town. My family was instrumental in the founding of one of the first Black churches, so I was literally brought up in the church. From the earliest time I can remember, each Wednesday night at 7 p.m., you would find my family in church for “prayer meeting.” That tradition continues today.

The meeting began with everyone singing a hymn, spiritual, or gospel song; and then sharing some experience; and ending with a prayer. Some people would sing a song that would reflect their prayer, like “This Little Light of Mine,” “We’ve Come This Far By Faith,” or “I Couldn’t Hear Nobody Pray.” My mother was the church pianist, and as soon as a person would begin the first note, she would accompany the song in the key the person was singing in. From the age of six, I can remember songs like “Amazing Grace” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” being sung so often that they became a part of my life. Each person in the congregation would lead with a song, and finally the service would end with a prayer for all of the concerns. In some ways, you could consider this the sharing of joys, sorrows, and concerns in the Black church tradition.

Being brought up in this kind of environment, I took the Bible literally and believed every Bible story I was taught in Sunday school. At the age of ten, I had my first spiritual experience, which I now consider a miracle. I was playing in the house with a cousin, and we were running around in different rooms. Suddenly, I tripped on the carpet and fell on the floor, where I knocked out my front tooth. My mouth was filled with blood, and my mother rushed me to the dentist. He examined me and put something in my mouth to stop the bleeding. He told my mother that the tooth could not be saved, and we would have to replace it with an implant. I cried and told my mother I did not want a new tooth. I remember very clearly my mother taking me home and calming me down. I climbed up on my bed, and she stopped me from crying.  Once the bleeding had stopped, she noticed that I was calmer. She got down on her knees by my bedside. She asked me if I believed God could heal my tooth. I said yes. She suggested that both of us pray for a healing. She took the tooth that I knocked out of my mouth, washed it, and placed it back inside my mouth and held it in position throughout the time that we prayed together. After we finished our prayer, I fell asleep, and my mother went back to work in the kitchen.

In an hour or so, I woke up, I asked mom if I could have something to eat. She asked what I wanted, and I said some toast with jelly. She asked if I felt I could eat it without pain, and I said yes. When she brought the jelly sandwich to me, I bit into it without any pain, and the tooth did not fall out.  It was firmly rooted in my mouth. We both jumped up for joy when I told her. Together we said a prayer of thanksgiving for the restoration of my tooth. When we told the dentist, he was amazed. Today that tooth is still there. As a child this was an incredible experience for me. Can you imagine how this would change the life of a ten-year-old child who was struggling with his own spirituality?  

Today therapists and medical doctors realize that there is a healing factor to prayer. Much of this is due to the work of Deepak Chopra, who lectured on a holistic approach to medicine before it was accepted by the general population. However, even as early as 1902, William James in his publication of The Varieties of Religious Experience stated that “prayers for the sick, if any medical fact can be considered to stand firm, it is that in certain environments, prayer may contribute to recovery and should be encouraged as a therapeutic measure.”

What we think and how we feel can actually change the biochemistry of our bodies. When we learn to go beyond our limitations and seek a place of oneness with the universe, things can change. Chopra tells us that the biochemistry in the body is a product of awareness. He feels that beliefs, thoughts, and emotions create chemical reactions that exhibit themselves in every cell. Chopra says the key moment in getting well is when loss of fear causes a shift in the quantum fluctuations, which results in the physical expression of health. As a consequence of this research, medical students are now learning about the spiritual practices of their patients. As a former hospital chaplain, I found praying with patients and their families was a very healing experience for everyone involved. It seemed to me that the collective focus of energy of several people on one individual helped that person begin a healing process from within. Prayer seemed to bring about a change within everyone present on a molecular level. 

I believe in the power of prayer. Not just because of my childhood experience but from my adult experiences in life. Sitting in silence with someone, holding their hand, or laying hands on them are special ways of praying that enhance our spiritual lives. Gratitude is an important aspect of prayer, and I certainly feel a sense of it each time I pray.

In our Quaker tradition, we have an expression of “holding someone in the Light.” I think it means different things to different people. For me, the expression has two dimensions. The first is a mystical quality of seeing the person or situation in my mind’s eye surrounded by Divine Light. I often think of God as the Light (John 1:9). That Light is filled with grace and love. It also has a healing quality about it. It is that healing quality that changes the biochemistry in our bodies and allows our Light to shine from within. As George Fox says, “The first step of peace is to stand still in the Light.” By standing in the Light, we are able to let that of God within us shine outward to touch another person. I like to envision the Divine Spirit illuminating a person or situation. This is not a result of our supplicating prayers, which for me, is part of this process, but rather a result of divine grace, which is freely given.

When I hold someone in the Light, I feel a spiritual bond or special connection with the person or situation. I am reminded of the Scripture in Galatians 6:2 of bearing one another’s burdens. This is what I feel, as if I am bearing that burden with someone. Take for instance, when one of my friends told me of the death of her daughter, I felt her pain and grieved with her. I tried to hold her in the Light for strength and courage to get through the difficult days ahead. Although I was not able to visit her, I still felt my spiritual bond was keeping us close.

The second dimension of “holding someone in the Light” is the practical aspect of not only thinking of the person or situation but opening oneself up to the possibility of helping in some way. That help can be manifested by just listening on the phone or in person, holding a hand, sitting in silence, or encouraging someone to express their feelings by crying on my shoulder or my extending a hug. The help can also be more in-depth by using whatever skills or abilities I have to make a difference in someone’s life. Maybe it is giving a friend who is taking care of a parent a rest break or going shopping for them. Maybe it is taking someone to a doctor’s appointment to help a caregiver, or sitting with someone while a surgery is taking place in a hospital. Sometimes I might be literally holding a person as they might be falling apart emotionally. These are just a few examples of what I might do. In each case, I feel as if I am holding the person in the Light.

In my view, prayer is a part of the process of holding someone in the Light. To hold someone in the Light is a spiritual practice, just like fasting or meditation. They all complement one another and help us on our spiritual journey.

The post Pray Without Ceasing appeared first on Friends Journal.

Holding in the Light, Prayer, and Healing

Friends Journal - Fri, 2024-03-01 02:55

I recently had major surgery and spent two weeks in a hospital. Some colleagues and staff from the office told me that they were praying for me; many Friends from my Friends meeting were holding me in the Light. There is a period at the end of our worship at Baltimore’s Homewood Meeting when someone from the Ministry and Counsel Committee announces a time for holding persons in the Light or praying for them, so I was held corporately in the Light for several weeks. These events prompted the current reflection on holding in the Light, prayer, and healing.

At the Friends General Conference Gathering one summer in the late 1980s, I took the workshop of the late Richard Lee on meeting for healing (See “Meetings for Healing in the Manner of Friends” (PDF) by Lee and Merry Stanford in the December 1995 issue of Friends Journal and “Meeting for Worship for Healing” by Lee and Sarah M. Lloyd, April 2018). I helped start a healing group at my meeting in the 1990s and facilitated the group for many years; the group continues though it is now hosted by Stony Run Meeting in Baltimore.

We felt bonded in the healing group. We had regular monthly sessions with many of the same Friends attending. We held hands in a circle for a few minutes at the beginning and end of the sessions (this was prior to COVID).

(As an aside, I’ll say that in this society, we do not connect physically with people very much. When I lived for four years in Europe in the early 1980s—one year in France and three in Belgium—Friends and people who knew each other well often embraced both upon meeting and parting, and they often also gave two or three cheek kisses. I had to end this habit quite rapidly upon moving back to the United States.)

I started our meetings for healing by asking those present for the names of people who needed healing, which could include persons present, and made a list. After an initial silence, I read a name followed by two to three minutes of silence before reading the next name. We also put an empty chair in the center of the circle, and if someone present needed healing, she or he could go and sit in the chair. Then during the two to three minutes, other Friends, with this person’s approval, could step forward and place their hands on the shoulder, arm, forehead, knee, etc. of that person to send healing energy to him or her. One participant knew Reiki techniques of energy and would provide that service at that time. Knowing of George Fox’s Book of Miracles also helped ground us by confirming that healing has a long history among Friends.

But as a scientist, I wondered if any studies had been done to document the effects of prayer on healing. In medical science, the gold standard is a randomized trial published in a peer-reviewed journal, which minimizes potential biases. I found such a 2006 study by Herbert Benson et al., titled “Study of the therapeutic effects of intercessory prayer (STEP) in cardiac bypass patients: A multicenter randomized trial of uncertainty and certainty in receiving intercessory prayer.” The study considered three groups of patients who had recently had heart surgery; patients were randomized to the three groups. In the first group were those who were prayed for and knew they were being prayed for. In the second group were those who were prayed for but did not know that they were being prayed for. The third group was a control group that was not prayed for. Complications are quite common among these patients, so that was used as the outcome of interest. The hypothesis, of course, is that those who are prayed for will have fewer complications. Surprisingly, the group that knew they were being prayed for had significantly higher complications rates. The authors stated: “Understanding why certainty of receiving intercessory prayer was associated with a higher incidence of complications will require additional study.” One possible explanation is that those who knew they were being prayed for were possibly more stressed, and stress is not good for those recovering from heart surgery. 

In the intervening years, more randomized studies have been done of the effects of prayer on health outcomes. A 2009 review of all ten of the high-quality studies (“Intercessory prayer for the alleviation of ill health” by Roberts, Ahmed, and Davison) produced the following result: “Overall, there was no significant difference in recovery from illness or death between those prayed for and those not prayed for.” 

Upon closer inspection, I discovered that in all of the studies those doing the praying did not know the person they were praying for! This is totally different from the experience with meeting for healing and holding someone in the Light at the end of Friends worship. The problem from a scientific perspective is that one can never do a randomized study where those praying know the person being prayed for. Specifically, suppose someone named Susan needs healing. One could not randomize the people who know Susan and tell one random half that they cannot pray for Susan while the other random half can.

There are therefore two possibilities. First, there may be a significant effect of praying or holding in the Light when those praying know the person being prayed for. Many of us have stories of someone we know who was very ill and was prayed for or held in the Light and then was miraculously healed, despite a terrible prognosis from physicians and with no explanation from medical science. But documenting this experimentally is virtually impossible. Or second, whether or not praying has an effect, the relationship between the person praying and the person prayed for is strengthened by the act of praying or holding in the Light. As Friends, we can affirm that holding someone in the Light strengthens our bond with that person. Similarly for the group in meeting for healing, it also creates a bond between members of the group. Prayer and holding in the Light helps the Spirit move among us. 

In a related matter at our meeting, every week in the announcements period after worship, we read the names of persons murdered in Baltimore in the previous week. We ask that they and all the persons who knew them be held in the Light. In addition, on a long banner in front of the meetinghouse, we write the names of homicide victims during the year. The banner title for 2024 (changed slightly from the wording for 2023 and earlier years) is “We hold in the Light Baltimore homicide victims and those who knew them—2024.” All persons touched by violence in the city and elsewhere need to be held in the Light.

Whether there was a difference between praying and holding in the Light came up in our monthly meeting for business when one Friend said that some of the pedestrians passing by on the sidewalk next to the banner would not understand the phrase “hold in the Light.” But overall, we felt people would understand and translate it, if needed, using their own experience. To go deeper, I must first make an admission: some may consider me a seasoned Friend, but I am very weak in theology. Thankfully this is not really a problem, because Quakerism is an experiential religion. Anyway, in Christianity, Islam, and some other religions, prayers are from a person to a Supreme Being. On the other hand, many Friends believe that holding in the Light simply recognizes that Light pervades all of life and that individuals can access that Light and hold a given person or persons in that Light. Might it be so!

The post Holding in the Light, Prayer, and Healing appeared first on Friends Journal.

Trusting God in a Season of Waiting

Friends Journal - Fri, 2024-03-01 02:50
Transformational Prayer and Healing

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void. . . . And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.” —Gen. 1:1–4 (King James Version).

A myriad of generations grew up with an understanding of God as our Creator. God, or the idea of the existence of a God, is so vast and complex that scientists debate and look for proof. Many people doubt and ask: How could a benevolent God exist when there is so much hatred and turmoil in the world today? If God exists, why doesn’t He or She stop bad things from happening to good people? 

Too often, we simplify our understanding of God as an entity—a Creator. If something can be created and later becomes broken, it can be fixed or healed. Sadly, however, something broken cannot always be fixed, and consequently, like Christ on the cross, we feel God has forsaken us. We stand in the darkness of pain, suffering, and grief, desperately grasping to once again see the Light: to once again breathe, hope, laugh, love, and feel joy. Not only do we long for healing, we need to heal—heart, body, and soul—as individuals, families, and nations.

I am neither a biblical scholar on the topic of prayer, nor am I a scientific researcher of the physical benefits of prayer. I am a seeker, trying to understand close encounters I have experienced with the Divine. I have had questions most of my life. Why do my spiritual sensibilities seem out of sync with my upbringing in a nondenominational Christian church? Why do I feel a presence calling me to serve? Why am I being haunted by the healing lyrics of a particular song on the radio every time I get in the car? How do I know if the inner voice speaking to me is divine intervention, my own inner monologue, or enemies of the Light? Where is God’s voice when I need it most?

I have suffered the unexpected loss of a spouse, cared for a dying parent in hospice, felt rejection and heartbreak in a relationship, and known the regret of making poor decisions and their consequences. I’ve had my fair share of being alone in the darkness shouting Why did this have to happen? or pleading Please take away this pain! In those prayerful moments of accepting that I am broken and feeling that I have lost control, my season of healing begins. 

The Purpose of Prayer

You may call it “prayer.” Some call it “affirmation” or “positive karmic intention.” I call it “talking to God.” Drawing upon the strength of a power greater than myself helps me focus on what matters in the moment, reduces my anxieties, gives me hope, and “restoreth my soul,” as David so aptly describes in the twenty-third psalm. Prayer helps me be more mindful of messages sent from God to help me find my way out of the dark, like the spoken ministries shared in a recent Friends meeting I attended. Sometimes it takes a tap on the shoulder from God to remind us that we’re not alone. Healing is not done in isolation; it is done in community with the support of family, friends, and God.

Healing Takes Time

I have a small plaque in my bedroom that I read every night to remind me to wait: to be patient for healing. I need the reminder because patiently waiting is not in my nature.

I once prayed for patience. For several weeks thereafter, it seemed every day, multiple times a day, my patience was put to the test. I even began to get impatient waiting for God to miraculously grant my request. Then one day, I realized the tests were God’s way of forcing me to practice and hone my patience skills. Since then, I have gotten better but still struggle with impatience, especially when it comes to emotional and spiritual healing. 

Sometimes, God is quite clear in answering our prayers. When I had doubts about the man I was in a relationship with and subsequently married to for 30 years, I prayed, “God, I don’t think this is what I want. Would you send me another?” God did not hesitate. I heard an assertive and somewhat frustrated message, “I don’t care if this is what you want; this is who you need.” This divine intervention has had a lifelong impact on me and has also been thoughtfully useful to others I have shared it with over the years. Scripture tells us that God wants to meet our needs and our heart’s desire. However, sometimes what we want simply is not possible or what is best for us. 

Other times, God answers in slower or more surprising ways. You may have experienced finding a doctor that finally was able to diagnose a health issue. You may have made a difficult decision to go forward in a particular direction, only to have obstacles put in your way that prompted you to alter your course. God doesn’t work in our time, so we need to be patient and wait for the right answers and for obstacles to be removed. Our prayers could be limiting what we need for healing. We have no view of what’s to come. God may be saying, “If you wait, I have more and better for you.” 

The past 18 months have been—and continue to be—a season of healing from the unexpected loss of my spouse. With one phone call from the ICU, my life was forever changed. My heart was broken. In the weeks and months that followed, I felt an emptiness and dull ache. I just wanted the pain to go away. I prayed but felt God was not listening and I began to question my faith. I didn’t realize it at the time, but while I waited God was working behind the scenes for my good and benefit.

Expectantly waiting doesn’t preclude us from seeking out new activities, relationships, or opportunities that could help in our healing or in finding purpose in our pain. Slowly I began my quest to seek out a purpose, to leave behind my pain (if only for a little while) so that I might serve others. I began to refresh my interests in creative endeavors l had long ago set aside, like writing, playing the piano, and networking with friends and work colleagues. I began refreshing my Spanish-language skills, walking more and eating less (or at least healthier). I forced myself to do things I enjoyed doing with my late husband, like going out to dinner and the movies. I even bolstered the courage—at the age of 72—to do stand-up comedy on open-mic nights. My community of people who cared about me stood by me, encouraged me, and loved me. I began to see the Light and feel relief from the pain. Laughter came back into my heart, and I began to feel more joyful than I had in years. 

There is no equation or set of variables we can use to measure, schedule, or forecast our healing progress. We all heal from pain and sorrow in our own time. Emotional and spiritual healing is not scientific; it is divine. When we trust God in a season of waiting, we open ourselves up to healing. When we are healing, we nurture our spiritual growth. Growing in spirit brings peace, hope, and transformation.

The post Trusting God in a Season of Waiting appeared first on Friends Journal.

Melody

Friends Journal - Fri, 2024-03-01 02:40

I swallow my sorrow, but cannot
digest it, so I tranquilize it into
girdling fat and agree not to bring up
the subject.
                      Rheumy-ness in my eyes
is a slug’s slimy trail of bad decisions.

Sometimes drunks don’t wake up.
Sometime weathervanes spin every
direction
                  and normal is only a concept,
the foggy plastic window in my wallet
where my photo ID used to be.

                                                          Prayer
is a song I sing, hoping to find a way
home by following the melody.

The post Melody appeared first on Friends Journal.

Elbow Grease

Friends Journal - Fri, 2024-03-01 02:35

He tosses his life’s work in Tuesday’s trash
and corkscrews down a hole of despair,
alone and unknown, certain companionship
is an illusion.
                         Love circles bedside, quiet-like,
stirring just enough to be a presence,
relieving pressure, uncramping space
with a sacred spine of focused not-doing,
a special kind of elbow grease.
                                                        Prayer is
a mystery. There’s no point in thinking
about it or even using words.

The post Elbow Grease appeared first on Friends Journal.

Jon Fosse: “To Me, Writing Is Listening”

Friends Journal - Thu, 2024-02-29 15:25
An Interview with Nobel Prize-Winning Author Jon Fosse

Last October, Norwegian author and playwright Jon Fosse was awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature, which recognizes a writer’s entire body of work. In 2022, his novel A New Name: Septology VI-VII, translated into English by Damion Searls, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize; and the book was named a finalist for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction. Centered on a pair of doppelgangers who are both painters named Asle, the multi-volume novel explores such themes as mortality, prayer, and the spirituality of art. Fosse has Quakers in his family, and he has attended meeting for worship in adulthood. He is now a practicing Catholic who views spiritual experience through a Quaker lens. Friends Journal staff writer Sharlee DiMenichi interviewed Fosse via Zoom in early February. The interview has been lightly edited.

Sharlee DiMenichi: Well, could you start by talking a bit about how your previous Quaker faith influenced your writing [in Septology] of the narrator’s view of light and darkness in his paintings?

Jon Fosse: I’m quite sure that my relation to the Quakers has been very fundamental for my writing and for me. The concept of the Inner Light, the way it relates to a Norwegian painter named Lars Hertervig [1830–1902] . . . I’ve written a novel about him called Melancholia. He was called the painter of light, and he’s a relative of mine, many years ago. He was a Quaker, and my grandfather was also a Quaker. He wasn’t organized, but he considered himself as a Quaker. So in a way, I grew up with this way of thinking, with the Inner Light as a very central concept. And later on in my 20s, I took part in Quaker meetings. In Norway—I don’t know what you have. We are just this quiet—we sit in this quiet circle.

SD: Oh, yes, that’s similar to our unprogrammed meetings in the United States as well.

JF: Yeah, we keep silent. And if you have something to say, you say it—or the best, you just keep quiet. This way, the trust in silence, that you can perhaps hear the voice of God in silence—I’m quite sure that’s crucial for my way of writing and has been for quite many years.

To me, writing is listening. And I hope at least that this God in me helps me to hear what I’m to write. And that’s just through the silence. I don’t hear any voices, of course, but I listen to the silence. And the silence tells what to write and what I’ve written before. So my earliest novels, they were very black, kind of heavy metal thing. But my later novels are closer to the music of Bach, I would say, in their composition and the way that I repeat it. But even they are basically written as a kind of literary music. Of course, it’s not music, but it’s—language also has musical qualities, and I use them for all they’re worth, I think. A long novel like Septology is a kind of composition. It’s the muse, the flow, the rhythm I guess is the right word. It’s completely crucial to it.

I feel like a Quaker still in many ways, but I’m a Catholic now. I converted to the Catholic Church for various reasons, but to me, I experience the mass very much like a Quaker meeting. You have these liturgical texts repeated again and again. I prefer the Latin mass, if I can choose that. And then I don’t understand all of it, just a little bit here and there. So in a way, this ritual element becomes also a kind of silence. The meaning is repeated again and again and has been for 2,000 years. So that traditional meaning, somehow it says nothing. It becomes a silence. So the silence is coming that way. And I guess in my fiction, in my prose, it’s the repetition that somehow lets the silence enter my writing. And it—this is also crucial for the rhythm—these breaks, these silences, these pauses in my plays—it’s easier to see in my plays to understand what I’m trying to say.

SD: So you talked a bit about the role that silence plays in your current spiritual life. How did that evolve when you left Quakerism?

JF: I have never left Quakerism, in a way. I go to the mass now, but as I tried to say, in a way, I experience the mass—to a large degree, the silence, the presence of God, I also experience in the Catholic mass. Perhaps it shouldn’t be like that, but I do. To me it’s like that. So I was never an organized Quaker. I thought that there was something un-Quakerish about being an organized Quaker, if you know.

SD: I see.

JF: I took part in the meetings in Bergen when I lived there, the second biggest town in Norway. Now I live in Oslo, and the Quaker communities both in Bergen—and there we were four or five persons normally, perhaps six, only that. I guess they are around 10 or 12 in a normal meeting here in Oslo. All in all, in the whole of Norway, there are only 150 Quakers organized. So it’s a very small community. And I felt I needed something bigger and stronger, in a way, to support me in my life. Because of that, I went to the Catholic Church.

The man who taught me a way to believe in a Catholic way was Meister Eckhart, the mystic. And if you read him, you will see that in the twelfth century, he wrote almost exactly the same as George Fox did in the seventeenth century but 500 years earlier. And he was a Dominican, a heretic of course. I am kind of a heretic in the Catholic Church, but they are very happy to have me as a Catholic. The pope, Pope Francis, sent me a personal letter when I got the Nobel Prize.

SD: Wonderful, oh my goodness.

JF: Yeah. That was very good. It almost brought me to tears. It was very touching—because I am, in a way, kind of a heretic. I’m also divorced, something you shouldn’t be as a Catholic. So they used their grace to let me into their community.

SD: So you mentioned that you worshiped with the Quakers in Bergen. Could you talk a bit about how you came to that meeting? And were you a member or an attender?

JF: I was, of course, a bit afraid the first time, but it was in a home in the living room of a woman living alone in Bergen. We met there, this small group. One of them was Andrew Kennedy; he was a professor in English, [teaching about Samuel] Beckett was his main thing. We were just this small, strange group sitting there. But this quietness, it came, and you could feel a kind of presence of what I call God in the meeting.

I’m quite sure that each and every human being has something of God in themselves. And in a strange way, that is what makes them completely unique, but at the same time, this quality is completely universal. So as a human being, we are completely unique, every one of us, and we are universally the same. This doubleness is very strange, but it’s true.

SD: How did the vantage point of the narrator evolve over the course of writing Septology?

JF: When I’m writing, as I said, it’s an act of listening. I started writing this novel in a castle in France that had belonged to Paul Claudel, the famous French poet and also Catholic; it belonged to him many years ago but now to his family. I was invited to go there, and I started writing this novel there. By then, I had written for many years, almost only plays, and I decided to quit writing plays. I wanted to write what I call slow prose. A play needs a kind of intensity, and I wanted to let the language flow in another, slower rhythm, but that was all I knew. It’s not any conscious decision about this or that. I feel that at least when I’m writing a novel, I’m establishing a kind of universe that has thousands of rules, and I have to listen to these rules and to follow them. I can’t formulate them. There are too many and too complicated for me to formulate, to tell them. Each and every part begins with the narrator saying, “And I see myself . . .” Then it goes into the mind of only one other person, and that’s the second Asle. Otherwise, he sticks to the “I” of the novel.

So what constitutes this novel to a large degree, at least as far as I can tell, is the way that language of time is used in the story, the way it goes back and forth. Now you can suddenly experience something that happened long ago in the past, many years back. The time is mixed; it becomes, at least to me, more like a moment, a moment stretched out like that. So it covers a whole life in a way, in these seven days that the main story takes.

SD: What were some of the most attractive aspects of Quakerism for you? And what are some of the most compelling aspects of Catholicism?

JF: As a young man, I left the Norwegian Lutheran Church as soon as I could, at 16, because I thought it was rubbish. I couldn’t stand it. And then I didn’t belong to any kind of—I had no religious connection. But I knew about the Quakers, and I read more about them and I learned about them. But as a young man, I called myself an atheist. What changed my way of thinking about it was, in fact, my own writing. Where does it come from? When I think about other writers and composers, the music of Bach, where does it come from? How can you explain that in a materialistic way? No, you can’t. Then that spiritual space, or what you call it, opened up for me. And this is an unseen thing, of course, this spiritual space. But you can feel it, and you can know it when it is there. At a certain point, I only knew that it was there, but I started to think about it as God, this unknown.

And then it wasn’t that long to come to this kind of understanding of the concept of Inner Light and to reach God, through science in a way. To me, it was and it is obvious. It became completely obvious to me. So it is. That’s the truth for me. And it still is. Even when I go to the Catholic mass, as I said, these liturgical texts are repeated again and again. And then they have their holy moment, the Eucharist, when you feel this presence—at least I do—of what I can call God during the Eucharist in a similar way that I could also feel the presence of God in a Quaker meeting. Not every time, but in a good meeting, in a good Eucharist, it’s like that. So it isn’t that different.

They are, in a way, on the extreme side. Catholicism is like a pageant with processions and, you know, all this. And with Quakerism, you remove all of this outside stuff. But they exchange themselves, and, in a way, meet. And to me, it was also a personal need, by being an alcoholic, to tell the truth. It was very hard. I had to quit drinking with a lot of help from medication and my friends and my family. And I managed, but I really felt I needed something strong to connect to, and at least in Norway, the Quaker community is small and fragile. But it was a great thing to join this 2,000-year-long tradition of Catholics and a church that’s spread all over the world.

The word catholic means “general”—that’s one thing to, in a way, take everything into itself. And at least in Norway, we are also few Catholics, Norwegian Catholics. We are only perhaps 5,000 or something like that, but there are many Catholics all in all in Norway, but they are from Poland, most of them, or from the Philippines. They are immigrants or guest workers or so. But at least it’s a very long tradition. The mass is celebrated several times each day. Even in Oslo, you can go to a mass at eight in the morning or in the afternoon or in the evening. You can go to a mass wherever you are. The liturgy is the same, the words, so I feel like I connect in a very strong way to a 2,000-year-old tradition, saying that it goes back to Christ, to Peter. He was the first bishop or pope. It’s the center there. It’s the mystery of faith. It’s the most central Catholic concept. The mystery of faith, in my view, is also a very central concept to understand the way I believed, or believe, as a Quaker.

SD: Which Quaker writers most influenced you?

JF: It’s hard to say. I would, in fact, say something completely wrong. It’s Meister Eckhart. He was, of course, not a Quaker because he lived in the twelfth century, but he was thinking like a Quaker. Then it’s the paintings of my relative, Lars Hertervig, who came from a Quaker family, and my grandfather. But if you’re into literature, as I’ve been my whole life, and art, for me, it’s so close to this, to science. A great painting, for instance, cannot tell—pronounce a word—but at the same time, it’s telling a lot, a lot, a lot in a silent way.

So you understand that each and every human being has a unique value. And this is, at the same time, the most general and worst part of this human being or of all human beings. The concept of the Inner Light also becomes, in a way, obvious. Eckhart speaks about the sparkle. He uses different concepts or words, but the sparkle he’s using the most.

And these paintings of Lars Hertervig, in Norway they call him the painter of light. The way he paints light is remarkable. He lived with a mental illness by the way, and spent most of his life in an asylum.

SD: What would you like to add?

JF: There are so many paradoxes in life, and Christianity is full of paradoxes. You can’t make it a rational system. Belief isn’t a rational system, as little as art is. So I accept that I can live with a lot of contradictions and still be as a Catholic and even at the same time as a Quaker. That’s the basic thing.

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Escaping Oppenheimer’s Shadow

Friends Journal - Tue, 2024-02-20 18:16
The Power of the Peace Movement

Growing up in Princeton, New Jersey, in the early 1960s, I was best friends with Sam, who was the son of Princeton University professor Marvin Goldberger, a renowned nuclear physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, studied with Enrico Fermi, and was a colleague of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Watching the movie Oppenheimer brought back memories of this formative period of my life. I spent many hours in the A-frame home of the Goldbergers and got to know the family quite well. (Just to be clear, I have no aptitude for physics or math. From an early age, I aspired to be a poet and spent time talking with Marvin’s wife, Mildred, about poetry rather than with Marvin about physics.)

Marvin Goldberger came to Princeton in the 1950s where he got to know Oppenheimer, later describing him as an “extraordinarily arrogant, difficult person to be with. He was very caustic. He was patronizing, and he was not a warm, easygoing guy” (as shared in a 1983 interview for the Voices of the Manhattan Project oral history collection). This is consistent with how he is portrayed in director Christopher Nolan’s brilliant film released last summer, which has been nominated for 13 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay. I should also add that Goldberger felt that the atomic bomb should never have been dropped on cities and opposed the nuclear arms buildup. As detailed in a 1981 profile by the Los Angeles Times, while Goldberger was president of the California Institute of Technology (1978–1987), he became active in Pasadena’s Interfaith Center to Reverse the Arms Race.

Oppenheimer’s life story is profoundly tragic, as most war stories are. Nolan’s film portrays him in all his ambiguity: brilliant, full of hubris, and morally conflicted. He realizes too late that he has released the genie of mass destruction from its bottle, and his efforts to curtail the consequences of this act of hubris prove futile.

Oppenheimer and Lieutenant General Leslie Groves Jr. at the remains of the Trinity test in September 1945. The white canvas overshoes prevent fallout from sticking to the soles of their shoes. Photo courtesy of the U.S. Army.

Oppenheimer assumes that the dropping of the bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945 was a necessary evil to end the war with Japan, and saved countless lives. This claim has been disputed by revisionist historians like Gar Alperovitz since the mid-1960s. In 2020, Alperovitz and historian Martin J. Sherwin co-wrote an op-ed piece in the LA Times laying out their evidence that even the military questioned the necessity of using the atomic bomb on Japan. They point out that the National Museum of the U.S. Navy in Washington, D.C., “states unambiguously on a plaque with its atomic bomb exhibit: ‘The vast destruction wreaked by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the loss of 135,000 people made little impact on the Japanese military. However, the Soviet invasion of Manchuria . . . changed their minds.’”

Most Americans wanted to believe—and still insist—that the atomic bomb was needed to win the war. In a dramatic scene, Oppenheimer (portrayed by actor Cillian Murphy) boasts to a crowd of Americans that the bomb has been dropped on the Japanese and should have been dropped on the Germans, and everyone applauds wildly. During the deafening applause, Oppenheimer has a horrific vision of the room consumed with atomic fire. This ambivalence is what makes Oppenheimer a tragic figure, and the movie worth watching.

The movie ends on an apocalyptic note, with Oppenheimer realizing that he has started an arms race that could lead to the destruction of all life on the planet.

The power of the atomic bomb is seen as godlike through the eyes of Oppenheimer and also the filmmaker, Christopher Nolan. In their best-selling, Pulitzer-winning 2005 biography of Oppenheimer, American Prometheus (which the movie is based on), coauthors Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin compare him to Prometheus, the Greek god who gave humans fire and was punished by Zeus by being chained to a rock and tortured for eternity. Oppenheimer names the first atomic test “Trinity,” in reference to a sonnet by John Donne titled “Batter my heart, three-person’d God.” When Oppenheimer witnessed the awesome power of the atomic bomb, he supposedly recalled a line from his favorite Scripture, the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Oppenheimer is all too human, however. His efforts to prevent the United States from building hydrogen bombs and to stop the arms race prove ineffective. He symbolized for many the folly of scientists who believed they could control the use of their research and the dilemmas of moral responsibility presented by science in the nuclear age.

I’d like to contrast this tragic and morally ambiguous story with that of the unsung heroes of the peace movement who helped to end the Cold War and reverse the arms race. For example, Albert Bigelow, a naval commander who went to Hiroshima and witnessed the devastation caused by the atomic bomb, quit the Navy a month before becoming eligible for a pension, joined the peace movement, and became a Quaker. In 1958, he set sail with three others on a boat aptly named the Golden Rule with the intention of entering the nuclear test site in the Marshall Islands. He and his crew were arrested in Hawaii, but his action inspired others like Quakers Earle and Barbara Reynolds, who sailed their own boat into the testing zone a month later, and the founders of Greenpeace, which began in 1971 with an anti-nuclear protest voyage into a test site near Alaska. Bigelow was also among the original 13 Freedom Riders who in 1961 risked their lives to desegregate interstate public transportation in the American South. What a great movie his life would make!

Golden Rule in 1958. From left to right: Captain Albert S. Bigelow, Orion Sherwood, WIlliam Huntington, and George Willoughby. Photo courtesy of Jessica (Reynolds) Renshaw.

American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and the Quakers began reaching out to the Soviets in the early 1950s to build trust and dispel stereotypes, with the hope of ending the Cold War. They persisted for the next 30-plus years, and in the 1980s their efforts bore fruit. When Gorbachev came to power, he wanted an end to the Cold War and the nuclear arms race. President Reagan was a staunch anti-communist and Cold Warrior, but he was willing to meet with Gorbachev: thanks in part to pressure from the peace movement.

The Nuclear Freeze movement not only gained the support of most U.S. peace organizations but also was endorsed by numerous public leaders; intellectuals; activists; and scientists, including Linus Pauling, Jerome Wiesner, Bernard T. Feld, and Carl Sagan.

Reagan was also influenced by the “citizen diplomacy movement,” of which I was a part. Because of glasnost, Gorbachev’s policy of “openness,” thousands of Americans went to the Soviet Union to meet the Russians, build relationships, and advocate for peace. This had a profound impact on Reagan and Gorbachev. They eventually met at the Reykjavík Summit in October 1986, and came very close to agreeing to ban all nuclear weapons by 2000. Both men wanted nuclear abolition, but the U.S. generals persuaded Reagan not to go that far. While Reagan and Gorbachev didn’t ban all nuclear weapons, their meeting led to the 1987 INF and 1991 START I Treaties, as well as limitations on nuclear testing. There were over 60,000 nuclear weapons in the world in the 1980s, and today there are around 12,500. Far, far too many, but this reduction wouldn’t have happened without the peace movement.

It is also worth noting that the peace movement in the 1960s had more power than many at the time realized. Robert Levering, a Quaker writer and activist, has recently produced a brilliant documentary called The Movement and the “Madman,” which was shown on PBS in 2023. The filmmakers write: “This film shows how two antiwar protests in the fall of 1969—the largest the country had ever seen—pressured President Nixon to cancel what he called his ‘madman’ plans for a massive escalation of the U.S. war in Vietnam, including threats to use nuclear weapons.”

Hollywood buys into the myth that Great Men are the ones who make history, and so does the media, but I believe that most lasting and positive change usually happens through grassroots movements.

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Writing Opp: 400th Anniversary of George Fox’s Birth

Friends Journal - Tue, 2024-02-06 20:48

Fast Facts:

We’re breaking two of our rules for the June/July 2024 issue. The first is our aversion to running issues focused on particular individuals. Perhaps it’s a remnant of the kind of old-school Quaker humility that gave the world plain speech, plain dress, and plain meetinghouse architecture, but we’re also a bit allergic to the “Great Man” histories that ignore the context behind most social movements. We also shy away from giving attention to anniversaries, which seem rather arbitrary and also too plentiful.

But rules are meant to be broken, right? This summer we’re looking at the 400th Anniversary or George Fox’s Birth (which occurred in July of 1624; historians are not sure of the exact day).

For those who have never walked into a meetinghouse or even cursorily scanned the Quaker Wikipedia entry, Fox is the founder of the Religious Society of Friends. Well, at least he’s credited for that. In reality there was already a strong movement of independent spiritual seekers when he arrived on the scene, and there were dozens of other ministers, organizers, and writers who each left their mark on the burgeoning Quaker movement.

Still, there’s a very good question to be asked (and perhaps an article to be written) about whether we should be making this kind of a fuss for George Fox. The irony is that those first Friends weren’t themselves interested in recent historical movements. They distrusted academic learning, rarely quoted spiritual contemporaries (except perhaps to mock them), and didn’t believe in any authority other than Christs’ inward inspiration and the Bible. What would Fox himself think of all the attention we give about him? When she first heard him preach, Fox’s future wife Margaret Fell went into a swoon when he preached “You will say Christ saith this, and the apostles say this; but what canst thou say?”

Many modern Friends very much care about what the apostle Fox said. In the twentieth century, many of the most visionary Friends were historians, from Braithwaite to Jones to Brinton. Quakers have used histories to divide us with claims that some types of Friends are closer to the original vision than others. But they have also been used to unite us by giving us a shared history that all Friends can claim.

Friends World Committee for Consultation has had its eyes focused on the anniversary for a while, hoping that Friends across the globe can put aside differences to get to know one another through our shared spiritual ancestor. There’s been a growing interest in recent decades for increased communication to understand differences among Friends. This seems as good a time as any to throw a Quaker block party.

What does George Fox mean to you? What parts of his life or writings have inspired and buoyed your own spiritual path? But we don’t just want a figurehead: we also want to understand the context of Fox’s life—his flaws, his evolutions, the things that make him not a saint but a fellow traveler. Give us the nuance. How did a movement coalesce around him? What lessons does his life provide for those of us wanting to bring together today’s seekers? What pieces of his legacy have we been overlooking?

Finally, a few pleas: please, please, please don’t write about Penn’s sword unless you’re discussing nineteenth-century Quaker hagiography (which, to be honest, could make for an interesting article for another issue). Also, take care to not dice up Fox quotes with so many cuts and pastes and ellipses that the original meaning is obscured. Let’s try to approach him as he was, or at least as he presented himself.

Submissions due Monday, March 18, 2024.

Submit: 400th Anniversary of George Fox. Other upcoming issues:

Learn more general information at Friendsjournal.org/submissions.

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Do Not Look Away

Friends Journal - Thu, 2024-02-01 03:00

There are always going to be things we instinctively look away from. Things we see but wish we hadn’t. Perceptions that make us uncomfortable for one reason or another. It might be because we feel guilty about our relative privilege or relative security. It might be because we fear what we don’t know and prefer the familiar. It might be because we recognize injustice but feel powerless to help. It might be because we see a reflection of something in ourselves that makes us ashamed.

If we truly believe in the testimonies that today’s Quakers name as foundational, though, overcoming the instinct to look away is essential. In this month’s Friends Journal, we are fortunate to have several pieces that guide us back toward seeing what’s there, and the Light within those people from whom we might otherwise look away.

Consider Brittany Koresch’s article, “Welcoming Joy and Spirit through Accessibility.” Reflecting on their own self-exile from meeting for worship, they decided to nudge their community toward addressing the accessibility barriers that kept them (and others) from full participation in the community, despite concern that even raising the question “went against what the community expected for worship, since no one talked about these things.” The result of this leap of faith, as they describe, was transformational for the meeting and for the cause of making space for all.

I saw myself in “Move Toward the Suffering,” when author Nathan Kleban describes the feeling of aversion he has been led to recognize in himself and overcome. Describing a life in the Spirit that has connected him to multiple Quaker-founded ministries like the Alternatives to Violence Project and Right Sharing of World Resources, he writes about the result of pushing himself to move closer to those who are suffering: “The mental narratives that justify the status quo have slowly lost their power over me.”

Shifting perspective somewhat, from what we perceive in the material world to what we dream of but might not necessarily think to connect to our faith journeys, frequent FJ contributor Marcelle Martin shares a fascinating look at the long history of dreams and dream-work in Quakers’ personal and collective spiritual development, from Margaret Fell in the cradle of Quakerism to modern times.

As you discover these stories and more, I’d be delighted to learn what you are led to turn toward that you might otherwise avoid. What do you find there, and what do you do with it?

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Quaker Dreams

Friends Journal - Thu, 2024-02-01 02:55
Pathways to Inner Wisdom

Whether we remember our dreams or not, dreaming is an essential function of being human, necessary for our health and well-being. Dreams also offer us a doorway from the conscious mind to unconscious realms, including collective social forces, forgotten memories, creative inspiration, spiritual guidance, divine wisdom, and more. In Western culture, we have been trained to focus on the outer world, ignoring pathways of inner wisdom that could give us needed guidance to face the times in which we live.

Dreams predicted the beginning of Quakerism before it happened. Mary Penington was an ardent Puritan before the English Civil War. Widowed by the war in 1644, she lost faith in the various Puritan denominations and stopped attending church services. Still, she continued praying for guidance on a daily basis. In her time of grief, she had some remarkable dreams about a future religion. In one she saw Christ, in both male and female form, enter a large hall wearing plain gray clothes. Christ embraced a series of humble people, which she saw as a sign of his wisdom. Finally he beckoned her to come to him. When the Quaker movement began a few years later, it proclaimed that the Spirit of Christ can manifest itself equally in men and women. Several years later Quakers collectively began dressing in plain gray clothes.

In the 1640s George Fox, who was an apprentice shoemaker at the time, began to have direct revelations of Divine Truth; he traveled from one village to another, wearing leather breeches and a white hat and explaining the truth that had been revealed to him. Mostly simple country folk were receptive to his message. When he reached Swarthmoor Hall in 1652, shortly after his vision atop Pendle Hill, both master and mistress were out of the house. Fox waited in the hall, along with the local Puritan minister, and the two of them argued vehemently about religion. The minister left in anger. When Margaret Fell arrived at her home, Fox addressed her in a familiar way: with the pronouns “thee” and “thou.” She was affronted by his coarse attire and appalling manners and most likely would have asked him to leave, but a night vision had prepared her to make a different decision. She had recently dreamed of “a man in a white hat that should come and confound the priests,” according to Fox’s Journal. She allowed Fox to spend the night in the attic, where traveling guests often stayed. She and her children listened to Fox’s spiritual ideas, and their lives were transformed. Margaret Fell became one of the most devoted supporters of the Quaker way.

From the beginning, Quakers were wary of superstition and imagination. They sought Truth and were, therefore, cautious about dreams. In his Journal, George Fox tells of a time he encountered people he thought paid excessive attention to their night visions. He cautioned them that there were three kinds of dreams. Most just reflected the business of everyday life, and some were the influence of the devil. The third category was “the speakings of God to man in dreams.” The Scripture stories of Jacob, Daniel, Jacob’s son Joseph, as well as Joseph the husband of Mary, showed examples of this third category: divinely inspired dreams. While it was important to heed what God spoke in dreams, it was necessary to distinguish such dreams from the other kinds.

The early Quakers who recorded dreams in their journals did so with discernment. As in the cases of Mary Penington and Margaret Fell, dreams containing divine guidance came most often to those who dedicated regular time in their lives to prayer, worship, Scripture reading, and other spiritual practices. The divine origin of dreams needed to be verified through worship and prayer. Howard Brinton’s 1973 book Quaker Journals contains a chapter on dreams, including a passage from the 1884 journal of nineteenth-century Friend Thomas Arnett in which Arnett describes his process of discernment after waking from a powerful dream:

After I awoke, my soul was gathered into the profoundest silence, the activity of thought was put to rest, every intervening cloud of imagination vanished, and my soul centered in God, the eternal substance. While thus influenced, the instruction of the foregoing dream or vision was opened in the ear of my spirit.

Early Quaker Dream Culture

In the scholarly book Night Journeys: The Power of Dreams in Transatlantic Quaker Culture, historian Carla Gerona focuses on dreams shared by Quakers between 1650 and 1800, a long period when Quakers gave great importance to dreaming. In the beginning, there was an emphasis on prophetic dreams about major social changes. Such dreams, shared widely in the Quaker community, helped create an alternative culture among Quakers, which then moved outward to affect society. The transatlantic network of Quaker traveling ministers knit the widespread community into a cohesive body. Sometimes they recounted dreams as part of their vocal ministry to the meetings they visited. Important dreams were passed from one meeting to another and often recorded by hand in commonplace books and then copied by others. Gerona writes, “Hundreds, probably thousands, of dreamers told dreams to enlighten others. . . . [I]t is the collective quality of dream interpretation that truly distinguishes Quaker dreaming of this period.”

From her study of hundreds of dreams, Gerona reveals that Quakers used dreaming to map the new, unknown territories into which they traveled, not only unfamiliar lands and landscapes but new social constructs and ways of forming community, as well as ways of being in relation with people of different religions and cultures. Dreams offered spiritual and moral guidance. For example, some were given clear guidance in dreams that slavery was contrary to God’s will. The earliest of these dreams of which we have a record was told by Friend Robert Pyle of Pennsylvania in 1698. His English-born indentured servants had fulfilled their terms of service, and he was contemplating buying an African slave. In the dream, he picks up a black pot and then encounters a ladder reaching heavenward. A man giving refreshment to those who climb the ladder tells him the ladder represents the Light of Christ. Pyle discovers that he needs both hands to climb the ladder and that, therefore, he needs to put down the black pot. He woke up with the certainty that slavery was contrary to the gospel. This dream not only persuaded him not to become a slaveholder, it convinced him to work for abolition. Pyle created and tried to circulate a plan for the gradual emancipation of all slaves. Subsequently, other Quakers were convinced by dreams to advocate for the abolition of slavery.

Photo by Inga Gezalian on Unsplash Contemporary Dreamers

Gerona reports that Quaker attention to collective dreamwork diminished in the nineteenth century. Today Quakers only infrequently hear someone recount a dream in vocal ministry, and it is even more rare to hear a dream meant for the community as a whole. Friends with a particular interest in dreams now look elsewhere for support and teaching. In the twentieth century, dreams became the focus of various psychological theories and methods of dreamwork, as well as scientific research. The more luminous aspects of dreams, what Quakers and others have characterized as divine guidance, get less attention.

I was fortunate to be living at Pendle Hill, the Quaker study center in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, at a time when the late dream teacher Jeremy Taylor led workshops there. During the Civil Rights Movement, Taylor led his first dream group for White people on overcoming racism. Other kinds of discussion and self-examination had failed, but collective dreamwork proved to be transformative. By sharing their dreams containing racist stereotypes, with the understanding that all parts of a dream represents a part of the dreamer, those who participated were able to see how they projected unacceptable parts of themselves onto others. In his book The Wisdom of Your Dreams, Taylor writes: “Subsequent experience has proven over and over that precisely this psychological dynamic of ‘repression and projection’ is at the root of racism, and indeed, of all forms of collective prejudice and oppression.”

Sharing dreams allowed members of Taylor’s first dream group to become more honest and open; it revealed their common humanity and allowed them to admit to parts of themselves they had tried to conceal. “[B]y increasing self-acceptance in this fashion,” Taylor explains in the book, “repressions are released, projections withdrawn, and even the most fundamental, ingrained, and habitual patterns of self-deception and destructive behavior are transformed.” This experience encouraged Taylor to offer dream groups in other settings.

Decades later, after working with thousands of dreamers in many contexts and cultures, Taylor could say that some aspects of dreams are universal among humans. He insisted that all dreams come in the service of health and wholeness—both individual and collective wholeness. And they come to show us something we do not already know consciously. All of them “always come to bring us to a deeper experience of the Divine and . . . they always start wherever the sense of transcendent presence is injured or broken.” Dreams therefore often show us places in our psyche that are wounded, hurting, and hurtful to others. Using images, stories, metaphors, feelings, and associations, dreams show us the messes that need to be cleaned up, the wounds that require healing, the deceptions we perpetuate, the fears that limit us, the dangers we face. They show us these things in order to help us clean up, heal, and become the people we are meant to be. Dreams come to guide us toward our greatest potential, both individually and collectively.

In Taylor’s workshops at Pendle Hill, the group collectively worked with the dreams of the participants using the method he called “Projective Dreamwork.” After hearing a dream and considering what it might mean if it were our own, participants were invited to share our “shameless projections,” without suggesting that we really knew what the dream might signify to the dreamer, who alone is able to judge the true messages of the dream.

Taylor insisted that dreams have several levels of meaning, related to different aspects of one’s being. One dream can communicate or reflect the inner condition of the dreamer on physical, emotional, relational, social, and spiritual levels, all at once, and may, therefore, have multiple interpretations that are true. A dreamer listening to the various projections offered by participants in the group can identify an accurate interpretation by means of an inner aha moment. Working with the social dimensions of dreams, whether one’s own dream or that of another, can reveal truths about society and its effects that have been hidden from consciousness and need to be revealed. Collective dreamwork can help all participants grow in awareness.

Quaker Tina Tau’s remarkable memoir, Ask for Horses, tells her life story by recounting 40 of her dreams and then showing how these dreams “revealed things about myself that I didn’t want to see. They tried to awaken me, to nudge or shove me toward wholeness.” Dreams were instrumental in helping her understand and face the challenges of her life and prepared her for wise choices. By connecting her to deeper parts of herself and mysterious realms of Spirit, they helped her to be more fully alive. Her decades-long attention to the guidance she received in her dreams helped her come to a fuller understanding of the Divine within each of us:

I grew up hearing Quakers talk about “that of God” in everyone. I always pictured that piece of God as a little spark of divinity inside us—like a gold ring in a cherry pie. Something glowing, of a different nature, hidden and small. But my dreams have taught me to see this differently. “That of God” in us has more motion, more urgency, than a ring. It is not finished. It is something like the tree inside an acorn. . . .  It has the power, and the intent, to make us more alive. . . . This wild intelligence—life itself—arises from both within and outside me, in some way that seems stranger the longer I live with it. And one of the ways it makes itself known in my life is in my dreams.

Tau writes that dreamwork can help us heal our relationship with the Earth. Racism involves projecting onto others the qualities in ourselves we can’t accept, and this is true of our attitudes toward the earth itself. Tau writes:

We cast our distrust of the fierceness, sexuality, and wildness of our emotions and bodies onto the planet itself, allowing us to treat her in brutal, exploitative ways. We have got to learn to look inward with curiosity and mercy, or we will be goners. If we owned our own mistakes, fears, and wildness we would look around us with entirely different eyes. 

Paying attention to our dreams and learning their language is an important aid in doing this.

The Evolutionary Function of Dreaming

Before the beginning of the Quaker movement, some seekers had dreams about events before they happened. Because of her dream of the man with the white hat who would confound the priests, Margaret Fell invited impudent George Fox to stay over and talk with her family. Mary Penington dreamed about Christ come among the people before the Quaker movement was known to her. These dreams saw events that had not yet happened and were not yet known to the dreamers on a conscious level. They suggest, however, that on a deeper level of ourselves the potentials of the future are known, that outer manifestations, movements, and events have their genesis inwardly and can be revealed in dreams, in particular to those who give close attention to their inner lives and are wholeheartedly seeking truth and divine direction.

Jeremy Taylor believed that on a collective level, humanity works out its evolutionary potentials of growth and development in dreams before these potentials become manifest in outward physical or social ways. He writes that “in addition to the personal/psychological and social/cultural layers of significance that regularly manifest in dreams, there is also a layer concerned with the evolution and development of the species as a whole.” He believed that “dreaming itself provides the venue where the evolutionary developments and survival strategies of entire species are first formed and manifested.”

Taylor ends his book The Wisdom of Your Dreams with an urgent appeal to attend to the guidance available to us collectively through dreams. He writes:

We have reached a point in the development of the species where we have taken into our hands the power to destroy the life of the planet. We are using that power, for good and ill, every day. If we are to survive, we must learn as much about our own unconscious depths and creative possibilities as we know about the structure of the atom and the makeup of the stars. Our dreams are an indispensable key to that learning. We must consciously explore this realm further. We can afford to wait no longer.

In the first centuries of Quakerism, Friends turned to dreams for guidance about new social and spiritual ways of being. Can we turn again to the gift of dreaming and collective dream-sharing that once blossomed among us as we seek for divine guidance in the crises of our time?

FJ Author Chat:

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Move Toward the Suffering

Friends Journal - Thu, 2024-02-01 02:50
Confronting Economic Injustice Head-On

Recently, I returned to visit the Salinas Valley, the “salad bowl of the world,” in California’s central coast, where I had lived prior to the pandemic. As I drove past its fields, the precise symmetry of crop rows grabbed my eyes like an optical illusion; the straight rows converged on the hills that rose in the distance. Periodically, people and trucks filled the empty geometric spaces, shattering the illusion. Farm workers hunched over while gathering strawberries. Then, with their boxes full, they ran at full speed under the heat of the midday sun to deliver the goods that would eventually make their way to supermarkets around the world. Thus they fulfilled their roles in a global supply chain. Years ago, I began to wonder how I could be in right relationship with these workers, and I wondered the same thing about the people I was on my way to meet.

I was driving to a prison in Soledad, California, and had often passed such fields and workers before. I was volunteering with the Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP), a 20-hour experiential workshop rooted in affirmation, community building, and play. In my previous job in the mental health field, a senior coworker impressed me with this advice: move toward suffering. For example, if you see someone struggling, find a way to move toward them; don’t just leave them to suffer alone. For as long as I could remember, whenever I saw an unhoused person sitting on the sidewalk with a sign asking for change, it had been all too easy to turn my head away and walk past. That visceral aversion was something to investigate.

My goal to move toward suffering led me to live in a Catholic Worker community in Salinas, where I spent time with unhoused people. The people incarcerated in prisons soon showed up on my radar as well. While living at the Catholic Worker, I found grounding and spiritual growth at Salinas’s Live Oak Meeting, which provided me with an opportunity to spend time with incarcerated people through AVP, and I soon began facilitating workshops in prison alongside incarcerated facilitators.

Previously, if you asked me to share my spiritual autobiography as Friends do, I might have described a trajectory of growing up without religious or spiritual community, exploring different faith traditions, serving with various Catholic Worker communities, living in Buddhist practice centers, and eventually making my way to Quaker meetings. Spiritual practice carried a sense of cultivating healthy thoughts, speaking kindly, and loving my (immediate) neighbors. Now the narrative of participating in particular communities and working on my individual growth has shifted to recognizing and being called to work with wider material concerns, including the ecologies within which we are enmeshed. Prior to my “spiritual” life, I received an undergraduate degree in economics. Over time, my attention has moved back toward learning about topics like global debt structures and monetary policy, as they’re deeply related to material and ecological concerns. More recently, I began working for Right Sharing of World Resources, a Quaker nonprofit that shares these interests. The etymological root of the word economics means “the way to run a household,” so economics isn’t so remote from these concerns: we’re all a part of the global household, including those working the fields and incarcerated people, who are also often performing some kind of work.

Migrant workers picking strawberries in a field. Photo by F Armstrong Photo.

When I facilitate AVP workshops, I don’t come in as an expert on conflict but as a fellow traveler. Hearing others’ stories and finding they resonate with my own, I experience a great sense of aliveness and growth in the AVP space. Workshop attendees that day expressed their appreciation, so I suppose I was of help to them, though I mostly processed my own emotional history and the mental narratives that I had, mostly unwittingly, gathered and labeled as my “self.” This suffering that I experienced, I would find, wasn’t just about this “me” but was intimately connected to the lives and contexts of those around me. Despite finding their hearts “beating with hopes and dreams as true and high as mine” (as written by Lloyd Stone in the poem turned hymn “This is my song”), incarcerated people and I had come together in prison under very different circumstances. A trend became obvious. Incarcerated participants often had histories of poverty and material misery, and they experienced traumas that can accompany such conditions, conditions that contrasted greatly from my own upbringing. I grew up with everything I needed. The differences in poverty and wealth or the inequities in society that lead people to be incarcerated—strawberry fields or corporate boardrooms—mirror dynamics on the world stage. On a larger scale, rich and poor nations have their own histories of development or underdevelopment.

Eduardo Galeano elaborated on the economic histories pertaining to Latin America, the home or ancestral home to many of the farm workers in the Salinas Valley. He began his 1971 book Open Veins of Latin America with a stark description of such divisions:

The division of labor among nations is that some specialize in winning and others in losing. Our part of the world, known today as Latin America, was precocious: it has specialized in losing ever since those remote times when Renaissance Europeans ventured across the ocean and buried their teeth in the throats of the Indian civilizations.

Underdevelopment has its basis in power: who has power and who doesn’t, and how power is used. “Common sense” these days is to use what power one has to maintain and increase power. Imperial powers use their might to subjugate other peoples or, as Galeano describes, use economic might to enforce terms that continue the plundering. On a smaller scale, individuals who have money make investments to “make” more money. While seemingly innocent on the surface—at least as far as current legal structures go—the mechanisms through which this is done include realities in global supply chains that make exploitation possible. The recipe has been followed again and again. Countries’ markets are opened to Western capital, whether it be by the force of the gun (a famous example being China in the nineteenth century as a result of the Opium Wars, which led to what they call their “century of humiliation”) or by other means (a coup or other form of external pressure). If money is a form of power and a market opens to foreign capital, democratic decision making loses meaning and average people have less power over their lives and their communities. Whose economy is it? We might say “the economy” is doing well, but that often reflects the well-being of those with the most power rather than the bulk of the population. Respect for human rights and ecological health are also integral to the health of the “household” an economy comprises.

When George Kennan, the first director of policy planning for the U.S. State Department, died in 2005, the New York Times described him as “the American diplomat who did more than any other envoy of his generation to shape United States policy during the cold war.” Kennan wrote a 1948 report that clearly showed how decisions are made in the higher echelons of power in the United States, and then become disguised by the language of public relations. He wrote that the United States has “about 50 percent of the world’s wealth but only 6.3 percent of its population,” and advised that it should maintain this imbalance:

This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.

To borrow vocabulary from world-systems theory, the movement of wealth and resources from the world’s “periphery” to the “core” countries continues, where peripheral countries serve as resource colonies for the core, and through myriad economic devices, a relationship of dependency and power asymmetry is maintained.

It’s easy to think suffering doesn’t happen when we don’t see it. But we can see it. In the past, news of violence often gets garbled as if in a long game of telephone, where people whisper a message into their neighbor’s ear in a line and see how confused the message becomes at the end. The global game is mediated by people, organizations, and news media each with their own interests. More recently, people on the ground are able to upload videos to the Internet, more easily and directly sharing their experiences with those around the world, as is happening with the current suffering of people in Gaza. Thanks to the Internet, it’s more and more possible to see what is happening, and move toward others in this interconnected world.

A provocative thought experiment is to place ourselves in the past and think how we might have responded during those times. In Quaker lore, these times might be that of the early Friends or during the antebellum period in the United States. The fantasy is that we would have acted heroically, fully living out the values that we espouse. Whatever the case, the world we live in now is not much different than it was then. Tens of millions of people are living enslaved lives shrouded behind global supply chains. Slavery helps produce our clothing, our food, our technological devices. And then there are the myriad forms of exploitation that are a regular occurrence. There’s walking by the unhoused person on the sidewalk and driving by the people picking strawberries. If I were in a history class in the future, how might I fantasize that I acted now? Would I want to be the person who just walked by? Understanding how these relationships came to be is central to learning how to end them and to establish new kinds of relationships. I don’t write this in judgment of others or myself but to ask: What are the kinds of community we need in order to best live out our aspirations? How can we support individuals and communities to live in ways that aren’t accommodating to the status quo?

RSWR gives grants to women’s groups that use the money to fund microbusiness ventures. Here a group member from Sama Village in the Eastern Province of Sierra Leone demonstrates her fishing haul. Photo by Jon Watts.

For me, it hasn’t been enough to engage economic relationships on an airy kind of spiritual basis that I used to believe: one that is disconnected from material realities. Individual-focused transformation and liberation are important but are incomplete without societal liberation. Nor is this just an intellectual undertaking. It has to be a journey, as Stephen Jenkinson put it on an episode of the End of Tourism podcast, of “translating what has been done in your name by your predecessors into a way of life that’s not self-serving and doesn’t prolong the dilemmas that have brought you to this crisis of conscience.”

AVP engages with power on the personal level through the idea of “Transforming Power”: practicing the skills that each of us has in order to change unhealthy relationships and behavioral patterns into healthier ones. Health, in this instance, might indicate mutually beneficial relationships that are fair and equitable. Working on ourselves affects our wider relations, such as our families and workplaces. Relations of power exist at these levels just as on the international level, depending on how decisions are made—if they are egalitarian or more authoritarian in structure—and who accrues the most benefits. Right sharing follows the testimonies and works with power on these levels: from establishing consensus decision-making practices in our communities and engaging with our governing institutions to challenge violence and exploitative practices to directly giving money and resources to those in need. The organization I work for, Right Sharing of World Resources (RSWR), follows the testimony of stewardship as it engages powers on a global level, supporting with grants those who are often most vulnerable because of the existing structure of global economic relationships.

Working with AVP and RSWR has been a meaningful, joyful way for me to engage with this crisis of conscience that characterizes our times. We have a clear way to help people’s lives, well-being, and destinies. It is readily evident with the farm workers sweating in the fields under the gaze of mansions perched on the adjoining hillsides. As a society, we’ve been bombarded with centuries of rationalizations and stories that normalize the current state of affairs. It’s understandable: we want the best for ourselves, our families, our communities, our countries. We use what power we have to help ourselves. But when we set out to benefit certain people without attention to the whole, others get left out. My parents wanted the best for me, which entailed love and care, and they also worked to set me up to more easily fit into a particular part of a global hierarchy of power. Through ignorance, we set the stage for some to live well and others to live poorly. Just as we can identify those forms and patterns of support on the familial level, we can also understand those patterns of relationships that play out on the global stage.

Through meeting with people inside prison walls and building community with them, the mental narratives that justify the status quo have slowly lost their power over me. RSWR, working toward right relationship (and thus change) within these structures, is transforming the material foundations of our societies by shifting the power dynamics of the world we live in. Mexican Friend Heberto Sein wrote in a 1976 Friends Journal essay titled “Toward a New World Order”: “Both rich and poor nations have respective roles to play in an enlightened, mutually beneficial process to create a new economic order. Right sharing is an essential part of that process.” How can we cultivate the clarity to see our present circumstances and discern skillful responses? Keep moving toward the suffering.

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Gathered Together

Friends Journal - Thu, 2024-02-01 02:45
Of Friends, Bees, and Virtual Meetings

When I enter the apiary, I carry my smoker, hive tool, and usually a veil, for though I no longer mind stings, I do not like getting stung on my face. I crack the first hive and wave the smoker over the top of the crowded frames, like a priest swinging the censer, and then I pull frames one by one, checking the state of the colony: whether they are in a good mood or not, whether the queen is laying, whether the colony is growing or contracting, whether they have enough food.

In fact, now that I think of it, the ritual of entering the hive begins a little earlier when I am preparing to visit the bees. There is the matter of checking the weather, for it is best to visit on a warm, sunny day. And I consider my intentions: Am I simply seeing to their health, or do I want to add or remove honey supers, or should I treat the hive for varroa mites or other pests that afflict so many bees these days?

Depending on the answers to these questions, I need different equipment. So I go down to the basement, which serves as my honey house, and gather whatever I need. The basement sits above ground, so I can go directly out the back to the hives. I use an old recycling bin to carry it all.

Then there’s the matter of lighting the smoker. (I use aspen wood shavings that I get at a pet store.) It’s important that it be well-lit and stay lit, so I test it by working the bellows vigorously until they belch forth a great cloud of white smoke, like an old-time locomotive. The smoke smells like a campfire.

Smoker lit, veil on, tool in hand, I step over to the apiary, turn off the bear fence (around here in the Blue Ridge Mountains, without electric fences, black bears would ravage the hives), and enter. Then I go from hive to hive; taking care of business; looking at bees; and, yes, even talking to them.

As I do all this, a shift occurs. My mind grows quiet. My heart slows. I become more focused than usual, aware of myself and what is near. The bees, I have learned, do not like a distracted beekeeper. I feel the way I feel when I am sitting in meeting for worship.

Keeping bees is not simply a matter of taking their honey. We beekeepers have a reciprocal relationship with our bees. And bees are remarkably attentive. They know what the beekeeper does and what the beekeeper smells like. There is even science to indicate that bees recognize individual people by sight. Beekeepers also come to know the personalities of our different hives. We know the behaviors, the sounds, and even the smells of healthy and sick, strong and weak, peaceful and agitated colonies.

Being together, we come in time to know each other.

I have come to see my work with bees as a form of worship. Writing about bees is an opportunity to reflect on what worship means to me, and it has helped me to explain why I much prefer in-person worship over worshiping on Zoom or other virtual platforms. Our meeting, like many others today, is partly on Zoom and partly in person, and there’s great and understandable interest in unifying us, but there is also resistance from some, including me, to the use of technology in meeting for worship.

I’m not alone in thinking that we encounter the Divine when we work with bees—not that they are more divine than anything else but that they are a window into everything else. I suspect that given the nature of the universe, we encounter divinity in infinite ways: anywhere, anytime, anyhow. But the idea of doing so with bees is many thousands of years old. Some of the earliest paintings in existence depict honey gatherers on rope ladders foraging honeycombs high up rocky cliffs. The care they took to paint these scenes so long ago gives them the aura of holiness.

Much later, apiaries were attached to monasteries and churches, not so much for honey but for the beeswax for candles: the bees delivered light! The old monastic tradition of hesychasm also comes to mind. Hesychastic worship, or prayer, is continuous and quotidian: one prays in the sanctuary and also while one sweeps the floor, washes the dishes, makes the bed, sows the wheat, keeps the bees.

The idea that life itself is worship appeals to me. It seems Quakerly: why should worship be one place and not another? This is related to the more fundamental question of why the Light should be in one person and not another. We are called to see the Light in others always, not just on First Day in the meetinghouse. We are called to witness the Divine in everything. Surely that act is a form of worship.

The author inspecting bees on a frame of honeycomb.

My father was a beekeeper and one of the most Spirit-led individuals I’ve ever known. For much of my youth, he was a Presbyterian minister (though he descended from old Quaker families in upstate New York), but even after he left the church for matters largely theological, he continued to regard the world, all of nature, as holy. I used to help him with his bees. When he died ten years ago, I carried on his beekeeping, and bees became a sort of conduit through which I accessed nature and, I like to think, divinity.

Beekeeping, of course, is associated in my mind with memories of my father, and my father is associated in my mind with notions I have about God or Nature or Spirit, in any form. Worship is not a simple thing. It is hard to pin down exactly what it is, let alone what it isn’t. One relies on what one already knows, and for me that begins with my parents and those early times in sanctuaries with and without pews.

What I learned from my father and mother, attending Presbyterian churches and Quaker meetinghouses, and walking in the woods and visiting beehives, was that there is something important about doing all of this fully present with our bodies: about showing up in person, about worship as embodied encounter. One cannot sweep a floor virtually; one cannot keep bees virtually; one cannot pray virtually . . . not really. One has to do it with one’s whole body and mind. 

We can pray anywhere, and I suppose that means we can worship anywhere, even on Zoom. But while it may feel like I’m gathering with others online, it is a paler, thinner form of gathering than what I experience in person with others. I feel this way for the same reasons that viewing a forest via a photograph in National Geographic magazine is a paler, thinner experience than visiting it in person.

I have Jewish friends (and Friends) who remind me that Orthodox Jews may not use a car or electronic device on the Sabbath. One reason for this, among others, is that the prohibition of technology holds the community near to one another: one must live close enough to one’s shul to walk there on the Sabbath, and that means people not only worship together in community but must also live together in community.

Now, I know that most of us have left behind the time when we were willing to set aside work, cars, computers, and light switches for the Sabbath. I am willing to drive and turn on a computer on First Day. But there is a kernel of an idea here that is worth keeping in mind. Worship is not simply an abstraction, or even what happens in a meetinghouse. It is a continuum of practices that involves bodies, minds, and spirits coming together, just as inspecting bees starts long before one cracks the lid on a beehive.

There is something about the physical act of rising from bed, preparing my body, eating and anticipating, then getting to the meetinghouse, greeting Norma or whoever is waiting at the door, finding a seat, shaking hands, nodding to others, smelling the smells of the room, seeing the light shine in through the windows, hearing the rush of the river outside, settling into silence, and waiting. . . . All of that and not any one thing in particular—not only the sitting in the silence—but all of that together is worship. At least for me it is.

I am a Friend and an anthropologist. I have spent much of my life, as many humans do, thinking about what it means to be human. I have not figured it out. We are too mysterious and complex and variable. But one principle my discipline has landed on is that in order to be truly ourselves, we must interact with other selves. In a strange alchemy, we must internalize them as we externalize ourselves, and as we are in turn internalized by others. To be our true selves, we must be or at least have been involved in interactions with others. In fact, to be ourselves we must, in a sense, be other selves, too.

Such exchanges are necessarily embodied. Despite what some think—particularly in the West—there is no split between mind and body. Our minds are our bodies, and our bodies are our minds. Meeting for worship starts with our bodies as we check in with our internal and external states. And our tradition involves doing this in the company of other bodies doing the same thing.

Yet we live in economic and technological times that promote the illusory mind–body divide. Social media, electronic gaming, artificial intelligence, and all sorts of other technological conveniences keep the metaverse at our fingertips. They market the allure of virtual life. They preach that our bodies don’t really matter, that we can (or will soon) do business together in a “meta” world.

All of that may in fact be our future. It certainly looks like a trend, but as Quakers, we have an obligation to step outside our society’s trends, norms, and expectations—just as we eventually stepped outside our society’s acceptance of slavery and war—and wonder whether such practices are wise, Spirit-led, humane, enlightened.

Yes, I know that some Friends cannot physically make it to meeting. That is the most common argument I hear for Zoom worship. It is not a new phenomenon. It did not begin with COVID. Friends (and members of other faiths) have wrestled since time immemorial with some Friends’ inability to attend worship. One of the distinctive features of our humanity is our care for those in need. How much more meaningful is showing up at each other’s doors and gathering those who cannot drive and bringing them in body and spirit to meeting? Or going in person to worship with them in their homes?

In many cases, it seems that the turn to Zoom is a turn to convenience, expedience, and efficiency. It began as a public health necessity. Now I fear that it is a too-easy acquiescence to the values promoted by the world’s tech giants. Don’t we lose something when we no longer do business with a person at a cash register? Don’t we lose something when we call an office and cannot speak to a person? Don’t we lose something when we buy on credit and do not pull bills from our wallet or trade goods for goods?

I know all too well that life is more complex these days, that a yearning for old exchanges is nostalgic and futile. Times have changed. I accept that.

But I also think that in these times we are called upon to wonder, to ask questions, to decide in the Light what sorts of change we can abide and what we cannot. We must decide for ourselves.

A Friend on Zoom recently associated Zoom and hybrid meeting with inclusivity—an open door—and suggested that those who resist the hybrid format were closing a door. The spirit here is right: keep the doors open, but the implication in this case is unfair. The door at our physical meetinghouse has remained open. Zoom Friends seem to want in-person Friends to consider hybridity: the inclusion of technology during worship, to welcome it in the spirit of inclusivity. I have spent a lot of time considering the question. But I have not felt much reciprocal consideration by Zoom Friends to return to meeting in person—where the door has remained open—or even to name the terms of such a return. 

There has been little, if any, recognition of the ways technologies such as Zoom intrude on worship. I remember when meetings prohibited photography during worship, even at wedding ceremonies. As much as the impulse has been to unify Zoom and in-person worship, the effect of hybrid worship is divisive, at least for me. True, all of the passengers on a commercial airline are flying on the same plane, but first and coach classes take fundamentally different flights. They are not gathered together.

What does technology like Zoom do for worship? There seems to be an assumption that it helps, or aids. But even its advocates suggest it is a compromise, a next-best thing: better than the utter absence of contact with each other but less than preferred. It seems to be a substitute. When does the stopgap end and the return begin? Are the alternatives—visiting shut-in Friends at their homes for worship, or gathering them up and bringing them to the meetinghouse—too inconvenient or impractical? And those who live far away, why do they not worship in person with nearby Friends? Divisions in meetings are as old as the Society of Friends: they are embedded in the difference between monthly and yearly meetings. We now have the technology to worship year-round as one congregation with yearly meeting, with the general conference, with Friends all over the world. Why don’t we do that? Because we worship with those at hand.

What if the inconveniences of carrying ourselves as well as other Friends across town or county were an integral part of the worship experience? What if one of the crucial factors of Spirit is our actually gathering together in the presence of one another, as a prayerful minyan, as it is known in the Jewish tradition: a practice that insists first on community with each other as a means to our communion with God. Have we really reflected on the effects of technology on our communities?

There is no virtual beekeeping. There is, I venture, no virtual community. Not really. There is, as there has always been, a community in flesh and spirit. It would be reassuring if I sensed that the question of virtuality was being threshed with consideration of its effect on gathered worship and our encounter with God.

Now I’m going to gather up my tools and step back out into the bee yard, risk the stings and anticipate the sweetness of honey, and hope that the bees accept me in person into their company.

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