A Prayer
March 9, 2025 § 2 Comments
I have found myself speaking quite often in meeting lately. Maybe it’s because I’m working on a submission on vocal ministry to Pendle Hill Pamphlets, so vocal ministry is not just on my mind, but really in my mind. It’s been making me nervous, speaking often like this, more consistently than I every have in the past—three times in four weeks, maybe four times in six weeks. Oy.
Furthermore, I’m relatively new to the meeting, so I’m worried about how it looks to have this newcomer loading up an early morning worship that not infrequently goes silent the whole hour, as it did this morning.
All these concerns are beside the point, of course. The only thing that really matters is whether I’ve been called. But this new trend has me worried about that, too. Am I really called to speak this consistently?
So I went to meeting this morning set on resisting, and so I did. And that resistance had me literally quaking for the last ten minutes. This was made both easier and more difficult, paradoxically, because the message was a prayer. I have only brought vocal prayer to meeting three times in 38 years, and one of them was an extremely harrowing experience. But I held on to my resolve and did not speak. Was I unfaithful? In the end, it felt okay, but . . . I relieved the pressure by sharing the prayer in “afterthoughts”, so I got it out after all.
I’ve always been uncomfortable with afterthoughts and I think it’s possible that I have not offered one afterthought in all my time as a Friend. I suspect, with no clear evidence, that afterthoughts have some kind of feedback effect on the vocal ministry—but what effect? Does it protect the worship from shallow ministry or lower the bar? I’ve been in meetings that have them and meetings that don’t, and I still can’t tell. But my instincts tell me that afterthoughts must have some kind of effect on the worship that precedes them.
Well, anyway, here is that prayer:
Our Father, who art in the mystery of transcendence;
Our Mother, who art in the earth in her immanence;
Our Holy Spirit, which art in each of us a holy presence;
hallow our hearts and minds to your guidance.
Please help us to bring divine love into the world.
Please give all of us who are in need the necessities of the day.
Please help us to treat others as we want to be treated.
Please help us to resist the temptation to do wrong,
and to have the wisdom and strength to do what is right.
And thank you, thank you, thank you.
Through the Flaming Sword 
I am curious if your prayer (thank you) was prepared in advance, written in meeting, or developed as you spoke. I ask because I continue to ponder the “rule” that what is shared during meeting for worship “should not” be prepared. Most of what lives in my mind and I feel compelled to share comes to me at all sorts of times and then bubbles up again in stillness. I have also been reading Quaker diaries circa 1890-1920 referring to sermons; implying that preparation was part of worship.
Thoughts?
The answer to how the prayer developed is: all of the above.
I have reimagining the Lord’s Prayer for myself for decades because some of it does not speak to me, but the overall thing is immensely compelling. “Father”, for instance, is not my experience of God, nor is a god defined by will and power. “Heaven” I prefer to think of as the spirit realm, a transcendental medium in which spirits (which I do have experience of) dwell. I prefer the literal translation of the prayer’s later half: Forgive us our debts (the actual word for money), as we forgive our debtors, evoking and invoking what I call the economics of redemption in the common-wealth of God. And: Lead us not into the final trial (the apocalypse) but deliver us from the evil one.
(As for other versions, I even have one that goes: Our Father which art in the cloud, hallowed by thy icon. Thy operating system boot, thy applications open; as they were coded so shall they execute. Give us this day thy daily update, and forgive us our errors as we forgive a lazy support tech staff. Lead us not into phishing scams, but deliver us from malware. For thine is the internet, the server system, and our end-user satisfaction. Amen.)
So back to your question: Some of this version has been in my mind for a long time. Some of it came while sitting in the silence this morning. And some of it came while I was speaking. And while I was speaking, I was in an unusually deep sense of communion, even though meeting for worship was formally over; I was actually praying.
I think that the resistance to the idea of “prepared” messages is an artifact of our having lost the faith and practice of vocal ministry as a calling. We now think of vocal ministry as an episodic phenomenon that arises in the moment, rather than bubbling up from a more generalized sense of calling to ministry flowing from an underlying prophetic stream. At least in some of the FGC-affiliated yearly meetings that no longer record gifts in ministry.
When you feel a calling to vocal ministry, as I do, things bubble up all the time, at any time, and then they float around, come and go, grow or get trimmed, branch out, die out, all within a kind of simmering mental stew that is drawing heat from somewhere deeper within while constantly interacting with what I’m outwardly experiencing: what I’m reading, and especially what I’m studying or writing, what I’m doing, who I’m seeing, what’s going on in my meeting. . . .
It’s ongoing. It’s conscious and subconscious, inward and outward, forward or into the background, connecting and resonating with other bits of potato in the stew, forming molecules, giving off radiation, all at the same time—it’s all very dynamic.
I imagine that this is similar to the accounts you’ve read, and I’ve read, in elder-day Quaker journals, when vocal ministry was a life commitment and a potentially long-term calling which meetings knew they needed to nurture and keep an eye on. When you have such a calling, it lays upon you a weight that one should not have to bear alone. Elias Hicks, for instance, had this utter dread of getting it wrong, though I’m not sure how amenable he was to eldering. Without such a calling and its weight of responsibility, without the underlying prophetic stream and its dynamics, the import of the moment looms much larger and the longer-term processes maintained by your ongoing devotional life fade away.
I think the loss of such a culture of eldership has diluted our ministry. The chickens get out in to a free-range yard where any seed or bug on the ground can look attractive. And the lack of a culture of eldership that actively and proactively nurtures vocal ministry (and other forms of ministry) means that this dilution of ministry goes unaddressed or even unnoticed. I think this is true at least in those very many meetings in the “liberal” branch that do not record gifts in ministry or have some proactive infrastructure for the nurture of ministry. But it might be even worse in programmed meetings, where the opportunities for the vocal ministry of the “laity” that we claim to have laid down are so constrained and you don’t have even the minimum amount of time one needs to become centered before speaking. I don’t know; it’s been twenty years since I attended a fully programmed meeting for worship.