Through the Flaming Sword

I once became close to a Friend while teaching First Day School together and discovered that she volunteered once a week in a hospice. Who knew? I think it’s possible that nobody else in the meeting did. She obviously had a gift for pastoral care and a leading to serve in that gift. Did she think of it as a spiritual or religious calling? Did she sometimes carry home some of the grief and pain that she witnessed during her ministry? Did she go through rough patches sometimes, or doubt her calling? Did she need any kind of spiritual support? Would she come to the meeting for that support? And would her meeting be equipped to offer it? How many Friends have gifts and leadings like hers that remain invisible to their meeting, maybe even to themselves?

We Friends believe that each of us has been endowed with gifts of the Spirit, and that many of us, if not all of us, will be called into some form of life-affirming service, some “ministry”, at some point in our lives. At least, that’s the “official”, traditional conviction. Also, in theory, one of our meetings’ most important responsibilities is to recognize and nurture these gifts, to recognize leadings into service, and to support them both. 

However, too often our members and attenders have never been invited to think about their spiritual gifts or how they might be led into ministry. Nor have our meetings done anything on their part to recognize  and nurture their gifts and leadings. Often, the closest we get is nominating committee trying to match the experience and skills, the talents and interests of members to the slots in the meeting’s committee roster; nominating committee does recognize some gifts, and serving on a committee can be fulfilling. But that’s not real proactive spiritual nurture of the gifts themselves.

No one starts off thinking in terms of spiritual gifts and leadings. You have to be exposed, invited, even taught this way of thinking. Yet, we often find our way into our gifts by instinct anyway. People who have been given a chance will often find their gifts “accidentally”, by virtue of their family upbringing, or their education, or other aspects of their environment, their church, or hobbies, or Scouts or 4H, or some mentor(s), or whatever. And they need to be lucky enough not to have been traumatized or oppressed along the way. 

So we may gravitate into our gifts and leadings naturally, organically, but still not think of them this way. I know I have. But I eventually came to recognize them as gifts of the Spirit because one of my callings is to the study of religion and of Quakerism, especially the faith and practice of Quaker ministry. Study is one of my gifts and one of my spiritual disciplines; I’m good at it and it feeds my soul. I ended up teaching myself until I found mentors in Doug Gwyn and Bill Taber at Pendle Hill. 

So I came to understand and develop my gifts and leadings in the arms of my Quaker tradition. But it took decades to finally find a meeting whose arms embraced this kind of spiritual nurture. Until relatively recently, it has been mostly Quaker institutions that have helped me: Pendle Hill, as I said, and also Earlham School of Religion, the School of the Spirit, and lately, Woodbrooke.

Some meetings write memorial minutes for their deceased members, and often this is the first time their meeting has paid attention to the gifts that they brought to others, to the meeting, to the world. We need to make opportunities for our members and attenders to share what they’re up to with an eye to identifying their spiritual gifts before they die. I would build this role into the questions we ask folks who apply for membership in our clearness committees for membership, so that we identify their gifts upfront—not just so that we can match them up with appropriate committees, but so that we can look for ways to nurture those gifts more directly, if they want it.