A Comforter in the Hour of Need
February 2, 2025 § Leave a comment
In several places in Christian scripture, Jesus promises to send a Comforter, an Advocate, to his disciples in their hour of need. Do you have a spiritual Comforter to whom you can turn in your hour of need?
Perhaps a spiritual ally, Jesus himself or a Spirit who fills your soul when you invite their presence?
Or a person in your life, or a historical personage, or even a fictional personage who brings you joy when you think of them?
Or an experience or memory that gives you joy when you recall it?
Or some piece of art or an image that lifts your spirits when you bring it to mind?
Or some piece of music that calms you and brings you to your center?
We can hold such an Advocate in the chapel of our heart as a reflection of the Light within us, whose presence there brings peace and strength and hope, even in these very difficult times.
I have such an ally and I can testify that it never fails to give me joy.
The New Oratorio
December 3, 2024 § 2 Comments
We are a kind of do-it-yourself religion, in that we do not have paid religious professionals. So the job of knowing and passing on our tradition comes down to us.
If we wanted to become find players of the cello, we would seek out good teachers, study music theory, and practice, practice, practice. Likewise, to play The Messiah well, an orchestra and chorus must have a fine conductor, know its music, and practice, practice, practice.
Just so, if we want to become seasoned as individuals in the Quaker way, we must seek out teachers, study our history, faith, and practice, and practice. And, if as a meeting, we want to become a fine orchestra and chorus, we must provide opportunities for teaching and learning the Quaker way, and we must practice.
Now, while the outward forms of our tradition are important—they are the music that makes up our repertoire—the more important focus should be on the music that is being written right now, in our hearts and through our members’ ministries, in witness and action, in word both spoken and written. We must have ears that can hear the new Messiah that will pour forth from the Spirit in continuing revelation.
For the spirit of the christ is the true Composer and Conductor. That spirit is the Spirit that anoints us, that “christs” us, that “messiahs” us with healing, forgiveness, strength, guidance, and inspiration, just as it anointed/christed Jesus and the disciples at the Pentecost, and all the prophets and saints and harpists and singers since, who are seeking to do right by their new oratorio.
Grace, the Sacraments, and Chocolate
July 3, 2023 § Leave a comment
The sacraments have been defined as outward signs of inward grace. Grace has often been rather narrowly defined as forgiveness of sins.
Friends have greatly expanded our understanding of the sacraments, of grace, and our relationship to them.
We do not practice the outward forms of the sacraments because we know that no outward form, especially one that is performed by rote, could guarantee inward grace.
And we know that the inbreaking of God’s spiritual gifts includes, not just forgiveness, but also correction, healing, strengthening, comfort, renewal, openings of the mind, loving impulses of the heart, inspiration of all kinds, guidance, and even mystical union with each other and with God, however one experiences the Divine.
We know that this continuous revelation of God’s gifts can come to any of us at any time in any place through any activity. Therefore, we practice a listening spirituality, trying to remember to pay attention, to look for where and how grace might be found in all that we do, in the books we read, the music we listen to, in the things that happen to us, and especially, in the people we meet. In other words, all of life is potentially sacramental.
Of course, it’s hard to remember to look for this grace. At least I find it hard. So many distractions. But we know it’s there because we have sometimes remembered and found it.
I liken this to eating chocolate. I love chocolate. A lot of the time, I’m doing something else while I’m eating it, and it tastes good. But as soon as I stop distracting myself from its flavor and actually pay attention to it, its flavor ramps up a notch and it tastes really great. Just by paying attention, the pleasure becomes something wonderful.
Chosen
October 2, 2022 § 3 Comments
In meeting for worship this morning, someone quoted Jesus from Matthew 7:7: “Ask, and it shall be given to you; seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.” He went on to say that, notwithstanding the promise, we often do not get what we ask for, and very often doors remained shut to us, and perhaps that is because we are asking for outward things that are not what would fulfill us. That what we are really asking for are friendship and love. (I am reminded of James 4:3, a favorite of George Fox: “You ask, and receive not, because you ask amiss, that you may consume it upon your lusts [unrighteous desires of any kind].”)
From this seed grew a message of my own, from the gospel of John, from which we get our name as the Religious Society of Friends:
You are my friends, if you do whatsoever I command you. Henceforth, I call you not servants; for the servant knows not what his lord does, but I have called you friends, for all the things that I have heard of my Father I have made known to you. . . . These things I command you, that you love one another.
John 15:14–17
I didn’t say more today—I just quoted the passage—but I have written in the past about how our name is therefore rooted in the commandment of love and in the promise of continuing revelation.
But today I left out verse 16: “You have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that you should go and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain: that whatsoever you shall ask of the Father in my name, he may give it you.”
After I had spoken, I realized that I had left verse 16 out—and that I always leave this verse out, or at least that I have never paid much attention to this verse about being chosen and its importance for early Friends. And it was opened to me that this verse was probably at least as important to early friends as the others, maybe—probably, even?—the most important verse of all.
I suspect that this verse was, among others, the foundation upon which they built their sense of themselves as a peculiar people, a people gathered by Christ for a purpose, and that purpose was to bear fruit that lasts. The most concrete and immediate manifestation of this sense of chosenness, this sense of being “ordained,” is vocal ministry, feeling ordained by Christ to proclaim the gospel, not just in meeting for worship, but also in the world—in the steeplehouses and streets, in the courts of the sultan and the pope, in England and the Americas. . . .
Somewhere along the line, we Friends have lost our sense of being chosen and our vision of the fruit we are to bear. Well, “liberal” Friends have, anyway; I don’t know the evangelical branch well enough to know whether they feel chosen anymore, or what their vision of their mission is, beyond, perhaps, winning souls for Christ.
Christ is the key here. To feel truly chosen, someone must have chosen you. Most of us in the liberal branch no longer believe in a Christ who might be choosing us. Now we “feel led.” We use the passive voice to avoid declaring our leader. (Though it must be said that the passive voice is a classic biblical rhetorical device, also: “Your sins are forgiven,” proclaims Jesus (Matthew 9:2); he obviously means forgiven by the Father.)
Now, “vocal ministry” is often expressed as “speaking in meeting,” or “giving a message.” “Vocal ministry” means, etymologically, “spoken service”. Service to whom? There’s a “whom” implicit there. We could say service to the meeting and/or to the other worshippers, and this is certainly true.
But that is not what we originally meant by vocal ministry. We originally meant service to God, or more specifically, to Christ, who is making know to us all the things he has heard of his Father.
We’ve switched from Christ to the Holy Spirit, sans the baggage of the Trinity. Now we pray for “Spirit-led” vocal ministry without tying “the Spirit” to the spirit of Christ.
Well, that actually works for me. I, too, have no direct experience of “the Spirit” as the spirit of the risen Jesus. And I share the modern liberal nervousness about believing we are a “chosen people”. Think of the ramifications.
But this highlights a radical shift in the character of Quakerism as a religion. It used to be about relationship (with Christ). Now it’s about a more vague, diffuse, impersonal spirituality of being led by “the Spirit”. There’s no sentient being on the other side of a relationship. What are the ramifications of that kind of spirituality?
Spiritual Pastoral Care
January 13, 2022 § 2 Comments
A while ago, a member of my meeting approached a member of our pastoral care committee seeking help with a general malaise of spirit. This was not a request for secular counseling, but for spiritual counseling.
When our committee member brought the matter to the committee, no one on the committee remembered ever receiving such a request. I’m pretty sure that some of the committee members did not actually recognize that this was the nature of the request. We were not prepared. Someone on the committee agreed to talk to this person and I don’t know what the outcome was.
The same thing happened during New York Yearly Meeting sessions some years ago: someone came to a member of yearly meeting Ministry and Counsel Committe seeking spiritual pastoral care right then during the week-long sessions—help with their spiritual life—and the committee did not know right away what to do about it. It had never happened before in anyone’s memory, and there was no established infrastructure for answering the call.
I suspect that these meetings and committees are not the exception among us. This says several things:
- First, that many of our members do not have spiritual lives that are deep enough and sustained enough to encounter obstacles that need pastoral care.
- Also, that perhaps those who do have deep and sustained spiritual lives and experience crises in their spiritual lives do not come to their meetings for help. Why not?
- That most meetings do not see the spiritual formation and nurture, support, and pastoral care of their members’ spiritual lives as a core charge of the meeting or of any of its committees, either pastoral care or ministry and worship, and/or that they have not created an infrastructure for it.
- That most meetings do not proactively “advertise” their eldering services to their members, even if they have people and processes ready.
- That most meetings have not inventoried their resources in this area. They don’t know who among them has an active prayer, meditation, or devotional life, and so has the spiritual experience necessary for such pastoral care; or who might actually have a spiritual gift for such care or even a calling to such a ministry, whose service therefore lies fallow in disuse by the meeting.
I therefore think that our pastoral care committees and our worship and ministry committees should:
- conduct such an inventory;
- inquire of such elders whether they feel a call to such ministry, and if they don’t or haven’t thought about it, to encourage them to do so;
- prepare for requests like this from the members—know who will respond; and,
- once this is in place, proactively
- ask members to share their spiritual lives,
- publicly and periodically provide and announce resources and other supports for the spiritual life, including programs on Quaker spirituality, various spiritual “technologies” (meditation techniques, Bible study guides, breathing exercises, etc.); and
- periodically advertise the service/ministry.
The goal would be to build the spiritual maturity of the members and of the meeting, so that enough of us are so deep into the life of the spirit that one might on occasion need the help of the community, and the community would recognize the call and be ready to answer.
Reclaiming the Christ
January 13, 2020 § 8 Comments
For years I have carried a ministry of seeking ways to reconnect liberal Friends to our root tradition. A recurring concern in this ministry has been to reconnect us to the Christ.
Now a lot of Friends are allergic to the word Christ, in most cases, I suspect, because of its connotations in traditional Christianity and its focus on sin and salvation, the cross and atonement, on Jesus’ divinity and the trinity. But traditional Christianity has redefined the Christ into something quite different than what Jesus himself meant, at least in the Synoptic Gospels.
In the Synoptic Gospels, Jesus unambiguously claimed to be the Christ and explained what he meant by this claim in Luke, chapter four. In this passage, he has just been baptized, during which the holy spirit descended upon him. The spirit then drove him into the wilderness, and after forty days he emerged and went home to his home town. There, on the sabbath, in the synagogue, as the “visiting rabbi”, he was invited to read from the prophets. He chose Isaiah 61, verses one and two, which read as follows:
The spirit of Yahweh God is upon me, because Yahweh has anointed me [a clear reference to his baptism]; he has sent me to proclaim good news to the poor . . .
Now that word “anointed” is the word “christ” in Greek, “messiah” in Hebrew. He is saying, “the Father has christed me”.
For Jesus, being the Christ meant being anointed in the spirit of God. Being the Christ meant having been called by God and empowered by His spirit to do His work in the world. For him, that work was ministering to the suffering and the condition of the poor.
The Christ is the consciousness of having been called by the Spirit and empowered by the Spirit to do the Spirit’s work in the world.
That is as good a description of Quaker spirituality as any I have ever heard.
Post-script: I am not saying that the Christ is limited to this one understanding. Certainly Friends have come to know the Christ in a variety of ways in their own direct experience, and I take their testimony at face value. For many Friends, in fact, their experience of the Christ accords well with the understanding that “traditional Christianity” has given us, or at least with the Quaker version that we see in the testimony of early Friends, which rests more on the gospel of John and the writings of Paul. I am simply trying to recover the Christ whose ministry we see being born in the gospel of Luke.
The Soul
May 18, 2019 § 12 Comments
I saw David Brooks speak the other day. David Brooks is a conservative columnist in The New York Times and on PBS and NPR. I have not always agreed with his views, but I have always appreciated his moral sense and reasonableness. He was terrific—very funny, very insightful, with a deeply encouraging spiritual message: that we’ve been snookered into investing value and identity in outward things, but what really matters is relationships.
In his talk, he raised up a definition of soul that expresses something I’ve been reaching for in my Quaker writing for a long time, a way to talk about Spirit that is not theistic but still deeper and truer than the pure humanism that often characterizes Quaker nontheism. A way to anchor a theology—a way to talk about and share—liberal Quakerism that takes us forward, that honors the impulse against simplistic theism that animates our nontheists, an impulse that I share, without jettisoning our tradition completely.
Let me quote from the book he was promoting with the lecture (The Two Mountains):
I do not ask you to believe in God or not believe in God. I’m a writer not a missionary. That is not my department. But I do ask you to believe that you have a soul. There is some piece of your consciousness that has no shape, size, weight, or color. This is the piece of you that is of infinite value and dignity. . . .
The soul is the piece of your consciousness that has moral worth and bears moral responsibility. A river is not morally responsible for how it flows, and a tiger is not morally responsible for what it eats. But because you have a soul, you are morally responsible for what you do or don’t do. . . . Because you have this moral piece in you, you are judged for being the kind of person you are, for the thoughts you think and the actions you take.
Because each person has a soul, each person is owed a degree of respect and goodwill from others. [sound familiar?] Because each person has a soul, we are rightly indignant when that dignity is insulted, ignored, or obliterated. . . .
The soul is the seedbed of your moral consciousness and your ethical sense. . . .
Mostly, what the soul does is yearn. If the heart yearns for fusion with another person or a cause, the soul yearns for righteousness, for fusion with the good.
This last sentence is exactly how George Fox defined “that of God” within us, not as a piece of God within us, but as something in the conscience (which in 17th century English had a meaning closer to what we mean by consciousness) that yearned for God. It was this yearning that we could “answer” with our ministry, as he expresses it in the famous epistle that liberal Friends like to quote so often.
Of course, Fox was a theist and he believed it was God for whom we yearned, not just “fusion with the good”. But this distinction is one of faith, not really of practice, of doctrine rather than of living and acting. For Fox, the soul was more explicitly your identity before this God, something eternal. At the same time, however, Fox and early Friends did not fuss much about the afterlife or some deferred judgment; this life was what mattered and judgment was here and now. The soul might be immortal but what mattered was what it was doing in one’s lived life. In practice, Fox’s treatment of the soul was very similar to what David Brooks is proposing. And in practice, I see very little distinction between what Brooks means by the soul and what liberal Friends mean by “that of God in everyone”.
I will say, however, that both liberal Quakers and David Brooks focus on the wrong end of the ethical dynamic regarding the soul/that of God: Yes, murder or rape are abominations against another person’s soul, and against one’s own soul, as he says in his book. But the ethical impulse that turns us away from such abomination comes, not from regard for another person’s soul, but from the guidance of our own soul. Our testimonies are not grounded in the belief in that of God in everyone, but in the experience of that of God within ourselves, which seeks to guide us through this yearning for fusion with the good.
With this understanding of the human soul, we are talking about consciousness in an explicitly spiritual and moral sense without having to invoke the sin-judgment-salvation framework that we’ve inherited from our Christian roots, but also without abandoning its essential import for human action, personal transformation, and community life. We can speculate about where the soul comes from and where it goes when we die, but that’s just speculation. Real life happens right here and right now, and now, and now, until who knows what. This reality of the soul we know and can affirm experientially.
Next, I want to explore what I will call the collective soul, that piece of the consciousness of a community that years for fusion with the good. This collective soul is the medium of the gathered meeting. And I think it could bring us even closer to a new understanding of “God” or Spirit that is practicable, reasonable, experiential, and transcendental, mystical—deeper than a purely humanistic understanding of Quaker community and worship. And for me at least, it pushes right up against the membrane that separates us from simplistic theism. I call it para-theism.
For (in my opinion) nontheism leaves important aspects of our individual spiritual experience and our collective worship experience unexplained, unarticulated, incapable of being shared with others in a meaningful way. But simplistic theism fails to answer essential questions and assaults the intelligence of the inquiring seeker. I am reaching for something that satisfactorily explains what we experience in worship when our worship is gathered, a way to answer the question, what is Quaker worship?
Holding in the Light
December 13, 2018 § 2 Comments
Liberal Friends have replaced prayer with the practice of “holding people in the light”. Maybe in their minds, the Light has a capital “L”, a kind of stand-in for the deity that is the object of prayer as conventionally practice.
I believe in the power of “holding people in the light”. But I also believe, based on my own experience, that just an inward lip service to the idea of holding in the light is not likely to be enough to effect the desired result. I believe that holding people in the light has become (maybe always was) an outward form without much real power.
Yes, it’s actually an “inward” form in that we do it in our heads. But I call it outward because it’s virtually empty. It’s a verbal and inward ritual. We do not give it the kind of attention it needs or deserves. We say it. We do some kind of inward wish-thing for just a moment. And then we move on.
I’m describing the practice in the context of meeting for worship or some other collective gatherings. I realize that individuals may bring this practice into their personal devotional life with more substantive attention.
My own experience with prayer—and especially with holding in the light—is deeply influenced by my experience with Silva Mind Control, and that experience involved holding someone in the light. Mind Control is a pop-psych, pseudo-scientific self help program that was somewhat popular in the 1970s. It has an unfortunately sinister-sounding name but it is actually quite effective. Half of the program is dedicated to various self-help techniques, many of which are focused on personal health, and half is dedicated to techniques for spiritual healing. I taught Silva Mind Control for several years in the early 1970s, mainly because I witnessed, and I myself performed, spiritual healing so extraordinary as to seem miraculous using its techniques.
As a teacher, I used to lead meetings of Mind Control graduates in which healing circles were a regular feature. They sometimes worked. Not all the time, not even very often. But sometimes.
So I know from personal experience that spiritual healing at a distance, both by individuals and by groups, is real.
Focused and healing prayer
Mind Control’s healing exercises—both the individual techniques and the group work— have three components that I believe really make a difference in actually healing people:
- intention and emotion to supply healing energy,
- centering to deepen consciousness and tap the energy, and
- visualization to focus the energy.
It’s all about energy. The group visualization usually used light as the primary image vehicle, and many practitioners, myself included, use light in our personal work, as well.
Thus I believe in the power of “holding people in the light”, as I said But I also believe in the power of these other components. To move beyond the outward form of holding in the light, to increase one’s chances of an actual positive outcome from the practice, I suggest the following, based on my experience:
- Supplying the energy. One needs to settle into the emotions involved, to connect meaningfully with one’s caring for the person or situation. This generates energy.
- Tapping the energy. To tap the energy, one needs to center down. One needs to take some time and, preferably, use an effective centering technique. I believe that an altered state of consciousness improves your chances for “successful” prayer by an order of magnitude. Sometimes grace happens, a gift born out of simple intention and attention. But not very often. “Success” is rare enough even when you’re doing all the things I’m suggesting here. That’s my experience, anyway.
- Focusing the energy. Finally, developing and using a set of psychic prayer tools seems to really help with focused prayer, and especially with healing prayer. In Mind Control, this includes having “imaginary” allies to turn to for help, specific ways to visualize focusing your energy—tools, as it were—and practice, especially at visualization in general and visualizing the body in particular. Mind Control spends two whole sessions just teaching anatomy and visualizing organs and systems of the body; this works.
So a “prayer” session works like this: You center down using whatever technique works for you. You greet your allies, if you have them. You gather your tools. You visualize the person you’re working on, and then follow your instincts. Openness rather than forcefulness is the key. The “force” comes from the love, the caring. But the healing comes through rather than from.
Wait in silent expectation until the problem you’re addressing presents itself somehow in your imagination. This can take many forms: pulsing somewhere, discoloration, enlargement—some irregularity in the way the person’s body or organs appear or feel to your imagination.
Then do whatever comes to mind. Maybe you’ll use one of your “tools”. Maybe you’ll ask for your ally’s help. Maybe something else will occur to you. Again, openness rather than forcefulness is the key.
Does this not sound rather Quakerly in spirit, if not in form, that is, in the form of techniques and “tools”?
Healing Circles
Mind Control healing circles work like this: You sit close together in a circle and join hands, left hand up and right hand down. You visualize energy—light—cycling through the circle from left to right, pouring out of yourself into the person on your right and pouring into you from the person on your left. When the facilitator feels the energy is up and running, she asks everyone to visualize it rising in a kind of cone, slowly, until it peaks at a point of convergence above the group in the center. Once this feels solid, then you send it to the person for whom you’re “praying”, whether they are at a distance, or someone sitting in the center of the circle.
Granted, this isn’t something that a group of Friends gathered for meeting for worship would do, unless maybe it’s a rather small meeting. But some meetings do have gatherings or meetings for healing, where this approach might be something to experiment with.
For some Friends, such an approach might feel too technical—too “technique-al”. It might seem like another outward form. It might feel ritualized. Can’t really argue with that. I stopped teaching Mind Control because I eventually felt like my life was too full of tools and I wanted to touch my experience with my bare hands again. But I was teaching it, and using it all the time. Now, it’s as natural feeling as meeting for worship itself, and it’s confined primarily to my daily practice. Like everything else, it becomes easy and natural with practice.
I hope some readers find this useful.
Vocal Prayer
December 13, 2018 § 2 Comments
Of all the changes in the character of silent, waiting worship among liberal Friends, one of the most significant, I think, is the loss of vocal prayer, and it’s among the most invisible or unregarded.
In thirty years of worship among Friends, I may have heard vocal prayer maybe a dozen times in meeting for worship, not counting the somewhat more regular prayers of a Friend in New York Yearly Meeting with whom I’ve worshipped a lot and who has the gift of prayer. I have only prayed out loud in meeting for worship twice myself.
Most liberal Friends, I suspect, don’t miss it. Most of us don’t hold dear a God who is “theistic”, whom one could address as an external sentient being who’s capable of hearing, let alone answering, one’s prayers. For many of us “God”, if the word works for us at all, is a much more amorphous—what? Not being; idea, maybe. Nor do most of us believe in a divine Jesus Christ to whom we might pray.
Instead, we liberal Friends “hold each other in the light”. More about this in a subsequent post.
But, for a sense of what we might be missing, listen to what William Penn has to say about George Fox in his introduction to Fox’s Journal:
“But above all he excelled in prayer. The inwardness and weight of his spirit, the reverence and solemnity of his address and behaviour, and the fewness and fullness of his words, have often struck even strangers with admiration, as they used to reach others with consolation. The most awful, living, reverent frame I ever felt or beheld, I must say was in his prayer. And truly it was a testimony that 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 and fear.
The lack of vocal prayer in meeting for worship reflects, I suspect, a lack of prayer (understood in the conventional sense) in our personal devotional practices. My dictionary defines prayer as an approach to deity in word or thought and, as I’ve said, I suspect most of us don’t resonate with the “deity” part. We may do something else and call it prayer.
In my own practice, I “pray” and I “meditate”. I’ve been trained in several kinds of meditation and I use several of them quite regularly. And I also pray fairly regularly in the conventional sense of addressing—well, not God, as conventionally understood, as a supreme being, or as the Father of Jesus Christ in the Trinity. I pray to the spirit of Christ, and I communicate with several spiritual allies or companions in a more shamanistic sense.
I am careful to say “spirit of Christ” here because I have no experience of Jesus Christ understood in the conventional sense; that is, as the divine, immortal, resurrected spirit of the biblical Jesus who is still with us today, albeit in heaven, or whatever you call the spirit realm in which the saints and Christ are said to dwell—which definitely isn’t here on the material plane.
That is to say, I’ve experienced something, and I call it the spirit of Christ. I have experienced something transcendental, which has come to me as a sense of presence and as eidetic imagery in the form of some generic devotional wall-painting form of Jesus. The metaphysics of these experiences is a delightful, intriguing mystery to me and I don’t fuss about it too much; I think about it, I have ideas about it, but I don’t take these ideas very seriously—unlike the experiences themselves, which I take very seriously.
So I pray to a “spirit of Christ”, a transcendental sense of presence that has clothed itself in familiar form in my spiritual apperception, and addressing it works for me. It focuses me. It satisfies something in me.
And this is the power of conventional prayer. It feels good, it feels right, somehow, to speak to someone, to communicate in a spiritual relationship that feels like communicating in our other relationships. It comes naturally—if you believe in or sense a “someone” at the other end.
This “spirit of Christ” whom I address is not the only “spirit” I’ve encountered in my journey. There are three others. Let’s call them angels, for want of a better word. They all have in common that they present themselves as beings with whom I can have—and do have—a relationship; they have a kind of personhood, they have moods and personalities. I could say that they are just in my imagination, except that they each have demonstrated their power on my behalf. They have done things that have improved my life, both inwardly and outwardly. Or more accurately, addressing them, bringing them into my devotional life, seems to be associated—causally—with little miracles; or big ones. Changes in my life that I am so grateful for, blessings that I sought and that were delivered, however that actually worked out in the spirit realm.
So I pray.
But these relationships are private, intimate, personal, and it’s complicated to share them with others. So vocal prayer doesn’t come naturally to me. Both times that I’ve prayed aloud in meeting for worship, I had the very rare experience for me of feeling ripped up from my seat, of being under some influence or power, of having hardly any choice in speaking or in what I said.
Did my prayer bring others into the Presence with me? I wonder. I doubt it. But maybe.
In my next post, I want to explore “holding in the light” as our go-to alternative for conventional prayer.
The Spirit
June 30, 2018 § 1 Comment
I have been reading Marcus Borg’s Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, and the book really speaks to me. One of the reasons is that he begins with his own personal journey as a religious person, and my story mirrors his quite closely. Also, the “theology” that follows this autobiographical chapter retains this personal feel and is quite accessible. I’m used to reading dense theology and detailed biblical commentary, but it’s refreshing to read something so direct and yet so full of truth.
Borg’s book also builds an elegant bridge between our root Christian tradition and the religious sensibilities that now characterize the liberal Quaker movement. He offers an understanding of God, Jesus, and the religious life (he calls it the Christian life) that I think would appeal to many of us. Not, perhaps, to the dedicated non-theists among us, though his understanding does not require a traditionally theistic faith. The book’s Christian language may be off-putting to some, if they’ve come to experience it as toxic, but the ideas—the ideas speak to me, just as Borg’s personal story does. This book is for those of us who are not willing to jettison the core of the Quaker tradition, as non-theists must, but who still can’t buy the traditional theistic understanding of God that dominated our tradition until the maturing of the modern liberal Quaker movement.
In his initial broad outline of who Borg thinks the pre-Easter Jesus is, the Jesus we can glimpse from the gospels who is still unburdened by what the tradition has subsequently added or reinterpreted, he defines “the Spirit” in a way that I suspect might resonate with many liberal Friends.
First, he describes Jesus as a “spirit person”, “a ‘mediator of the sacred,’ one of those persons in human history to whom the Spirit was an experiential reality.” (p 33) Then, in a note, he talks about “Spirit”:
I use the phrase the Spirit in as generic a sense as possible, and not the specifically Christian sense of the (Holy) Spirit. By the Spirit I mean the sacred, understood as that nonmaterial reality or presence that is experienced in extraordinary moments. Religious traditions name it various ways. In Christian terms, Spirit is synonymous with God, so long as God is understood as an experiential reality and not as a distant being. (p. 42, note 26)
Borg goes on to talk about the implications of such a view for the Christian life: “It shifts the focus of the Christian life from believing in Jesus or believing in God to being in relationship to the same Spirit that Jesus knew.” (p. 39)
God as an experiential reality rather than as a distant being—to me, that is simple and elegant, and, for me, it’s true. My own definition of God for a long time has been the Mystery Reality behind our religious and spiritual experience—whatever that experience is. It’s real; we know it is real because the experience has changed us for the better. But it’s also mysterious. It transcends normal experience, normal consciousness.
And it’s transpersonal—it comes to us from beyond the boundaries of the self. At least it does sometimes, for example, in the gathered meeting, which has a psychic dimension of communion with the other worshippers. That dimension, that medium for the communion between the worshippers, that transcendental, transpersonal sharing of consciousness that takes place in the gathered meeting, is the sacred, the Spirit, for me. It’s not a distant being; it’s an experiential reality.
Many spiritual and religious experiences are solitary experiences, utterly internal and subjective, and so perhaps merely projections of our own inner workings, our subconscious minds, if you will. But we should not say “merely”. For there is nothing “mere” about it. These solitary experiences are also mysterious and real, and for the same reasons that the collective experience of the gathered meeting is real and mysterious. To say that the same Spirit we encounter in the gathered meeting is also that which we experience in these solitary experiences is a statement of faith; or more accurately, it testifies to a feeling of inward—and therefore unverifiable—knowledge.
Finding the Quaker path has integrated these two levels of experience in my life—my personal spiritual experiences, many of which have taken place outside the Quaker tradition, and the shared experience of Quaker community. The Quaker faith has given me a way to understand both in common terms. Quaker faith offers a common framework for meaning between my personal experience and our collective experience. And Quaker practice, especially, of course, the meeting for worship, has given me a way to renew that experience, to return to that dimension where the sacred mystery waits, waiting for me and for us to wash in its baptism again.
Through the Flaming Sword 