Through the Flaming Sword

I found myself thinking last Sunday morning in worship about something that happened a long time ago and is still an issue for us Friends, I think.

Sometime in the 1990s when I was serving on New York Yearly Meeting’s Ministry and Counsel Coordinating Committee, someone came to the committee during annual sessions looking for spiritual counseling, pastoral care for their spiritual life. I don’t know anything about the particulars of that person’s request and I wasn’t involved in how we ultimately dealt with it, but I do remember the meeting in which the committee struggled to meet this person’s needs.

No one in our memory had ever come for pastoral care of their spiritual life and we weren’t really sure what to do or who should do it. We had to meet the need on the fly. We had no collective structure or experience in place.

So this experience woke me up to some things that I’ve not paid attention to for a while and they came back to me that morning in meeting. 

The first is that our pastoral care committees often are not prepared to offer spiritual nurture and pastoral care to Friends in need of spiritual counseling. We tend not to think of pastoral care as including spiritual nurture. We’re focused on helping with health problems, family problems, maybe even financial problems, and so on. Not on Friends who find themselves in a spiritual dry spell, or feeling that their prayer life is going nowhere, or feel cut off from God somehow, when God had before seemed present and nurturing, or who feel lost in a “dark night of the soul,” or who don’t feel motivated to continue whatever spiritual practice they have, but who feel guilty about abandoning it, Friends who know how good it is for them, how good it has been, but now just don’t feel like it.

Meanwhile, this is one of those areas that falls between the charges of pastoral care committees and worship and ministry committees. Which committee should prepare for this, and to which committee would members go? Have we ever posted some kind of notice, so that they would know? Maybe w&m committees are the place to answer these needs. And would the committee be ready to meet the need?

The practical reason that our committees aren’t often prepared to meet this need is, I think, that our members just don’t come to us with this kind of request, so we’ve not been forced to figure it out, and we haven’t had the imagination to prepare in advance. I imagine that this is because most of our members don’t actually have that kind of spiritual life, and maybe our committee members don’t either. How many of our members have a regular prayer or devotional life that could inexplicably dry up, or a practice of some kind that no longer calls to them, even though they want it back. Or they haven’t ever felt the active presence of the Spirit in their lives and in their souls in some way that could leave them feeling bereft if that presence were to go away. 

I suspect that for most of our members, going to meeting for worship and embracing “Quaker” as part of their personal identity is the sum of their spiritual lives. Which for many Friends is enough; maybe. Or maybe some members do have a deeper spiritual yearning, but it hasn’t quite consciously emerged yet, or they don’t know what to do about their sense of something missing.

What would our meetings do about it? Should we do something about it? What is Quaker spirituality beyond just attending meeting for worship and identifying with the Quaker way?

A practical way to approach these questions would be to simply ask our members: do you want more in your spiritual lives than just meeting for worship? We might start by asking our committees to ask themselves what their committee members’ own answers are to these questions and whether the committee is interested in furthering this project, including getting up to speed as spiritual nurturers somehow. Then maybe hold a worship sharing session with a committee member in each small group, or make this question part of however our pastoral care committees keep in touch with members and attenders.

This is spiritual formation at work: finding out what our members want from their spiritual lives and, for those who want it, providing the resources and support they need to pursue it. Quite a few may not want it. That’s fine. But for those who are willing to explore or deepen their own spiritual formation, we would be fulfilling what I think is one of a Quaker meeting’s primary missions. I would work on the “build it and they will come” principle: get prepared, spread the word, invite Friends to programs.