Through the Flaming Sword

Encountering Spirit—An Opportunity

Friends General Conference is sponsoring a retreat in April titled Encountering Spirit. I will join Marty Grundy and Stanford Searl in a panel and following workshop on The Gathered Meeting on Sunday, April 14. So I’m doing what I can to get the word out.

Information

Retreat website: Encountering Spirit.

Workshop schedule: Workshops.

When: Friday, April 12, 2024 – Sunday, April 14, 2024.

The Gathered Meeting Plenary: Encounter in Community—Sunday, 1 pm Eastern.

The Gathered Meeting Workshop: Sunday, 3–5 pm, Eastern.

Who: Steven Davison, Marty Grundy, Stanford Searl.

Description: How do we encounter the Gatherer in the Gathered Meeting? Thomas Kelly describes Gathered Meetings as “group mysticism of the disciplined soul and the disciplined group.” In this plenary, three Friends will describe their experiences of the Gathered Meeting and how they prepare for disciplined group mysticism. How do we encounter the Gatherer?

An “Unconference”

FGC is experimenting with a new format they’re calling an “unconfeence.” Participants will have the opportunity to add sessions to the agenda each day. Think of these as spontaneous interest groups or affinity groups, or even spontaneous workshops. Is there a conversation you’d like to share with likeminded Friends? A spiritual topic you’ve been exploring that feels alive and timely?

The topics for the peer-to-peer sessions will be decided during the event and participants may join whichever sessions they choose. Learn more about attending an unconference and preparing to convene a session.

Dear readers:

Pendle Hill program on The Gathered Meeting. I will be facilitating a virtual Pendle Hill program on The Gathered Meeting next month, working from my Pendle Hill pamphlet of the same title. I hope some of you are able to participate. Details below.

Date: August 14–16

Info and registration link: https://pendlehill.org/events/the-gathered-meeting/?bblinkid=233450785&bbemailid=23138102&bbejrid=1575042267

Cost: $35 Basic; $50 plus; discounted because it’s virtual.

Registration: You can register online using the link above or by phone (610-566-4507, ext. 137). We will be limiting participants to 30. Registration closes on August 14 at 8:00 am or when we reach capacity.

Schedule: 4 sessions, Friday evening, Saturday morning and afternoon, and Sunday morning. Click here for the full schedule.

Invitation: I invite my readers to consider joining us for a deep exploration of the importance and character of the gathered meeting, and the prospects for fostering more gathered meetings in our own meetings.

The downside is that we won’t be able to worship together in each other’s presence or share the fellowship that comes from living and exploring together at Pendle Hill. The upside, though, is that people can attend who might not otherwise be able to, from all over the world, really, and because of the reduced price.

I look forward to seeing some of you there.

Steve Davison

I have been on vacation for several weeks and also not led to write anything particular lately, but I do have a bit of news: Pendle Hill has published an essay of mine on The Gathered Meeting as Pendle Hill Pamphlet number 444, published in April 2017. Here is a link to their page for the pamphlet.

Much of this pamphlet first appeared as a series of entries in Through the Flaming Sword under the Category The Gathered Meeting. Note that entries for this and other categories appear with the most recent entry at the top, so to read them in the order in which they were published, you have to start at the bottom.

In several of those entries, I found myself exploring the role of the Christ in the gathered meeting and I did not include that material in the pamphlet submission, both because of limits on the length of the piece and because those thoughts really were an exploration that evolved as I was writing and they never quite coalesced into something that felt solid and experience-based enough to trust as a contribution to the pamphlet.

I am still thinking about how we were gathered at first as a people of God by the spirit of the Christ and how we are gathered today. I think these are important questions, but the answers I have so far are useful to me, but still only an unfinished personal exploration, and in the pamphlet I wanted to be as useful to others as possible. I do plan to return to this theme of the Christ and the gathered meeting and write more about it.

I have not posted in a while—intense deadlines at work have been a distraction. But I have kept writing, only waiting for some time to confirm that these pieces were ready for publication. Here, I return to the theme of the gathered meeting. (Meanwhile, however, I am going on vacation tomorrow for a week. So I hope my readers will comment, if they feel so led, but I won’t be able to respond to your comments until I get back.)

In previous posts on this theme, I have asked how the Christ gathers the meeting, while I have circled an understanding of the Christ in terms of consciousness, a recurrent theme in this series. It’s time to look at “consciousness” itself more closely, especially as it might apply to our understanding of the gathered meeting and of the Christ. And here I am talking about both personal consciousness and collective consciousness.

Unfortunately, Christianity’s understanding of personal consciousness is primitive in the extreme. Being so theistic at its core, Christianity’s real strength lies in its understanding of personhood, of psychology, personality, feelings, will, and the religious dimension of human social systems (though, in this regard, I feel it has given unwarranted emphasis to the social systems of monarchy and the law and has only begun to focus on democracy and ecology). But I’m talking, not about personality or personal psychology, but about consciousness itself, the underlying miracle of the human being that is capable of self-understanding and transcendental communion.

And Christianity’s understanding of collective consciousness—well, such a thing hardly exists at all—only, as far as I know, in the work of Teilhard de Chardin. In fact, like me, Teilhard virtually defines the Christ in terms of collective consciousness. Teilhard deserves his own post(s), so I will defer a discussion of his work for now.

To understand more deeply the religious dimension of consciousness, we must look outside the Christian tradition, and especially to the East.

Some insights on the gathered meeting from yoga, the ancient Indian science of consciousness

I was an avid student of yoga for several years. My formal affiliation in those days was with Self Realization Fellowship, the organization founded to teach Kriya Yoga in North America by Paramahansa Yogananda, one of the great Indian gurus of the 20th century.

But I started with Transcendental Meditation, which was the Western world’s institution for another deeply respected school from India. And living within striking distance of New York in the 1960s and ‘70s gave me and my friends access to a number of other teachers based in the City, most notably, Ram Das and Hilda Charlton. Hilda Charlton held fairly regular satsangs in Manhattan and every time I went, Ram Das was there.

Hilda Charlton was a mildly gifted siddha yogi. A siddha yogi is an adept with the ability to psychically reach into a student’s consciousness and effect some spiritual transformation, to help the student’s spiritual progress along. Once when I attended one of her satsangs, she did some laying on of hands and she laid her hands on me.

When she touched me, I felt her presence and I felt a thrill, a jolt of awareness and joy. I don’t know how transforming it was. But it did blow my mind.

Such an experience has only limited spiritual value, if it does not demonstrably transform you. I can’t say that that experience changed me at all except to reinforce a faith in my practice. At the least, however, it suggests that a gifted teacher can posses psychic power. Such a teacher is called a siddha.

Siddha yoga emphasizes close relationship between teacher and student. Actual physical proximity is important, face-to-face encounter with the teacher, preferably living closely together in an ashram or community settlement, because just living in the presence of such a soul is transformative. And there are moments when the siddha’s power manifests, when she or he sees an opportunity to reach into you and grab a piece of your karma and set it straight, usually by yanking it out. The path of the siddha yoga devotee is one of extreme personal devotion and self-sacrifice. You are baring your soul to another in utmost faith. Sound familiar?

I think Jesus was a siddha. His ashram was a traveling ashram, instead of a settlement, which probably upped the level of commitment required even more.

I think of the story in the gospels of the Syro-Phoenician woman who touched the hem of Jesus’ garment, and Jesus felt his power go out from him. Or again, the experience of the lame man at the healing pool in the gospel of John; or of Jesus healing the blind man by mixing his spittle with dust. In a wonderful book titled Jesus the Healer, the author looks at Jesus’ healing miracles from various angles, and has really interesting things to say about his parables as psychic koans, stories that reached into his listeners and opened a channel for him to transform them. And Jesus often knows what’s really going on inside his disciples.

The skeptic would say, of course, that what I experienced was no more than a form of hypnosis, the power of suggestion. This is a frequent explanation of Pentecostal experience, of “holy rollers” and faith healers. And in my case, with Hilda Charlton, they may be right; in fact, I suspect that they are right. But siddha yoga is real, siddhas do exist, and this reality confirms, at the very least, that a realm or medium exists in which interpersonal psychic/spiritual communication takes place.

I have been there, not only in gathered meetings for worship among Friends, but also in moments of communion while meditating with other meditators, as a student of yoga and as a student and teacher of Silva Mind Control. (I know, that’s a truly sinister sounding name, but actually a rather benign but remarkably effective pseudo-scientific, pop-psych self-help program. I taught Silva Mind Control for several years in the mid-1970s. More about that later.)

When I was a disciple of Yogananda, Yogananda was dead. He died in 1947, I think, the year I was born. But I was taught that we was still alive as a guru, that he still had the power to work with me as a student. His transformational autobiography, The Autobiography of a Yogi, is full of stories in which his own teachers going back several generations, continued to teach him, even though they were dead. Sound familiar?

Who’s to say that the Christ as siddha is not also still capable of gathering his people? (In fact, Yogananda himself considered Christ one of his teachers, having had mystical experience of Jesus, as he describes in The Autobiography.) Without direct experience, I can only conjecture. But I have had experience of the siddha galvanizing a community into a covered state of spiritual unity. Maybe that will be my next post.

But back to the gathered meeting and the relevance of what I’m discussing here. My experience of siddha yoga, and the faith and practice of siddha yoga, all suggest that there is a psycho-spiritual dimension in which direct communion between people, and between disciples and teachers, does exist. That, I believe, is the medium in which the gathered meeting takes place.

On July 8, Bill Rushby wrote this in his comment on my post on The gathered meeting and Jesus the Christ—some questions:

I think there are important questions that are being missed here. In discussing this blog, we have moved off into “rabbit trails” concerning the theological basis of Quakerism.

No one here has offered an explication of the concept of “gathered meeting”. And, at least in this blog and discussion, the origins of this idea have yet to be probed. It would be useful to narrate some specific experiences of gathered meetings, both in the ministers’ (and other) journals/memoirs and in the personal recollection of the parties to this discussion. The theological context of these experiences would also be relevant.

I have been trying to explicate the gathered meeting in terms of experience and testing early Friends’ testimony that the gathered meeting has its origins, as an experience rather than as an idea, in Christ. I have been trying to square their testimony, which I believe, and their experience, which I trust, with my own. And I was just about to start a series that does describe my own experiences with the gathered meeting. Some other commenters have done this along the way, as well.

My approach so far is something of a departure for me. Usually I start a project like this with research and then try to make that concrete. This time, I’ve started with concrete experience and haven’t done any research, though all along my intellectual temperament has has lured back into the realm of ideas and the whole thing has been an exercise in theology.

I do think that the “idea” of the gathered meeting came from scripture, as did almost all the “ideas” of early Friends. And I’ve said already that I suspect that Matthew 18:20 is the original source for the idea, though I believe there are others. I remember Bill Taber mentioning Acts 15 in this regard, the so-called Council of Jerusalem, in which the disciples decide whether to accept Paul’s mission to the Gentiles. And, as I note below, there’s Matthew 23:37. But in fact, I don’t really know where this idea came from for sure, or, just as interesting to me, when Friends began using the phrase “gathered meeting”.

Still, Bill’s comment reminds me that I have covered some of the ground he seems to be looking for already in an article I wrote for the January 2013 issue of Spark, New York Yearly Meeting’s print journal, titled simply The Gathered Meeting. It’s too long to publish in this blog, except in installments and I don’t know if I want to do that. You can read it by following the link above. But I do want to excerpt at least one section of it, headed A Short History of the Gathered meeting. Here it is:

The gathered meeting runs as the essential thread of spiritual ignition in our tradition. This began with the original gathering experience of Jesus’ early followers. It reemerged in the birth of the Quaker movement, and in it Quakerism has found its Guide ever since.

The first recorded gathered meeting in our root tradition was the baptism of Jesus, in which all assembled shared a psychic experience of God’s revelation in some way. This continued in the event we call the transfiguration, in which Peter, James, and John were all caught up with Jesus in a vision of Moses and Elijah. Whatever else those events were, they were gathered meetings for worship in which Jesus and his friends were all gathered up into a shared religious experience. The defining example of a gathered meeting in our root tradition was Pentecost, in which several thousand were converted to the Way that Jesus taught in a manifestation of the Spirit through the apostles’ vocal ministry shortly after Jesus’ death.

The term gathered meeting comes, I suspect, from several passages in Christian scripture, and especially, from Jesus’ teaching in the gospel of Matthew, chapter 18, on how to elder wayward members. It ends with this promise: “wherever two or three are gathered in my name, there am I also.” This promise is the foundation of Quaker worship, and especially, of Quaker meeting for business in worship.

The first recorded gathered meeting in our Quaker tradition was the fulfillment of George Fox’s vision on Pendle Hill of a “great people to be gathered” (see note below)—the convincement of the Seekers at Firbank Fell in 1652, the initiation of the Spirit that jump-started our movement. The journal of George Fox and of many other early Friends and continuing through all the periods of Quakerism into at least the middle of the 19th century are full of descriptions of meetings that were covered by the Holy Spirit and “the power of The Lord.” (“The power of the Lord was over all” was their way of saying that a meeting was so overflowing with the Holy Spirit that some Friends quaked.)

Note: I wonder whether Matthew 23:37 may have been on George Fox’s mind when he saw “a great people to be gathered” in his vision on Pendle Hill at the beginning of his ministry: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her brood under her wings.” A number of other biblical passages use gathering in the harvested grain or the flocks as metaphors for the final judgment, and these may also have informed early Quaker use of the word “gathered”; examples include: Matthew 12:30, 13:30, 24:31, 25:26, 31-32, and Luke 3:17.

A couple of commenters a while back raised the question of why I have focused so much on the Christ as the gatherer of the gathered meeting. The answer is that I don’t really know why. Or rather, that this is the direction in which I’ve been led, all unexpected. I have not been systematic in my approach to this series. Rather, I have been following trains of thought and publishing them when they seemed seasoned enough.

I have explored ways in which I feel that the consciousness of the gathered meeting corresponds to the glimpses we get in Christian scripture of the consciousness of the Christ, which has led me to speculate about the Christ as consciousness. In this regard,  I can say that I believe we are “gathered in Christ” when we find ourselves in the gathered meeting, though I have not directly experienced Christ in that way.

So Friends in all ages have said of the gathered meeting, that they were “gathered in Christ”. But how exactly does the Christ “gather” a meeting? On the surface, this looks like a question that can only lead to what early Friends called “notions”, airy speculation that is, at best, only a shadow of the truth. But for theistic Friends, for whom this talk of consciousness misses the point, that Jesus the Christ is a distinct divine person active in the world and in our lives and in our meetings and capable of relationship, not some vague “consciousness”, then the question of how Christ gathers a meeting seems to me more than just a diversion.

Presumably, if he exists (and I believe he does) and he is present in the meeting, and the worshippers sense his presence, then some kind of “hub and spoke” connection gets made between the Christ and the individual worshippers. But what about the “rim”? How does the presence of the Christ enable the worshippers to sense each other in a gathered meeting? For this is one of the signature characteristics of the gathered meeting.

The answer might be that the Christ acts as a conduit for communication between worshippers, that our consciousnesses flow through the Christ as the hub of a wheel, as it were, and then on out to the other worshippers along the “rim”, to whom he is present also. To use a cybernetic analogy, we communicate with each other through the Christ much as computers communicate with each other through the server in a computer network.

The Christ consciousness serves the worshipping community as the medium through which we become spiritually present to each other. (I am tempted to explore John 15 along these lines: “I am the vine, you are the branches”; or John 14: “I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you.”)

But I have reverted to my consciousness language again. This, as I said, may not satisfy the more theistic Friends among us, who, I suspect, focus more on communion with Christ than they do on communion with each other. They may have no such speculative and metaphysical approach to a “Christ consciousness” in the gathered meeting, but are satisfied simply to say that Christ gathers us and leave it at that.

I think I feel encouraged to pursue this consciousness angle because I have no direct experience of the Christ as the gatherer of the gathered meetings I’ve experienced. Moreover, I am hungry for more; the gathered meeting is all too rare among us these days. So I am seeking for ways to improve our chances of being gathered. I am looking for elements of both faith and practice that might foster the gathered meeting.

And I suspect that Christ is one of the key factors of faith. I can hear my Christian readers saying to themselves, no, Christ is THE key, the indispensable factor. But isn’t this just a confession of faith? Where is the evidence? Are there not gathered meetings in which no one experiences the Christ? Certainly, one does not have to believe in a divine Jesus Christ to experience the gathered meeting. So, in terms of actual experience, it’s not clear that a traditional faith in Christ is necessary. But that doesn’t mean that the Christ isn’t necessary.

In fact, I am inclined to agree that Christ is key. As I have said, I believe that Jesus the Christ actually exists, though I have not experienced him as such myself. Thus my own experience leads me to relax and expand my understanding of who and what the Christ is to explain what actually happens. This exploration of consciousness is part of my effort to do that.

I guess I’m evangelizing a new way to think about Christ. How did I end up here?