Through the Flaming Sword

I have arrived at a fairly settled practice in meeting for worship involving the following steps or stages.

Deepening. First, I deepen using deepening techniques I’ve picked up as a student and practitioner of yoga and of Silva Mind Control, which is a sinister-sounding name for a pretty effective and benign pseudo-scientific, psychic healing, self-help program that is based on the first three degrees of Rosicrucian practice, which had a brief spin in the early 1970s, but is apparently still around. I used to teach Silva Mind Control, after using its healing techniques to miraculously psychically treat a couple of people, most dramatically, my son Raziel when he was just a baby.

Prayer. So I deepen. Then I pray. I commune with a couple of “angels”, I will call them, spiritual entities that have come through for me in ways dramatic enough to earn my spiritual regard. One of these is Jesus.

Jesus. This started when I was at Pendle Hill in 1991 when I became aware suddenly that someone in a very specific part of the meeting room was going to speak. Just after I had this clear intuition, I had a “vision” of Jesus standing behind this woman right there, as a kind of apparition, very much like the figure of Jesus in the painting The Presence in the Midst. Then the woman rose and spoke, as I knew she would, and Jesus stood there, just behind her and to the side a little, a comforting and strengthening presence, or so it seemed. Some time later, again at Pendle Hill, the same thing happened, though less dramatically.

Ever since then, I have chosen, as an act of faith, basically, to assume that Jesus is with us when we worship (as the scripture has promised, Matthew 18)—Jesus as spirit, as the Christ, essentially. And, feeling that I have been taught something, I now pray for Friends as they give their ministry, imagining Jesus there with them as he appeared in those experiences.

That’s a long time ago now, and no dramatic psychic experiences of Jesus since. But still, a vague sense of something, perhaps—of presence? I’m not sure what it is. But I hold to my faith, because it works for me. So I pray, and part of my prayer is to ask Jesus for his presence. And one time not too long ago, for only the second time ever, I felt compelled to actually get on my knees and ask him to be present out loud. Very out of character, and weird. But there you are.

The angel of the meeting. Three times I have had similar “visionary” experiences of the angel of the meeting I was worshiping with. I had learned from Bill Taber at Pendle Hill about the elder-days belief of some Friends that every meeting had an angel, a belief that stemmed from the second and third chapters of the Book of Revelation, in which the spirit of Christ addresses letters to the angels of seven churches in Asia Minor.

Like my experience of the present Jesus, these experiences combined a sense of presence with a strong eidetic image of a figure hovering in the meeting, usually in some rather odd mudra, or position relative to the body of the gathered meeting. And the symbology of the position and of other aspects of the figure presented a meaning to me, a sense of something that was going on in the life of the meeting. In the most dramatic case, this sense of the meeting was confirmed for me by several of its members. And this was the way Bill Taber said ministers in the elder days had used the angel of the meeting—to get a sense of a meeting when they had been called in to minister to it in some way, in some crisis they were going through.

So I try to commune with the angel of the meeting, even when it’s my own meeting and the chances of such communion are basically nil—because I think of the angel as a projection of the meeting’s collective consciousness, especially of its unconscious, and that means that my own consciousness is part of the collective consciousness of any meeting I worship regularly with, and it’s hard to see what you are yourself projecting, without some kind of exotic collective Jungian therapy. Like maybe a clearness committee of the whole. Well, on to the next practice.

Opening to need. After trying to commune with the angel of the meeting, I more or less systematically move mentally through the room, slowly, seeking to open myself to pain or need, hoping that I will “hear” the “prayers” of others, their inward groanings and callings-out. I hope to feel where in the room someone needs something. I rarely get any such indication, but I do it anyway, for it feels wrong not to do it, and you never know.

Continued deepening. After scanning the room in this way, I return to deepening. I use a mantra I learned as a student of Transcendental Meditation—37 years now I’ve been using that mantra. And I use another mantra with the Centering Prayer technique, because Centering Prayer as a technique works exactly like TM, except that you choose your own centering word rather than being given a mantra from the Bhagavad Gita by an initiator. For the Centering Prayer, I use “Amen”. I move back and forth between these two mantras, the TM mantra and Amen, using their shared technique for deepening.

More prayer. Then, when someone rises to speak, I pray for them. Specifically, I imagine Jesus standing a little behind and beside them, giving them strength and awakening and guiding their truth.

This started when I was at Pendle Hill in 1991 when I became aware suddenly that someone in a very specific part of the meeting room was going to speak. Just after I had this clear intuition, I had a “vision” of Jesus standing behind this woman right there, as a kind of apparition, very much like the figure of Jesus in the painting The Presence in the Midst. Then the woman rose and spoke, as I knew she would, and Jesus stood there, just behind her and to the side a little, a comforting and strengthening presence, or so it seemed. Some time later, again at Pendle Hill, the same thing happened, though less dramatically.

Ever since then, I have chosen, as an act of faith, basically, to assume that Jesus is with us when we worship (as the scripture has promised, Matthew 18)—Jesus as spirit, as the Christ, essentially. And, feeling that I have been taught something, I now pray for Friends as they give their ministry, imagining Jesus there with them as he appeared in those experiences.

Waiting and opening. Meanwhile, before the first person speaks and between speakers, I continue deepening with my mantras, but I also bring my mental focus to my center, seeking to open myself to divine prompting. “Amen” means, basically, “let it be”, and one of the reasons I use it in addition to the Sanskrit mantra is that I know its meaning and I like its meaning. I want whatever G*d wants for me then to be. I cannot describe this practice of inward focus any more clearly than this, that I seek to open myself to the Light within me, offering myself for service, as Isaiah did—”Send me, send me!”. 

Discernment. Sometimes, there seems “to be” something, after all, a seed of possible vocal ministry. So I begin to test it. When I started describing my process for discernment, my words started pouring out, so I’m going to leave that for its own page and I link to it here. On that page, I also discuss my practice while speaking my ministry.

Continued cycling. I continue to “rotate” through prayer, deepening, waiting and opening, maybe discernment, until meeting closes. I cringe when someone speaks of breaking meeting for worship.

For me, vocal ministry takes place in the context of relationship with the body of the meeting as it is gathered right then. That context consists of a pattern of inner mental/spiritual actions in which I explore and engage with the body in various ways; and it also consists of the responses I seem to get from the meeting in this engagement—a back-and-forth feedback system of my inward engagement and apparent meeting response leading to further engagement, and then more response. So I can’t talk about vocal ministry without talking about this pattern of behavior and experience.  Here’s the pattern.

(When I started describing what I do internally in meeting for worship, it just kept expanding, so I’m going to offer short descriptors of my practice as just bullet points here. I invite Friends who are interested in reading a fuller description of my practices in worship to visit this web page.)

• Deepening—using techniques I’ve picked up from my years as a student of yoga and other more “New Age” spiritualities. One of these techniques includes attuning myself to the room and the people in it.
• Prayer—directed to several . . . well, I think of them as angels, faces of the divine that have names and personalities and who have come through for me over the years, and with whom I have a relationship, including, among others, Jesus and the angel of the meeting. (Some day I want to write about the profound difference between a religion practiced as relationship, as is the case for Christians who have experienced Christ personally, and religion practiced as a spirituality that doesn’t engage with spiritual entities capable of relationship, as is the case I think for many “liberal” Friends.)
• Opening to need in my fellow worshippers—a systematic spiritual antenna scan of the meeting room. If I pick something up, I try to focus on it, to open to it, to offer myself in prayerful service inwardly and then to wait to see whether this includes vocal ministry.
• Further deepening—when I’m done “listening” for need, for the prayers of others, unless I hear/feel someone calling, I go back to my deepening techniques. I rarely clearly hear someone calling.
• Waiting and opening—do you have a message for me, dear G*d?
• More prayer—when someone rises to speak, I imagine Jesus standing with them to strengthen and guide them. I’ve had this experience twice spontaneously, and so now I do it as a practice that I feel has been taught to me.
• Discernment—if it seems that there might be some vocal ministry rising up in me, I begin to test it.
• Continued cycling through prayer, deepening, waiting and opening, maybe discernment, until meeting closes. I cringe when someone speaks of breaking meeting for worship.

So for me, vocal ministry sometimes arises out of this back-and-forth inner engagement with the room and, especially, with my fellow worshippers.

But sometimes it arises as openings that emerge from my reading or writing or in prayer or meditation. As I have said before, the face of God that is most powerful for me is God as Muse, God as the Source and Guide of my inner life, which is tantamount in many ways to my writing life.

In Preaching the Inner Light, Graves has returned several times to the fact that Fox and early Friends insisted not on the immediate inspiration of the Holy Spirit, meaning only right then and there, but on immediate as meaning direct, unmediated. He argues that what he calls the impromptu preaching of Fox and early Friends clearly and often grew out of openings that had come to them before the meeting and had been seasoning until they matured. But still they tested whether this was the time, these were the people, whether Christ was offering this ministry through them NOW.

This has been my experience exactly. I have in some cases mulled a message for years before I felt led to speak it.

Vocal ministry as an emergent phenomenon

So for me, vocal ministry is an emergent phenomenon. I want to return to emergence theory and spirituality in future posts, but here let me just say that some phenomena happen as individual members of an ecosystem respond virtually simultaneously to small signals from each other. Like when a huge flock of starlings suddenly swerves in a radically new direction seemingly simultaneously. Or like identical twins who end up being different in some ways, even though they have exactly the same genetic code, because the genes are expressing in a constant dance with their environment from the molecular level on up.

This is an opening for me: I think spirit-led ministry may be an emergent psychic behavior, Friends responding to subtle ripples in the aether as we all deepen and attune to each other, and send out our prayers, our needs and desires and thoughts and blessings, which we then sense as small signals at some subtle level of consciousness.

Stories of psychic manifestation in and through vocal ministry abound in our tradition, and as I’ve alluded, I have experienced this myself. Something transcendental is going on, at least some of the time in our meetings for worship. And for me, the role of vocal ministry is to prepare the medium for the gathering by calling it deeper into our collective center, to seed the medium with the nutrients that the Seed needs to germinate, and to be a catalyst for the precipitation, to provide the seed around which the crystal of a gathered meeting forms. (Whoah, mixed metaphor mania, with my old chemistry-major past in partial dominion—sorry for that.)

Finally, a word about my discernment process. But no . . . this post is long enough. Later.

We’ve had some very thought-provoking comments. Thank you, readers. The post that follows was in works while these comments unfolded.

For centuries, our answer to my title question—where does vocal ministry come from?—was obvious and unquestioned: Jesus Christ. Or his spirit, the Holy Spirit. The Light within us, understood to be the inward spirit of Christ. All the same thing.

In the famous passage in which Margaret Fell describes her first encounter with George Fox, Fox is addressing precisely this question—where does your preaching come from? He is speaking specifically to the primary rhetorical approach of the Puritan minister, to preach from a passage in the Bible, unpacking it, as it were, for the congregation in his (sic) sermon.

And so he went on, and said, “That Christ was the Light of the world, and lighteth every man that cometh into the world; and that by this light they might be gathered to God,” &c. I stood up in my pew, and wondered at his doctrine, for I had never heard such before. And then he went on, and opened the scriptures, and said, “The scriptures were the prophets’ words, and Christ’s and the apostles’ words, and what, as they spoke, they enjoyed and possessed, and had it from the Lord”: and said, “Then what had any to do with the scriptures, but as they came to the Spirit that gave them forth? You will say, ‘Christ saith this, and the apostles say this;’ but what canst thou say? Art thou a child of the Light, and hast thou walked in the Light, and what thou speakest, is it inwardly from God?” &c. This opened me so, that it cut me to the heart; and then I saw clearly we were all wrong. So I sat down in my pew again, and cried bitterly: and I cried in my spirit to the Lord, “We are all thieves; we are all thieves; we have taken the scriptures in words, and know nothing of them in ourselves.”

Today, we still ask the question, “What canst thou say?” But we no longer assume that this Light is the Light of Christ and we no longer assume that what we speak in meeting for worship is “inwardly from God”. Of course, this depends on what you mean by “God”.

I suspect that nowadays, any Friend who claimed to be speaking on behalf of God would receive a skeptical and anxious regard. Especially since so many of the people who DO claim to know God’s mind these days are violent sociopaths.

Yet this is exactly the claim that Friends have made until relatively recently.

This momentous shift in Quaker thinking about vocal ministry is mostly about our understanding of and attitudes toward “God”, and ultimately, toward Jesus Christ. God used to be a “who”; now God is a “what”, if God is anything meaningful to us at all. (Of course, I am speaking mostly of liberal Friends here.)

Many (liberal) Friends do not consider Jesus to be God. Put another way, they don’t believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who “was God and was with God” from the beginning. Thus the Light within us cannot be the inward Light of Christ. It has to be something else. But what?

Without Jesus to hold the Trinity together, “God” recedes into the distance. No longer the Father, God becomes an undefinable, basically unrelatable Supreme Being. You start piling up the absolutist adjectives, like all-knowing, all-powerful, all-present, etc., and each one of these adjectives only makes God more distant, more difficult to relate to. Not in the way that you could relate to Jesus, or even to God as the Father.

So—no divine Jesus, and you’re left with a distant, absolute, abstract God. That leaves the Holy Spirit—no longer the spirit of Christ, however, no longer the ongoing presence of the resurrected Christ, the Comforter/Advocate that Jesus promised from the Father. Cut loose from a disassembled Trinity, the Holy Spirit becomes just “the Spirit”. And here we are.

“The Spirit” is even more undefined than God not-the-Father. More potentially universal. More plastic in the hands of us quasi-believers.

Moreover, many Friends, I suspect, connect this now-generic “Spirit” to “that of God” in everyone, which I think many Friends consider some kind of divine spark, some piece or aspect of “the Divine”—the Spirit—within us. The Light within, that of God within, the Spirit—all one mysteriously continuous and universal spiritual reality that we humans do somehow participate in in some vague and undefined way.

Now we’re getting somewhere. If God is Spirit and if the Light, that of God within us, is also somehow that same spirit, then Spirit-led vocal ministry arises within us from the Light and yet partakes of something spiritually larger than just ourselves.

I think that this might approximate what modern liberal Friends think is going on with vocal ministry, if they think about it at all. And it’s not really so different from the understanding of early Friends—except that it’s no longer tied to Christ and the rest of the tradition, which stands on scripture. Which is a huge difference. It’s post-Christian. It’s even post-traditional, in the sense that it has thrown over most of Quaker tradition, and has not yet developed or adopted any other tradition to replace it.

As a result, it lacks substance. But it’s open, welcoming, malleable. You can embrace it almost whatever your prior experience is. You can be indifferent or even hostile to Christian and biblical tradition. You can bring whatever pieces of other tradition you’ve picked up along the way, as I have done. You can even be Christian, for these ideas are really not too far off from some of the ideas in the gospel of John, especially those surrounding the Word, the logos.

And since this religious ideology has no real substance, Friends often seek substance somewhere else. They become Buddhist Quakers—or are they Quaker Buddhists? Or they are thrilled to find the Gospel of Thomas and become a kind of home-grown gnostic.

Many of us, though, fall back on the credal idea that Friends have no creed. We reject the practice of thinking too much about our religion, and we do without much substance. Who needs it?

However, being a post-traditional, mostly substanceless community means that individualism reigns. We have become a community without clear boundaries or definition, in which anything goes.

And the nebulous, unarticulated character of modern liberal Quaker thinking about God, the Spirit, encourages this individualism. And it quietly and increasingly dominates our attitudes toward vocal ministry. Though it’s probably going too far to talk about Quaker “thinking” in this context, for our ideas and attitudes are mostly tacit assumptions and unstated shared conclusions, maintained by a tacit agreement not to probe it too much.

Without the weight of our tradition holding us down, giving us boundaries and context and actual text—content with which we could talk to each other about what’s going on with a common vocabulary—we tend to float up and away. By contrast, believing that you have been inspired by the actual spirit of Christ necessarily instills a certain gravity, a very powerful sense of responsibility. Which we no longer feel.

Read Samual Bownas’s book The Qualifications Necessary for a Gospel Minister, or the journals of earlier Friends like Elias Hicks or John Woolman, and you get the sense that getting their vocal ministry right was one of the most arduous, terrifying, and important things in their lives. Most Friends, I think, find speaking in meeting a little terrifying, too, at least in the beginning. But this is not because we feel the weight of divine judgment; not because we feel we have assumed an apostolic mantle to speak for the living Christ. Not because we are, for the moment, at least, prophets of God’s word.

No longer afraid to give offense to God, we fear instead giving offense to the community, and we fear, perhaps, failing to be true to our higher selves.

This individualism in our practice of vocal ministry has led the community to a new set of agreements about the practice, but we do not discuss these agreements openly very often. We learn these agreements—we teach them—by osmosis. We see other Friends speaking in a range of ways about a range of things, and nothing happens to them. Most Friends seem happy with the ministry. The community seems to accept these messages, even embrace them, and so that’s what we do, too.

Even our language is shifting. Why do I say “even”—of course it shifts. “Vocal ministry” is giving way to “speaking in meeting” and “offering messages”. “Vocal ministry” makes us vocal ministers, which implies a sense of calling. But a sense of calling would mean speaking rather regularly, with a sense of mission. Mission could easily slide into sermonizing. “Speaking in meeting”, on the other hand, is rather generic. It is safer. It implies, perhaps, that the individual is responsible for the action and the message. But at least it doesn’t imply you’re channeling God.

Well, this has been a lot of speculation and generalization. In my next post, I want get down and personal. I want to talk about what vocal ministry is for me.