Pages tagged "Spirit"

I want to start with an inglorious story of protests gone by. During the lead-up to the Iraq war in 2002-2003, I was a student at Earlham College. Weekend after weekend, I traveled from Indiana to Washington, DC, for marches and protests. It seemed to be a ritual intended for building up and projecting our own sense of power as a people. I don’t remember how many weekends I made that trip. We marched through the empty corridors of large granite buildings with nobody in them, seemingly hundreds of thousands of people, yelling to the ether.

 

I never realized what was going on the moment I let go of the ground. It wasn’t until I was high in the air holding onto God that I saw God was all I had.

Excerpts from the keynote presentation to Pacific Yearly Meeting; June 18, 2016; Walker Creek Ranch, Petaluma, California

 

Imagine the Dalai Lama comes to your part of the world and decides to visit your Meeting for Worship. This may be his first visit to an unprogrammed Friend’s meeting. After worship, during fellowship, he approaches you.

In the earliest years of our faith, buoyed up by currents of the Enlightenment, Friends professed Truth as they drew it from individual revelations. Even though they shared a common Christian background and perspective, early Friends’ revelations multiplied wildly, leading to strife and confusion among them. By 1666, many prominent Friends had been executed or imprisoned, and the faith seemed destined to fizzle. What saved Friends’ faith was Friends’ invention of practices of corporate discernment, which allowed them to create some order among themselves, so they could truly function as corporate bodies (articulated), rather than merely as disperseable collectives of individuals (amorphous).

Love and truth spring forth in all times and all places – even in the hearts of chaos and corruption. We strive to follow the Good Way, but only in vain can we define it. Dust devils of DNA whirl down the generations, rampaging, making things new, making things fit, breaking eggs to make omelettes. To our surprise, we arrive in this life. Then we do our best to do the right thing, never really knowing all the good and all the damage we are causing.

I need a miracle. I cannot bring into the world all the good that I want, no matter how much it is needed. But by some miracle, I can learn to play my part.

Dear Editor: We Quakers have been called practical mystics. The title of our handbook makes it plain: Faith and Practice. Our prayer and our witness are a tightly woven fabric. Inseparable yet unique. The warp and woof of our witness. We cannot have one without the other. This is our charism. And our challenge.