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• Features run 1200-2500 words (General information)
• Submissions close June 17, 2024. (Ready? Submit here)
• Questions? Email martink@friendsjournal.org

The Quaker way is something that can be explored in isolation through books or correspondence, but it attains deeper context with the ongoing relationships, either in-person or online. I’ve attended memorial services for a few dear Friends and mentors this spring, and I’ve found something humbling about being around people who knew me decades ago.

September’s issue of Friends Journal will be all about Relationships—intimate ones, mentorships, friendships. How do they help you to be a better Quaker? A better human being? Are there ways in which friendships and your Quaker life conflict?

Some ideas we’d like to see:

Many families are like mine: religiously mixed, with partners and kids following different religious paths (I suspect this has actually become the norm). There are also so many forms of families, from the traditional nuclear ones to blended families, and co-parented families, to single-parent families and ones headed by grandparents or some other custodian. How do we manage the logistics of Quaker life—the Sunday morning trips to meetings, the evening committee Zoom sessions, the extended Quakers gatherings?

We’d also like to hear about romantic partnerships. How easy is it for single Quakers to date these days? What forms of non-traditional relationships are some Friends experiencing, like poly couples or non-monogamy? For those with toxic families of origin, how do we construct chosen families that will help us learn healthier forms of relationships? How do we navigate intimate relationships through tools like couple and family therapies or peer groups like the Friends Couple Enrichment program?

Another possible set of stories could include relationships within your meeting community. Both of my recently deceased Friends were particularly talented in hospitality to newcomers and adopted a succession of fledgling Friends over the decades, introducing them to new people and ideas. Who has done that in your life? I’d love to hear more stories of cross-generational Friendships from readers.

Submit: Relationships. Other upcoming issues:

• Unthemed issue (October issue, due July 22)
• Quaker Fiction (November issue, due Aug. 19)
• Spiritual Optimism vs. Pessimism (December issue, due Sept. 16)

Learn more general information at Friendsjournal.org/submissions.

The post Writing Opp: Relationships appeared first on Friends Journal.

The post Quakers, Birds, and Justice appeared first on Friends Journal.

Quaker author John Andrew Gallery is interviewed about his April 2023 article, “The Gospel Model of Fatherly Love.”

John Andrew Gallery discusses his article “The Gospel Model of Fatherly Love,” published in Friends Journal. He explains how seeing the figure of Joseph at Christmas prompted his reflections on Joseph’s role as a loving father in the Gospel of Matthew. Gallery draws insights about fatherly love from the stories of Joseph and the Parable of the Prodigal Son, emphasizing the importance of letting go and giving unconditional acceptance as a parent. He also mentions his book “Living in the Kingdom of God” which explores how the parables of Jesus illustrate how one should behave as a person living in God’s kingdom. Gallery finds the poetic imagery of parents as bows and children as arrows, from Kahlil Gibran’s “The Prophet,” to be a powerful metaphor for the parental role.

John Andrew Gallery lives in Philadelphia, Pa., and attends its Chestnut Hill Meeting. He has authored many articles in Friends Journal and several self-published spiritual books. He has authored four Pendle Hill pamphlets, including the just-released Wait and Watch: Spiritual Practice, Rehearsal, and Performance. Website: Johnandrewgallery.com.

Links

John Andrew Gallery’s website: Johnandrewgallery.com

Read previous Friends Journal articles by the author.

Gallery’s Living in the Kingdom of God.

Pendle Hill’s interview upon the publication of Wait and Watch.

The post John Andrew Gallery Interview appeared first on Friends Journal.

A Friends Journal Report on the Work of Protective Accompaniers in Palestine

Through the World Council of Churches’ Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel (EAPPI), Quakers join members of other faiths to provide a supportive presence at the request of Palestinian church members in the region. EAPPI sends 25 to 30 accompaniers at a time and has provided more than 2,000 volunteers since the program began in 2002, according to its website. Israeli peace activists also offer protective accompaniment. Friends Journal talked with three protective accompaniers about their inspiration and experience.

Ian Cave and Debby, who requested that we use only her first name, are British Quakers who volunteered with EAPPI from mid-January to mid-April 2023; both were based in the West Bank. Jewish Israeli activist Sahar Vardi, who lives in Jerusalem, currently works with the New Israel Fund and provides protective accompaniment to Palestinians. Vardi previously spent about ten years with American Friends Service Committee, coordinating its Israel program, until she left in 2021.

Debby contrasted her sense of security at home in Britain with the experience of sleeping in villages where residents feared being killed or displaced.

“You take it for granted that you put your head on the pillow and you feel safe,” said Debby, who is a member of Surrey and Hampshire Border Area Meeting in the United Kingdom.

Debby found it unsettling to accompany Palestinian children to school when they had to walk past two Israeli settlements where they feared attack by settlers. Soldiers from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) walked behind the children to prevent the settlers from attacking them, according to Debby. The ecumenical accompaniers with EAPPI intended to make sure the military personnel showed up to escort the children.

The United Nations views accompaniers as the “eyes and ears” of the UN, explained Cave, because they are able to verify and report any human rights abuses they might witness in the ongoing Israeli military occupation of Palestine. During his time in the West Bank, Cave witnessed human rights violations by Israelis and also saw video footage of a Palestinian trying to stab an IDF soldier.

Vardi is an Israeli conscientious objector who is deeply involved in protective accompaniment for Palestinians. When COVID-19 restrictions froze international travel, more Israelis started providing a protective presence, according to Vardi. Israeli accompaniers persisted even since the October 7 attacks.

“Israelis were there on the ground and continued to provide protective presence,” Vardi said.

One person providing protective presence was killed since the October 7 Hamas attacks, according to Vardi. She added that violence by Israeli settlers increased significantly after the Hamas assaults. Israeli settlers displaced the residents of 16 Palestinian communities with which Vardi is familiar. In some cases protective presence did not prevent the displacement, and in other cases it helped stop the forced removal of Palestinians.

“That became one of the rare spaces where there was continued shared work of Israelis and Palestinians,” Vardi said.

Debby noted that an Israeli peace activist offered protective presence in the village where she was serving. Some Israelis with dual passports practiced protective accompaniment, capitalizing on their ability to talk with police and soldiers in Hebrew. Israelis regularly came across the border to protect Palestinian farmers trying to cultivate land, according to Debby.

An ecumenical accompanier with the EAPPI program walks behind two IDF soldiers while accompanying Palestinian children to As-Sawiya school in the northern West Bank. Photo courtesy of EAPPI.

In addition to accompanying Palestinians, ecumenical accompaniers connect with Israeli peace and human rights groups such as Rabbis for Human Rights, B’Tselem, and Women in Black, according to Quakers in Britain, the group that runs the UK and Ireland part of EAPPI. Ecumenical accompaniers also meet with Israeli individuals, synagogues, and organizations that don’t support EAPPI’s work but want to be in dialogue.

A small portion of Israelis are ideologically motivated to be settlers in the West Bank, believing that God promised them the land, according to Cave.

“In many ways they’re doing what the Europeans did in North America,” Cave said of the Israeli settlers.

Most Israelis feel extremely concerned about security because they fear becoming victims of Palestinian rockets and suicide bombings, according to Cave. Maintaining the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza financially and emotionally drains residents of the region.

“It’s a problem that needs solving, but it seems insoluble,” Cave said.

Cave is reminded of the British Army occupying Northern Ireland, a conflict that started in the late 1960s and lasted decades. From the Palestinian perspective, Palestinians have been living on the land for generations and are now feeling intimidated and harassed. The IDF’s mission, Cave recalled, is to protect Israeli settlers, not to protect human rights.

Before October 7 Palestinian children had to go through checkpoints to get to school, but since October 7 many Palestinian schools are closed. Cave pointed to another historic example of inequitable military occupation: when the United States used similar tactics to invade Iraq in 2003 and maintained a presence there until 2011. International law allows short-term military occupation; the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has been going on for 57 years, Cave noted.

Social, personal, and spiritual resources strengthen the accompaniers and help them continue their work. When Vardi was incarcerated for conscientious objection, she drew strength from developing relationships with other inmates.

Cave, a nontheist Quaker, also fortified himself with communal connections.

“It’s very much about drawing on the people around me and their sense of purpose,” said Cave, who is a member of Charlbury Meeting in the UK.

Since becoming a Quaker, Debby grew more committed to living out her faith commitments and becoming more politically active. She had previously volunteered in the region with a small Christian team to rebuild demolished Palestinian homes.

Spiritual practices that sustained Debby during her service included going to the rooftop of the home where she was staying to gaze at the expansive sky. In addition, she turned to Scripture.

“I actually found myself reading the Bible, which is not something I would normally do,” Debby said.

Debby’s childhood experiences inspired her to volunteer as an ecumenical accompanier. While she was growing up, her parents talked extensively about the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, the conflict in Northern Ireland, as well as fighting in Israel–Palestine. Over her lifetime, Debby saw progress in the first two conflicts, but the third remained intransigent.

It took a long time for Debby to feel ready to become an ecumenical accompanier. As part of the application process, she explained her faith journey and discussed how she interacts with different groups. She had to present a five-minute talk on an aspect of the political situation in Israel–Palestine. Trainees engaged in role plays and heard a presentation from a rabbi.

Debby believes that people in the West Bank desire peace; and she’s aware of many West Bank Palestinians who have participated in nonviolent resistance. One Palestinian family Debby spent time with included four young children whose parents were raising them to love others.

She recognizes that the ongoing war has traumatized both Israelis and Palestinians.

“Peace is possible, but we have to envisage it and work for it,” Debby said.

The post Bearing Witness for Peace appeared first on Friends Journal.

I don’t take for granted what a privilege it is to be able to write this column every few weeks for you to read. I always look forward to rereading the contents of the magazine and asking myself, how does Spirit, through the words of these Friends, resonate with me today? My answer today is that it resonates deeply.

Today, it’s a bright day in Philadelphia, on the doorstep of spring. As I write from my kitchen table, I find that I keep getting distracted by glimpses of the birds outside. Today a pair of downy woodpeckers have been frequenting the suet cage hanging on the stone wall outside my front window, their high-contrast black-and-creamy-white bodies hanging upside down, tails tucked, taking their time. House finches and song sparrows arrive like clockwork at the tube feeder for black-oil sunflower seeds. Brilliant red and golden northern cardinals swoop down to gather what falls, where they coexist more or less peacefully with the mourning doves who have been there all along. None of these birds is exotic where I live. They’re just our “everyday folks.” I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Like the increasing whiteness of my beard, the avocation of birding has settled in and become a part of my life over the past few years almost without me realizing it was happening. When I read Rebecca Heider’s piece for this issue, “A Quaker Guide to Birdwatching,” I immediately understood why I find this pastime so well suited to my Quaker countenance. Like Rebecca, I’ve come to love walking the paths at Dixon Meadow Preserve, the seasonal arrivals and departures of species familiar and novel, the discipline of returning to a place often, dwelling there, and being open to the lessons revealed.

John Andrew Gallery’s “The Gospel Model of Fatherly Love” is a lesson unfolding for me, too. With a poignant reminiscence as his starting point, John teases out meaning and queries from stories of fathers in the Gospels, finally reflecting on his own arc of fatherhood now that his sons are grown. As a father to two sons myself, I found his essay to be relevant and thought-provoking.

It is always tempting to reflect on the present moment and claim it to be unique, unprecedented: extreme in some new way. While no doubt this can be true in some ways and at some times, as J. E. McNeil lays out in “Planting Ourselves in Time and Place,” I find it oddly comforting to recognize that the deep divisions I see all around me in my country and in our world are far from unprecedented. There is wisdom to be gained from Friend J. E.’s example of confronting seemingly intractable divides with a recognition of that of God in the other and an acceptance of the different paths that have led each of us to where we stand today.

Now it’s your turn: how does Spirit, through these stories, resonate with you today? I hope you’ll consider this query and let us know what surfaces for you.

The post Resonant Lessons from Nature, Scripture, and Experience appeared first on Friends Journal.

Rebecca Heider was featured in the March 2024 Quakers Today podcast.

Eight Lessons for Friends and Seekers

When the Adult Class Committee of my meeting first approached me last year about giving a presentation on my new hobby of bird photography, I balked. ”I’m just a beginner,” I protested. “There are so many people in the meeting who are more experienced birders and better photographers! Besides, what does birding have to do with Quakerism?” The presentation didn’t end up happening that spring. But all summer, every time I was out with my camera looking for birds, I was thinking, What does birding have to do with Quakerism?

As I thought about it more, I found many connections between my new practice of birding and the Quaker practice that has long been part of my life. I realized that as a newcomer to birding, I may not have authority on the topic, but I had the perspective of a seeker: thinking intensely about it and learning along the way. So I find I have something to say about birding and Quakerism after all, which I’ve condensed into eight lessons from birding that can inform our Quaker worship.

Bald Eagle Lesson 1: Bald Eagle

I finally found time to explore nature photography during the COVID-19 pandemic. 2020 was my year of insects, when I spent long hours in sunny meadows chasing butterflies; 2021 was my year of mushrooms, poking around in wet leaves on the forest floor. In 2022, I was ready for the year of birds, so I purchased a camera with a telephoto lens. I thought our family trip to Alaska—specifically a day of rafting through a bald eagle preserve—would be the perfect time to launch my career in bird photography.

In fact, that was a foolish and hubristic plan. I could barely operate the camera, and the only halfway-decent photo from that day was this still from a video. I now realize that even a veteran photographer would find it challenging to get a good photo while bobbing over whitewater.

By waiting to begin my journey into bird photography until I had traveled thousands of miles to this one special place on this specific day, I had set myself up for disappointment. And I had missed out on opportunities to get started earlier closer to home. This brings me to my first lesson: If we look to connect with Spirit only in a designated sacred place or on a specific holy day, we limit our opportunities for spiritual transformation.

Song Sparrow Lesson 2: Song Sparrow

On the opposite end of the birding spectrum from the bald eagle preserve in Alaska is a site a few miles from my home that I typically pass several times a day: Dixon Meadow Preserve in Lafayette Hill, Pa. Where the Alaska trip was costly in terms of time and money, I could fit a visit to Dixon into my day with no advance planning. Where Alaska was once in a lifetime, Dixon was three times a week.

As birding outings became part of my weekly routine instead of a special event, the pressure to glimpse a rare bird or to capture a stunning photo subsided. Even if there were no birds in sight, I felt nourished and restored by the beauty and peace of the meadow, like a meeting for worship when no vocal ministry is given.

At Dixon, the counterpart to the bald eagle was the song sparrow. On every visit, from a hot summer day to a blustery winter morning, these cheerful birds were there to greet me. Where the bald eagle is huge and majestic, the song sparrow is small, humble, and plain. Song sparrows are also cooperative photo subjects, perching at the tops of trees and singing their hearts out to announce their presence.

Over the course of the year, song sparrows gave me practice with my camera and taught me to appreciate how much beauty and variety there is, even in something ordinary; I’ve been able to capture many photos of song sparrows, each one with its own beauty. My second lesson became this: Practicing connecting with the Divine every day and in ordinary ways prepares us for worship and helps us go deeper.

Northern Flicker Lesson 3: Northern Flicker

A transformative moment in my relationship with birds came at an Audubon event where a multi-generational group shared about their “spark birds.” Sitting in a large circle, we spoke out of the silence about the bird that first sparked our interest in birding. It was a powerful experience of sharing our deep emotional connections with nature and with each other, and it had the spirit of a Quaker meeting for worship.

My own spark bird was a northern flicker. I saw this bird with its beautifully patterned plumage in my yard and had no idea what it was. Breathless with excitement, I ran from room to room peering out my windows to get a better view. That night I eagerly reported the encounter to my family.

In the following days, I reflected on the immense and unlooked-for joy that bird brought me. The northern flicker had likely been visiting my yard regularly, but I hadn’t been paying attention before. It was an important lesson to realize the joy I felt that day had been available to me all the time; all I had to do was look for it.

As I began to notice birds, I was also more aware of what the people around me were missing. While I stopped to photograph a red-tailed hawk on Forbidden Drive in the Wissahickon Valley of Philadelphia, a dozen or more people made their way around me on their bicycles, or jogging, or chatting with friends. No one’s gaze followed the direction of my camera to see what I was photographing. How close we are to such transformative encounters every day! And how often we miss them.

Later, after photographing a goldfinch on a stalk of goldenrod, I was approached by a group of birders excited about a rare bird spotted nearby. “Did you see it?” they asked eagerly when they noticed me with my camera. No, this was “just a goldfinch.” It was nothing exciting, but another small miracle. That brings me to lesson three: The Divine is available to us everywhere and all the time. We just need to pay attention.

American Robin Lesson 4: American Robin

Once I started to truly pay attention to birds, I realized that familiarity had blinded me to their beauty. What is this lovely bird with its speckled breast tinged with apricot and its distinctive white eye ring? It’s the ubiquitous American robin, which we see so often throughout most of North America that we stop seeing them at all. How can we awaken ourselves to the beauty all around us every day? This robin paused while snacking on winterberries to pose for me.

In the right light, you realize that the humble, dun-colored mourning dove has complex patterns and rosy tones in its soft plumage. I was on my hands and knees under a rhododendron bush to photograph a mushroom one day when I looked up to see a young chickadee perched on the mossy branch right in front of me. Moments later an attentive parent came by to offer him a snack: so ordinary, so beautiful.

Throughout the summer, there is a constant thrum of ruby-throated hummingbirds visiting the feeders on our porch. They are just a whizzing blur in the background, until you stop to really look, which brings me to my fourth lesson: Truly paying attention to the world around us allows us to experience the Divine in the ordinary.

Palm Warbler Lesson 4 (part 2): Palm Warbler

As I began to visit Dixon Meadow Preserve three times a week, I became aware of how the population of birds changed over the course of the seasons: which birds were regulars and which were just passing through. The palm warbler was the first migrant bird that I really took an interest in. Stopping by twice a year on their migration, the palm warblers spend a few weeks enjoying the flowering goldenrod. The day I took this picture, I remember asking myself, “Could there be anything more beautiful than these sweet, butter-yellow birds among the goldenrods?”

I only saw an American tree sparrow once, on a winter morning. The orchard oriole was another bird that was only in town for a few weeks in the spring. This brings me to the second part of lesson four: Truly paying attention to the world around us allows us to experience the Divine in the ordinary and also in the extraordinary.

Indigo Bunting Lesson 5: Indigo Bunting

I usually appreciate the serendipity of crossing paths with a particular bird, but I really wanted a good photo of an indigo bunting. These beautiful birds always looked blurry or malformed in the photos I took. Over time, I learned to recognize their call, and I knew what section of the meadow they frequented and at what time of day. Finally, all of this preparation paid off when I captured my favorite photo of the summer. This experience informed lesson five: Preparation through study and practice will help us find the rich experience of worship that we are seeking.

Hooded Warbler Lesson 6: Hooded Warbler

Most of the hours I spend birding, I am alone. But one of the highlights of the summer was when veteran birder friends came to visit me in the Poconos. Birding with them, I noticed how much richer our experience was because we each contributed something. I knew the area and was able to lead them to likely spots. My younger ears could pick out birdsong before they heard it. And they had a wealth of experience and knowledge to share that guided us in spotting and identifying birds.

The hooded warbler was one of the more uncommon birds I photographed that summer. When I took this photograph, I was alone, but I wouldn’t have been able to take it without everything I learned from the shared experience of birding with friends. This reminds me of a question I reflect upon often: if Quakers believe there is a direct connection between an individual and God, why is it important for us to worship in community? Lesson six offers one answer to this question: Worshiping in community broadens our experience of the Divine by drawing on diverse gifts and perspectives.

Red-Winged Blackbird Lesson 7: Red-Winged Blackbird

Over the year, I learned that in order to capture interesting photos of birds, you have to adopt their vantage point. Seeing the world through a bird’s eyes, you notice the rhythms of their lives as they migrate, mate, and feed their young. When the red-winged blackbirds returned to Dixon in late winter, the meadow was filled with their raucous mating cries. In the fall, when the meadow was golden with wheat in the morning sunshine, goldfinches fattened themselves up for winter by eating the plentiful seeds and grains. I also observed an osprey feeding fish to its offspring and a tree swallow preparing to defend its nest (top of page, main photo) from an approaching house sparrow.

When we practice a radical empathy with birds, we remind ourselves of how connected we are with all creatures and how much their lives are like our own: filled with joys and challenges. At the same time, this inspires humility. There is so much more going on in the world than only our human concerns. This brings me to lesson seven: Experiencing the Divine involves cultivating radical empathy to connect with something greater than ourselves.

Red Fox Lesson 8: A Fox in Forget-Me-Nots

I always have to remind myself not to be so focused on birds that I miss other miracles. One afternoon, I followed the call of a great crested flycatcher through the dense woods and into a sunny clearing filled with forget-me-nots. As I perched on a mossy log, hoping to glimpse the elusive bird, I noticed that I wasn’t alone. A red fox was silently nosing its way through the flowers nearby. I sat watching, entranced, until it made its way back into the woods. I had gone looking for a bird but instead found the most profoundly peaceful moment of my summer.

How often do we head into Quaker worship looking for an answer to one question, and find instead the answer to a question we didn’t know we had? I’ve noticed a perfectly formed spider web illuminated by sunlight, a mourning cloak butterfly resting on tree bark, and a Halloween pennant dragonfly hanging on to the tip of a branch; these moments lead to the final lesson: When we let go of our preconceptions, we may encounter the Divine in forms we didn’t expect.

Web extra

The author’s extended slideshow on Quakers and birding includes many more photos of birds mentioned in the article.

BirdsForQuakers_revised

The post A Quaker Guide to Birdwatching appeared first on Friends Journal.

How We Chose a Meaningful Resting Place

I am not alone.
I am one with all the Earth.
What an adventure!

—Edward Ashley

Dad died this past summer. Instead of a churchyard burial, he rests in the middle of a meadow filled with six-foot-tall wildflowers, hovering bees, mooing cows, and songbirds. Dad’s body was wrapped in his mother’s quilt that had the words “Sweet Dreams.” His grandchildren carried the body, which was wrapped in a shroud and placed on a board, and they used ropes to gently lower him into a shallow grave.

Family and friends threw wildflowers picked from the meadow onto his body. Afterward, three grandsons shoveled about three tons of dirt onto his flower-covered body. Dad’s body lies in an unmarked grave in a conservancy cemetery, where the grasses and tall groves of wildflowers take over his plot. Only GPS coordinates locate his remains.

The author’s father in Saxapahaw, N.C., where he lived for the last year and a half of his life. No Ready Burial Ground

Setting aside the idea of burial within a churchyard or military burial ground can be a monumental leap for a family. As ours decided on a green burial within a conservancy cemetery, we embraced the possibility of the wild, open space of nature. For regular Sunday churchgoers raised in a formal faith structure, this ceremony was very different from the priest-led devotional liturgy and the songs, blessings, and ceremonial faith structures that bookend sacred moments. Baptism, confirmation, weddings, and funerals are standard appointed times for the church community to individually and collectively encounter God. As many questions emerged in the weeks before Dad’s death, our family actively engaged in “worldmaking”: we felt we were creating a unique, sacred space. The meadow was a world where Dad could rest after death and where we could feel connected to both his and our collective stories, and open to the great story beyond this one. My family embraced the act of questioning where to place our loved ones after life.

In light of these profound questions, more families—religious as well as nonreligious—are exploring alternative burial plans and rejecting passive acceptance of “the way things are.” Sacred burial sites now extend beyond religious buildings and grounds; other places can now qualify as sites where families can opt to memorialize their dead loved ones. Families are rethinking the nature of the sacred: where and how it is expressed and what its role and value might be after death and for the living left behind.

For those lucky enough to live in North Carolina, state regulations permit families to pursue alternative burial options called “green burials.” A green burial place is dedicated to following specific protocol and may be part of a cemetery or a new area altogether. Green burial involves the use of the overall ecological well-being of the land. For some, environmental concerns and questions about health hazards influence people to choose a green burial. The standard conventional funeral, complete with embalming and burial in a lawn cemetery, is fraught with health hazards, thereby requiring the permanent installation of non-biodegradable vaults around non-biodegradable caskets. In green burials, embalming is forbidden and natural decomposition of the body is encouraged with a more shallow grave.

As the public demands access to more information about the resulting health risks associated with crematorium pollutants, questions arise, such as “Is there a safe level of exposure to mercury?” With no Environmental Protection Agency oversight and with increasing public awareness surrounding environmental health concerns, preservation and restoration of local lands, and concern over rising costs of funeral products and productions, green burials are becoming an increasingly attractive option.

While Dad was less interested in the politics and economics of green burial, he quickly became interested in the ecology of the conservancy cemetery. Dad saw humans as part of God’s total creation and nature a manifestation of God’s presence. We engaged in a process of nurturing deep care for God’s creation while we planned to bury Dad within a green conservancy cemetery. Mom and I chose Dad’s final resting place eight hours before he died; we rested well knowing Dad’s future burial would be in a place of spirit-nurturing, transformative beauty.

Wildflowers collected in the fields near the burial site. Creating Space for Death and Memorialization

The last week of Dad’s life saw us asking a new whole line of questioning about burial places. Earlier in the year, my parents and I visited a half dozen church graveyards as potential final resting places. I suggested that none of the children and grandchildren would be eager to visit a churchyard that held no real connection for my parents. The decision needed to be made soon now that Dad was dying: he desperately wanted to know where his wife would eventually join him after death. The churchyard cemetery’s purpose of memorializing people and even serving as a cultural marker of history did not fill him with comfort, especially when considering that he might be buried in a random cemetery. As a past marine, the military burial ground—a free option for both him and Mom—wasn’t interesting. Neither of them felt any kind of attachment to nationalistic fervor or the armed services. Ultimately, both wanted to know that their children and grandchildren would visit them after their deaths.

Dad, Mom, and I seriously questioned any remaining options for Dad’s final resting ground. They had no religious roots in any of the churches they had visited over the past year, and we all agreed: wherever Dad would be buried, Mom would eventually follow. We needed to find a burial place that could include Dad’s history, provide the family with connection and continuity, and inspire a sense of the sacred. Ultimately we were searching for a burial ground that would serve as some kind of reverential and awe-inspiring place: literally and figuratively rooting Edward Ashley and his family in the years to come.

My father was vivaciously curious about the beauty of existence, and he was deeply connected to the story of God’s love in all of creation. In The Common Good and the Global Emergency: God and the Built Environment, T. J. Gorringe writes: “Places of transformative beauty—places which inspire, motivate, give meaning and fulfillment—are spirit nurturing.” In the last week of Dad’s life, after having visited one of 13 green conservancy cemeteries in the country, he and my mom decided to make their final resting place in a natural environment. They had allowed for what Gorringe describes as “a kind of interior pilgrimage” to take place. And it felt like a miracle that the closest green burial site to our location was a conservancy cemetery. It seemed strange to Dad that meadows and woodlands might serve as a burial ground, operating under the premise that nature and natural growth eventually obscure burial spots.

Dad hung onto the sides of the four-seater cart as we spun around the acreage through the woods and surrounding meadow teeming with life; we talked about a kind of sacred sensibility of green burials. In the drive up to and around the 126 acres, he noted a kind of felt “sacred anticipation” as he searched for signs that people were resting within the beautiful landscape of woodlands and meadows. Visitors walking through the woods on well-made trails were all part of this life cycle. Dad appreciated how the conservancy cemetery centered the social and community value of people individually and collectively, so that the celebrations of loved ones were engaging and inseparable from the place. The conservancy cemetery offers opportunities for families and volunteers to forge ongoing relationships with the physical environment through Friday workdays (for trail making, gravedigging, wildflower picking, and volunteering during funeral services) and offers them a physical way to live out their moral and social values.

In an article for Oxford’s Literature and Theology journal titled “Embodying the Artistic Spirit and the Prophetic Arts,” Willie James Jennings writes:

To consume is holy work. It is tied to life. But what happens when it becomes bound to death? I do not mean the death of that which must be consumed, but consumption that conceals death’s operations, consumption that isolates us from one another, and leaves us alone in our hungers.

In the world of green burials, there is a pragmatic release and liberation from the increasingly business-centered burials of funeral homes. The end result of those burial practices—largely for monetizing purposes—has served to disconnect folks from the raw rites of passage with their loved one. It is right and good that contemporary families question the mode of consumption that impedes and denies the human species’ natural connection to the lives and deaths of other humans, as well as from nature and creation.

In the business of death and burials today, there can be a kind of denial and detachment about the realness and naturalness of dying, as if we could separate this moment from creation: from the life and death cycle of abiding reality. It was this curiosity and wonder about life and living, creation and God, that brought Dad to tour the Bluestem Conservancy Cemetery, a mere six days before his death. There was a mindful practice of presence as we spun through the trails, looking for possible burial spots for Dad and Mom. We recognized a series of feelings: grief, hope, love, connection, and loss. There was hopefulness hiding in the beauty of nature, and it was powerfully invigorating. My family and I experienced a “vision of the sacramentality of the world which is not sentimental,” as Friend Steve Chase writes in Nature as Spiritual Practice. The nature of space matters.

Green burial is a way to care for the deceased beloved in the most natural manner possible. With no box or embalming fluids, it allows for a burial with minimal environmental impact. My family eventually found peace and value in burying Dad in his mother’s quilt and laying him directly in the earth without a casket. With Dad simply returning to the earth, the family found comfort in the idea that Dad’s burial would also aid in the restoration and preservation of the local habitat as well as aid in the conservation of the acreage for the next one hundred years.

The post My Dad’s Green Burial appeared first on Friends Journal.

Each year, in the days leading up to Christmas, I set up a small crèche depicting the birth of Jesus based on the story in the Gospel of Luke. I have read and heard that story read many times; it has become the basis for the popular way the birth of Jesus is represented and re-enacted. The Nativity scene I own includes a small structure for the stable, a few cows and donkeys, a manger, and several figures to represent Mary, Joseph, baby Jesus, the angel, the shepherds, and the three wise men. I put them out in the order in which they appear, as if I were directing a play, and then, when the wise men (who are “borrowed” from the Gospel of Matthew) depart, I put them back in the box for another year. As I was putting the figures away last year, I had reached the point where only Joseph and baby Jesus were left when something made me stop. The little statue of Joseph depicts a middle-aged man with dark hair and a dark beard. He is kneeling, gazing down—in my mind gazing lovingly—at the baby lying before him in the manager. As I looked at the figure, I was reminded of the times I gazed lovingly at each of my two sons right after they were born. A wave of emotion passed through my body, bringing forth momentary tears of joy at the memory of those two occasions. Whether Joseph was the biological father of Jesus or not, he must have felt the same emotion gazing at this baby who was now his son. Suddenly, I saw Joseph as a real person, as a father like me with a son he loved.

Saint Joseph with a young Jesus. Illustration by Marco Sete.

The gospels tell us little about Joseph. Some apocryphal stories say he was an older man, even in some cases a man in his 80s, who had six children from an earlier marriage, thus accounting for the reference to Jesus’s brothers and sisters without abandoning the idea that Mary was a perpetual virgin. I don’t see Joseph this way. I see him as a young man of typical marrying age for his time, maybe 18 at most to Mary’s 14 or 15. Two teenagers experiencing the miracle of the birth of life together, an event that must have filled them both with joy and awe.

Matthew’s Gospel tells a different version of Jesus’s birth in which Joseph plays a very significant role. It says that he is visited by angels on three occasions, more than anyone else in the gospels, including Jesus. In the first, an angel tells him that Mary is pregnant by the Holy Spirit and that he should accept her and name the child “Jesus.” The second angel appears sometime after Jesus’s birth and tells him to take his family to Egypt, and the third appears in Egypt, telling him that it is safe to return home.

There is no way to know which version is true, or whether they are each the invention of the gospel writer. But both suggest that Joseph had reason to believe his son was something special. If so, did that affect his role as a father? Did he allow Jesus to go off to the synagogue to read Scripture as was Jesus’s preference, or did he require him to remain in the carpentry shop until Jesus was old enough to make his own decisions? Or being only human, like myself, perhaps he just tried to be the best father he could be, having no idea what that would lead to and, if we are to believe the stories, not living long enough to find out.

The Calling of the Sons of Zebedee (Vocazione dei figli di Zebedeo), 1510, by Marco Basaiti. Accademia delle Belle Arti, Venice, Italy.

Joseph is not the only father who appears in the gospels, but he is one of only two mentioned by name. The other is Zebedee, father of the disciples James and John. Zebedee appears for a brief instant in Matthew 4:21, the scene where Jesus is walking along the Sea of Galilee and summons James and John to follow him, while they are in the boat with Zebedee mending their fishing nets. When I originally read this verse, my attention was drawn to James and John. I marveled that they could so easily walk away from their past lives. Did they know Jesus already, and did he know them? Were they disciples of John the Baptist and at the river when Jesus came to be baptized? Or were they among John’s followers when—as some stories say—Jesus stayed with John for a while thereafter? Or did they go simply because their friends Simon and Andrew were with him, and it looked like something more interesting to do than mending nets? Whatever the reason, their sudden departure is amazing and even more extraordinary if we assume they did not know Jesus at all but were simply drawn by the magnetic nature of his presence and his unusual and unexpected invitation.

But when I think of this incident now, in the context of my thoughts about Joseph, it’s the figure of Zebedee that draws my attention. How did he feel when both his sons jumped overboard and went off without asking permission or even saying a word of goodbye? Perhaps he shouted after them, “Come back! Where do you guys think you’re going; there’s work to be done!” Did he expect them to obey as good Jewish men brought up to honor father and mother should rightly have done? Or did he say, “Go with my blessing. Come back sometime and tell me what you find”? Did he harbor a twitch of envy, wishing he had the freedom to abandon his own life and follow Jesus himself? Did Joseph have similar conflicting feelings? Did he allow Jesus to leave the carpentry shop to go study in the synagogue because this was clearly his preference, or did he require him to stay until he was old enough to make his own decisions?

The Parable of the Prodigal Son: Received Home by His Father,
c. 1680–1685, by Luca Giordano. Uppark, the Fetherstonhaugh Collection (National Trust).

The answer to these questions and some insight into how both Joseph and Zebedee might have seen their relationship with their sons is suggested by a story about another father and his sons: the one called “the prodigal son” in Luke 15:11–32.

This story has interested me for a long time because I am the father of two sons whose personalities are similar to the two sons in this story. My older son is generally the more responsible one, as is the older son in the story. This does not mean he chose to stay home and help run the farm, so to speak; he’s gone off and had an adventurous life, more adventurous than my own. Nonetheless, he seems to be more grounded and responsible in his behavior. This is not to say that my younger son is irresponsible, for that would be inaccurate too. But he does seem to be more adventurous, more willing to take off on the spur of the moment to walk the Camino for a month or climb the mountain to Machu Picchu. He is definitely the one who would not hesitate to ask me for his share of my estate to go off and pursue his own interests.

While this story is labeled “the prodigal son,” it is really about the father and his relationship with his two sons. In response to his younger son’s request to receive his future inheritance so that he can go off and pursue his own interests, the father could have said, “No way, I need you here on the farm,” just as Zebedee might have told his sons to come back. As a compromise, he might have given him some money for a short vacation but not his entire inheritance with no strings attached. He essentially says, “Go with my blessing. Come back sometime, and tell me what you find.” In addition, he gives him the resources necessary to do that. If Jesus is telling this story to illustrate how a loving father should act, then we must also assume that both Joseph and Zebedee send their sons off with a smile and a blessing. And if that is the case, it would be natural for both men to greet their sons eagerly and joyously when they returned home, as the father in the parable does. In addition to giving his son a ring and a robe, I can imagine him saying, “Tell me all about your adventures. I want to hear everything.” While they are feasting on the fatted calf, the young man enthusiastically might have told his father a slightly censored version of his experiences. And when he later tells his own friends about them in more candid detail, I have no doubt they secretly would wish to have the same opportunity.

You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent
forth. . . . 

Let your bending in the Archer’s hand be for gladness. 

For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so he loves the bow that is stable.

—Kahlil Gibran

In his book The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran provides a wonderful description of the relationship between parents and children that is relevant to Joseph, Zebedee, and the father in the parable of the prodigal son. It begins with these words: “Your children are not your children. / They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.” At the end, he uses the analogy of an archer to convey the notion of what it means to be a parent. In this analogy, the parent is the bow and the child is the arrow. The function of the bow is simply to launch the arrow. It does not determine the target, the path the arrow will follow, or whether it will go high and long or short and low. This is the responsibility of the archer who directs both arrow and bow.

You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.

The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.

Let your bending in the Archer’s hand be for gladness;

For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so he loves the bow that is stable.

Throughout the gospels, Jesus frequently refers to God as “father.” Some people believe that the story of the prodigal son is intended to illustrate what he means in using this term. From that perspective, the father represents God; the sons represent all of us; and the moral of the story is that God loves us, no matter what we do. If, however, the story is intended to tell us that God’s attitude toward us is illustrated by the father’s attitude toward his son, then it also tells us that God wants us to enjoy our lives and to follow our dreams: follow our own particular destinies. The father in the parable wants his younger son to enjoy his life on his own terms. Joseph and Zebedee want the same for their sons. All three fathers allow themselves to “bend in the archer’s hand [with] gladness.” They send their sons off with their blessing to pursue their own destinies.

And so, we must assume that in Jesus’s view, the gift of life comes with God’s blessing to go forth and enjoy our lives: to see what life has to offer, to explore, have adventures, and pursue our own particular destinies. With that blessing comes the resources to fulfill it: a beautiful earth on which to live, food and water, and friends and companions with whom to share our adventures. And I imagine God is just as eager to hear our stories when we return as were the three fathers.

It seems strange to me to have these thoughts now. My sons are in their mid-40s, both adults with lives of their own. These ideas would have been more relevant, and more helpful, when I was younger and trying to learn how to be a loving father. So why do I find them now? Perhaps it is to encourage me to consider how I’ve done: was I a good bow? Did I send them off with my blessing and with resources to help them pursue their own destinies; did I greet them eagerly and with unconditional love when they returned? I can easily see the places where I might have done better, but overall, I think it would be fair to say the answer to those questions is yes. However, that’s for them and not me to judge.

But perhaps this message isn’t for me at all. Perhaps I am just a messenger, enlisted to pass it along to my sons to help them understand what it means to be a loving father to their children, my grandchildren.

Be a good bow; bend in the archer’s hand with gladness. Remember that once you were the arrow and what it was like to fly.

FJ Author Chat Show notes for the interview.

The post The Gospel Model of Fatherly Love appeared first on Friends Journal.

An Expanded Vision of Conscientious Objection

“In these difficult times” has become an overused phrase in recent years. We disagree vehemently with our neighbors, with family, and with Friends. Sometimes the tone in meetings for worship and meetings for business has been harsh. We speak in intemperate language, complete with name calling and accusations, even from the Friends most dedicated to peace. How can we move forward?

When I was the director of the Center on Conscience and War (CCW) (formerly NISBCO) in the early 2000s in Washington, D.C., I traveled among Friends and other faith communities throughout the United States. During that time, I observed a great disparity between beliefs. Occasionally faith communities would drop their connection with CCW because we accepted non-Christian faiths, such as Muslims (Jews were okay, they would say).

I had to tiptoe around the issues of the death penalty and abortion as well, since there were many conscientious objectors (COs) who vehemently disagreed over those issues.

Sometimes what you need to do is to realize that your life has brought you at this time to a particular place on the continuum of the issue you are discussing and accept that where other people stand is where their lives have brought them at this time.

The U.S. Department of Defense defines conscientious objection as a “firm, fixed, and sincere objection to participation in war in any form or the bearing of arms, by reason of religious training and/or belief.” Vietnam-era draft boards (and modern-day investigating officers for military personnel seeking CO discharge) ask stumbling-block questions, such as “What would you have done in World War II?” or “What will you do in Armageddon?” For many decades CCW bought into the government definition of conscientious objection; after all, the founders of the center had helped craft it.

But I became increasingly uncomfortable with the government definition, and instead more open to the idea that it needed to be more flexible and inclusive. In early 2007, I reached out to the group Appeal for Redress, which consisted of career military personnel who objected to the war in Iraq but would deploy there, if ordered. They wanted Congress to act but had no intention of refusing orders; it was their job. Many who supported CCW thought I was wrong to do that.

Around that time, some of the service members involved with Appeal for Redress were featured in a segment on 60 Minutes, and I was invited to a celebratory dinner for them held a few days later. At the event, a young marine and I had an interesting conversation. He was concerned that there might not be any vegetarian choices on the menu. I asked him why he was a vegetarian: health reasons, climate reasons, cruelty to animals? He said he refused to kill animals. I was startled for a moment and then said, “I am not criticizing you but am trying to understand: you don’t want to kill animals, but you are willing to kill humans?” A couple of weeks later he filed a CO application.

This moment reminded me of growing up as the youngest of five very smart children. Every time I would learn something I thought was really interesting, I would relay that information to one of my siblings. They would reply: “Yes, I already knew that.” By the time I was in junior high, I was convinced I was pretty dumb compared to my siblings.

But then, one day in my 20s, I had an epiphany: my siblings had all taken the classes in school before me and read the books before me. They weren’t necessarily smarter, but had simply had the experiences before I did. Their different experience was the crux of the situation. This was confirmed when I went to law school, and none of them did. My different experience changed my understanding.

Different experiences are not just age-related, of course, but come from families, neighborhoods, class, economics, and just being in a particular place at a particular time, such as being in Washington, D.C., during 9/11 and watching the smoke plume rise from the Pentagon—something I witnessed.

It may come to pass that you move; it may come to pass that they move. It may come to pass that you both will stand where you are or you both will move closer together. But you should still reach out your hand to others.

Over time, I began to have a vision of conscientious objection as a continuum: that we all stood along a line. That line extended from the consistent life (sometimes called the seamless garment or web) ethic’s objection to war, death penalty, abortion, and eating animals and continued along the line to those who objected to all wars but supported the death penalty and legalized abortion. Further along were those who objected to only one war, such as Muhammad Ali, who in interviews said he had no argument with the Vietnamese and cited that as one motivation for his conscientious objection. And at the far end of the line were those, like the Appeal for Redress career military, who objected to a particular war but would still participate in it as part of their job.

I spoke about this vision at the Truth Commission on Conscience in War at Riverside Church in New York City on March 21, 2010, pointing out that we should not allow the government to define conscientious objection. Everyone objected to some war at some time. Therefore, we were all conscientious objectors.

I was reminded of all of this last October at the 2023 Baltimore Yearly Meeting Women’s Retreat, which was held on Zoom and in person in College Park, Maryland. There we gathered with the theme of “Hope for an Inclusive Future.” During a group discussion focused on including all genders identifying with women and all People of Color, one young woman spoke about young Friends’ frustration with waiting for unity. She had a different vision for Friends not able to come to unity: she said that those who were clear should move ahead even without unity, but—and this was the most telling moment at the retreat for me—go forward while turning around again and again to others left behind and say in a friendly way, “Are you coming?”

When you think about it, a similar pattern is what has played out for most of the cutting-edge positions throughout Friends’ history. John Woolman did not walk out on Friends when they did not understand the evils of enslavement the way he did. He went to meeting after meeting, home after home, and invited Friends to join him in ending enslavement. He lived his life where he was but did not reject others for not being there with him; he invited them along.

It was after the divisive 2016 presidential election when I began looking again to help bridge the large divides found along political lines in our country. Pulling from my own experiences working with all kinds of people, I created a workshop and training called “Conversations with the Other: How to Speak with People with Whom You Disagree,” and began offering it to Friends and other groups. A lot of the effort of that training is learning to listen and getting past the idea that all you have to do is show them the “error” of their thinking to resolve your disagreements since they are clearly wrong. (This approach doesn’t work in relationships either, or in meeting for business).

Sometimes what you need to do is to realize that your life has brought you at this time to a particular place on the continuum of the issue you are discussing and accept that where other people stand is where their lives have brought them at this time.

It may come to pass that you move; it may come to pass that they move. It may come to pass that you both will stand where you are or you both will move closer together. But you should still reach out your hand to others, as I do to you.

Are you coming?

The post Planting Ourselves in Time and Place appeared first on Friends Journal.

L

ast year, Hellen Lunkuse, a co-clerk of Bulungi Tree Shade Meeting in Kamuli, Eastern Uganda, earned a Global Leadership Award from Vital Voices Global Partnership for her work as founder and executive director of Rape Hurts Foundation. Rape Hurts Foundation is a nonprofit, non-govermental organization that offers trauma-informed care, education, and vocational training to female survivors of rape. Lunkuse accepted the award at an October 25, 2023 ceremony at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.

Vital Voices supports the foundation through capacity building, funding, and relocating rape survivors, according to Lunkuse. Since 1997, Vital Voices has supported more than 20,000 women, enabling skill acquisition, networking, and publicity, according to its website.

During a week-long capacity building training in D.C., Lunkuse shared her work with more than 1,000 people. Speaking of the training she received, she said, “It was a very important period of time.”

Rape Hurts Foundation and its partner organization, Bulungi Tree Shade Meeting, have a long-standing relationship with Olympia (Wash.) Meeting in the United States, which financially supports them and has sent members to visit them in Uganda.

Lunkuse and Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the awards ceremony. Clinton is a cofounder of Vital Voices with the late Secretary Madeleine Albright.

In 1995, Lunkuse was raped at age 11 while gathering firewood and water. The attacker was a well-respected man in her community. Lunkuse’s father, as well as the rest of the village, demanded that she marry the assailant, but she refused. Lunkuse’s mother supported her, and the father threw both of them out of the house.

Based on her own experience, Lunkuse founded Rape Hurts Foundation in 2008, which offers practical and psychological care to women and girls who have survived rape in rural districts of Eastern Uganda. Poverty often keeps rape survivors from advocating for themselves, so the foundation offers vocational training to economically empower women and girls who have been victimized.

Bulungi Tree Shade Meeting, which Lunkuse started in 2019, gathers twice a week to meditate and to share the individual struggles that worshipers are facing. The meeting is also caring for 125 boys who were victims of sex trafficking. The police referred the trafficking victims to the meeting, according to Lunkuse.

“All the people that gather with us are survivors. Most of our people are typically needy,” Lunkuse said.

To address worshipers’ economic needs, the meeting offers food and education, including training in such skills as soap making, knitting, and crocheting. Members who have experienced sexual trauma start on a path to self-forgiveness through the meeting’s psychosocial support, according to Lunkuse.

Left: Members of Bulungi Tree Shade Meeting, including Lunkuse (second from left) and Rape Hurts Foundation program director Robert Mboizi (right). Right: A group of boys under the care of the meeting. Some of the boys are survivors of trafficking in persons, and others were abandoned by the guardians or parents. Photos courtesy of Hellen Lunkuse.

The meeting and the foundation receive support from Friends at Olympia Meeting, whose members David Albert and Kathleen O’Shaunessy first got involved in working in Uganda through serving on the board of Friendly Water for the World, an organization that partners with residents of countries in Africa to improve water supplies. At the village level, Friendly Water promotes building water storage tanks; at the household level, it offers slow sand filters to remove pathogens. Lunkuse’s undergraduate degree is in environmental management, and she started collaborating with Friendly Water for the World in 2015. Albert met Lunkuse when he visited Uganda in 2018 as part of his work with Friendly Water. That year a team came to Uganda for a conference, and Lunkuse got to know O’Shaunessy. Lunkuse appreciates the love and care of Olympia Meeting.

O’Shaunessy is a clinical psychologist who works with survivors of trauma and sexual abuse, and she attended a week-long conference in Mityana, Uganda, in 2018. During her month-long visit, she volunteered with Lunkuse to assist clients of Rape Hurts Foundation. Speaking through an interpreter, she counseled 25 female rape survivors for an hour each. When she asked each what they most needed help with, many mentioned food security and adequate shelter. O’Shaunessy credits Lunkuse for preparing the women to speak candidly about their lives and struggles. One 19-year-old woman who worked as a police officer explained that she would be fired from her job if her supervisors knew she was attending counseling sessions through Rape Hurts Foundation.

“They came prepared to be honest with me about their lives. And a number of them were kind of anxious. I felt frightened. But they all did. Every one of them did remarkably well. They were honest, and they had talked with me about what had gone on,” O’Shaunessy said.

The post Quakers Partner to Aid Survivors of Sexual Violence in Uganda appeared first on Friends Journal.

Giggling, she runs from the family room couch
where I sit and count, both hands over my eyes.
“1,2,3,4,5 and 5 is 10. Ready or not, here I come.”

First, in the kitchen, opening and slamming cabinet
drawers and doors, “No, not here. Not here, either,”
repeated loud while lifting corners of the tablecloth,

again as I look under a chair cushion, behind the curtain,
then seek into the living room to flip pages of a book
on the shelf, “She’s sure hiding good, where can she be?”

Muffled laughter in the closet, ever her same hiding spot,
as I pass the half open door, again not seeing her crouched
smiling presence as I continue my search into the hall.

“I wonder where that girl can be, I’ve looked everywhere.”
A tug on my pant leg, I turn around in wild surprise,
“Here I am, Papa, right here. See. You couldn’t find me.”

“You certainly are a wonderful hider, much better than me.
Now it’s my turn.” She counts with covered eyes as I slip
into the closet, same place as when her mommy was small.

The post Ollie Ollie  appeared first on Friends Journal.

At that time Jesus said,

Plant trees easy
for kids to climb,
cherry and apple,
low to the ground,

or cloud-high
and many-branched
like the pine.

Let willows swing
laughing children
over the river.

Let catalpas provide,
with their great, green hearts,
places to hide and heal.

Suffer the children
to come to the trees.

The post Little Gospel appeared first on Friends Journal.

Her breath rose and fell
spaces between in and out growing wider
Gasping for air, heartbeat shallow and fast
feeble voice barely heard
pink skin turning purple
finally, breath stopped, heart raced a few seconds, concluded its beating.
The doors of body closed.
There is no return.

      May the rising sun sanctify and bless Your name
      We sing praises to the Holy One
      for the life of one we loved so long

Gasping for air, crying on an inhale
learning the in and out rhythm of breath
The fast heartbeat that slows with growth
purple skin turning pink
lungs growing a louder voice.
The gate of womb shut.
There is no return.

      May the falling rain sanctify and bless Your name.
      We sing praises to the Holy One
      for the new life we have been blessed with.

May the Lord of doors and gates
Going out and coming in
acorn and oak
child and old woman
bless our hearts with unceasing wonder
as we witness the commonness of mystery and holiness.
May Your name be praised into all eternity.

The post Kaddish for Death and Childbirth קדיש appeared first on Friends Journal.

Praying for results

Peter Blood-Patterson’s article on holding in the Light (“We Are All Held in Love,” FJ Mar.) really spoke to me. I have always felt that praying for a particular result was risky. As he stated, if the desired outcome does not come to pass, the pray-er may feel that they didn’t pray “hard enough,” or that the prayer’s beneficiary was somehow “out of harmony with God.” In addition, one can lose faith in a loving God who does not heal a person or situation in response to a fervent prayer.

He mentions scientist Jocelyn Bell’s stance that it is incongruent to believe in a God who is both all-loving and omnipotent (if omnipotent, how can a loving God allow tragedies?). This is also the conclusion reached by Leslie D. Weatherhead in the 1940s, who wrote The Will of God. I read this book as a college student in the 1970s and have re-read it several times since. Like Bell, Weatherhead, and Blood-Patterson, I have chosen an all-loving rather than all-powerful God. This has been invaluable in dealing with several personal challenges in my own life, which consequently did not shake my faith.

Kate Hood Seel
Greensboro, N.C.

Online: Peter Blood-Patterson discusses his article in a video interview at Friendsjournal.org/blood-patterson.

The power of prayer

I really appreciate Stan Becker’s exploration of prayer through a scientific lens (“Holding in the Light, Prayer, and Healing,” FJ Mar. online). As a former hospital chaplain, I was called upon to minister to strangers in the emergency room all the time. If someone was open to prayer, I would pray with them.

One of the most traumatic cases was with a woman who was raped early in the morning on her way to work. The rapist not only physically abused her, but disfigured her face. When I met her in the emergency room, she was in shock. I held her hand and explained that I would be with her throughout her time in the hospital. She stayed in the hospital for several weeks and went through many surgeries to restore her face. I asked her if she would be open to me inviting my colleagues to lay hands on her for healing. She said yes. Before the bandages were to be removed from her face for the first time, I asked the other Protestant chaplains to join me and lay hands on her for healing both physically, spiritually, and emotionally. I knew she would need a tremendous amount of support to get through this. She had not met the other chaplains when they came into the room, but she trusted me. We all laid hands on her in the bed and prayed. After the prayer was over, we could see a change in her eyes. We could see that her body had a physical response to the prayer. When she was able to see herself, she was able to accept the changes in her appearance with grace. I think that our prayers helped contribute to that acceptance. I do believe that prayer has an effect on individuals whether we know them or not.

Chester Freeman
Rochester, N.Y.

What the universe holds for us

Thanks to John Calvi for sharing “Carrying Light to Need” (FJ Mar.). I would love to think that holding him in the Light, to the best of my ability, would bring him back to the state he was in before. But experience is teaching me that we don’t go back; in the best scenario we move forward to what the universe holds for us. As Calvi has been teaching us, the work is to listen, and hear and feel. And then move.

Margaret Katranides
St. Louis, Mo.

Wonderful insights into both healing and prayer. The reminder that stepping stones are not homesteads is just one of the many images from this piece that will stay with me.

Vicki Winslow
Liberty, N.C.

Online: John Calvi discusses his article in a video interview at Friendsjournal.org/calvi.

Answered prayers

Chester Freeman’s Quaker’s Light is an interesting concept (“Pray without Ceasing,” FJ Mar. online). It’s certainly a powerful means of connecting with the afflicted, who are all around us. Too few take the time to show interest. We are too caught up in our own everyday activities. Chester shows us how to change that. The light that God gives us is for others to see. The transformation taking place in our lives will attract others (Isaiah 49:6). Paul tells us we do not always know how to pray (Romans 8:26–27). I find it useful to just get on my knees and let my mind come to complete quietness, letting God’s Spirit search me and carry what “He” sees as important to the throne of grace on my behalf. God knows what is on my heart.

Tom Rood
Penn Yan, N.Y.

I answer the phones at a local hospital. Recently I was having a terrible day, when out of the blue three different people asked if they could pray for me. I was overwhelmed and in tears, but a sense of peace came over me. I was told that it doesn’t matter how tired you are at night, a one-word prayer “thank-you” will work. One other thing I have learned is that a smile is almost as powerful as a prayer.

Nancy Dowd
Seminole, Fla.

How timely is this publication! This week our family, friends, and congregation have been “praying without ceasing” for a dear friend of ours and the medical staff caring for him. When we first received the news of the severity of his heart attack, I had no words, no cohesive thoughts. The only thing I could do was sing the hymns of my childhood that have carried me through the most challenging times, knowing God knew what was in my heart. Chester Freeman’s description of the two dimensions of holding someone in the Light is so well expressed. Prayers of thanksgiving are also vital. We need to celebrate answered prayers and the goodness in our lives.

Annaliese Parker
Farmington, N.Y.

God’s continued call

I think of heaven as a place where our discarnate souls can contemplate their past lives and plan for future lives that will give them a chance to develop spiritually (“Do Quakers Believe in Heaven?,” QuakerSpeak Feb.). I like Lynnette Davis’s explanation of energy. I think that souls are gathered into groups where they can learn lessons, and recognize what they have done insufficiently, kind of like a school.

I don’t believe in hell. Why would a loving parent condemn a child to eternal pain?

Allison Browning Richards
Camden, Del.

So it is true that often Christianity has been co-opted as providing simply a “ticket to heaven.” I believe we are called to help create (co-create) a just world in our here and now, on earth as it is in heaven. But I also believe in a heaven that is a next step where the love of God continues to call me. I have no idea what it looks like, but everything within me tells me there is more.

Deborah E Suess
Greensboro, N.C.

Such eloquent people. My prime reason for being a Quaker is their acceptance that I do not believe in God or an afterlife. This world suffices, and the spirit within us is our inspiration.

Jenni Bond
Hobart, Australia

Rustin preached, lived, and practiced what he believed

I deeply appreciated the review of the film Rustin (“Unsung No More” by Rashid Darden, FJ Nov. 2023 online; Jan. 2024 print). It is a movie everyone should see. I had the privilege of knowing Bayard Rusin, and working with him, when I was the president of New York Friends Group, a Quaker foundation on which he was a member of the board of directors. The film touches on a very important gift that he had in administration and the ability to carry out things to a successful conclusion.

But there were so many other concerns and actions that he took. At the time of apartheid in South Africa, he was deeply involved; at the conclusion of a report, he stated that the United States should seek “a nonviolent end to apartheid.” He preached, lived, and practiced this philosophy his entire life, including on his trip to the Middle East during the Israel-Lebanon war in 1982. At his 75th birthday celebration in 1987, it was inspiring to hear tributes from the likes of Congressman John Lewis and Elie Wiesel. As I wrote to Newsday at his death, “unfortunately in our society today there are so few who can see where we are as a people and how to survive into the 21st century. Bayard Rustin understood and saw what was needed. To say he will be missed is an understatement. He was unique and irreplaceable.” How relevant these words seem to me today.

George Rubin
Medford, N.J.

The history of protesters should be known

As a former protester (with an almost fanatic zeal) against the war in Vietnam from the earliest days, I get incensed when I hear all the praise of the Vietnam veterans and the sometimes-derogatory attacks on the protesters (“Escaping Oppenheimer’s Shadow” by Anthony Manousos, FJ Feb. online; Mar. print). Young people were desperate to get the young men out of the killing fields of Vietnam. We all had friends and family members who were there—most drafted—and in the end, we did get them home.

I knew pacifists who went to prison and heard of many who went to Canada, all for moral reasons. They should be the ones honored today. No one knows how many violent attacks there were on peace protesters in the early days when the war began, mainly on the young men who carried peace signs and burned their draft cards (I was at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill). This history should be known. People who refused to fight should be honored as the truest heroes. Thanks for a powerful article that brings these memories back.

Katherine van Wormer
Madison, Wis.

Corrections

In the March issue “Forum,” a letter from Mason in Marshall, N.C., stated that Clear Creek Meeting in Richmond, Ind., hosts an afternoon meeting for worship at 1:00 p.m. That worship is a program entirely run by Earlham College.

“Dear God, Help Me Here” by Sharlee DiMenichi (FJ Mar.) incorrectly listed Mickey Edgerton as worshiping virtually with First Friends Meeting in Indianapolis, Ind. She actually worships with First Friends in Richmond, Ind.

We apologize for the errors.

Forum letters should be sent with the writer’s name and address to forum@friendsjournal.org. Each letter is limited to 300 words and may be edited for length and clarity. Because of space constraints, we cannot publish every letter. Letters can also be left as comments on individual articles on Friendsjournal.org.

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Anderson—Mary Frances Anderson, 79, on June 3, 2023, at John Muir Health Medical Center in Walnut Creek, Calif. Mary was born on February 21, 1944, in Berkeley, Calif., where her mother, Anne Anderson (née Dowden) was studying nursing. Her father, Victor Charles Anderson, was involved in a research project in Southern California regarding underwater sound for military use during World War II.

Mary grew up in the San Diego, Calif. area. She married H. Lee Watson in 1963. Their son, Jeffrey Elam Watson, was born on April 10, 1966. Mary earned her doctorate in mathematics from New York University in New York City in 1970. She taught mathematics for two years at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pa., then for another two years at Wayne State University in Detroit, Mich., and for four years at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Mary returned to the United States and studied computer science at University of California, Berkeley. She held a series of computer programming jobs with the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at UC Berkeley, Bank of America, Hewlett Packard, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. In addition, she offered programming services as an independent contractor.

In 1973, Mary married Lim Mah Hui from Malaysia and moved to Malaysia with him. After returning to the San Francisco Bay Area she met George M. Bergman, who was with her when Michael Lim Yong Ping was born on October 11, 1977. In 1981, Mary and George married under the care of Berkeley Meeting. On August 8, 1982, she gave birth to twins, Clifford Isaac Anderson-Bergman and Rebecca Nadia Anderson-Bergman.

Mary attended Berkeley Meeting, becoming a member in early 1978. She transferred her membership to Strawberry Creek Meeting in Berkeley, and, in 2020, asked to have her membership transferred back to Berkeley Meeting. Her membership was renewed at Berkeley Meeting on March 14, 2021. Beginning in 2015, she also attended Lakeshore Avenue Baptist Church in Oakland, where she enjoyed singing in the choir.

Mary was an avid gardener, taking agriculture courses at UC Davis and elsewhere. She was a passionate singer. She volunteered for the Alternatives to Violence Project, a group that offers workshops designed to help participants find ways to resolve conflicts without coercion or violence.

Mary began to suffer falls in the early 2010s. She gradually developed other disabilities, and was diagnosed with corticobasal degeneration, a rare syndrome similar to Parkinson’s disease. In May 2023, a swallowing problem led to pneumonia.

Mary was predeceased by a brother, Victor Charles Anderson Jr.

She is survived by her husband, George Bergman; ex-husband, Lim Mah Hui; four children, Jeffrey Watson, Michael Lim Yong Ping Anderson, Rebecca Anderson-Bergman, and Clifford Anderson-Bergman; five grandchildren; and one sister, Judy Myers.

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Quaker author Peter Blood-Patterson was interviewed about his March 2024 article, We Are All Held in Love: Reflections on the Practice of Holding in the Light.

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Quaker author John Calvi was interviewed about his March 2024 article, Carrying Light to Need.

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Quaker interest in prayer and healing goes back to our earliest days, to George Fox, the founder of the Friends movement. An early manuscript called Book of Miracles cataloged some 150 cures he was reported to have performed in his lifetime, including healings from diseases and accidents. His Journal includes a gripping account of his bringing a traveling companion back to life after a fall from a horse broke their neck.

Our queasiness over healing is almost as old. The manuscript of Fox’s Book of Miracles was lost, probably suppressed by later Friends who were wary of its supernatural claims (we only know of it because a partial index was discovered by Henry Cadbury in the Friends Library in London in 1932). Most modern Friends prefer to trust the calm and rational waters of science and medicine.

Still, a tradition of healing has continued. Friends’ memoirs and journals are full of stories of Friends who seemed to be able to sense unanswered prayers and respond to spiritually threatening situations out of a kind of instinct. Many Friends work in healing professions: we treat bodies as doctors and nurses, treat minds as therapists, and treat souls in pastoral work or as hospice workers.

Even much of Friends’ activism and work in the world can be seen as a form of healing. For this issue of Friends Journal, we asked Friends to tell us about healing in their lives and communities.

Marcelle Martin starts us off with some of the stories of George Fox’s miracle-making. Much as she did in January’s article on Quaker dreams, she examines these early accounts as a way to understand how these almost-forgotten folkways and practices shaped Quaker understanding of how faith breaks through into the human realm. Many of us struggle to reconcile those times when healing doesn’t come and we watch as loved ones slip away. Early Friends understood this too, of course, and I was most struck by the account of how Fox reassured his stepdaughter that her child was ready to die. In a vision he knew the child had experienced “a glorious life.”

A well-known healer among Friends, John Calvi, shares his remarkable experiences of both prayer and healing. I appreciate his observation that prayer is a discipline that can be grown over time, and I’m humbled that even he has experienced dry spells.

The Colorado mountains were the setting in which Moon Beiferman-Haines first felt a powerful experience of God—a voice inside proclaiming “I am here.” That experience prompted a spiritual search that eventually brought her into a Quaker meetinghouse, where that reassuring presence returned. Further exploration brought her to healing groups, first at an FGC Gathering, and then, later, one begun in her meeting and over Zoom.

Peter Blood-Patterson explores what modern Friends mean when we promise to hold a situation or person “in the Light.” These prayers need not be private or personal but can involve the whole meeting. Peter asks, “How can we make our meetings into the kind of faith family where we trust each other enough to do this?” It’s a powerful question, one which I’ll be bringing back to my own meeting community in weeks ahead.

Our staff writer, Sharlee DiMenichi, interviews Friends working in hospice care. Perhaps Friends’ practice of silence and our experience of everyday holiness lends itself to this transitional time.

There is a lot to be said about prayer and healing. All of our articles are online at Friendsjournal.org, and all have active comment sections. Come share your stories of how prayer and healing have worked in your life.

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Healing Miracles among Early Friends

Many Quakers are skeptical of the possibility that prayer, faith, and healing touch can contribute significantly to physical and mental healings. In recent decades, an increasing number of respected medical doctors, including Bernie Siegel, Larry Dossey, Joan Borysenko, Andrew Weil, Jeffrey Rediger, and Lissa Rankin, have promoted both the research and case studies that show that the body, mind, and spirit work together to create health. Prayer, faith, authenticity, and spiritual community have all been identified as potent elements of health and healing. Many miraculous healings happened among the first Quakers, and I hope Friends today will  re-examine the history of healings in our tradition and invite the Spirit to work in us more fully to bring healing to ourselves and others.

Jesus was known for performing healing miracles, and when he sent his disciples out two by two to share the good news of the gospel, he commissioned them also to perform healings. Though their efforts were not always successful, the four gospels and the Acts of the Apostles recount numerous healing miracles attributed to apostles. Likewise, when Quakerism arose in seventeenth-century England, many early Friends testified that healings happened among them. They and others saw this as a sign that they were, indeed, a fresh manifestation of original Christianity.

William Dewsbury, like many of those who became the first Quakers, was a spiritual seeker from childhood. In York, he became connected to a group of fellow seekers that was one of the first communities to be convinced by the message of faith that had been brought to them by George Fox in 1651. Other members of this group joined Fox in taking the good news farther north, but Dewsbury wasn’t sure if he should join them. He had been disappointed by other zealous religious groups, and he asked himself, was God truly at work among these people? According to an account by Edward Smith, author of William Dewsbury c.1621–1688, Dewsbury prayed to God for clarity: “I cried mightily unto the Lord in secret, that He would signally manifest Himself at that time amongst us, and give witness to His power and presence with us.” Afterward Dewsbury witnessed some miraculous healings, and this provided him the assurance he had sought:

I can never forget the day of his great power and blessed appearance, when he first sent me to preach his everlasting Gospel. . . . And he confirmed the same by signs and wonders; and particularly by a lame woman who went on crutches. . . . Richard Farnsworth, in the name of the Lord, took her by the hand, and George Fox after, spoke to her in the power of God, and bid her stand up, and she did, and immediately walked straight, having no need of crutches any more.

This healing and others witnessed by Dewsbury were for him outward signs of God’s blessing on the Quaker message and ministry. They corresponded to the inner confirmation he had already received, and this provided a joy and courage that stayed with him even during subsequent long years of imprisonment.

William Dewsbury was not the only person to see the seal of God’s favor on the Quaker movement in the healings that happened. Elizabeth Hooton was one of the first to become a convinced Quaker, after George Fox joined in the religious gatherings she held in her home. This group soon called themselves “Children of the Light.” In a testimony he later wrote of Hooton, Fox said, “She had Meetings at her house where the Lord by his power wrought many Miracles to the Astonishing of the world and Confirming People of the Truth which she there Received about 1646.” One particular healing had the effect of convincing many skeptics. A woman who had suffered for 32 years from what seemed to be an evil spirit sought help from Fox. She was very disruptive in one Quaker gathering, and Fox felt inspired to hold a meeting at Hooton’s house. During the second meeting at the Hooton home with this woman, a transformation came over her; she became calm and sane. The Children of the Light kept her with them for two more weeks before sending her home, demonstrating that her cure was lasting. Many local skeptics were convinced.

Many miraculous healings happened among the first Quakers, and I hope Friends today will re-examine the history of healings in our tradition and invite the Spirit to work in us more fully to bring healing to ourselves and others.

Most of the healings and miracles associated with Quakers in the early years were connected with George Fox. When he spoke, he had an ability to bring listeners into contact with the Divine Power that was inspiring him. William Penn later wrote, in a testimonial published along with Fox’s Journal: “The most awful, living, reverent frame I ever felt or beheld, I must say, was his in prayer. And truly it was a testimony 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.” The Divine Power working though Fox sometimes caused healings. Many of these happened after Fox spoke to an injured or ailing person, touched them, prayed for them, or did some combination of these three things.

In 1653, a man brought his wife to Fox in hopes that she might be cured. It had been a long time since she had been able to eat or speak, and she was not able to sit without assistance. The husband had tied her behind him on his horse, to keep her from falling off. After she was brought inside, Fox spoke some words to her, as moved by God. Before she left, she was able to eat and speak and to climb onto the horse without help. On another occasion in a house of Baptists, Fox and his traveling companion found a group of people gathered around a sickbed. They invited Fox to talk to the dying woman, if he could say something consoling about the world to come. In his Journal, Fox recounted: “I was moved of the Lord God to speak to her, and the Lord raised her up that she was well, to the astonishment of the town and country.” Afterward the husband and wife both became Friends and opened their home for Quaker gatherings attended by hundreds of people.

Another healing occurred in Hawkshead, also in 1653, while Fox was traveling with Margaret Fell Jr. and teenaged William Caton. The three of them came to spend the night with a local Friend, and found a dirty 11-year-old boy in an advanced state of illness, being rocked in a cradle. His parents had taken their only son to see doctors in the large towns nearby, but the doctors said nothing could be done for him. Fox asked the servant girl to wash the boy clean.

“[T]hen I was moved of the Lord God to lay my hands upon him and speak to him,” Fox wrote in his Journal. Soon afterward, the boy was playing in the streets. When Fox passed through the town three years later, the boy’s mother urged him to stay and hold a meeting. She said everyone in town was convinced that her son’s healing was a miracle.

A later healing in 1677 comes from the Journal of John Banks and is mentioned in George Fox’s “Book of Miracles”; it involved Banks, a farmer and teacher who developed a pain and then paralysis in one arm and hand, making him unable even to pull clothes on nor off himself. The arm withered and the pain increased. The local physicians were not able to help him. Then he dreamed of a cure, which he documented in his journal:

[A]s I was asleep upon my bed, in the night time, I saw in a vision, that I was with dear George Fox; and I thought I said to him, “George, my faith is such, that if thou seest it thy way to lay thy hand upon my shoulder, my arm and hand shall be whole throughout.”

When he woke from the dream, Banks had a persistent feeling that the vision had been true and that he should go see Fox. Finally, he felt it was a test of his faith to travel to Swarthmoor Hall to ask Fox for this help. Banks made the journey, and after a meeting for worship, he pulled Fox aside and the two men took a walk together. Banks showed Fox his paralyzed, withered arm, and described his dream or vision. Fox stopped walking, looked at his friend, and lay a hand on Banks’s shoulder. “The Lord strengthen thee both within and without,” Fox said.

There was no immediate change in the arm. That evening, however, as Banks ate dinner at Thomas Lower’s house, without thinking about what he was doing, he picked up his silverware with the arm that had been paralyzed, something he had not been able to do for many months, “which struck me into a great admiration, and my heart was broke into true tenderness before the Lord; and the next day I went home, with my hand and arm restored to its former use and strength, without any pain.” When he next encountered Fox, he told him that the arm had mended. “Well, give God the glory,” Fox responded.

Illustration of Valentine Greatrakes, a seventeenth-century “touch doctor,” as shown in the 1948 edition of George Fox’s “Book of Miracles” (Cambridge Library Collection).

In his 1658 introduction to The Great Mystery, a book by George Fox, Edward Burrough gives an account of the beginning of Quakerism, writing that it was an extraordinary time: “[T]hings unutterable were known and made manifest; and the glory of the Father was revealed.” Burrough does not specify what these events included, because he says he would not be believed: “much more might be declared hereof, that which could not be believed if it were spoken, of the several and particular operations and manifestations of the everlasting spirit that was given us, and revealed in us.” In 1671, Fox extolled the charismatic healing powers of Quaker women: “I believe there is a thousand women that are beyond the wisdom of this world all: yea, and the power of God hath wrought miracles among them.” He may be referring to healings that happened in the women’s meetings, but he does not give specifics.

Reports of miracles also arose when Fox traveled in the North American colonies in 1672. One remarkable event, recorded in George Fox’s “Book of Miracles,” occurred that year in New Jersey. One of Fox’s traveling companions, John Jay, was thrown from a horse onto his head, breaking his neck. Witnesses, including Fox, thought Jay was dead. However, Fox knelt down beside him and lifted up Jay’s head by the hair. The neck turned loosely. Fox then put aside his riding stick and gloves, braced his feet against a tree, took Jay’s head, and with one hand under the chin and the other behind the head, lifted it with all his strength three times and then “brought it in.” Jay began to rattle, then breathe. The astonished witnesses carried Jay and set him beside a fire to get warm. Later they fed him and put him to bed. The next day John Jay was able to get back on a horse, and he rode 16 miles with his traveling companions to the next meeting.

Can Friends today learn to embody our faith in deeper ways, so that our presence, words, touch, and prayers can become increasingly powerful conduits for the divine healing that is always ready to manifest in this world?

Fox’s efforts to bring about physical healing were not always successful, nor was such healing always his intention when he prayed with or for someone who was ill. While staying with Margaret Fell Jr., who was now Margaret Rous after marrying Barbadian Friend John Rous in 1662, Fox sat with her sick child. The next day, at the request of Margaret, he visited the child again and felt satisfied that “the child was full of the power of the Lord and it rested upon it and rested in it.” The child died that night and appeared to Fox in a vision, with “a mighty substance of a glorious life.” Fox encouraged Margaret to be content that her child was well in the Lord.

In a 1654 letter from Francis Howgill to George Fox, Howgill reported that he and Edward Burrough were moved to visit a Friend’s house in the city, where they encountered a lame boy. After about two hours both Howgill and Burrough were feeling a burden associated with the boy’s condition, which they both interpreted as a call to pray for healing for him. Howgill prayed for the boy to be “made whole.” The boy stood up but was unable to walk.

The intercessory prayers of Fox, Howgill, Burrough, and other Quakers did not always result in physical healing. The critics of Quakerism mocked several cases of Quakers who prayed for healings that did not happen. However, the validity of the Quaker faith did not rest on the manifestation of miracles; these were, at best, signs of the activity of the Spirit; an encouragement to faith; and a gift that helped build and bind together the new community, as was the case of the miracles manifested at the beginning of Christianity. Perhaps it is both because miracles were not central to Quakerism and because unsuccessful attempts at healing subjected them to mockery that Quakers did not preserve the manuscript of George Fox’s “Book of Miracles,” in which Fox recorded about 150 miraculous healings to which he was a witness. Only the index for this book was preserved, which contained the first lines of the descriptions of each healing. In the twentieth century, Quaker scholar Henry J. Cadbury reconstructed much of the book, using accounts of healings in the journals and other writings of early Friends.

In our day, many people give up praying for healing for themselves or others after doing so has failed to bring about a desired effect. “Oh ye of little faith!” Jesus sometimes exclaimed when the efforts of his disciples failed to bring about a healing. At the same time, Jesus often told a person who was healed by his touch, prayer, or words of blessing, “Your faith has made you well” (or “healed you” or “made you whole.”) This suggests that receptivity to the work of the Spirit and belief in its power—in both the person who prays and the one who seeks healing—may play a role in the mysterious process by which seemingly miraculous physical, mental, and spiritual healings sometimes happen. More miracles may be associated with George Fox than with other early Quakers because of the depth of his faith, which was more than just a mental assent to radical spiritual beliefs. As William Penn testified, Fox embodied his faith. His relationship with the Eternal and his trust in the power of God were real and deep, forged through much struggle and hardship as well as through long faithfulness to divine leadings.

Can Friends today learn to embody our faith in deeper ways, so that our presence, words, touch, and prayers can become increasingly powerful conduits for the divine healing that is always ready to manifest in this world?

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What Healing Taught Me about Prayer

At 16, I came to my first Quaker meeting and fell in love with the deep, extended quiet in which only a few spoke in that long hour. I felt deeply at home at last.

I had been informally raised Catholic, by which I mean I did only one ritual and that was called “first communion.” It was supposed to be done in first grade at six years old. I was seven, and the two Catholic moms teaching that beginner class had looks of horror when they heard that I knew no prayers. Three prayers in particular were assumed to be known at this age. Here I was, seven years old and already judged as a lost child in a dysfunctional family of heathens.

I struggled with the idea of prayer being the beseeching of this guy God, who seemed to be the biggest landlord ever, owned everything, and was such a grouch that anything could dangerously set him off, and then—as they say—God help you!

I began to understand that for me this approach felt like whining and laying down as a victim. Oh, Big Daddy God, please, I don’t know anything and have no power. You are all powerful; please let my team win this football game! This may well be the most common understanding of prayer: begging for outcomes and supposing the most sincerely expressed need wins.

Over time, the better position seemed to me to ask, what are you showing me, and what is it you’d like me to learn? I do this speaking generally to the universe, as the word and idea of “God” seems to be copyrighted by clergy whose ideas of congregational dependency and full employment taint every word. That’s the sort of posture I came to when I thought of prayers and God in general. There certainly is a power: something large and beyond human conception. It’s not the big, old White guy on the cloud; it’s something else: something that doesn’t want passive obedience but rather a worker ready to roll up sleeves. This view began to sort itself out in me while I was a young Montessori teacher of small children.

Later, as my life descended into hands-on work in the rape crisis and the AIDS wars, I felt myself get common with God on a verbal level. Shaking my fists at the sky, I yelled, “What the hell is going on here? Why are these women and children suffering so? You’re going to kill all these men? And for what? So I can be in the School of Life learning compassion? Are you kidding me? Who the hell is scheduling up there? Graduate students?”

And by and by—if one studies hard—there comes a set of disciplines that help with growth and restoration from the battlefield of compassionate work. What do I know about rest, concentration, listening, mercy, and all my own obstacles?

An important discipline is learning the essence of a thing. Discover what the essence of good touch is, and then fashion a massage for trauma. A study of the essence of prayer is also important. What is prayer, and how is it done without surrendering all our gifts and knowledge to fear and whining? What is prayer at its essence?

For me, there was something about learning to lean into a gut feeling about how to proceed: a kind of surrender but also a strong sense of rightness. The preparation for reaching this place was to lay down the noise of the world and the noise of my own mind rattling on about mere stuff. Humility comes first, like wiping your feet at the door and then coming in.

I learned to be aware of humorous signs along the way. Spiritual post-graduate work includes keeping a necessary sense of humor and noticing when the universe is being a trickster coyote with you. Is this an obstacle, or is it just a challenge that I should first laugh at and then move gracefully forward or sideways?

There certainly is a power: something large and beyond human conception. It’s not the big, old White guy on the cloud; it’s something else: something that didn’t want passive obedience but rather a worker ready to roll up sleeves. 

Years ago, an elder mentor of mine strongly suggested that I have several spirits guiding me and that I must invite them to work together within me and listen very carefully with each sense so as to be well-guided. (This is not a great discipline for those of us with learning disabilities whose focus is squirrely and on the move.) It’s been a struggle for me to always be prepared: the work you do to get ready before beginning to work. As a healer, I bring a certain reverential tone to each task, before and after inviting help from all my spiritual tutors who gave me great guidance in fieldwork for four decades.

Another part of prayer for me became the spiritual practice of gratitude: I am so happy for this work and this gift. Gratitude is a shortcut to mercy. If you can feel grateful that one thing is working well in your life, that eases the way to feel merciful with yourself and others. I think a good prayer always starts with gratitude then moves on to asking to learn.

Listening and observing carefully allows me to discern what is my work and what isn’t. Don’t expect to do all the good works that one can see need doing. Choosing well serves everyone better, including oneself.

Another piece of this complexity that I’m trying to explain is this: I come to the end of a work and ask to be washed of all the despair I’ve seen. Why not? You showed up and did your best; after saying thank you, the least that you can ask for is a shower of Light.

My sense of prayer includes an openness to learning whatever is being shown to me: this is the polite way of my past yelling, “What the hell is going on here?!”

I’ve been asked to pray for many people. Here’s what that experience has grown into and become for me. I gather some deep quiet and stillness. Then, with all my tenderness, I bring into my awareness and consciousness a sense of the person’s essence, feel it deeply, and share my essence of calm and reverence, always listening for any messages. It’s a joining of beings, sensing another’s experience and bringing a gift of peace. It is carrying Light to need, not joining in suffering (which honors no one).

The simple work of spiritual care is easily spoken, but the concentration and maintenance of an open posture is exhausting, especially while living in a noisy, popular culture of commerce rather than community. This discipline is to be grown over time.

Like sitting in meeting for worship, we can strengthen the muscles that let us be still and not hear ourselves. One’s capacity to listen without thinking comes to that quiet place of wonder and awe. That’s when prayer is most organic: it’s lots of power that only needs witness, and the meaning becomes clearer later.

Photo by xy

I became very ill a while back, and all my gifts and all my guidance seemed to disappear. It got very quiet and tiny—too small to use. A new experience, compassion, caused an ache in my chest. I was to stop all work and focus on my own wellness. Now, many months down the road, there is some recovery of messages and slightly warm hands, but clearly I’m in a new place of learning. The tone of my life remains while the motions and intentions have shifted.

To be without enough energy to summon angels, to bring someone to heart and mind until you can feel them, and then to share a gift of peace and care to help someone toward healing— to be without these things and have them gone was shocking. For me, this meant no prayer. It also meant no moments of grace for me to be washed.

I wasn’t going to revert to my old victim posture of “Big Daddy God knows all, and I am helpless; please save me.” Once one sees the limits of that practice, stepping outside the confines looks good, if scary. Of course, panic and helplessness may be logical first responses; we’ve all had these feelings, but they’re just stepping stones, not homesteads.

Is it possible for me to say all this without being misunderstood? Probably not. We are aspects of the Divine, the fingers and breath of the Divine. Teaching this in divinity programs took some explaining. Since we are aspects of the Divine, our main task is maintaining connection to it. How do we stay on the spiritually conscious plane of awareness even in the noise of day-to-day life?

The repeating of words and phrases have been useful to many over many generations and cultures: making prayer simple, accessible, and portable. This is especially so if experienced somatically; Quakers are known to feel changes in their bodies as reverence takes hold and there is a surrender toward Light, away from common day-to-day thought. This is what happens to us in meeting for worship, right? As long as we’re open to it.

Conversations with the Divine tend to be of two flavors: thanks and help. If prayers ever rise above “oh poor me,” these can inform if there is patience and listening on our part. Mostly I experience the release of tension, conflict, or fear within myself. I open to what might be learned and what mercy can be had. What overview am I capable of that will reduce the pain and confusion that controls so much of the world and each of our perceptions?

Like sitting in meeting for worship, we can strengthen the muscles that let us be still and not hear ourselves. One’s capacity to listen without thinking comes to that quiet place of wonder and awe. That’s when prayer is most organic: it’s lots of power that only needs witness.

Healing is more mysterious than prayer. It’s bigger and occurs in dimensions that we cannot be sure of. Healing is an old word that originally meant “bringing all the pieces back together again.” My experience of healing is limited to helping people with trauma: the worst things that happen to people and change their feelings for the worse about being in the world. In the case of trauma, all the pieces do not come back together. One heals enough so that pain and confusion from trauma are less, maybe much less.

This kind of work meant learning at all levels and went on for 40 years. The learning was monstrous: huge and constant. Are you a disciplined person? I spent the first third of my life laying down restrictions and other people’s orders of how to be in the world. Early violence can turn a child into a stubborn warrior. Then comes grown-up time in which to choose which disciplines are necessary.

There is the discipline of rest; there is the discipline of nutrition and stimulants. There is the constant watching to see if something or someone is about to present themselves, and if so, is it my work to engage: not my choice, but is it my work? Sometimes when someone approached, I would cast out sensors to feel what the nature of the hurt might be. In my understanding, my angels or spiritual tutors were always ready to message me. Is this mine? What is the nature of the wounding? If I could feel correctly where the pain was before they spoke, then I knew it was my work to release what hurt was possible at the moment. This is a constant state of mind.

There is the dynamic that one’s own healing will inform the work we do with others. And the healing work one does in the world also informs us about our own healing. This should be pondered, not prodded or pushed, but open to wonder.

There was another more mysterious and common event. I would walk into a room to teach 25 to 70 people. As I surveyed the crowd, certain faces would appear to me to be dear ones I’ve never met. It was not unusual to feel a giant, tender weeping at finding this long lost stranger so that I could help. Being prepared meant big work got done. Not being alert for any reason meant missing the mark and someone’s relief.

Some people would come forward for hands-on work. They would tell the most horrible story of malice. All the while, I would be smiling and nodding, knowing that much of it was about to be stripped away in a moment of grace. More than that I cannot explain: it just happened over and over. As day jobs go, I had to be strong, awake, and able to escape or pace myself in order to rest deeply all the time. It meant learning compassion for the rapist and the murderer. It meant making as beautiful a life as possible so that I could wade into the worst humans had to offer.

Prayer and healing are very individual and personal experiences. My words may not have meaning for you. Or maybe there’s a hint of something akin to my experience, but all the details are different. Spiritual life means laying down all the assumptions, especially what you’ve been told by “experts.” And this is why Quaker silent meeting for worship is a grand garden not to be entered into unless one wants to travel far from wherever you are.

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