FALL 2002
ear Friends,
I am enjoying getting to know more of you in the quarter. Since I was appointed clerk I have worshipped with Friends at five monthly meetings. I look forward to visiting all the meetings—and more than once—to get to know you and learn of the strengths and beauties of each meeting community.
Having recently returned from the FGC annual Gathering of Friends, where I took a workshop led by Lloyd Lee Wilson, I have been reflecting on and developing a number of things I learned or was reminded of there. I figure that if I needed to be reminded of some of these things, you might also, so I would like to humbly share with you my thoughts of late. As I did in the previous newsletter, I write in my spiritual language and invite you to read in yours.
In his workshop, Lloyd Lee said that Friends should not think of meeting for worship as that time when we get spiritually charged up for the rest of the week. Rather, he said, we should get charged up throughout the week so that we bring a rich silence to our First Day worship. I knew this on a gut level, but I was surprised to realize I had retained an image from my previous tradition, where one does, in a sense, receive in the bread and wine of communion spiritual food, or grace, for the week. Even though this image did not fit my experience as a Friend, I had continued to occasionally refer to corporate worship as a time to get nourishment for the week, as though meeting for worship were some sort of holy filling station, or God lived in the meetinghouse. It was sloppy language and lazy thinking. I determined to think things through and find a better way of looking at our worship together.
I believe it is unreasonable for us to expect much to happen during the hour of worship on First Day if we have not been attentive to the movements of grace in and around us throughout the previous week. The silence of the worship hour cannot help but be filled with the clutter of thoughts, images, notions, memories, and desires, if we have not held them in the purging and healing light of God’s grace each day of the week. During the worship hour, a cluttered mind may even find itself composing shopping lists, reviewing the weather report, or revisiting the morning newspaper! Early Friends called this clutter “the flesh.” I am not immune, and I know even they were not immune to succumbing to it. Quaker spirituality relies heavily on negation: giving up images and rituals, intellectual notions, personal will, the temptation to yield to our emotions and appetites, and more! This negation does not imply that any of these things are bad in themselves. Rather, we realize how very easy it is to substitute any or all of these for God. Yes, we even offer to God our faithful and loving service in the world. We seek to avoid worshiping anything, no matter how good, which is not God. If we have not done our homework during the week, our task during corporate worship is too much for us and worship can be lifeless.
Modern life is busy and seems to get busier every year. Our busy-ness may lead us to see the worship hour as our quiet time for the week, the one time when we are not responsible for making money, taking care of family, or doing other important things. Just keeping our schedules clear enough to get to the meetinghouse on a somewhat regular basis may seem in itself a sufficient accomplishment. However, even the busiest of us can prepare for worship, for living in the life and power does not necessarily require outer silence and inactivity, but attentiveness, intention, inner stillness, and surrender. It requires self-emptying, yielding, being low. This is not the lowness of humiliation, cowardice, or defeat, but the lowness which brings power and life. The clutter of “the flesh” smothers the seed within us, stifling its growth. We cannot remove all the clutter ourselves, but God works cooperatively with us, if we are willing, and we are empowered to reach and keep to the root. How I wish I were faithful in this.
The early Friend Isaac Penington put it so much better than I can: “Give over thine own willing; give over thine own running; give over thine own desiring to know, or to be any thing, and sink down to the seed which God sows in the heart; and let that grow in thee, and be in thee, and act in thee, and thou shalt find . . . that the Lord knows that, and loves and owns that, and will lead it to the inheritance of life. . . And as thou takest up the cross to thyself, and sufferest that to overspread and become a yoke over thee, thou shalt become renewed, and enjoy life, and everlasting inheritance in that.” In another place Penington says that when we have so yielded and, in worship, we wait in humble silence, “the fountain of the great deep is unsealed, and the everlasting springs surely give up the pure and living water.”
Friends, I am not criticizing our worship within the quarter. I do, however, invite us to consider the language and images we use to describe our meetings for worship. And I invite us all to imagine for a moment what our corporate worship might be like if each of us consistently brought to the worship hour the fruit of a week lived in that life and power which is our source and strength: a rich silence, an overflowing emptiness, a pregnant humility, a holy joy, a continuous regeneration.
Blessings,
MichaelRETURN TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
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Wednesday, February 18, 2004 at 08:19 AM
