Message given as New England Yearly Meeting Secretary at NEYM Annual Sessions, August 2, 2025
I want to speak about convincement, about becoming implicated in each other’s faithfulness, and about our Testimony. I want to speak about living in the Life and Power. Some of what I share may be difficult to hear, but these are difficult times. I trust with all my heart that we are eternally held, and pray that our Guide will help us hear whatever we need to hear.
Almost 20 years ago now, I spent five years of my life engaged in a ministry of humanitarian aid, advocacy, and peace activism in support of people internally displaced or made refugees as a result of the United States’ invasion of Iraq in 2003, its precursors, and its devastating aftermath.
In those years, I encountered daily, with visceral intensity, the evidence of what the weapons of war do to human families, to the human body, to human hearts and souls. Working alongside a group of Iraqi, Palestinian, and American activists, we sought to partner with efforts to find vitally needed support for people in need of significant and often lifesaving medical care.
When not in the Middle East and West Asia, through the support of several US-based organizations, I had the opportunity to travel across the United States, telling stories, with permission, that some of the people I had worked with had trusted me to share. They were stories of profound suffering, abandonment, shattered hopes, broken lives. Stories that would defy comprehension, if they weren’t true.
They remain with me still, etched in memory. A man my age paralyzed by a fall from his roof caused by the concussive impact of bombs falling on his neighborhood. A young woman learning to live with unremovable shrapnel in her body, the only survivor of a missile’s destruction of her whole house and family, including her baby daughter. A 6-year-old boy burned from head to toe by an explosion caused by a U.S. Marine raid on the camp where he and his family had taken shelter from sectarian violence. A woman’s face burned by acid, part of attacks by sectarian militias who had been armed and empowered by the U.S. occupation forces. Their trust in me, and their yearning for their stories to be shared with a world seemingly or willfully oblivious to the hell they were living, spurred me on.
In those days, I was mostly fueled by anger. It drove me. I remember how it felt to bear witness, face to face, to the stories and the experiences like these I have just shared. The weight of that burden. Maybe some of you have felt a burden like that, in your own context. Perhaps some of you are feeling that kind of burden here and now.
Sometimes, the only relief that I could feel was when I was speaking to a group of people in the United States, and I realized that the pain that I had shared had brought tears. Knowing that I had disturbed people’s hearts, that they had felt in some small way the pain of those whose stories I carried, that I had made them hurt. Anger is an insufficient word for how I lived my days. So is guilt. So is obsession.
In 2008, I was in Syria, in a neighborhood that was later reduced to rubble in the Syrian civil war to come.
I’ll always remember the words. “He wants to meet you.” For weeks, we had been hearing stories about a man who had suffered profoundly, unspeakably. People said we should speak with him, but his location was a secret, out of fear of retribution given what he had been through; Syria was an uneasy refuge for those fleeing violence and chaos in Iraq in those days.
But now we had been approached with an invitation. To meet with this man, to drink tea, and to hear his story. One of the man’s companions led us to the place, through the winding streets of the Old City of Damascus.
The man was seated and waiting for us. After the tea was poured, he began to tell his story.
He was an Iraqi Christian, he said, part of one of the oldest Christian communities in the world. His ancestors had lived in Iraq for centuries, largely peacefully with their neighbors of all faiths.
But when the war came, and the chaos followed it, ethnic and religious minorities began to be increasingly targeted by rival sectarian militias, groups intent on creating polarization, mutual distrust and division, and fear, leading to ethnic cleansing.
He told me how a gang of men with their faces covered with black masks dragged him from his bed into the street. They took him to the basement of a now-empty house somewhere he didn’t recognize. And there, in that cellar, they tortured him. Not for any action he had taken, but simply because of his religious identity, and to serve as a warning to others. And then, in sacrilegious mockery of his most deeply held faith, they ended that night of horror by hanging him on the basement wall. They crucified him. And they left him to die.
With whatever partial consciousness he had remaining, he prayed. He prayed that God would free him from this suffering, even if it meant helping the end come soon so that he wouldn’t have to endure the pain and humiliation any longer. He prayed that Jesus would save him from the evil that had been unleashed among his neighbors and in his country, that Jesus would save his country.
It was then, he said, that the miracle happened. He said that he saw an image of Christ, bearing the same wounds he bore, coming toward him amidst the shadows and desperation. But, he said—and this he said was important—this Presence didn’t take away his suffering. The One he experienced as Christ didn’t take him down from where his broken body was hanging.
Instead, as he described his experience, the Presence of the Living Christ joined him in his darkness and desperation, climbing up to accompany him where he was hanging on the wall to share with him completely in his suffering and misery and grief and yearning for justice. And in that moment—though time seemed to fade away—he told me that he felt an all-embracing sense of peace, an overflowing of a profound joy. And then, everything went dark.
When he awoke, he realized that he had been thrown in a vast garbage heap, left for dead. And somehow, through step by grace-filled step, he was given the strength to escape the neighborhood, the city, the country. With help from Muslim friends, he crossed the border into Syria, was found again by caring people there, and offered this place to live, and to heal.
As he finished his story, my hands were shaking—with rage, despair, and powerlessness. It was as if all the burdens that I had been carrying in those years, all of the horror and the anguish of the evil of which we are capable as humans broke like a dam in my head and heart. I was unable to speak, maybe even to think. For a long time, I couldn’t lift my head to reach his eyes.
And then he spoke again: “Wait, my friend. This is why I wanted to meet you. This is what I wanted to tell you, this is what I believe you need to know, and what I want you to share—Did you hear that He came? And do you see that I am Alive?” His eyes, I now saw, were shining. And his face was radiant with light and joy.
In that moment, I suddenly understood that he had called me there not for him, but for me, and all whose hearts might be opened by his testimony. The story he had called me there to hear was not—at its heart—the story of an encounter with evil, but of an encounter with the power of being met by the peace that the world cannot give, and brought home into the transforming power of God. It was a story of Life triumphing over death, a narrative outpost in enemy-occupied territory, a breaking in of divine Love restoring human dignity and personhood in a parched wasteland of despair. And this was the story to which he had called me to bear witness—through sharing this experience in his life, and, if I chose it, in my own living as well.
Friends speak about moments of conviction in our spiritual lives, when we come to see the condition of our hearts and souls with a clarity and starkness that offers an almost irresistible invitation—even a crying need—to change and grow. This encounter was such a moment for me.
I came to see that, in my quest for justice, and even in my yearning and advocacy and organizing for peace, I had so often been bearing witness not to the Life and Power, but to the power of anguish, tragedy, terror, and evil. I had been preaching what could be called a “gospel” of despair. There was no “good news,” only more anger, more struggle, more relentless fighting to assuage my conscience and keep the nightmares at bay. And in this way of living, there was no invitation to another kind of Life. I was sunk down in the ocean of darkness and death; the ocean of Light and Love seemed like a fantasy.
I realized then, with a shudder that swept my whole body, that I was in the tendering presence of a human being who had come to live in the Life and Power. And in this encounter, the cords that bound about my heart began to loosen. The burden I had been carrying, and the way I believed I had to carry it—with anger, desperation, and the need to control, to fix and save—began to change. And in the breaking of my heart, a living stream of joy began to flow—slowly at first, then growing, as I attended to it, to be of service in ministry. It had been there all the time, waiting. And in the many years since, while I have often been distracted, denied it, dishonored it, or suppressed it, I know that it has never stopped flowing.
“Living in the Life and Power.” George Fox, one of the founders of the Religious Society of Friends, used these words to describe his experience of the inward reshaping of his heart that made him unable to engage with outward weapons in the warfare and social turmoil so rampant in the bloody times in which he lived, and in which the Quaker movement was born.
Reflecting on a meeting with recruiters for one of the armies who claimed that they were fighting for justice, liberation, and the Kingdom of God, who had seen his gifts of leadership and were seeking to give him a military commission to command soldiers in battle, he wrote in his journal,
“I told them that I lived in the virtue of that Life and Power that takes away the occasion of all wars and strife … I told them that I had come into the covenant of peace, which was before all wars and strivings were.
This testimony to a direct experience of the Spirit at work in a life, and in the lives of those around that person, has been at the heart of what Friends have called “testimony”—the ways in which the liberation and repatterning of our hearts, and the actions arising and patterned by that freedom and joy, bear witness to the Truth, as Friends have used that word, to describe not a set of principles or list of rules or a catchy acronym, but a relationship—that is, a relationship and journey with the Spirit, present and active, at work in our world, within, among, and through all whose hearts are willing.
We can help remind each other, when we inevitably forget or get distracted or confused or frustrated. Our meetings’ rhythms of common life are intended for that purpose. In our own Faith & Practice, that trusted handbook on this pilgrimage together, the query for the twelfth month that is read in many of our local meetings for worship, including my own in Vermont, reads:
“Do you live in the virtue of that Life and Power that takes away the occasion of all wars? …when discouraged, do you remember that Jesus said, “Peace is my parting gift to you, my own peace, such as the world cannot give. Set your troubled hearts at rest, and banish your fears.” – John 14:27 (from F&P 1985, pg. 147)
Queries such as this are designed to help us reflect as a worshipping community on what is most essential in our living tradition, and how it shapes our living. Because this is the essential part: Friends have found that this seeking, this abiding, this growing and testing and acting in the Spirit, is a pilgrimage on which we need accompaniment. Some of us are given frequent or overwhelming experiences of this spiritual reality, others only glimpses. For some of us, our experience has yet to reflect the words we hear about worship, about leading, about living in relationship with this tender, unshakeable, and infinite Love Who seeks us. And that is why we need each other. As my friend in Syria was for me in that moment of conviction, we are called to present to one another, to help unbind each other’s hearts.
I have spoken about joy, and I want to take care not to be understood to glorify suffering or urge passivity, or to suggest that mere “happiness” is an antidote or a thin bandage that we should cultivate to cover over the very present manifestations of humans’ capacity for evil—in these times, or in any. These platitudes are the story our society is selling all around us. I am speaking about something different when I speak about this kind of joy.
New England Friend and minister Elise Boulding gives words to this difference with clarity and power:
For the real difference between happiness and joy is that one is grounded in this world, the other in eternity. Happiness cannot encompass suffering and evil. Joy can. Happiness depends on the present. Joy leaps into the future and triumphantly creates a new present out of it. It is a fruit of the spirit, a gift of God—no one can own it … Joy is the ultimate liberation of the human spirit. It enables the human being to travel to the very gates of heaven and to the depths of hell, and never cease rejoicing.
These are times of terror, of scattering, of collapse, when evil masquerades as truth, and despair is crouching at the threshold. When corruption seems ascendant, and mercy is outlawed by human authorities. Yet they are also times of healing, of remembering, of new vision, of weaving and reweaving the threads of covenant community in ways more resilient, more authentic, more willing to invite and share our testimony to the Life and Power in which we have covenanted to travel on this adventure of faith.
The Religious Society of Friends, our local meetings, were never meant to be places for the welcoming, respectful practice of hyper-individualism. The discovery and nurture of these fellowships, centered in worship, was always intended to help Friends gather and be gathered by the Spirit into local covenant communities—anchored and shaped in worship, nourished in fellowship and mutual care, formed in exploration of our living tradition, and sent forth by the overflowing of Love in our hearts into service and love of neighbor in the whole of our lives. And all of this, all these fruits of this journey together, however imperfect, are our Testimony.
But there is one thing needful. We must not allow ourselves to fall into despair of the living water, even in this parched wilderness. It is the witness of countless generations, who like us suffered and struggled and mourned and rejoiced and lived and died in faith, that the Life and Power we seek is closer than breath to us, always seeking new channels through which Love might continue to come into the world.
There is a fragment of a poem, a gift from Denise Levertov that has become a prayer to me—and a vow—one that speaks to me in the deserts of my soul; I hope it might speak to us:
Don’t say that there is no water
to solace the dryness at our hearts
It is still there and always there
with its quiet song and strange power to spring in us
up and out through the rock.
