Message for Durham Friends Meeting based on Psalm 133, September 8, 2024

Psalm 133

How very good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity!

It is like the precious oil on the head,

running down upon the beard,

on the beard of Aaron,

running down over the collar of his robes.

It is like the dew of Hermon,

which fall on the mountains of Zion.

For there the Lord ordained his blessing, life forevermore.

       —The New Oxford Annotated Bible Fifth Edition, NRSV

            Good morning!  Hallelujah!  I am so grateful to be here with you this morning, and so surprised.  I am surprised that Spirit asked that I bring a message to you because public vocal testimony is not my strongest gift.  As Friend Sue Reilly often says, the conversation with the Divine often includes the incredulous question “You want me to do what?!” So, I am here before you in faithfulness – trusting that all will be well.[1]  Please extend both patience and grace to me as I practice being faithful to this leading to be among you.  What I believe I am asked to do today is to help us celebrate the joy, the labor, and the messiness of Quaker unity which like all great symphonies has plenty of dissonance. Today I hold out to you that we need to celebrate that dissonance – that messiness, that uncomfortable feeling – as part of the in-breaking of the Holy Spirit in our time.  We need to figure out how to do this without becoming so focused on the dissonance, or the messenger, that we forget to take in as much of the entire opus as possible. We also need to allow the dissonances and the silences in order to appreciate and fully enter the joy of the musical experience.

              I rediscovered Psalm 133, the Psalm we read this morning, after a concordance search to see what the Scriptures had to say about unity.  I was asked to help present a program on the “Spiritual Literacy: Reading the Sacred in Everyday Life” and my assigned theme was unity. Honestly, the New Testament verses weren’t very helpful to me that day. They focused on unity as a way to protect and build a new community in the midst of first century Christian persecution. The authors of the text we were using as the base of this program, Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat,[2] would probably would have found the New Testament readings acceptable because they defined unity as “living in harmony with other people.”[3] They continued their description of unity saying:

“It means working for a common cause with those around the globe who know that when one person gains, all gain, and when one fails, all fail. We are crafting unity when we build communities.” They continue:

“The spiritual practice of hospitality helps us learn to respect differences and celebrate diversity in Creation. Unity is about affirming commonalities.  This can be as simple as acknowledging how you are like another person. It can lead to actions demonstrating your solidarity with others. Without unity, there is little hope for compassion, justice, or peace.“[4]

I could agree – all of that is true, but for me this definition wasn’t complete enough.  I had much more that I wanted to express about the process of getting to unity.  As a Quaker, I have found that unity goes far beyond the Brussats’ description. Their description left out the messiness, and sometimes hurtfulness, in getting to unity.  It seemed to pass too quickly over the acknowledgment of and celebration of differences as well as commonalities, and it left out the mysticism of personal unity with the Holy Spirit. That moment when one’s head, heart and gut align, and one just knows that their will is aligned with the will of the Divine.  That moment when one can stop struggling and striving, at least for a short time.   I delighted in this Old Testament image of messy oil and damp dew. In its poetry, the psalm seemed to capture both the messiness of unity and the mystical union that was beyond caring about any possible mess. This image of unity, with all its messiness, painted exactly the vision of what I wanted to express about Quaker unity to this non-Quaker group. As I became aware of the Holy Spirit guiding my search of the Scriptures for an adept Biblical metaphor, I experienced a tiny bit of the Everyday Sacred.

            When this group and I eventually read Psalm 133 together, and I described how chaotic unity could look in my Quaker world, I wondered if I was making any sense to these non-Quaker folks.  I spoke of Quakers protesting and getting arrested for any number of causes while other Quakers sit and hold them in waiting, expectant worship or stand in silence to film and witness their protest.  I spoke of those Quakers raising funds for the bail and defense of those arrested.  I spoke of the sacrifice of time, comfort and money on each person’s part. I spoke of Bolivian Quakers creating water filters in their country.  I spoke of worldwide gatherings of Quakers and different worship practices with some worshipping by singing and shouting praises to God and Jesus while others sit in silent, expectant worship listening for the still small voice within and some who do both. I spoke of those using very different language to speak of the Divine. Those that use the words God, Christ Jesus and Holy Spirit and those that prefer to speak of the Light and the Light within.  I spoke of the energy needed to lovingly listen through another’s language – a process that can be painful and rewarding at the same time.  I spoke of the longing to hear one’s own language spoken by another.  I spoke of intervisitation both regionally and internationally with Friends going, and being received, in a Spirit of Love and Friendship. I spoke of some of these travelers bearing needed medical or other supplies or a message that needs to be heard.  I spoke of those carrying a message hearing another message in response. I spoke of other Quakers sponsoring refugees from war torn, poverty ridden, or intolerant places to come to other safer places for a better chance at reaching their divine potential; I spoke of the fear and needs of those coming and those receiving them.  I spoke of Quaker Women from Kenya and the United States working together to provide something as simple as reusable sanitary pads, and the means to make more, so that poor Kenyan women could continue to go to school or work regularly and reach their potential in the place that they live.  I spoke of those teaching at the Friends Schools in Portland, ME, Providence, RI and in the West Bank City of Ramallah.  I spoke of painful arguing among ourselves over how all of us will be welcomed to our Quaker table.  I spoke of some putting their bodies in harm’s way while others stayed home and maintain a base of operation as Margaret Fell did at Swarthmore Hall centuries ago.  I spoke of those that gave of their capital so that other could answer these calls to witness to the Love of the Spirit in the World. We also spoke of the individual unity with the Divine that is possible. 

            I paused and asked the group if what I was describing made any sense to them. What I didn’t know was that I was speaking with some weighty and skilled musicians.   To show their understanding, one of them gave me back the beautiful metaphor of dissonance in a symphony with which I opened this message.[5]   The rest of the group joined in the development of that metaphor.  Hallelujah, my shoulders dropped three inches, and I sighed a breath of relief as I watched this group run with this discussion of how chaotic unity could look and how messy and fulfilling it could simultaneously be.  They described their understanding that Unity was not about sameness and uniformity, but an active Spirit working to make the “City of the Divine”[6] a reality for all in this moment right now.  They spoke of how hard one musical piece might be to perform while another is easy. They spoke of a unity not just about building community and restoring “streets to dwell live in”[7] by working toward a common goal, but a unity of our will transformed to match that of the Divine in its many manifestations both individually and collectively.

            Soon after this Spiritually-covered experience with these non-Quaker friends, I took a class on Quaker Beliefs at Earlham School of Religion with Stephen Angell.  Kenyan Quaker Paster Noah Kellum was also taking that class.  In the class he summarized well this symphony of messy Quaker unity when he shared:

The concept of unity in diversity is a cornerstone of Quaker belief and practice. Despite the diverse interpretations and practices that have emerged over the centuries, Quakers maintain a sense of unity rooted in shared values and spiritual experiences. This unity is not about uniformity in thought or action but a deeper spiritual connection and mutual respect that transcends differences. – Noah Kellum, May 2024

I would modify Noah’s summary only slightly to say “a sense of unity rooted in shared values and in both shared and diverse spiritual experiences.”

            More recently, at our Yearly Meeting Sessions, Friend LVM Shelton expanded the metaphor of the symphony for me when she noted that the silences in the piece are often as important as the dissonance.  She noted how the silent rest can mark endings, new beginnings, and changes in the direction of the movement, changes in the direction of our lives.[8]  

            I hope today that sharing this story of my still evolving, metaphor for Unity brings you both joy and hope for the work before us as 21st century post-modern Quakers. I hope we continue to be alive to and listen for new in-breaking of the Spirit of Love, Light, Toil and maybe even a little Chaos and Pain   We may hear that still small voice anywhere – in the melody, the harmonies, the dissonance, or the silent rests.  I pray that we might recognize and greet this Spirit both among us and among those that would be co-creators with us. I pray that the oil we receive is warm and free flowing and acknowledge that often I fail to perceive my oil this way.  Sometimes it feels cold and sticky.  I seek to feel my oil as warm and free flowing every day: however, I was recently reminded by Tammy Forner, who is here with me today as Elder, that “cold, sticky oil also serves a purpose,” one being a base for healing salves.  

             Now, I invite you to close your eyes and feel your oil and dew in this moment and know your condition whatever it may be.  Is it blessed warm oil pouring over your head and dripping down your neck and over your collar?   Is it encounter in a blessed, silent pause or in a cacophony of sound?  Maybe today it feels more like a cold, sludge that you are going to need help removing. Is it getting in your eyes and dripping from your nose making your way forward seem unclear possibly filling your heart with fear? Or maybe your oil feels like gentle, anointing massage oil, working its way into your pores, relaxing and energizing at the same time.  Preparing and opening you with love for whatever comes next in your call to live a life aligned with the Holy Spirit.  Maybe it’s like a good hand lotion, soaking in and moisturizing your soul – hardly noticed once applied.[9]  Is it so unnoticed that you forget to return to the Source and apply more before your soul has begun to dry out and long for more moisture?

            And speaking of moisture, what about that dew that gives needed moisture to plants?  While sometimes dew is a blessed relief from relenting heat and drought, at other times it makes your feet wet and cold and has dirt and grass clippings sticking to your shoes.  That dew can make it impossible to sit down in the grass or on a lawn chair without soiling your britches.  Don’t we sometimes grumble over the moisture and soiled britches and forget to be grateful for them both?   

            So what does unity or being in the process of getting to unity feel like for you in this moment?  Does it feel like a refreshing blessing or costly, dirty struggle?  Is it oily or dewy?  Does it raise hot fear in you that needs the moist dew to calm it? Are you exhausted and in need of oil to relax and be rejuvenated?  Are you able to feel any joy in the knowledge that unity is both a process and moments in time?[10]  It’s probably clear that for me, Unity is not a destination to which we arrive together once and for all.   How is your process of getting to unity both with the Divine and with the communities surrounding you fairing today? 

Bibliography

Abbot, Margery Post. To Be Broken and Tender: a Quaker theology for today. Palo Alto, California: Friends Bulletin Corporation, 2010.

Brussat, Frederic, and Mary Ann Brussat. Spiritual Rx. New York: Hyperion, 2000.

[1] Julian of Norwich reference

[2] (Brussat and Brussat 2000)

[3] Ibid

[4] Ibid

[5] Thank you to Mary Anne Totten and the residents of the Havenwood Heritage Heights first “Spiritual Literacy: Reading the Sacred in Everyday Life” group for this wonderful metaphor of dissonance in a symphony.

[6] (Abbot 2010)

[7] See Isaiah 58:12 RSV

[8] Thanks to Mary Anne Totten for reminding me that a musical term for a silent pause in the music is a “rest.”

[9] Thank you to Mary Wholley, from the Hadley MA UCC church for adding the metaphor of the love of the Spirit being like hand cream to my repertoire.

[10] Thanks to Brian Drayton for a conversation in which I realized that Unity is a both/and situation.  It is something that happens in a moment and a continuous process

Message given at Durham Friends Meeting, August 11, 2024

What do we say to God?

A friend recommended a book of poems, Bucolics by Maurice Manning.  I trust their recommendations so I purchased it. I didn’t appreciate the poems until I started reading them out loud. These poems are one side of a conversation between the poet and Creation or God.  Reading them out loud made me pay attention. This is the poet talking to God or creation – what he calls “Boss” – without including God’s response. 

I’m going to read a few poems and some sections of poems in this message – I will read each poem twice.

O boss of ashes boss of dust
you bother with what floats above
the chimney what settles to the ground

you wake the motes from sleep
you make them curtsy in a ray of sun
they hold their tiny breath as if
they’re waiting for the little name
of the dance that’s coming next then they
will take their places Boss if I
were smaller I would join them O
I’d cut a rug or two I’d slap
my hand against my shoe if that’s
the kind of fuss you’re raising Boss
you know I never know for sure
I only know you bother me
from time to time you’ve caught my breath

a time or two you’ve stirred me up
before which makes me want to tell
you Boss I wouldn’t mind it if
you bothered me a little more

What leaps out is the clarity that the poet knows that Boss is present in each moment, each small event is significant, and that the poet feels invited to observe, comment and feels bold enough to make suggestions to Boss. This is an intimate, reciprocal relationship. The speaker is curious about Boss,  and sees themselves as a collaborator with Boss.  And Boss knows the poet fully.  By sharing their half of the conversation, we are invited into this wonderful relationship.  The poet is engaged in a ceaseless conversation and is sharing what they have learned about God from their experience.  

Am I your helper Boss or am

I not do I bring in the Hay

For me or you or only for

The horse I help the horse he helps

Me too why sometimes Boss he hooks

His head across my shoulder just

To rest it there he’ll heave a sigh

As if he’s tuckered he always makes

me laugh he knows I know he wants

an apple Boss his heavy head

on me it helps it helps so much

it helps to hear him sigh a sigh

he doesn’t really mean he means

another thing is that the way

you mean to mean another Boss

another thing beyond the thing

you want from me you see the horse

gives me a weary sigh when he’s

not sleepy Boss he doesn’t want

to hear sweet dreams from me he wants

to hear you want an apple hoss

I mean we help each other Boss

—————-

Fragments:

 … O everything gets carried Boss, / even if it never moves / I wonder if you ever notice/ but sometimes Boss I carry you.

How big is your hand Boss hold it up / to show me if you can I need / to know you know I need to know/ so many things …

I guess you’ve got a lot / of hands though I’m just one / of many Boss  I’ll turn / the earth I’ll shock the corn / O Boss whatever else / you need I’ll pitch it in …

In reading these poems, I found myself paying attention to what I say to God – beyond the intentional forms of praise and gratitude and listening. ..  I recognized that when I am asked how spirit is with me,  I’m more apt to share what I felt or heard from God then to share my side of the conversation.   Talking with God is prayer. 

In The Sermon on The Mount, Jesus is giving direct and clear guidance to his followers – to preach, to share all things in common, to heal.  But he has to teach his followers how to pray – they know how to do all the other things, but they did not know how to pray.  The prayer he talk, as it comes to us after many translations is a prayer that includes permission to make demands on God “Give us our Daily Bread”…

When I pray each morning I start singing “Praise God from whom all blessings flow..”  The way I talk to God reveals how I see God, what I know from my experience. Do I see God as playful, inviting, distant, funny, known or a mystery? Do I see God as a Savior, a Father, a constant companion? As separate from me or as something I am a part of? The other day in my morning prayers, after singing “Praise God” and noticing all that I had to be grateful for since the day before, I realized that the meadow where I go each morning was so full of bees and other pollinators that I could hear it hum.  It was this that I talked to God about through the rest of the day – not the gratitude or the praise or the petitions.  

The query that I bring is what do you say to God? Are you bold enough to make suggestions? Are you paying the close attention that creation warrants? Are you paying attention to the dance of the dust motes.  What do you say to God and how does that inform you of what you know of God?

______________________________________________________________________________

Here is a poem I did not read that I find particularly delightful and close to some of my conversations with God.

I  like the weaving bees I like

The purple clover blossoms the way

The pasture runs away I like

In winter sinking lambs in straw

How I like bearing buckets full

of water waking up the sun

I like making up a little song

O looking at the sky I close

One eye I hold my hand in the air

I let the red hawk tip my fingers

Every day I pretend I am

A tree in your pasture Boss a tree …

Message given at Durham Friends Meeting, June 23, 2024.

Message given at Durham Friends Meeting, July 7, 2024

My working theme for this message has been integrity, journey and courage.  This past month my thoughts have been on national voting impacted by Brexit, a day of remembrance for those killed in the troubles, a weekend seminar on Borderlands. 

Following the result of the Brexit referendum, Corrymeela produced biblical resources to enable Christian faith communities to talk about the nature of borders and belongings and the difficulties thrown up by Brexit. These resources have been used for catalysing conversation about all manner of borders we make between ourselves.

One such resource is that of Borderlands which met for a residential a few weeks ago.  I was able to attend part of the sessions.  

Outside of the residential Borderlands is a monthly gathering in Belfast of those who are exploring the edges of faith, the borderland of faith and our society using stories, poetry readings, music, songs, courageous conversations on faith, doubt, questions, meaning outside of traditional church, for people to come together to explore faith on the edge, at the borders of where faith stands – in a bar.   Borderlands creates a brave and bold space for people to explore difficult – often life-changing – moments from their personal lives to help others find solidarity and healing, to be agents of peace and change in the world.   To be a safe space and also a courageous space for those who ‘don’t sit comfortably in or feel excluded from the traditional spaces of faith.  Space for meaningful encounter, sacred stories, using scripture to open and extend courageous conversations rather than close them.”

Borders.  Edges. Frames with edges.  If you move the frame you are looking through the picture changes. What you see and understand changes. Borders. That which makes us stop and go no further. To declare this is us and there is you, the other.   Where we encounter our perceived limits, walls, frames. 

Each time we come to the edge or borders we can choose to go beyond or to stand and ponder, to figure out what this edge means, how it defines and defined us and what is beyond.  Can we go beyond?  Do we want to go beyond?  Why? Why not? 

At our borders we can choose to move beyond us-them divisions to ‘we’.  Many of you in this room are doing just that in the courageous conversations, seminars, writings, facilitation of different groups and more.

The Borderlands gatherings provide a space for courageous conversations along with safe places.  

Quakers were and are often on the edge.  They pushed borders, boundaries, pushed the limits of society and established churches throughout history. 

So also with the Beatitudes.  These new words and invitations were and are challenges and inspiration from Jesus to expand our understanding of others and ourselves in our struggles and poverty.  An invitation to shift our understanding of God’s love for all and  enter into courageous conversations and relationships rather than close them with walls and borders.  The Beatitudes were presented to the crowds, blessings that were on the edge.  A reading from ‘First Nations Version. An Indigenous Translation of the New Testament.  I was inspired to purchase the book after a visit from one of the authors of the book The Gatherings.

A new road, beyond the borders of the writings of the Old Testament.  ‘You have heard that it was said, an eye for an eye …  but I tell you …If some one strikes you on the cheek, or if someone wants to take your tunic give it away along with your cloak.  If someone forces you to go one mile, go two miles.   MT 5:38

We are called to go beyond the expected.  Go beyond our physical, social and psychological borders.  To be courageous.  To share the love of Spirit, God, Jesus to all.  ‘A new command I give you: Love one another.  As I have loved you, so you must love one another.’  MT 13:34  This is illustrated further in the parable of the Good Samaritan. 

‘I am giving you a new road to walk’ he said.  In the same way I have loved you, you are to love each other. ‘  First Nations version.

My personal borders.

Talking to another who has a different opinion than my own.  Where our passions contradict each other.  At least at first then we see our commonalities.  We share our truths.  Not in anger but in sharing our experiences of love of those who are a part of our stories and experiences. 

There are 2 woman who sit in the Coleraine town square.  On the ground.  I assume they do not have a home or much money.  My personal borders are raised high when I pass by.   What keeps me from doing anything?  What might I do to help?  How might I best love my neighbour?  What walls and borders keep me from acting, reaching out?

My sense of belonging where I live now.  Struggled for many years to come to terms with a desire and a need.  Limited in my frame which indicated my picture was only to be in the states but now see that the frame can be moved to include the US and where I live now.  As a good friend once said – when you know where your home is then home is everywhere.

My discomfort with the borders of the zoom frame which limits my ability to fully engage and connect with others in worship. 

It takes courage to look though the walls, to break them down, to build windows in them, to look beyond the edge of our personal borders. 

What truth is yours?  What truths are yours?  What borders do you come to in living your truth?  Borders of standing still and waiting for more insight or borders of courageous conversations?

I offer this final reading from John Lampen, who, along with his wife Diana, was the Director of Quaker House in Belfast during the Troubles.  A house where people from both sides of the walls and borders came together for courageous conversations.

An old Greek priest, a refugee, dreams that a small bird perches in front of him on a branch, singing so beautifully that all he wants is to catch it. As he tiptoes towards it, it flies away to another branch, still singing.  He follows it: and again it flies a little way off.  The dream lengthens out to days, to years, to the length of his life, and still it is out of reach, captivating him with its song.  Jesus, brother, enchant us too with your singing.  Stay beyond our grasp, do not let us put you in a cage.  Lead us forward.  John Lampen, 1985 [From Quaker Life and Practice: A Book of the Christian Experience of the Religious Society of Friends in Ireland, 1.110].

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More about Corrymeela here.

Available on the Corrymeela website is Exploring Brexit Through the Lens of Ruth

“An Indigenous Quaker’s Relationship with Christianity,” by  Gail Melix/Greenwater

Message to Durham Friends Meeting, June 2, 2024.

Wunee keesuq -good day- friends. Nutus8ees – I am- Gail Melix. My Native name is Greenwater. Nutomas – I am from… the Herring Pond Wampanoag Tribe of Plymouth, the tribe that met the Pilgrims. Plymouth was originally called Patuxet, a Wampanoag name meaning The Place of Little Waterfalls. I am just beginning to learn my Wopanaak language. There is great joy in this. 

My father was Wampanoag and German. He is deceased. My mother’s people, from England, came over on the Mayflower, and were Puritans who became convinced Quakers. Many generations ago someone in my family tree decided to marry other than a Quaker, so they were no longer members. In 1980 I attended my first Quaker Meeting, the first in my family to return, brought in hand by a friend who told me, “You are a Quaker, you just don’t know it yet.” From that very first meeting for worship I knew this is where I belonged and had been seeking it for many years. 

I am a member of Sandwich Monthly Meeting, and I attend East Sandwich Preparative Meeting, which is located on ancestral homeland of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe. The Wampanoag of Massachusetts and Eastern RI have lived in these areas for more than 12,000 years.

It is delightful to be here. Thank you for the invitation. The plans were to come in person but I fractured my fibula where it meets up with the ankle, making it difficult to travel. I’m here to share part of my journey as an Indigenous Quaker. 

When preparing for today I felt led to begin my message to you with an Indigenous translation of the Lord’s prayer. [Creator-Sets-Free is the Indigenous name given Jesus in the First Nations version of The New Testament)]

“Our Father” (First Nations Version), Matthew 6: 9-13

Creator sets free, Jesus, said: 

“When you send your voice to the Great Spirit, here is how you should pray:

O Great Spirit, our Father from above, we honor your name as sacred and holy.

Bring your good road to us, where the beauty of your ways in the spirit world above is reflected in the earth below.

Provide for us day by day—the elk, the buffalo, and the salmon.

The corn, the squash, and the wild rice.  All the things we need for each day.

Release us from the things we have done wrong, in the same way we release others for the things done wrong to us.

Guide us away from the things that tempt us to stray from your good road, and set us free from the evil one and his worthless ways.

Aho!  May it be so!”    

This prayer can be found in the book, First Nations Version, an Indigenous Translation of the New Testament. This publication of the bible really resonates with me and other Indigenous peoples that I share it with. “It connects, in a culturally relevant way, to the traditional heart languages of over 6 million English speaking First Nations People of North America” as stated by the Indigenous authors. It follows the tradition of storytellers of our oral cultures. I find the language profoundly beautiful, as did the Indigenous who wrote this translation, which included Native Americans from over 25 tribes. More information about how this bible came to be, the method of translation and a list of the tribes that were involved in the writing of it can be found in the introduction of the book.

Great Spirit, Creator, Great Mystery, Maker of Life, Giver of Breath, One Above us All, and Most Holy One are a few of the names for God you will find in this translation. 

I have had several opportunities to share the First Nations Version of the New Testament with my Indigenous friends and there has been a lot of interest in it. I met 7 Indigenous Grandmothers who led a recent retreat at Woolman Hill and represented many different tribes. There was interest in knowing more about the First Nation’s version of the New Testament and plans to order it.  

 I belong to a group of Indigenous Quakers from across North America and a few from Canada who meet regularly on Zoom to share our stories and our concerns. We discuss the ways in which we are addressing Indigenous rights. We’re asked this question, what draws you to the Quaker faith? What does it add to your Indigenous ways? The number one answer is…. We are Quakers because of the worship.  Other factors: Because of the peace testimony, because of social justice work, because it is a living faith, because of the connection to Creator that is possible from silence. Indigenous Quakers also attend the Decolonizing Quakers steering committee meetings. It’s a good example of how right relationship can blossom when Indigenous and Quakers spend time together.     

I’d also like to share what it means to me to be an Indigenous Quaker.  Choosing Indigenous or Quaker is not a choice for me. What I know is that together they make me whole. The mix adds a tenderness and warmth to my sometimes-rough edges. Worship from a deep well of silence with expectant waiting is one of my favorite places. I don’t see it as just a place of waiting.  Sometimes it becomes a place of mystery for contemplation and discovery. Sometimes I bring a hawk or a favorite tree into expectant waiting with me and I can feel God’s smile. God loves when we witness and acknowledge the beauty of his creations. I love that Our Living Quaker faith is always in the here and now, any moment the possibility of revelation, of incarnation… And Jesus connects me more deeply with a God that I can’t fully conceive of or imagine a face for. When I am despairing it is Jesus who weeps with me and comforts me. He teaches me how to better Love God, myself, and others.  He knows me. 

The named Christianity that came to this country during colonization, fueled by The Doctrine of Discovery, allowed Christian explorers in the name of their sovereign, to claim and seize land if it was not owned by a Christian. There were over 1,000 treaties that were never recognized or honored. The named Christianity that came to this country ran boarding schools for over 150 years that stripped Indigenous children of their identities, cultural values, and traditions, abused them and separated them from their families and caused intergenerational trauma. Genocide. This is not Christianity in any form. There is nothing of Jesus’ teachings here. When my Indigenous friends question me about the effect of Christianity on Native people during colonization this is what I tell them, this was not Christianity being practiced.

I believe that Quakers had good intentions. Education is important to Quakers and some worried that if children did not learn English and the ways of a changing world it would be to their detriment.  That may be true but how come they could not see that of God in Native people? That’s such a basic tenet of Quakers. How could Quaker Indigenous Boarding Schools go on for over 100 years and no one see the harm being done? It’s unbelievable to me. No one had an inkling that their sense of privilege and superiority was destroying a culture? So I struggle with this part of our Quaker history.  I opened myself up to grieving all that was lost, all the harm done, and the great suffering that resulted. I did this alone and in worship with others. This is ongoing.

My father raised me with traditional values and cultural practices.  There was respect and gratitude for the natural world. We were taught to be thankful. We were taught to be kind and help others. To share what we have. He was a quiet and gentle man, spoke sparingly and only when something needed to be said. You take care of the land and the land will take care of you Gail. He walked softly and when he was outdoors his eyes were everywhere, taking notice of everything. He loved animals and trees and gardening and fishing.  He would say with a smile, “Nature is my church.” He was very kind and rarely raised his voice. He was the one who took splinters out of us. Even though my mother was a nurse. He liked peaceful spaces and harmony. Dad was outdoors whenever he could be. In part, prayer worked best for him outdoors. He could communicate better with his ancestors in the natural world. 

I am thankful for my mixed heritage and my two faith communities which connect me so deeply to my Creator and the Lord. I see and feel the many similarities, including core values that both faiths share. Building relationships between Indigenous and Quakers will take time but I see many places where this is already happening. I look forward to serving in this way, as led by the Divine, doing what is mine to do. 

Lakota prayer: 

The Elders tell us the greatest gift we can seek is peace of mind; to walk in balance, to respect all things. For us to do this, we must have peace within ourselves and peace within ourselves cannot come unless we are walking the path the Creator would have us walk. Sometimes the tests on this path are difficult, but we know that each test makes us stronger.

Oh Great Spirit, I ask You to whisper your wisdom in my heart. You are the only one that knows the secret to peaceful living and the mystery of harmony. Teach me of Your peace, understanding and balance, and guide me onto your good path.

Aho /Amen

Thank you, friends, at Durham Friends Meeting for your invite. I want to thank my elders who have been holding all of us and this meeting space in prayer: Leslie Manning and Ken Jacobsen.

Message given at Durham Friends Meeting, May 12, 2024.

Jan Collins, assistant director of the Maine Prisoner Advocacy Coaltion (MPAC), brought the message at Durham Friends Meeting on April 7, 2024

Greetings and welcome.

Thank you for inviting me to your house of worship and into your lives. The topic of my message is transformation. Before I begin, I would like each of us to take just a moment to reflect on our own transformation. You may have changed slowly, or as the result of an event, often a trial by fire or a time of great suffering. As a result of that tribulation you became a different person. Try to recall how you were before and how you changed. How did your thinking change?

I chose “Amazing Grace” as our first hymn because of its tale of transformation. The song was written in 1772 by a former captain of a slave ship, John Newton who, by his own words, labelled his young life as depraved; filled with greed, violence and debauchery.

On March 2, 1748 at age 22, his ship the Greyhound was caught in a violent storm and was about to sink. He watched shipmates wash overboard. When he took the helm he began to pray for God’s mercy. He remained at the ships wheel for 11 hours while his crew attempted to staunch leaks in the hull. Gradually the storm eased and the ship survived.

He began changes to his life immediately, but they were gradual. He left his life aboard ship in 1754, began studying Hebrew, Greek, scripture and the ministry. He was ordained in the Church of England and was appointed to a church in Olney, England where he wrote Amazing Grace for a Sunday service to compliment his scriptural reading of first Chronicles 17:16-17 in which King David looks back on his life and asks, “Who am I that God hast brought me here?”

”Amazing Grace” is about redemption, the joy of receiving God’s grace, even when you have done terrible things. John Newton wrote the song at age 47. He had already been a pastor for 18 years, yet he reflected daily on his previous life of wretchedness and the path before him.

But how do we get from a life of complacency to one of transformation?

I decided to Google it. Although Google is a fount of information, it is lacking in wisdom.

According to several articles, you can achieve transformation in seven easy steps… or six… or five, depending on which site you consult.

If you follow “7 Steps to Transformation: How to Radically Change Your Life …” You must – “identify your goals; visualize your future; create an action plan; take small steps; overcome challenges; celebrate success; and live a transformed life”. Sounds simple.

Certainly some of those steps apply to John Newton’s life, take small steps, overcome challenges, live a transformed life, but there are essential ingredients missing in this recipe.I have found that transformation chooses us, not the other way around. John Newton did not choose to be in a life threatening storm, or to watch his shipmate be washed overboard never to be seen again. When faced with his and his crews mortality he became keenly aware of his own powerlessness and the fragility of life.

That awareness and the pain that accompanied it provided an opening, a hole for grace to slip in.

The process of transformation is as much about giving up things that no longer serve us as it is about learning new things.

It can be extremely painful to give up those things, those beliefs that may have insulated us from pain or given us great comfort. A person seeking sobriety, must give up the comfort of addiction…a good friend that protected them from deep pain.

When we give up racism or sexism, we must give up the comfort of believing that we are somehow superior to those around us and instead accept the humanity of others.

I spent most of the first decades of my life believing that I could erase the pain of my early childhood and my father’s incarceration by being a great student and a hard worker. I avoided people who were troubled or trouble makers. When my husband and I adopted three children ages 7, 8, and 9 from foster care, we truly believed that our love could make up for the years of abuse they had suffered in there biological home and the trauma of being in 5 foster homes in 5 years.

But at age 21, my son was arrested for a terrible crime and sentenced to 20 years in prison. I felt like I was on a sinking ship.That experience opened up a hole in me, a terrible pain that allowed grace to step in. I stopped running, stopped building protective walls.

I learned several lessons –

1. Good people can do terrible things. John Newton could participate in the violent, inhumane and heartless slave trade. My son could commit a violent crime.

2. The answer to violence is not more violence, and the answer to inhumanity is not more inhumanity. It is love.

3. We are all capable of transformation. We are all capable of redemption.

4. An environment of support and nurturance encourages transformation. A trauma filled environment stifles it. John Newton found his support in the friends he found in the church and in slavery’s abolition. I in the community of folks affected by incarceration.

In his transformation John Newton eventually became instrumental in the f ight to end slavery in England, a fight that was achieved just months before his death.

For my part, I am fighting to end our system of mass incarceration in Maine and the US. I recognize that it does more harm than good, that it is a war against the poor, the sick and the black, and that it perpetuates the very harms that John Newton saw in slavery.

The parallels are uncanny. Both an enslaved person and an incarcerated person lose everything, including their family. The state may take their children and give them to someone else. Others will lose family members to death, never having the opportunity to say goodbye. In prison you are expected to work for free or next to nothing, Your clothing will be of the poorest quality, as will your food and your medical care. Punishment will be your daily lot with very little support for real change in your life. It is no wonder so few succeed upon release and almost 700 individuals have died in Maine in the last 10 years while on probation.

Just as abolition of slavery was the cause of the nineteenth century, abolition of the carceral system should be the cause of this century. The thirteenth amendment of the US constitution, ended slavery in the United States except for those who are incarcerated. Now it is time to end incarceration.

I would ask you to join me in recognizing that fight. We heal in community, not in isolation.

In closing, it is not enough for to us believe in our own ability to transform, our own redemption: we must also believe in the transformation and redemption of others.

Thank you for believing in the humanity of those in prison and their ability to change. Please join me in making the abolition of prisons a reality. It is not an easy task, but it is a just one that our faith demands of us.

Craig Freshley brought the message at Durham Friends Meeting on April 14, 2024. An audio recording is HERE. The message started with Craig playing a song by Iris Dement, “Let the Mystery Be.” Below are the lyrics.

“Let The Mystery Be,” Song by Iris DeMent

Everybody is wondering what and where they all came from
Everybody is worrying ’bout
Where they’re gonna go when the whole thing’s done
But no one knows for certain and so it’s all the same to me
I think I’ll just let the mystery be

Some say once you’re gone you’re gone forever
And some say you’re gonna come back
Some say you rest in the arms of the Savior if in sinful ways you lack
Some say that they’re coming back in a garden
Bunch of carrots and little sweet peas
I think I’ll just let the mystery be

Everybody is wondering what and where they all came from
Everybody is worrying ’bout
Where they’re gonna go when the whole thing’s done
But no one knows for certain and so it’s all the same to me
I think I’ll just let the mystery be

Some say they’re going to a place called glory
And I ain’t saying it ain’t a fact
But I’ve heard that I’m on the road to purgatory
And I don’t like the sound of that
I believe in love and I live my life accordingly
But I choose to let the mystery be

Everybody is wondering what and where they all came from
Everybody is worrying ’bout
Where they’re gonna go when the whole thing’s done
But no one knows for certain and so it’s all the same to me
I think I’ll just let the mystery be

I think I’ll just let the mystery be

Source: Musixmatch

Let The Mystery Be lyrics © Universal Music Corp., Songs Of Iris

Message given at Durham Friends Meeting, February 18, 2024

“He swore an oath.”  What does that mean and why does anyone do it? “He swore an oath.”   That’s what’s on my mind this morning. 

Notice that “he swore an oath” could mean two quite different things.  It could mean, he said a lot of bad words in frustration or anger, words that no one should say and certainly not in a bad, loud tone of voice.  Or “he swore an oath” could mean he mean that, on a solemn and important occasion, he assured us that he would do all that was expected of him.  Like when the newly elected President stands on the steps of the Capitol and says certain words with his hand on the Bible in front of the Supreme Court Chief Justice and tens of thousands of others.  “He swore an oath:”  oddly, two quite different meanings. 

This morning, it’s the second meaning I have in mind: the solemn and important occasions, the assurances that are  given, the magic words that are spoken.  Just the second meaning. 

Here’s an example, an oath a witness in a criminal trial is likely to be asked to give:  “I swear that the evidence that I shall give shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God.”

Notice, of course that God is invoked here.  The oath is given knowing that God is right there as a witness.  The implication is that if I swear this oath and don’t do what I’m swearing I’ll do, there be divine punishment.  (That’s why it is a solemn occasion when we swear an oath. The original – 14^th century – meaning of solemn” is “performed with due religious ceremony or reverence.”)

Of course, we Quakers know – don’t we – that God is always right at hand, paying attention to all that we do.  So what’s the point of an oath?  And you probably know that Quakers from our earliest days have refused to swear oaths.  We have often gotten in trouble for it.  In the 17^th century, many Quakers went to jail simply because they would not swear an oath that was asked of them. 

Why is that?  Well, because of Matthew 5:37:  “³⁷ All you need to say is simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything beyond this comes from the evil one.” 

Or James 5:12:  “¹² Above all, my brothers and sisters, do not swear—not by heaven or by earth or by anything else. All you need to say is a simple “Yes” or “No.”

And because of these two verses in the Bible, and because of  how Friends understand what God is saying through them, Quakers have a testimony against swearing oaths.  Here’s how the Advices from NEYM’s F&P puts it:  )  “Let us maintain integrity in word and deed.  Holding to the simplicity of truth, let us keep free of oaths”  (p 207).  

And here’s how Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s 1955 Faith and Practice put it:  “Friends regard the custom of taking oaths as not only contrary to the teachings of Jesus but as implying the existence of a double standard of truth.  Thus, on all occasions when special statements are required, it is recommended that Friends take the opportunity to make simple affirmations, thus emphasizing that their statements are only a part of their usual integrity of speech” (p20).

This admonition against swearing oaths is a part of our Testimony of Integrity.  To swear an oath to tell the truth, Friends have believed for hundreds of years, is to imply that you might not be telling the truth when you do not swear an oath.  That’s the ‘double standard.’  We believe we should always be telling the truth and telling it straightforwardly.  Let your yes be yes and your no be no.  Instead, we make simple affirmations when expected to ’swear an oath’, and we remind people that we endeavor always to speak the truth. 

So Quakers don’t swear oaths, but other people do.  What do these other people think they are doing in swearing an oath?  I agree we shouldn’t swear oaths, but there’s something in oath swearing worth noticing.  What do people think they are doing?

I want to acknowledge, in truth, that all this is on my mind and on my heart because the business of swearing oaths has been much in the news.  And that’s because oath swearing is in the U.S. Constitution in several places. 

The President is asked to swear this oath before taking office:  “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States” (Article II, section 1, clause 8).

For members of Congress, the Constitution provides that they “shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation to support this constitution.”  The exact words of that oath are up to Congress and here’s the current version:  I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.

This business of swearing oaths seems a little quaint, doesn’t it, a little old-fashioned.  Maybe it made sense back when people really worried that God would strike them dead on the spot (maybe a lightning bolt?) if they had their fingers crossed when they swore an oath, or simply thought, ‘who is this God; this God will never catch me?’

So, again, why do we do this?  Or more bluntly, if someone isn’t going to support the Constitution, why wouldn’t they just lie?  Why does saying the words matter?  Wouldn’t someone who lies be prepared to lie while taking the oath? 

Think of what’s happening when you swear an oath.  You are speaking in front of others, probably a crowd of people, some of them holding positions of importance.  You know they will hear you say this oath.  Maybe that puts you on your best behavior.  Maybe even for selfish reasons, you care what they think.  So shaming is at work. 

You are also hearing yourself say the words.  Maybe that doesn’t mean much, but maybe it does.  It reminds you that you are promising to do the right things.  So embarrassment is at work here. 

And of course you are speaking out loud to God.  Maybe that means something to you.  If it does, then fear and awe, and the promise of redemption are at work here.

There’s an understanding of human nature bound up in our having this requirement to swear oaths in the Constitution.  It’s an understanding that knows that people sometimes act selfishly or meanly.  It’s an understanding that realizes people sometimes just do what’s best for themselves and the hell with anyone else.  

But it’s also an understanding that knows that people can act honestly and generously, with the welfare of others fully in mind.  The oath is an effort to call people to their best selves.  The oath is sworn to draw someone to that best self.  It’s an occasion to remember God is listening, and will remember.  There’s a religious backdrop, no doubt about it, no matter what God you believe in. 

I’m not trying to make a narrowly political or partisan point here, really, I’m not.  I’m asking us to notice that in this business of oath swearing is a view of human nature that has a religious underlay that our Founders thought important, even as they also believed in the religious liberty voiced in the First Amendment.  This view of human nature is far from cynical.  I know there are days I can slip into thinking ‘everyone is just in it for himself.’  ‘What did I expect?  Of course all politicians are corrupt’ always, always.

That’s not my best self, however, and it doesn’t expect that others have their own best selves.  A different understanding of human nature is far more accurate.  We Quakers believe that God can and will speak to each of us if we still ourselves and listen. 

This business of oath swearing is a reminder that the Founders of our nation believed that people could stoop to selfish, corrupt behavior but also believed that people could be called to their best selves.  Swearing an oath is one way to do that.  There’s nothing magic about it; it doesn’t always work.  We shouldn’t elect people who will swear a false oath.  But when we elect someone who can act honestly and generously, let’s also ask them to swear an oath that they will promise to act out of their best selves.  It nudges them in the right direction. 

What else nudges us to be our best selves?  We should think about that, even as we Quakers reject the swearing of oaths.  We, too, believe, maybe more than most people, that we can all be called to our best selves, and we probably need nudges, too. 

I believe we all have worst selves and best selves, selfish selves and loving selves.  How do we find it in ourselves, regularly, to be at our best?   That takes effort.  It takes nudges,  If oath swearing doesn’t do it for us, what does?  For me, I know coming here on Sundays helps.  I know prayer helps.  I know our Quaker advices and queries help.  I know having a spouse and friends with high expectations helps. 

This is a challenge for each of us. 

Also posted on River View Friend

At a Meeting for Worship for Healing on February 11, 2024, Leslie Manning led us in the following:

Prayer by Maya Angelou (call and response) 

Father, Mother, God, 

Thank you for your presence 

during the hard and mean days. 

For then we have you to lean upon. 

For this we give thanks 

Thank you for your presence 

during the bright and sunny days, 

for then we can share that which we have 

with those who have less. 

For this we give thanks 

And thank you for your presence 

during the Holy Days, for then we are able 

to celebrate you and our families 

and our friends. 

For this we give thanks 

For those who have no voice, 

we ask you to speak. 

We ask your mercy.

For those who feel unworthy, 

we ask you to pour your love out 

in waterfalls of tenderness. 

We ask your mercy. 

For those who live in pain, 

we ask you to bathe them 

in the river of your healing. 

We ask your mercy. 

For those who are lonely, we ask 

you to keep them company. 

We ask your mercy. 

For those who are depressed, 

we ask you to shower upon them 

the light of hope. 

We ask your mercy. 

Dear Creator, You, the borderless 

sea of substance, we ask you to give to all the 

world that which we need most—Peace. 

Amen

At Falmouth Quarterly Meeting on January 27, 2024, held at Durham Friends Meeting, Brian Drayton led a worship sharing session on James Nayler‘s last words. With a short introduction from Britain Yearly Meeting’s Faith and Practice, here are those last words:

In 1659 [James Nayler] sought to be reconciled with George Fox, from whom he had become estranged, but was rebuffed. William Dewsbury was at last instrumental in bringing a reconciliation, and James Nayler resumed his Quaker service, ‘living in great self-denial and very jealous of himself’.

In 1660, after his release, he set out on foot for the north, intending to go home to his wife and children. On the way, he was robbed and bound, and found towards evening in a field. He was taken to a Friend’s house near King’s Ripton, where he died. These were some of his last words:

There is a spirit which I feel that delights to do no evil, nor to revenge any wrong, but delights to endure all things, in hope to enjoy its own in the end.

Its hope is to outlive all wrath and contention, and to weary out all exaltation and cruelty, or whatever is of a nature contrary to itself. It sees to the end of all temptations.

As it bears no evil in itself, so it conceives none in thoughts to any other.

If it be betrayed, it bears it, for its ground and spring is the mercies and forgiveness of God.

Its crown is meekness, its life is everlasting love unfeigned; it takes its kingdom with entreaty and not with contention, and keeps it by lowliness of mind.

In God alone it can rejoice, though none else regard it, or can own its life. It’s conceived in sorrow, and brought forth without any to pity it, nor doth it murmur at grief and oppression. It never rejoiceth but through sufferings; for with the world’s joy it is murdered.

I found it alone, being forsaken. I have fellowship therein with them who lived in dens and desolate places in the earth, who through death obtained this resurrection and eternal holy life.

Message given at Durham Friends Meeting, January 21, 2024

“Make a joyful noise.”  “Come into his presence with singing.” In recent weeks Craig has gotten us talking about prayers.  Today I want to talk about singing. 

One of the things that led me to drift away from religion when I was younger was that very little of what religion involved made any sense to me, and no one really tried to explain it to me.  Church was different from anything else in life.  That was clear.  But why?  Just to be different?  As I grew older, I started realizing Church was supposed to help make sense of things that went on the rest of the week, a different more all-encompassing sense.  But – and this was a problem for me – Church itself didn’t make any sense. 

Every week it was the same pattern in my Presbyterian Church.  Organ playing, a hymn sung while the minister walked down the aisle, an Old Testament Reading, a prayer, a New Testament reading, an offering, the Doxology, a responsive reading, and so on, eventually a sermon.  And of course, I came to realize it was different at other churches.  Why do we do all this, I wondered?  Why our pattern? Why not the others?  There seemed to be no answer other than “this is the way,” “this is the way we’ve done it for ages and ages.”  For me, that didn’t make any sense. 

That was just how it was:  many things about going to church were different, even odd, yet left unexplained.  No one ever said, “here’s the deal;”  or “this is why we do it this way.”  This is why we sing; this is how and why we pray, and so forth. 

I mentioned “The Doxology.”  That was an especially puzzling word.  Most hymns are known by their first line.  I now know the Doxology is a special kind of hymn, one tacked on to the end of something else, like an offering.  It’s a word from the Greek meaning literally “a speaking of praise.”  The idea of singing such a thing reaches back to Jewish worship liturgy.  There are a few different Doxologies, but in most Churches, they use the same one each week.  There isn’t a Doxology in our Quaker Worship in Song hymnals (Quakers for the most part don’t use a Doxology) but there are a few in our brown hymnals, The Singing Church.  Let’s sing one: #556.  (This Doxology, by the way, comes from a psalm, Psalm 150). 

Praise God from whom all blessings flow;

Praise Him, all creatures here below

Praise Him above, ye heav’nly host

Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost.  Amen

You can see it’s a joyful noise, a hymn of praise to God.  And it’s brief, just one stanza; it adds a little excitement to something that has just happened. Think of it as an exclamation point after whatever just proceeded it. 

No one ever said why we sang the Doxology right after the offering was taken. It was like the Bible: no one ever said what that was, either.  It was just there, and ponderous.  Also, a little odd.  No one ever said ‘here is a book written over time by many people telling stories about people being faithful to God, and people not being faithful to God, and about what happened next.  Thinking about all these stories can help you be more faithful to God.’   (Maybe you would explain what the Bible is in a different way than what I just said, but any explanation would be better than none at all.)

One of the many reasons I became a Quaker is that we have a simpler form of worship, and we often talk about why we do it the way we do.  Like why we settle into silence or stillness.  When we Quakers are not being silent, we talk about that, about why we fall silent to listen to God, and what we hope we do after one or another of us hears from God. 

Sunday School made a little more sense.  I learned some things there.  At the Presbyterian Church my family attended, there were two Bible passages we all learned by heart.  Perhaps you did, too.  (I know Ellen did.)  Both passages were Psalms.  We learned the 23d and the 100th Psalms. 

But still, as I recollect it, no one explained to me, then, what a Psalm was.  There they were in the middle of the Bible, pretty different from the stuff that came before or came after inn the Bible.  Sometimes they were part of what was read or recited as part of a Church service.  Why? I had no idea. 

 It was some years later that I realized that the psalms were songs.  Now I even know that the word “psalm” means “a sacred poem or song, especially one expressing praise or thanksgiving.”  The word “psalm” comes from a Greek word meaning “a song sung to a harp” or more simply “something plucked.”  That Greek word found its way into Church Latin, and then into English.  The Hebrew word, by the way, for that book in the Bible is “Tehillim,” meaning “songs of praise.”

Here at Durham Friends, we begin worship with a song, and we end worship with a song.  I like that.  I’m grateful that Dorothy Hinshaw and Nancy Marstaller play the piano for us.  And KJ Williams before, and Sukie Rice especially encouraged our singing, and Craig Freshley sings occasionally for us, and now Ezra and Laura.  Tess has a striking voice, and really, all of us sing.

You probably know not all Quakers do it this way.  It’s more an Evangelical or Friends United Meeting way of doing things than a Friends General Conference or Conservative Friends way of doing things.  I first became a Quaker at Germantown Meeting, part of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting.  Hymn singing was definitely not part of the regular worship service there.  We gathered in silence, and we ended in silence.  Hymns might be sung as part of a midweek potluck supper gathering, but not during First Day Worship.  Not.  No. 

Psalms 23 and 100.  I spoke earlier of those two.  Today, I hear the 23d more often than the 100^th, but today it is the 100^th that is on my mind.  Like the Doxology, it urges us to praise God, but it says more.  Here it is, from the King James version of the Bible. 

100^th Psalm

¹Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all ye lands.

² Serve the Lord with gladness:

come before his presence with singing.

³ Know ye that the Lord he is God:

it is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves;

we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.

⁴ Enter into his gates with thanksgiving,

and into his courts with praise:

be thankful unto him, and bless his name.

⁵ For the Lord is good;

his mercy is everlasting; and

his truth endureth to all generations.

It is not only a psalm – a song – it is also a psalm about singing – about singing a song of praise and thanksgiving.  It is a song giving us some guidance about how to worship God. 

If you look more closely, you’ll see that this psalm consists of four instructions followed by three reasons.  (Now here’s somebody explaining what the deal is – why we do things the way we do.)  The instructions are about how to worship God.  Remember Craig’s three kinds of prayer: please, thanks, sorry?  The instructions in the 100^th psalm – there are four of them —  are these:  sing, serve, know God, and be thankful. 

Sing:                ¹Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all ye lands.

Serve:              ² Serve the Lord with gladness: come before his presence with singing.

Know God:      ³ Know ye that the Lord he is God: it is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.

Be thankful:     ⁴ Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with praise: be thankful unto him, and bless his name.

Why should we do these things?  That’s the subject of the three reasons that come at the end of this psalm.  Like many Psalms, the 100^th takes a turn in its middle.  It starts out one way, and then it shifts to another.  Sometimes that’s a change in focus or in voice or in perspective.  Here the change is from encouraging us to sing our praises to God towards giving reasons for such singing:  serving, knowing and thanking God. 

In a nutshell, those reasons are goodness, mercy and truth. 

God is goodness through and through. 

God’s mercy extends to every person through all time. 

And God’s truth is rock-solid and eternal. 

Here are the words of the psalm.

⁵ For the Lord is good;

his mercy is everlasting; and

his truth endureth to all generations.

You might also be thinking that this Psalm is like a prayer, and I think you’d be right.  Psalms are songs, but they are also prayers of a sort, ones that praise God and voice our thanks. 

So I’m thinking, that’s a good reason we sing as we enter our worship (we make a joyful noise), and why we sing at the end.  That’s the deal.   We sing our praises to God, then we fall silent to hear what God has to say to us, and then we sing again in praise as we leave worship. 

Also posted on River View Friend

At worship this past Sunday (January 14, 2024), Leslie Manning brought the message. You can see and hear a recording of the lecture here (password is UL7WA?zi). She read this poem from the Iona Community:

She also read this passage from William Penn:

True religion does not draw men out of the world but enables them to live better in it and excites their endeavors to mend it. — William Penn

Craig Freshley delivered the message at Durham Friends Meeting on January, “Get a Second Opinion.” You can hear a recording of the message here, from his Quaker messages website.

Read at the opening and closing of worship at Durham Friends Meeting, January 7, 2024:

Meditation of the Rt. Rev. Steven Charleston, Ret. Episcopal Bishop of Alaska, of Choctaw Ancestral Lineage. 12/24/2023, Sunday.  

Please join me today, whoever you are, whatever you believe: join me in releasing love into the world.

Love as mercy, love as peace, love as forgiveness, love as healing: join me in sharing love in every way you can.

And when you do, join me in believing it will make a difference. Love always makes a difference.

Please join me today in extending that love as far as your heart can reach.

Message given at Durham Friends Meeting, December 3, 2023

You can hear a recording of Craig Freshley’s Message, “Please, Thanks, Sorry,” at his website Craig’s Quaker Messages.

This message focuses on three types of prayer and during this message I held up three little signs to match what I was saying; signs that read PLEASE, THANKS, and SORRY.

For a few cycles to start the breathing exercise at the end, I held up PLEASE as I inhaled, and THANKS as I exhaled.

There’s silence in the middle of the message from 13:30 to 16:30, and also at the end of the message beginning at 18:34.

Here is a transcription of the message:

Please, Thanks, Sorry

Good morning, friends.

The last message I brought was about prayer, and today’s message is about prayer. Last time I recited my prayer, a specific prayer that I have pushed myself to write over many years, and it’s evolving. In fact, I’ve changed it since the last time I spoke to you about this prayer, and maybe I’ll say it at the end of today’s message. Last time I talked about the value of what I’m going to call stock prayers, prayers with specific words and verses that we say over and over again the same way. The Lord’s Prayer, the prayer of St. Francis, the 23rd Psalm, the Prayer of Yellow Hawk, the Serenity Prayer. These are some of my favorite stock prayers. A lot of thought has been put into the words of these prayers, and it’s so helpful to say them and think about their meaning. Take them to heart over and over. Reciting stock prayers is, for me, a form of meditation. It focuses, the mind cuts out distraction. It’s in keeping with the Catholic tradition of using rosary beads, or the Buddhist tradition of chance or mantras. It provides a discipline. So whereas last time I focused on my stock prayer, my way of bringing discipline and saying the same things over and over. I say that to myself several times a day that, that prayer,

But I also ex explained last time that sometimes I make up prayers, and that’s good too. That’s the focus of today’s message, is making up prayers on the spot. I think there is great value in quieting the mind in wrestling with this question. What should I pray for right now? What a big question it requires me to consider all that I could pray for and make a short list. It pushes me to decide what’s most important. Just the exercise of making that decision before we even get to the prayer. Deciding what to pray for is, I suppose its own form of prayer. I’ve been told, I don’t remember where I heard this, but I’ve come to believe this, that there are basically three kinds of prayer.

Please. Thanks, and Sorry. So to help me make my short lists, I think of prayers in these three categories. I think to myself, what do I want help with? What am I thankful for? What things have I done that I’m sorry about.

In a moment, I’m going to ask you to think about your short lists of what’s most important in these three categories. But first, I’m going to say just a little bit more about these three different types of prayers and what they mean for me, how I think of them. These are often prayers of desperation. Please help so and so get better. Please prevent X, Y, z, bad thing from happening. Please stop the fighting. Stop the oppression, stop the flooding. Please help those in desperate need. Please help me get out of this jam. Sometimes those are the most desperate prayers of all. I’m in trouble. I need help. Please help me. But a please prayer can also be from a not so desperate place, a more, a more thoughtful place. Please help me be a better person by blank, blank, blank. Please help me with this particular thing so I can be better. Please help me better understand why. Blank, blank, blank, blah, blah, blah. Please help me forgive him or her. Please help me be more open to them.

It can also be a prayer of humility. Just yesterday, I heard Rob Levine say, if you don’t know what to do, pray. If you don’t know what to pray for, pray for help. Sometimes I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to think. I don’t know how to be, but I remember that I have this available to me. I can ask for help. I can say a prayer and I can begin it with please. It’s really hard for me to ask for help. Yet I’ve learned that it’s one of the most valuable things I can do, and I’ve learned that when I ask for help, it’s good to be okay with non-specifics rather than please change that person in these ways so that they’re nicer to me. I’ve learned that’s not a helpful prayer. I’m likely to be disappointed with that type of prayer, but rather, please help me find peace in this situation from a place of humility, not knowing the answer, rather than, please tell me what I should do about this or that. Instead, please help me be okay with however, turn this turns out and help me play my part.

It’s okay to ask for help. It’s good when you start with the word please, and it’s good to be open to however the help might come. Thanks. This is gratitude. When I’m not feeling good about myself or about the world around me, there is nothing more helpful to me than to take stock of the good things I have. Do not take things for granted.

It seems to help me every time. I knew a guy named Leon, an old guy, and when you asked him how he was, he would always say the same thing. I’m fantastic. I woke up on the right side of the grass today.  Every time, same answer, grateful to just be alive. That is a good place to start.

But not only that, it’s not just that I’m alive. I have an amazing life. So many blessings. We as humans have a long and deep tradition of prayers, of gratitude and blessings. Blessings before a meal, blessings at the start of an endeavor. Gratitude at the end of an endeavor. Gratitude upon winning the award. I couldn’t have done this without you. All prayers of gratitude. Folks in recovery are often asked to make a gratitude list. When I was a child, my mom encouraged me to end my day by kneeling at my bed and thinking of the good things that happened that day. Pretty simple prayer. Just think back on the good things that happened. I have found that gratitude is pretty much universal medicine for whatever ails you.

Sorry, another type of prayer. You might call this confession or repentance. I’m going to bring something else that I have learned in recovery. This is, this book is called Alcoholics Anonymous. I’m going to read a paragraph. “When we retire at night, we constructively review our day. Were we resentful, selfish, dishonest, or afraid? Do we owe an apology? Have we kept something to ourselves, which should be discussed with another person at once? Were we kind and loving towards all? What could we have done better? Were we thinking of ourselves most of the time? Or were we thinking of what we could do for others of what we could pack into the stream of life?”

But we must be careful not to drift into worry, remorse, or morbid reflection for that would diminish our usefulness to others. After making our review, we ask God’s forgiveness and inquire what corrective measures should be taken. I find it helpful to review my actions, to look at me and consider how I have been aligned or not aligned with how God wants me to be. And consider what corrective actions need to be taken. What apologies do I need to make to help me feel better? What do I have to fix with actual actions and what do I need to let go of? I don’t need to be responsible for everything. Back to please. I can ask for help with the burdens of my regrets. I would like us to pause for a moment. I’m going to stop talking and I’m going to offer a few minutes of silence for you to consider, for us all to consider our transgressions. What are you sorry about? What regrets do you have between you and your God? Let’s just take two or three minutes here and each try to make a short list.

[PAUSE]

I love that everyone seems to be praying so hard, and I hate to interrupt.  But I’d like to wrap up and take us into even more silence, and I’d like to do one or maybe two more things before I walk back over there. I’d like to do a little breathing exercise with you. 

We just spent some time reflecting on, sorry, regrets, transgressions. Now I’d like to spend a little time reflecting on please and thank you. And the way that I do this sometimes is I, I breathe and when I breathe in, I think please. And when I breathe out, I think thanks. It’s a really simple prayer, and when I breathe in, I think of things that I need help with, and when I breathe out, I think of things that I’m grateful for. So I’m going to ask that we start this together. I’m going to hold up signs, and then I’m going leave you to your own rhythm and we’ll see what happens after that.

We breathe in and we breathe out.

Message given at Durham Friends Meeting, December 10, 2023

Good morning, Friends,

This is Diana White in the Meeting House. I have not yet met all of you. I am in the process of transferring my membership from Portland Friends Meeting. In my request for transfer, I said that I feel that the semi-programmed worship here speaks to my condition. My sense is that in a silent Meeting there is not the opportunity for sharing, education, and spiritual development in the same way that is possible in this setting. I am excited about becoming a member of this Meeting.

Robert Lawrence Smith, head at Sidwell Friends for many years, said that a Quaker Meeting is “…something akin to a spiritual potluck. Each person [brings] something personal, simple, and sacred to the table in the belief that out of the silence, the voice of truth might be heard.”

Today I will tell you something of what I bring to this spiritual potluck, the Durham Monthly Meeting of Friends.

I first attended Quaker Meeting as a teenager, in Princeton, New Jersey. I was a well-churched child, baptized twice after the Methodists found the Dutch Reformed baptism an insufficient guarantee of my membership in the Kingdom of Heaven. I have many years of Sunday School pins, acquired into my teens. I was also a Pioneer Girl, a sort of fundamentalist Girl Scout. I earned badges for such skills as being able to recite all the books of the Bible.

I was brought up in a union family. My father served in the Pacific theater in World War II. He was a civil rights activist and a champion of democracy. I was raised as an activist and a patriot. Four members of my family, my grandmother, my father, my sister and I, all ran for public office. We are proud losers, zero for seven. My father’s death when I was a teenager left an indelible mark on me about the importance of living one’s life in the moment, because there may not be that many moments. I became a nurse and union activist, then a lobbyist and organizer.

I started attending Quaker Meeting regularly in Farmington in 1990. I spent 25 years active in my monthly meeting, Vassalboro Quarter, and New England Yearly Meeting. I was the first woman to serve as Yearly Meeting Treasurer. I was clerk of Friends Committee on Maine Public Policy after Ed Snyder stepped down. I found Quaker thought and practice consistent with my sense of justice and activism…. “Let your life speak.”

When my son started college, I felt restless. I was teaching at the University of Maine at Fort Kent. I loved my life in northern Maine but felt led to make a contribution to social justice. That sense slowly became a leading to go South, to work for change around issues of racism. I met a professor from Tuskegee University at a conference and then was recruited to teach there.

One of the books that deeply affected me was Booker T. Washington’s autobiography, Up from Slavery, which I first read in elementary school. I have returned to it several times in the last 50 years. Washington was a freed slave who founded Tuskegee Institute to educate other freed slaves. Tuskegee University is a Historically Black University, what is known as an HBCU. It is now one of the Black Ivies. When I first visited there, I felt that I was standing on Holy Ground.

In August 2011, I went to Yearly Meeting in Vermont, and then drove south. I stopped to see my brother in New Jersey. He asked me if I knew the difference between a Yankee and a Damn Yankee. I did not. He explained that a Yankee visits the South, but a Damn Yankee stays. I stopped at my father’s grave to tell him where I was headed. Two days later, I arrived in Montgomery, Alabama, and started at Tuskegee the next day.

I left Maine, with one of the lowest rates of church attendance in the country, to go to

Alabama, which has one of the highest rates of attendance. There is always a whole lot of public praying going on. We always said grace at meals and prayed for success for the football teams. My students prayed before exams… not just prayed… one of the students would spend several minutes in fervent exhortation for their success.

At the end of my first week at Tuskegee, I was asked where I planned to go to church. I said I did not know. I was living and working almost exclusively with African Americans. That Sunday morning, I decided that I needed to find me some white people. So, at the most segregated hour in America, 10 am on Sunday, I attended the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship. A week later one of the regulars called me a Damn Yankee.

I was frequently asked by my co-workers about my religion. I said I was a Quaker and then I was asked what Quakers believe. I used a phrase I learned from Brian Drayton, a New Hampshire Quaker. I said that Quakers believe that the Kingdom is already here and we live in the Kingdom. Anyone who asked found that an acceptable answer although I don’t think that was understood in the way that I meant it.

It was easy to live the testimonies in Alabama. I settled in and learned a great deal. My overall contribution may have been that I demonstrated that there are white people who understand the problems and are supportive of change. More than once I was told, “You understand. You can talk to white people. They don’t listen to us.”

My work in Alabama extended beyond my involvement with Tuskegee University and the Tuskegee community. The US Air Force graduate school is in Montgomery, educating officers advancing to higher ranks. Every year, there are also several hundred foreign officers who are educated with US officers to support collaboration around the world. I started working with the program for foreign officers from Botswana, Tanzania, Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda, Burkina Faso, and Zambia. I did not know how to square that with the peace testimony.  As I got more involved, my dilemma worsened. I talked with a Quaker I knew in Montgomery, a war tax resister and activist. We decided that I was speaking truth to power, in the “belly of the beast,” as it were. I was demonstrating that there is a different way to be an American patriot. I did my best work undermining the Air Force doctrine of air power, supplementing for African officers a different approach, an African framework.

One of the Ugandan officers was a helicopter pilot and an attorney. The Ugandans have long fought the Lord’s Resistance Army, a Christian rebel group which sent armed child soldiers into action against Ugandan troops. He asked me to help him with the literature review for a paper he was writing, evaluating the ethical issues when faced with an armed child shooting to kill. I was witness to his distress, and by proxy, to the suffering faced by those who live in very difficult and complex situations around the world. 

I sometimes worked with a defense attorney who had a well-honed sense of justice, with righteous indignation about the injustices of the criminal justice system. I was an expert witness in federal court in a high-profile prisoner abuse case. My testimony gave the judge a rationale to reduce the mandatory minimum sentence of 20 years to four years.

I also went to an execution at the lawyer’s request, to evaluate the efficacy of the drug cocktail used to terminate the prisoner’s life. When I arrived at the maximum security prison, I was met in the parking lot by officers who greeted me, “Are you the witness?” I answered, “I am the witness.”  I was strip searched and then taken to the viewing room of the execution chamber.

Both the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Equal Justice Initiative are based in Montgomery. The Civil Rights Memorial Center is fronted by a Maya Lin sculpture. The sculpture includes the verse from Amos frequently cited by Martin Luther King, “until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” 

I returned from Alabama in 2019. I was very ill and spent 2020 so sick that my son returned home to take care of me. My daughter was deployed for much of 2020 and 2021, as a nurse supporting COVID care. I have been recovering slowly and learning to walk again. For three years, I have been asking myself, “What am I to do with the time I have been given?” It is still a question that I ask myself every day.

Ten years ago, I met another Damn Yankee, a career Air Force attorney from New Hampshire who was living in Montgomery. He wanted to write a book and needed help. We published Heartlessness of Dixie in 2016, documenting the conditions in Alabama which support racism. Things have not changed much since then.

I was the witness. I was there, in Alabama, to witness. Change occurs in our society when many people work to make that happen. It is important that we witness, name the injustices we see, and stand with those who are burdened by injustice. We witness and we show respect, over and over and over again. Until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.

At Durham Friends Meeting on November 19, 2023, Leslie Manning read this poem, “Taking Sides,” by Rabbi Irwin Keller, to open worship:

message given at Durham Friends Meeting, November 5, 2023

Dear Friends,   It is my privilege to bring the message this morning and my hopes are that it will bring blessing and closure in some manner to us this day, in this season of the drawing back of nature’s life force to be contained and conserved in the darkness, preparing for another season of growth in yet another time. I asked to bring the message today for two reasons. One, because there was an empty line on our calendar for message bringers, but more importantly  because this message has been growing inside of me for at least two years, perhaps even more.

I have captured little thoughts and inspirations from the life and lives we share as a corporate body and of course from my personal prayers, meditations and conversations with the invisible realms, with the angels and spiritual guides, with my relationship with God.

This message comes out now following our last Sunday’s Meeting for Grieving as a continuation of the deep need to honor and grieve all those we have said goodbye to over the last three years and also all that has been lost within our community as a result of the Corona virus pandemic.  I want to speak to all of this because our wounding from it is deep, and because it continues to reverberate throughout the present experience we share. I am mindful that not all has been lost, and there have been gains of new growth and adaptation throughout this period as well. BUT, I want in this moment  in time to give attention and voice, here and now, to what we have lost. To give voice to that which causes us to sorrow, here, in our small beloved community and beyond! Because our small, beloved community exists in the larger world and we recognize how our lives are affected by tragedies around us. That which we sorrow after is the physical, warm, flesh and blood and bone presence of our friends. Those who we sorrow over have vanished from our sight and we are filled with sadness while we continue to yearn for the, while we long for their presence among us. The spaces that they inhabited are now hollow……….. We no longer feel the comfort of their tenderness, or the joy of their laughter. We no longer bask in the light of their eyes and the music of their voices, each one’s unique and distinct personality and the vibrance  of their spirits. What makes these losses even more poignant is that they are not flesh and blood family members. They and we are a body of like- minded spirits who come together in relationship because we share in the common desire to seek after God, we come together to worship the Divine in all life and in each other , to lift one another into that light and to be led by that life and fullness. So, it is right and good that we suffer the absence of their warmth and companionship and shed our tears and feel the gnawing in our throats when their memories rise within us.

I personally grieve a lot of life that has been missed since we stopped meeting here in this holy space, our Meetinghouse. And I will say it again, how I ache over missing our connectivity by not gathering near to one another for two long years. My soul aches terribly when I think about the slow deaths of aged ones who in their isolation during the lockdown, were buried  by the weight of loneliness and lack of human touch. I grieve over the loss of our young families and the precious growing years of our youth, never to be recovered. And I grieve over the misunderstandings and hard and difficult differences among us that were only magnified when we couldn’t sit down with one another in attempts to work things through. I grieve the loss of normalcy and the strange, cold distancing that kept us afraid of one another getting close. I the reality and trauma of mask wearing, robbing us of seeing each other’s facial expressions and smiles, and I grieve that weddings and funerals and birthdays and graduations were not celebrated as is our custom in the life of our Meeting community. I grieve and regret the disruption of our lives together and many who are no longer with us.’ But,’ you might say, we survived and we came through and we and we and we……………………………………………. And that is true, but today’s message is not about survival, is not about adapting, it is not about how we came through. As I said at the beginning, this message is about loss. Let us allow one another to grieve our losses, pay them the attention they deserve, and then and only then, in the space that follows look to and acknowledge all that we have survived and how we have come through.

When my mother died eleven years ago, I remember the sense of losing the biggest part of myself, that beautiful woman who brought me into the world and was my anchor here spiritually and physically. Suddenly, she was gone, no more laughter and shared moments, no more going to the grocery store with her or for her, no more dinners and sleepovers and family gatherings, no more trips to PA, or Vermont or Ohio. She was just gone- and her leave taking ripped away at the very fabric of life and time and purpose. I remember feeling such terrible loneliness and raw sadness going into the grocery store, knowing that I was not shopping for her anymore. It would come over me and permeate my whole self, such that I would feel like a little lost girl and could not wait to get out of there.

And so, it is with each one of us, missing the people who have gone on and are no longer with us.  Who have gone with their precious human forms, leaving with a little portion of our souls that go with theirs.

And so, here we are, still here, with each other, figuring out the new dance steps with fewer dancers remaining. Like survivors of a shipwreck holding tight to the flotsam of debris left floating on the sea, holding on for dear life to one another.

It becomes even stronger then, our need for one another. Our need to pray with one another and for each other. To bear up patiently and with deep kindness, the understanding that we are all surviving the pain and the losses, the trauma of our collective suffering on a grand scale. And that we carry the burden of grief and sorrow together.

I want to close now with the words of an amazing soul who was a poet, philosopher and artist. Born in 1883 and who lived till 1931. Kahlil Gibran, who  many know, for his seminal work,” The Prophet. “  It is one of my favorite works of spiritual writing which as of this year is 100 years old. It is a collection of poems in which innumerable people have found in them an expression of the deepest impulses of man’s heart and mind.

So I end this message with Gibran’s poem called, “On Joy and Sorrow”

Then a woman said, Speak to us of Joy and Sorrow.

And he answered:

Your joy is you sorrow unmasked.  And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.

And how else can it be?

The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain. Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven? And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, made by the carver’s knife?

When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful, look again in your heart, and you shall see that you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

Some of you say, “Joy is greater than sorrow,” and others say, “Nay, sorrow is the greater.” But I say unto you that they are inseparable. Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.

Verily you are suspended like scales between your sorrow and your joy. Only when you are empty are you at standstill and balanced.

When the treasure-keeper lifts you to weigh his gold and his silver, needs must your joy or your sorrow rise or fall.

[Or, We’re Slipping Again into a Time of Religious War]

Message given at Durham Friends Meeting, November 12, 2023

It is tolerance that is on my mind this morning.  Tolerance isn’t one of the Testimonies of Friends, and perhaps it should not be so considered, but still it has an importance for Friends. 

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all of us agreed about everything?  Wouldn’t that be splendid – a harmony.  A peace, you might say.  I don’t mean we’d all agree about the little things, like which flavor of ice cream is best, or whether the Patriots are our favorite team. 

I mean wouldn’t it be great if we all agreed about the big questions like what is the proper name of God, or how should God be worshipped or what is sinful in the eyes of God and what is not.  Wouldn’t agreement on those matters be heavenly?  Surely in heaven there is nothing but agreement. 

Or would it?  Maybe you can think of some reasons this might not be so good.  Maybe you can think of reasons this would be hard to achieve without conflict or violence.  Humans can find it hard to agree with one another; that seems to be just the way we are.  Sometimes people try to force others to believe what they believe, to achieve that uniform harmony of belief.  And that conflict can be painful.  It can become religious war – war to achieve heaven on earth.    

Today, I’ve been thinking we are slipping again into a time of religious war – or something very like it.  Conflict, yes, but “religious”?  Is that the right word?  That may strike you as an odd thing to say.  In the United States many fewer people consider themselves religious than just a few decades ago.  The same is true in Europe and in much of Asia and Latin America. 

Nevertheless, around the world we have religious wars between Jews and Muslims.  Think about what’s happening in Gaza.  And we have religious wars between Shia and Sunni within Islam.  Think of the long struggles between Iran and Saudi Arabia for dominance in the world of Islam – struggles in which we are constantly being caught up.  These conflicts are heartbreaking. 

But I’m also finding myself thinking there is a possibility of religious war here in the United States.  Some of this mirrors those global conflicts, but more to the point it involves conflicts among Christians, and between some Christians and others who do not consider themselves religious at all. 

1648.  That’s a date I don’t imagine many of you ever think about.  It’s the year the great religious wars in Europe ended.  It was the conclusion of what we came to call the Thirty Years War, but it was really a war that lasted longer than that.

The Thirty Years War was a long, extremely bloody struggle to decide what was the one true religion – the one, true religion that everyone should believe and practice – to achieve that universal agreement bon big questions.  It was largely between Roman Catholics and Protestants, though sometimes also between different kinds of Protestants.  Each side tried to impose its understanding of the one true religion on everyone else.  Our understanding of sin.  Our understanding of baptism and communion.  Our understanding of marriage. 

This was an appalling war.  The International Red Cross estimates that between 4 and 12 million people lost their lives from combat, or from resulting disease or famine.  Perhaps 20% of the population of Europe died. 

The Thirty Years War ended in a stalemate, a very bloody stalemate.  Exhausted and appalled at the carnage, the various kings and princes and Dukes of Europe agreed that each country would have whatever religion its king or prince or duke decided, and that the various countries would no longer try to impose their religion on others.  These wars ended in 1648 with the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia. 

This wasn’t yet religious liberty as we know it today – the kind of religious liberty that we celebrate in the First Amendment.  After 1648 Kings could still impose the one true religion on those in their own country.  And they did. But they agreed not to try to impose across national borders. 

Nevertheless, it wasn’t many decades before countries began to agree that there wouldn’t be religious war within their own boundaries.  They began to agree that each person could worship God as he or she saw fit (or not worship at all).  They began to agree that governments wouldn’t say this is the right way, the only way allowed.  It wasn’t so far and so long from The Thirty Years War to the First Amendment, from the one true religion to religious liberty. 

Aren’t I talking politics here in Meeting?  Yes, but I’m also talking religion.  The beginnings of Quakerism are deeply connected to this search for religious liberty.  Remember we’re the religious group without a creed, without an authoritative statement of belief.  We’re a religious group whose beliefs and practices disturbed many people. 

Let’s come back to 1648, the Treaty of Westphalia.  It was just four years after that date that George Fox climbed Pendle Hill and had his epiphany: Christ would speak to him if he stilled himself to listen.  And that very same year Fox preached to over a thousand people at Firbank Fell beginning the movement we call Quakerism. 

The beliefs and practices of Quakers were deeply offensive to the leaders of the Church of England.  I think we can lose track of that.  Fox was imprisoned and more than once.  Dozens, hundreds of other Quakers were imprisoned.  Some died.  Why?  Because Quakers wouldn’t go the local Church of England church.  They wouldn’t take off their hats to nobility.  They used “thee and thou” with everyone.  They believed they didn’t need priests.  They wouldn’t swear oaths.  They wouldn’t recite the creeds of the Church of England.  They wouldn’t fight in wars.  They allowed women to preach.  All these upset people in the established church. 

In those first decades of Quakerism, it was perilous to be a Quaker.  It took secrecy or courage – or both.  Not until the Petition of Right, in 1685, was there even a modest measure of individual religious liberty in Britain.    

We all know the stories of people coming to the American colonies for religious liberty.  Often, however, they created communities where there was one true religion, their own, and they persecuted others.  In 1660, Mary Dyer was hanged in Boston, in Massachusetts Bay Colony, for repeatedly defying a Puritan law banning Quakers from the colony.

We might think those days are long in our past.  After all I’ve mostly been talking about the 17^th century.  But here in the 21^st century, some of our most difficult conflicts involve abortion, sexual orientation and gender identity, and attitudes toward those with different religious beliefs, Muslims or Jews or Sikhs.  We’ve come to call these “social issues,” but they are very much like religious ones.  They involve beliefs about “the right way to live.” These are conflicts fueled by strong beliefs about what is sinful and what is not:  like abortion, like sexual identity.  I fear we are slipping back into a time of religious war. 

We often talk about the religious freedom part of the 1^st Amendment to the Constitution as “Separation of church and state.”  Those aren’t the words of the Amendment, though.  The Amendment really has two parts.  It says there shall be “no establishment of religion.” That means no official church.  No one is compelled to have any particular beliefs or practices, and no church is given special status.

And the Amendment also says (this is the second part) that there shall be “no prohibiting the free exercise of religion.”  That means each person can have whatever beliefs they choose or use whatever worship practices they choose. 

“No establishment of religion” and “free exercise”.  Those two principals have defined what religious freedom has meant in the United States since our founding.  They are bookends.  And they are simple, aren’t they?  No, not really.  Both principles are open to a good deal of interpretation.  And we are finding ourselves again in a time when the current interpretations are being challenged. 

“Tolerance” is another way to talk about these two principles.  ‘You go your way and I’ll go mine.’  ‘You worship as you please and I’ll worship as I please.’  We can try to persuade one another, but we won’t try to coerce others into sharing our beliefs or our practices.  It’s a way to avoid conflict over deep beliefs.  “Tolerance” is a basis for living together with people with whom we disagree – with whom we disagree about the most important matters. 

“Tolerance” is a good thing, or so we’ve long thought.  Quakers have valued it because tolerance has allowed us to have our unusual practices without being thrown in jail.

We should recognize, however, that “tolerance” is a second-best solution.  Wouldn’t it be better if we all agreed?  Wouldn’t it be better if we all shared the same beliefs and practices?  Wouldn’t that be best?  I think we’d all rather live in harmony with people in a situation where no one did things that horrified or disgusted anyone else.  But is we cannot have that, tolerance is second best, and the best humans can achieve. 

Such harmony can be hard to achieve.  We found that out in the 17^th century in a very deadly, bloody war.  And it seems like some people are aching again for that first best solution: everyone agrees, and we use the law and coercion to insist that everyone agrees. 

Nevertheless, if we want everyone to agree, the only way to achieve that is likely through coercion, conflict and war.  Think about that when you hear someone say this or that is the only right way to live, or you hear someone say that this or that practice should be outlawed.  Think about that when you hear someone speak of the U.S. as “a Christian nation,” and men by that their own particular brand of Christianity. 

If we don’t want that, if we don’t want religious war, tolerance is the way to live together.  We’ve been here before.  Tolerance doesn’t mean we give up having our beliefs and our practices.  It simply means we give up trying to coerce others to follow our beliefs or our practices.  We can try to persuade people, but not coerce them.

As William Penn says, ““Let us then try what love can do to mend a broken world.”

Also posted on Riverview Friend

At worship on October 29, Tess Hartford read the following, from French priest Teilhard de Chardin:

When the signs of age begin to mark my body

(and still more when they touch my mind)

when the ill that is to diminish me or carry me 

 off strikes from without

or is born within me:

when the painful moment comes in which I 

 suddenly waken

to the fact that I am ill or growing old;

and above all at the last moment

when I feel that I am losing hold of myself

and am absolutely passive in the hands

of the great unknown forces that have formed me;

in all those dark moments, O God,

grant that I may understand that it is you

(provided only my faith is strong enough)

who are painfully parting the fibers of my being

in order to penetrate to the very marrow of my 

 substance

and bear me away within yourself.

   —Teilhard de Chardin

Message given at Durham Friends Meeting, October 15, 2023

Craig Freshley began his message by reading the latest version of a prayer he has been writing and rewriting for several years.

Creator,

Thank you for making the universe.
Thank you for making me a part of it.
Thank you for providing me with all that I need, and more.

You are the light upon me,
the heat within me,
and the time that carries me along.

I want to see straight and stand true,
notice miracles all around me,
always ready to receive, give, and forgive.

Help me detach from expectations.
Help me like me.
Help me do what’s light.

Here is a recording of the whole message — what he said about this prayer.

At Durham Friends Meeting on October 8, 2023, Ingrid Chalufour read Walking Together, a book the Meeting is distributing to teachers participating in our Social Justice Project. The book tells of the blessings that come from “walking together in a good way.”

ELDER DR. ALBERT D. MARSHALL is from the Moose Clan of the Mi’kmaw Nation, Eskasoni First Nation in Unama’ki-Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. A fluent speaker of Mi’kmaw, he has brought forth the concept of Etuaptmumk / Two-Eyed Seeing which honors the strengths of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous knowledges and ways of knowing for the benefit of all.

LOUISE ZIMANYI, who is of French-Canadian and Hungarian descent, lives as a guest in Tkaronto/Toronto, Treaty 13 territory. As a professor and researcher, she is co-learning from and with the Land and wise teachers, co-transforming early childhood pedagogy and practice.

EMILY KEWAGESHIG is an Anishnaabe artist and visual storyteller whose work captures the interconnection of life forms using both traditional and contemporary materials and methods. She creates artwork that highlights Indigenous knowledge and culture. Emily is from Saugeen First Nation in Ontario, Canada.