Message given at Durham Friends Meeting, March 15, 2026

Thank you for inviting me to bring a message.  I think I have brought a message to Durham each year since we moved to Maine six years ago.  I look forward to being with you and am so grateful for the opportunity to expand upon and share the conversations I’ve been having with the Eternal with you.

A lesson I’ve learned from Kirenia Criado Perez, Pastor of Havana Meeting, is that context matters when talking about witness, ministry, the testimonies, being faithful.  I want to start by providing a bit of context for this message.

This message began in conversation with a Friend from Portland, who was talking about the frustration of recognizing that their expectations of worship were not shared by all who came to meeting.  And that sometimes made coming to meeting hard.

In that conversation I shared the following quote from Ben Yousua Davis as a partial answer to the question of why I come to meeting.

“As people of faith, our goal is not to cultivate our imagination in a general sense, but rather [to cultivate] a very specific type of imagination as we align our vision with God’s imagination for the world; and as we learn to hold that sacred frame in conversation (and sometimes in conflict) with the competing imaginations that surround us. The Christian imagination is fundamentally a weird one: with unusual beliefs about sharing all things in common and loving our enemies and the power of prayer and of being God’s body in the world. In covenanted spaces, we learn to practice our imagination together through seasons of discovery and arduous awkwardness until the imagination that we artificially practiced finally becomes our own.”
— Ben Yousua Davis  

I come to meeting to be together, to listen together and to experience Spirit, the Light, God together.  I come prepared to imagine – to align our imagination for the world with God’s vision, prepared to practice this ‘fundamentally weird’ vision together in covenanted space until it becomes our own, and then to carry this imagination back into the world. This last part is important.  I come to strengthen my commitment to this vision of the true nature of the world and live into it.  To live into it in a world where experience confirms the competing imagination that all are not equally valued and worthy, that there is not enough for all, and that violence and power work. I come to meeting to be part of a community that is radically counter-cultural.

Another thread that has been informing my spiritual life recently has been Walter Brueggemann’s book The Prophetic Imagination. Last week at Portland I facilitated a conversation focused on his understanding of prophetic ministry as something rooted in “Prophetic Imagination”.  He talks of a The task of a prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture that surrounds us. [To] energize persons and communities to live in the fervent anticipation of the newness that God has promised and will surely give.”  Quakers are a prophetic faith community – we expect to encounter the divine directly and to make it visible in the world. That is what is what “prophetic” means.  It seems clear that Brueggemann and Davis are both calling us to this ministry based on imagination.

But how do we do this?

How do we practice committing to a vision when our experiences often tell us that this is not the way things truly are? When what we experience here, in this covenanted space, is in conflict with the imaginations that surround us and with our own experience when we are not at meeting.

I have a story to share about practicing a fundamentally weird imagination that I think, perhaps, suggests a piece of an answer to this question:

Over Christmas we spent eight days with our grandchildren, and my 7-year-old grandson’s passion was playing “cars”.  The cars were a set of 4 trucks and 2 helicopters which were a firefighting team.  Every day for 8 days, we would play each morning and each afternoon enacting the story he was creating. First, we put out all the forest fires, then we sang songs around a campfire, we had a firemen’s’ ball, and then a fire dog from Venus arrived.  The dog was cold because Earth was colder than Venus, and the dog sucked all the warmth from the campfire and put it out, and then from everyone’s campfires and furnaces.  We solved the problem, we thought, by digging a hole to the molten core of the earth and throwing the fire dog into the core, trusting it would be warm enough.  But it sucked all the heat out of the core, the core solidified and the earth’s rotation began to slow down.  We extracted the dog and had to start a fire in the core again – but we were a firefighting team, we put fires out, we didn’t start fires. We thought we didn’t know how to start a fire.  However, our equipment truck shared that it had a lighter which it had kept secret from us.  So we could restart the fire in the Earth’s core, and we did.  But trust in the team was shattered as there had been secrets kept. We totally committed to this weird imagination and we practiced it.  We felt the angst of the lost trust and struggled to repair it. Even when not playing the game, we talked about it.  It was a powerful and real as our daily experience. On a phone call two weeks ago, when I asked permission to share this story, my grandson leaped back into the story and the struggle with the dog from Venus.

When I come to meeting I feel encouraged to let go of the mature, practical, realistic adult perspective, and find a way to imagine as freely and as wildly as my 7 year old grandson is able. To let go of what is realistic and embrace what is imaginable.  To imagine and believe in “sharing all things in common, loving our enemies, the power of prayer and of being God’s body in the world.”