A message for the Durham, ME Quaker meeting, April 19, 20

Thank you for inviting me to bring a message.

My name is Lori Milner. I live in Chelsea, I attend UUCC, the Unitarian
Universalist Community Church in Augusta, and I know Leslie Manning
from our mutual affiliation with the Chaplaincy Institute of Maine, or ChIME.
I’m honored to be here with you today.

Earth Day is this week, but for those who love the Earth and are concerned
about her health, every day is Earth Day.

My opening words are those from Wendell Berry, “The Peace of Wild Things”

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

In the midst of the human-created chaos that is the daily news cycle, I
often look out my window or go outside. Even in the midst of our concerns
about climate change, the sun still rises and sets; the moon shows her
lovely face, shining in my windows at night. The stars are brilliant,
especially in crisp cold air. The trees are standing tall, patiently waiting for
the changing of seasons and their leaves to bud and unfurl. Birds are
singing. Grass will grow, and I will have to mow it. Over and over. I live on a
road that ends in Butternut Park, across from Hallowell. My dog, Sarayu,
and I walk down the hill to the park and the Kennebec River. The geese
and ducks are back. An eagle soars overhead, coming in to rest in the top
of the pine tree where the nest is waiting for eggs. The Maine sky is the
blue of Mother Mary’s robe. I’m finding solace and refuge in the natural
world.

Now, I’m not your typical outdoorsy person. I don’t like going barefoot. I’m
afraid of ticks and I had a nice run-in with brown tail moth rash the first
summer after I moved back to Maine. Welcome home. I like the sun, but
when it’s out, you’ll find me in the shade. I’ll go in the water, but I wear
swim shoes. I don’t like getting rained on. I hate sweating! Yet, here I am,
about to begin a practice of wandering in the outdoors, engaging in sacred
interaction with the natural world surrounding me. Not to use the Earth and
nature to make me feel better, but to get to know and love Creation in a
reciprocal way that is new for me. And I’ll be inviting others to do it with
me, as I am starting a wild church in the Augusta area.

In her book Church of the Wild, How Nature Invites Us into the Sacred,
Victoria Loorz shares her story of falling in love with the natural world
outside her door. Restoring relationship and entering into conversation
with the more than human parts of creation, taking her pastoral ministry
from indoor churches into the holy wild, with respect and reciprocity.

Some definitions:
Wild: not out of control, but pertains to the natural world itself, not tamed
or domesticated.
Church: an opportunity for intentional connection with the sacred through
nature.

The heart of a wild church gathering is the invitation to wander in the area
with a sense of wonder and curiosity. See if something calls to you, that is,
it catches your attention. Or it may not be one thing, but the entire scenery
around you that draws you into relationship with All That Is. “Sauntering is
an ancient spiritual practice of slowly and reverently wandering through
nature, open to the possibility of an encounter with a particular place, wild
being, and the unknown.” (Field Guide to Church of the Wild, pg 102.)
Sixteenth century mystic St. John of the Cross wrote about his sauntering
(Field Guide, pg 103):

I was sad one day and went for a walk;
I sat in a field.
A rabbit noticed my condition and came near.
It often does not take more than that to help at times – to just be close to
creatures who are so full of knowing,
so full of love that they don’t – chat,
they just gaze with their marvelous understanding.

In the book of Job 12:7-8 in The Message translation it says:
Ask the animals what they think – let them teach you:
let the birds tell you what’s going on.
Put your ear to the earth – learn the basics.
Listen – the fish in the ocean will tell you their stories.
So today I would like to invite you into a saunter, a “wander and wonder”
time. We won’t be going outside, but as you came in, each of you was
offered a pine cone. Is there anyone who didn’t get one?

I suspect you all are masters at sitting in silence, listening for the voice of
Spirit. And I think that will happen later in the service. For now I want to
invite you into a little different experience of listening to Spirit. This is an
invitation to engage with your pine cone, hold it with curiosity, see if it has
something to tell you about itself, or the Creator and/or Creation. We will
take five minutes to listen, and then offer the opportunity for a few minutes
of sharing.

There are pens and paper available if anyone wants to journal. I’ll keep
time for us.

[Pause]

Would anyone like to share what you heard, or what this was like for you?

My final invitation is to come forward if you like, and place your pine cone
somewhere on the mandala. If you want to keep your cone, feel free to
take another from the basket and place it.

I thank you for your time. Blessings to all of you

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.”

Message given at Durham Friends Meeting, March 8, 2026

Fair warning:  it is words that that I have been thinking about, and some of you know how fond I am of words.  I have been thinking about how some words help us with spiritual matters, and some are less helpful.  I’ve been thinking about useful language for the inward landscape, to draw on the title of one of my favorite Quaker books.[1]

Psalm 117 Praise the Lord, all nations!
Extol him, all peoples!
² For great is his steadfast love toward us;
    and the faithfulness of the Lord endures forever.
Praise the Lord!  (RSV)

That’s Psalm 117.  It is the shortest of the Psalms, and often used as a call to worship.  It seems like a good way to begin what I have to say, today.

Here is what is on my mind today:  what do these times call us to do?  Of course we all have our ordinary lives: work, children, spouses, grocery shopping, laundry.  But that’s not what I’m thinking about.  I’m thinking about the overwhelming national crisis in which we find ourselves: immigration cruelty; illegal tariffs; Iran and Venezuela and Cuba; election fixing; corruption; politicization of the judicial system; tyranny.  I know I’m drifting into political topics, maybe crashing into political topics, but sometimes, we can’t live our ordinary, personal lives without finding ourselves, at every turn, facing political matters.  “The personal is the political.”  Are you old enough to remember that phrase?[2]

For me it is like being lost in a thick cloud.  It’s hard to see; hard to know which direction is forward; hard to know what is mine to do.  Unusually hard.  I find myself looking for guidance from people and from organizations I trust. How do we face this?  What should be our posture in getting through this, or, better, in resisting?  Our posture.

I recently picked up an American Friends Service Committee newsletter.  It used the word “perseverance” to tie together its initiatives on behalf of justice and peace in these trying times.  AFSC is calling itself – and calling us – to persevere. To endure.  It calls us to stay the course, to be strong, not to be dismayed or discouraged by the wrecking ball that the current administration is taking to policies and alliances, to principles and values.  A few days later the same message came from QUNO – the Quaker United Nations Office. 

“Perseverant;” there’s a posture. “Perseverant” is one of those words that came over to English from French after the Norman conquest.  Its first uses in English seem to be from the 14^th century, and it has Latin roots.  To my ear, it’s a bit of an old-fashioned word, one more commonly used a century ago than today.  Maybe that’s the point: it’s a call to stick with the course we were on before this crisis, pursuing equality, justice, democracy, rule of law, and peaceful relations among nations. 

Just a day or so later I picked up a recent report from the Friends Committee on National Legislation.  They used a different word to tie together a host of their initiatives regarding the current crisis: “Resilient.”  Resilience means “the act of rebounding or springing back,” or “the capacity to withstand or to recover quickly from difficulties.”  It is a word that comes into English from Latin in the 17^th century, but its usage was relatively rare and largely technical until very recently — about 25 years ago.  Then it quickly came to be an organizing concept for ecology and the environment, and its use then rapidly widened to comprehend the ability of persons and communities also to bounce back from adversity. 

“Perseverant,” “Resilient”:  Both words encourage us to be strong.  “Perseverance” reminds us this is likely to be  a prolonged struggle and urges us to stay the course.  “Resilience” reminds us we’re likely to have some setbacks and we’ll need to pick ourselves up and keep going.  Still, I think AFSC and FCNL are telling us pretty much the same thing.  We need to stand tall, to be strong; we must not be discouraged, we need to bounce back.  That is are the guidance we are hearing from them.  It is useful guidance I think we can agree: these are rallying words. 

Bear with me here.  Those two words, “perseverance” and “resilience” took to me to a book I regularly consult when I’m following a spiritual line of thought or a spiritual wondering.  It’s a Concordance.   A Concordance is a guide to finding words in the Bible, what they are and where. If I want to know where the word “river” shows up in the Bible, for example, or the word “grace,” I can look it up in a Concordance and find all the verses that use that word.  I have an old King James Version of the Bible published in the late 19^th century, and in the back, it has a Concordance.  The granddaddy Concordance is Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible.  It was first prepared in the 19^th century and regularly updated since; it’s a bigger, contemporary, scholarly Concordance. 

Of course this is a little tricky.  The Bible as we know it was written in Hebrew, in Aramaic (those are the languages of the Jewish Testament) and in Koine Greek (the language of the Christian Testament).  But we use the Bible in translation, in English.  So every time there’s a new translation, there needs to be a new Concordance.  The new version likely translates some of the words differently than earlier ones. 

Still with me?  Here’s the thing: “perseverance” and “resilience” – those words — do not show up in the Bible, not in any of the translations we are likely to use.[3]  The various Concordances don’t contain those words.  These words, perseverance and resilience, however useful, are not Biblical words.  Is that odd?  Are those the words we should be using to find our posture in resisting, in seeking justice?

Put another way: does the Bible have different guidance for us?  Are the words it would have us use different?  Well, yes, and no, and that’s what’s on my mind today. 

There is a phrase in the Bible – it appears dozens (maybe hundreds) of times — that says something akin to what AFSC and FCNL are saying:  “Fear not.” 

For example, here is Isaiah 41:10: “Fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.” 

Here is Jesus, in Luke 12:32:  “Fear not, little flock; for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” 

In these passages (and many others) God isn’t saying ‘lie back, do nothing, I’ll take care of it.’  Rather, God is telling us we may have work to do; we may have to put our backs into it, but God will be with us, always.  That’s why we do not have to be afraid.  “Perseverance” and “Resilience” put the emphasis on what we humans have to do; “Fear not” puts the emphasis on ‘God with us’ as we do what needs doing.  It brings God back in.  I think that’s an important shift of focus, a different posture. 

There is another word that also is used frequently in the Bible that helps us see the same thing. It is the word “steadfast.” Steadfast means “unshakable, resolute; firm and fixed in purpose.”  It’s a very old English word.  It’s another “strength” word, like perseverant and resilient.  Many of the Biblical uses of “steadfast” are in the Old Testament – and many of those occasions are in the Psalms, so they are in Hebrew.  The Hebrew word by the way is “hesed.” 

But here’s the thing.  When “steadfast” shows up in the Bible, it is not to describe what we are like, or what we should be like or what our posture should be. Rather, “steadfast” is used as an assurance of what God is like.  And what God is like is strength wrapped around love.  The word points to God’s unwavering, loyal, covenant love. There is strength in that.  It points to God’s mercy, and kindness; “steadfast” is a combination of love, loyalty, and generosity.  Such steadfast love is not passive; it is love in action.  It is the strongest force there is.

The Bible assures us that God’s love is steadfast.  And it calls us to rise to God’s love with a steadfast faith.  Yes, we must be strong – perseverant and resilient.  Yes, we must “fear not.”  But we need to do this in the embrace of God’s steadfast love – and let that be our guide. 

“Steadfast” is used in the short Psalm I read at the beginning:  Psalm 117: 

² For great is his steadfast love toward us;
    and the faithfulness of the Lord endures forever.

Having started with the 117^th Psalm, let me close with these words from the 130^th Psalm:

Psalm 130 …⁷ O Israel, hope in the Lord!
    For with the Lord there is steadfast love,
    and with him is plenteous redemption.
⁸ And he will redeem Israel
    from all his iniquities.  (RSV)

“Steadfast” is a word for the inward landscape.  Relying on a steadfast God, let us, too, be steadfast. 

Also posted on River View Friend

[1] Brian Drayton and William P. Taber, Jr., A Language for the Inward Landscape: Spiritual Wisdom from the Quaker Movement (Philadelphia: Tract Association of Friends, 2015). 

[2] “Feminist and writer Carol Hanisch’s essay titled ‘The Personal is Political’ appeared in the anthology Notes From the Second Year: Women’s Liberation in 1970, and is often credited with creating the phrase. However, in her introduction to the 2006 republication of the essay, Hanisch wrote that she did not come up with the title. She believed “The Personal Is Political” was selected by the editors of the anthology, Shulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt, who were both feminists involved with the group New York Radical Feminists. Some feminist scholars have noted that by the time the anthology was published in 1970, “the personal is political” had already become a widely used part of the women’s movement and was not a quote attributable to any one person.”  https://www.thoughtco.com/the-personal-is-political-slogan-origin-3528952

[3] Actually, Ephesians 6:18 in the KJV does use “perseverance”:  ¹⁸ Praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, and watching thereunto with all perseverance and supplication for all saints;…”

For the February 15, 2026 message at Durham Friends Meeting, Craig Freshley presented a new version of the prayer he has written and re-written, uses regularly in his life.

He asked, What is your prayer? You can hear the entire message HERE.