"Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls; all your waves and breakers have swept over me."  Psalm 42:7.

I have had several conversations recently with Friends who are longing for deep worship.  In my experience, deep worship is a rare and powerful thing, impossible to fake. It is a gift from God, which can be nurtured by Friends who live deeply in the Spirit, but is not something you can manufacture.

Many Friends say that they want deep worship, but we are not always good at saying what that means.  For me, it is a corporate experience of the presence of the living God―a time of worship that is so drenched in the Spirit that everyone can feel it and we are all changed by the experience.  

I have most often experienced deep worship in silence, but unprogrammed Friends do not have the monopoly on it.  Sometimes the singing, prayer, and prepared messages in semi-programmed or programmed meetings for worship bring all of our hearts together so that we can better listen to the voice of God out of the silence.

Expecting to have deep worship every week at meeting may lead to disappointment, but we can always hope for it.  Here are a few of the things I have learned that can encourage deeper worship:

• Keeping a daily spiritual practice.  There are many spiritual practices and it is important to find the right one for you―one that you can do on a regular basis.  Spiritual practices keep the embers of worship alive throughout the week.

• Worshiping regularly with others who are seeking the same depth of worship.  In the School of the Spirit residencies, we spent an hour each morning in worship together.  On the first day, the worship was good, but could be a little superficial.  By the fourth or fifth day, the worship was deep and rich.

• Coming to worship with the expectation that you will hear from God.  In our meetings, God speaks through us, directly and through the vocal ministry of other Friends.  We must prepare for that possibility each time we gather together and know that we may be changed by it.

Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre has launched its augural young adult leadership programme, beginning this summer. The course is designed to develop young people’s leadership skills and authority within Quakerism and wider society. It is also a chance for Young Friends to feel confident about themselves and, especially for those who have been convinced rather than growing up in a Quaker meeting, it is an opportunity to absorb some of the ‘being Quaker’ elements that are often left untaught in meetings.

“The course will give young people a chance to reflect on what it means to be a Quaker today”, explains Michael Eccles, a member of Woodbrooke’s tutor team who also provides support for Quaker Peace & Social Witness placement programmes. “We will look at Quaker history, processes, decisions and concepts such as clearness, concerns, testimonies and what it means to follow a leading.” Woodbrooke is well placed to run this course as they have the UK’s only team of permanent Quaker tutors: in Quaker Studies, Biblical Studies, Practical Theology and Peace and Social Justice.

Michael adds: “It is a great opportunity for young Friends to think about faith and how it affects how you live your life. There will also be training in workplace skills such as marketing, budgeting and report writing.” Importantly, the group will be building a learning community among themselves and will have online facilities to help the stay in touch.

By being a participant on the course each person qualifies for substantial discounts for three other Woodbrooke courses of their choice.

As well as face to face sessions and online learning, every participant will have a personal tutor from Woodbrooke and will be encouraged to bring a project to develop on the course, whether it will be to do with Quaker service, committee participation, or writing a business plan. The idea is fairly open and it is intended to be something that the person might have been doing anyway but will explore now in a more mindful way.

The programme lasts for 12 months and begins with a 10-day residential at Woodbrooke, has a weekend away part way through and finishes with a week-long stay at Woodbrooke, during which the graduates can participate in leading on the initial course for the following year’s intake.

Participants should be aged 19-28 and consider themselves to be a Quaker – so formal membership is not a necessity. Although designed primarily for those within Britain Yearly Meeting, applications are welcomed from anyone across the Europe and Middle East Section of Friends World Committee for Consultation.

The programme costs £1,450 but no one should be put off by the cost as bursaries are available. It is hoped that organisations such as Local and Area Meetings will support participants from their meetings to take part. The first course begins on 5/8/2012.

Meetings and individuals interested in participating should contact Michael Eccles on 0121 415 6760 or email michael.eccles@woodbrooke.org.uk, follow YAFsWoodbrooke on twitter and join Young Adults at Woodbrooke on facebook.

Photo: Andrew Rendle

We are hard-wired to protect ourselves when we’re threatened. The environmental movement often invokes this reality in its appeals to care for the earth, claiming that, since we and the earth’s other creatures and processes are all interconnected, we protect ourselves when we protect the environment. This is especially true regarding climate change.

This sounds good and it is sound ecological science. But for most of us in the West, at least, this idea is what Friends used to call a ‘notion’—just an idea that has only very shallow roots in our actual experience. Even for those of us who have had profound spiritual experience of the natural world, these experiences tend to be isolated events that struggle to remain vivid in the face of modern life’s overwhelming alienation from a sense of relationship with the ecosystems we depend upon. And our communities—our meetings—only very rarely have had collective, land-based religious experience. Why? Some claim religion—Christianity, to be specific—is the reason.

In 1967, medieval technology historian Lynn White published a landmark article in Science magazine, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis” (Science, 3-10-67; vol. 155, no. 3767). In it, he blamed Christianity for our ecological crisis. Many have found fault with aspects of his argument, but its central thrust has the ring of truth: by desacralizing creation, by denying the presence of spirit in nature and locating spirit elsewhere and elsewhen instead, Christianity has abstracted the human from the natural world and removed the spiritual impulse to care for the creatures and processes that are our ecological relations.

This stands in stark contrast to the indigenous peoples of the world, for whom religion is defined by place, by spiritual practices that build relationships between communities and their landbases. These practices deeply involve, not just the sustenance patterns, the creatures and processes that their local ecosystems require for sustainable preindustrial civilization, but also the social, political, psychic, and religious lives of the community and its individuals. For these communities, spirit not only dwells in the heart of the natural world but also communicates directly with the human, through visions and other shamanic practices employed not just by their medicine people but by everyone in the community. The faith of the animist worldview and the practice of shamanic religion and spirituality guided indigenous peoples in ‘lifestyles’ that remained remarkably ecologically sustainable for centuries before contact with ‘civilized’ peoples.

I would take this argument a few steps further. Christianity is both a ‘cosmic’ and a universal religion. It speaks of ‘earth’ and ‘creation’ rather than the local landbases and ecosystems of its communities. And it claims to be spiritually relevant and valuable (if not spiritually necessary) for all peoples in all times in all places. Religious practice is virtually the same everywhere and through the centuries, with very little change (at least within any one tradition). Most importantly, our religious practices have nothing to do with where we live. We have almost no religious culture of place.

Christianity’s focus on Jesus Christ as the primary god of our religious attention and on his atonement for sin on the cross as God’s primary function has tended to devalue Jesus’ Father and the Father’s role as creator rather than judge. Furthermore, Christianity actually inverts the moral view of creation that prevails in animist and preindustrial and aboriginal spiritways: far from being sacred, creation is anti-sacred, even evil. Christianity views creation as the stage upon which the drama of sin, judgment and salvation plays, yes, but creation is not a morally inert ‘environment’; it actually shares in the sinfulness that lies at the heart of the drama. Nature is not just a stage upon which the salvation story plays; it is a character in that story. Sin came from a fruit, an animal, and a woman, after all.

Furthermore, from the cosmic battle between Yahweh and Baal in ancient Canaan through the conversion of the pagan peoples of Europe and the Western Hemisphere to the witch burnings in the Middle Ages to the war against ‘New Age Spirituality’ today, people who have felt drawn back to concrete spiritual relation to the land have often suffered violent persecution for answering that call.

Quakerism has spiritualized religion even further, doing away with all the religious practices that call to the senses: no music, no incense, no genuflections or sacred bodily movement, no art, no food. Most importantly, perhaps, we’ve done away with the two outward practices that could actually serve as channels back into relation with our landbases, baptism and the Eucharist. To be fair, these land-based sacraments don’t reconnect worshipping Christian communities to their landbases, anyway: how many parishes know where their baptismal water comes from or how it’s treated, let alone use rivers or lakes for baptism? How many know where the grapes for their wine are grown or whether the workers in those vineyards breathe and touch pesticides for a living, let alone make their own wine? But they could know and do these things if they chose. We Quakers can’t.

So how do Friends find their way back to the ‘earth’ if not to their local landbases? We have precedents: Fox and his days and years walking about England outdoors, his very localized visions and the way they opened the ‘virtues of the creatures’ to him; Woolman and his earthy compassion for the creatures around him. But naturally, inevitably, perhaps, we Quakers are drawn outside our tradition for meaningful ways to connect spiritually with our landbases.

The Quaker Pagans (Quagans) are trying. I haven’t followed this movement, so I don’t really know what they’re up to. But I was very close to some Wiccans for a while, some of them Friends, and the neo-pagans I’ve known have not found a way to get free of their European psycho-religious background. They are still attached to European gods and goddesses, for one thing. And what role would Demeter, for instance, have in a North American land-based spirituality? She’s the goddess of wheat, and we’ve used wheat as the standard bearer for European agro-imperialism on this continent: we have  ‘ethnically cleansed’ the indigenous grasses of North America, especially of the Great Plains, and almost wiped out the indigenous strains of maize, the primary grain of indigenous North America, and we’ve imported European grains instead. More catastrophically for the health of the continent, we have also imported European cattle culture, when the continent once teemed with its own indigenous ungulates. The European deities who embody the spiritual power of European sustenance patterns are no less ‘invasive species’ than the plants and animals these European patterns cultivate.

So also with the popular members of the culture-hero pantheons we’ve inherited from our Indo-European ancestors: the king-smith-warrior-herald (etc.) paradigm that has given us Zeus, Hephaestos, Thor, Hermes, etc. These gods reinforce the socio-political power dynamics of ancient monarchical Europe. Is that what we as Friends want to embrace?

Of course, most neo-pagans (and Quagans?) are women and they have gravitated toward the goddesses—Gaia, Persephone, Isis, Astarte, Innana, even Lilith—all Old World Powers who have nothing to do with New World ecosystems. And goddess-oriented neo-paganism tends, in my experience, to be a Jungian, depth-psychology spirituality: the goddesses are archetypes of female power through which women can rediscover sources of identity, meaning and power within themselves. This is a potentially powerful spiritual path, don’t get me wrong, especially in a social-political-religious milieu that suppresses female power, like ours does. But it has nothing directly to do with reconnecting to the spiritual presence of the land.

So where would Friends turn to resacralize the natural world in which we live, upon which we depend for everything, and which does have inherent spiritual presence? We know this latter claim to be true experientially. I’ve been part of many Quaker workshops and conferences on environmental concerns and these events almost always have opportunities to share personal stories that illustrate why we were attending. Everybody has stories of spiritual opening that took place in ‘nature.’ Many Friends have been profoundly affected by these experiences. Very often, they were childhood experiences.

So many of us have the experience. But our religion provides scant opportunity, either in its faith or in its practice, for exploring this experience, or for deepening and expanding it into a land-based spirituality or a religious culture of place. We have added earthcare to our testimonies. And many Friends have done a great deal to alter their lifestyles to make them more sustainable. But we still are far from a spirituality that would transform our landbases into sacred places that would demand that we protect them by direct spiritual communion.

We still tend to speak of earthcare rather than of care for the Sourlands (where I live in central New Jersey), or Lake Cayuga, or the White River in Richmond, Indiana. We still fly thousands of miles to attend continentally constituted committees of environmental concern rather than attending meetings of the local planning board or environmental commission. We still tend to name our macro-organizations after cities or politically defined geographical regions (Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, Pacific Yearly Meeting, Indiana Yearly Meeting), rather than watersheds or bioregions. We still worship indoors using an inward-focused spirituality of silent waiting. We do nothing to open ourselves to the spiritual presence(s) waiting for us in the ecosystems in which we live.

Assuming we think this is desirable (and many of my readers may question this), I see three possible avenues forward. The first is the potential for leadership in our farming communities, especially those in the Conservative branch. They still have the intimate communion with the land that a religious culture of place requires and, because they are still essentially Christian, they will not veer off into ranterist paganism (though paganus means farmer and ‘heathen’ comes from heath—both meant country people originally).

Then there’s Christ himself. Jesus used his landbase in his own spirituality so intensely that it’s one of the most bizarre and telling indications of just how much our tradition has desacralized nature that we don’t think of him that way. He is always going off alone to “a deserted place” to pray, or taking his disciples with him, from the call of the twelve to the feeding of the multitudes to the last night in Gethsemane. I will talk more in a later post about what I call the spiritual ecology inherent in Jesus’ spirituality. Here let us just note that every major revelation associated with the Christ took place outdoors and many through natural agency. And this is true, not just for Jesus, but throughout our religious tradition, beginning with creation itself, the first revelation, through the Exodus and lawgiving to Fox’s vision on Pendle Hill and the conversion of the Seekers on Firbank Fell. The God of this tradition obviously prefers meeting God’s people outdoors, often on mountains, often in the ‘wilderness.’

Finally, there are our young people. They have environmental concerns in their spiritual DNA. Baby Boomers like me remember the birth of these concerns; we acquired them by choice. Our children have grown up with our secondary awareness built into their awareness as a primary reality. And they are just disaffected enough with our spirituality—with its abstractness and its apparent lack of meaningful transformational experience (as I discussed in my last post)—to be ready to seek something else. Maybe they can still hear the screams and pleading of the lands we inhabit and learn to spiritually reinhabit them.

Tagged: earthcare, land-based spirituality, religious culture of place, spiritual ecology

In 1949, Elton Trueblood published a short book on The Common Ventures of Life: Marriage, Birth, Work and Death (New York: Harper and Row).  “The purpose of this book,” he says in the Preface, “is to help puzzled men and women to prepare for the intelligent and reverent facing of those experiences which are so central to man’s life that they have seemed supreme in all generations and in all cultures.”  Marriage is the first of those “common ventures” that Trueblood discusses. 

Rather than the Bible (which has relatively little to say in depth about marriage), Trueblood finds an anchoring statement of this crucial “revelation of the grace of God,” in a sermon of a renowned 17^th century English preacher, Jeremy Taylor.  Wrote Taylor in his “Sermon of the Marriage Ring:”

“Marriage is a school and exercise of virtue; and though marriage hath cares, yet the single life hath desires which are more troublesome and more dangerous, and often end in sin, while the cares are but instances of duty and exercises of piety; and therefore if single life hath more privacy of devotion, yet marriage hath more necessities and more variety of it, and is an exercise of more graces. …

“Here is the proper scene of piety and patience, of the duty of parents and the charity of relatives; here kindness is spread abroad, and love is united and made firm as a centre: marriage is the nursery of heaven …

“It lies under more burdens [than the single life], but is supported by all the strengths of love and charity, and those burdens are delightful.”

These passages are from what Trueblood quotes from Taylor.  You can find the whole Taylor sermon at http://www.prnd.ca/PRNDmarriagetaylor.html. 

Taylor argues that the single life can lead human beings astray because of desires that may well up and become dangerous.  Marriage puts those desires to good use. 

“Marriage is the nursery of heaven,” says Taylor.  What a lovely phrase, that is, and I think it statement that gets at the true importance of marriage.  In marriage we learn about the possibilities of the love to which God calls us. 

The picture of marriage that Jeremy Taylor provides could, it strikes me, just as fully describe a same-sex marriage as an opposite sex one.  In both, the partners are pressed to learn piety and patience, duty and charity, kindness and uniting love.  The lessons come from commitment and fidelity, not from anatomical specifics. 

True, Elton Trueblood’s chapter on marriage in The Common Ventures of Life considers only opposite sex marriage.  Indeed, the whole book makes no mention whatsoever of homosexuality.  Trueblood says of marriage that it is “relatively independent of changing manners and customs,” so it is beyond imagining that he would have been comfortable with same-sex marriage despite the gender-inspecific, spiritual understanding of marriage that Jeremy Taylor provides.

However it is also striking that Trueblood’s description of marriage assumes fixed roles for men and women, roles that make the husband dominant and the wife subservient. 

Trueblood says, for example, “Both of the partners give up a great deal when they unite their lives.  The woman usually gives up further chance for academic training and worldly independence.  Especially after children come along, it is idle to speak of her as free to do whatever she likes.  Frequently she is so encumbered with trivial and even menial duties that she has no opportunity to keep up her intellectual interests.”

Or consider this from Trueblood: “The economic problem may be even harder for the wife, who, prior to marriage, may have had money of her own and now suddenly finds herself dependent upon another, whom she must ask for whatever she needs.”

Whatever may have been the gender assumptions of 1948, few of us would accept such a conception of marriage today.  Reading these passages, one can scarcely accept Trueblood’s assertion that marriage is “relatively independent of changing manners and customs.”  Over the past six decades, we have seen a tremendous upheaval in gender roles in marriage, a loosening of fixed expectations that allows men and women (both) more freedom and more equality. 

Marriage roles have changed, and yet marriage’s essential core has not.  That’s why Trueblood is right to quote Jeremy Taylor at length.  The never-changing case for marriage does not rest upon fixed assumptions about ‘men being men’ or about work or sex or any other activities of the flesh.  It rests, rather, upon the lessons of love that we can learn best by committing ourselves to faithful partnership with another person, one man and one woman -- or two men, or two women.  Those lessons of love make us more able to “love our neighbors as ourselves,” and to love God with all we have. 

Taylor's case for marriage makes it clear why we should not ask gays or lesbians to live as chaste, single people, trying hard to throttle their natural desires.  To deny gays and lesbians the opportunity to marry is to pointlessly deny them “the nursery of heaven.”