Fear and Prayer

I recently had an experience of facilitating a women’s group’s retreat where it seemed like most of the women came with a deep thirst for God, and because their thirst was so strong, I knew almost before the day had begun that the event would be deeply transformative for some of the participants.  

I also think of events I have attended where it seemed many of us came with some trepidation, not quite sure of what might happen, not sure if we were there for the same reason others were there, waiting to see if it would be safe to open ourselves up. If there are too many cautious attenders, in my experience, a facilitator can be as spiritually grounded and prayerful and well prepared as anything – but it will be hard for him or her to create an atmosphere in which the Spirit will move the group.

I do not mean to say there are limits to God’s power, but I do mean to say that our beliefs and degree of openness sometimes make a difference to what God can do in our lives. 

As politicians try to increase our fear so we will give them more power, and as companies try to sell us new safety products for us to buy, and as the media increasingly focus on conflict and heighten our awareness of “adversaries” and things that may have an adverse effect on our lives, I sometimes wonder what this means for our Meetings, churches, and our worship?

When God knocks on our door, do we peer cautiously through the spy hole and challenge the visitor to prove his identity and good intentions before we allow the door to open a crack for further verification? Or do we throw the door open with a big welcoming smile and arms open for an embrace, trusting that the visitor means to love us and be good to us? 

Queries for prayerful consideration:

In worship, do I open the door to the visitor God sends? Do I listen with eagerness to everyone’s message, expecting from every speaker a Word from God? In encounters with my “neighbor” and my “enemy”, is my door sufficiently open to allow God to be in the interaction and transform me? How do I release any fears I have? How can I be more welcoming in Meeting? How can I be more welcoming of God’s Word to me in every interaction?

LQHeresies Part II: Mysticism

A Lutheran pastor once told me that most people don’t have mystical experiences, and the Quaker expectation that they would is elitist. Taking communion, singing hymns and listening to a sermon, though, those are things that everyone can participate in. That is truly democratic, she said. 

A Protestant friend of my husband once came along to Quaker meeting. It was a “covered meeting” with a very powerful experience of the presence of the Spirit. As they left Meeting, my husband’s friend said, “Oh my God, I don’t know if I could stand that kind of intensity every Sunday!”

In my series on Liberal Quaker heresies, I want to turn my attention to the claim that Quakerism is a mystical religion. I fear that claim may make us guilty of the heresy of creating a hierarchy of religious experience. 

Many Quakers have mystical experiences and many mystics feel drawn to Quaker worship because it provides a space for those kinds of experiences to happen. Once again, I need to confess that I define my own faith as being of the mystical variety and that if indeed we Quakers are committing a sin, I am as guilty as anyone else. Now, there is nothing wrong with mystical experience in and of itself. It only becomes a heresy if we claim that it is the only authentic experience, expression, or practice of faith, or that it is somehow superior to others.  

I don’t want to look at technical definitions of this because that is not my style of doing theology. Whether or not I or others understand the technical definitions of mysticism is not important. My style is the applied theology approach: I want to look at what actual people mean when we say that Quakerism is mystical and what this statement means for those who don’t identify themselves as having had mystical experiences.

Liberal Quakers like to think that unprogrammed silent worship levels the playing field and creates the opportunity for everyone to encounter God in their own way. We may think that is true, but what if others don’t see it that way? Many of the people I come into contact with as a spiritual director or chaplain or just conversation partner don’t claim to have had mystical experiences. Those who don’t identify themselves as having had mystical experiences tell me this in hushed tones, almost like a guilty confession. If they are Quakers, they often seem to feel like 2nd class citizens among Friends, or they express a sense of inferiority compared to Friends’ mystical faith. It is especially painful to me if they express a sense that I must be something special because of the  mystical experiences I have had.

When that happens, I know that – whatever the reason – the person I am talking with has been subject to the heresy that mystical experiences are somehow superior, and they have most likely been exposed to someone who has sinned by claiming superiority. I hope that someone wasn’t me.

I am convinced that God does not create some ways of practising faith than are better than others – provided we are engaged wholeheartedly in faithful living. I am convinced that God has not created a hierarchy of prayer and faithful living so that we might fight about the superiority of one over another – again, provided we are engaged wholeheartedly in faithful living. 

So how might we talk about mysticism in ways that make it just one among many other forms of faith, all of equal value? Isn’t the Quaker message fundamentally that faith is not a one-size-fits-all proposal? That would be my statement about Quakerism: It is a faith that recognizes the wide variety of ways in which we can know God.

I have already looked at issues of power gained by those who get to do the defining, see this post, so I won’t say more on that topic here, except to state that whether we want it to be that way or not, we can’t be naive about the fact that mystical experience has historically been defined as superior. We each need to examine our souls in prayer and be sure that we aren’t making use of an historical injustice in ways that feed our own egos. 

Let’s question the often unstated belief that spontaneous mystical experience is superior. Here follow some other ways of looking at mystical experience that I have found helpful to my own consideration. Some of these thoughts may make it sound as though mystical experiences are inferior, and I want to let you know that my intention is not start an argument about which is best. My intention is to say things that will give us pause, things to make us less sure of what we know to be true, and perhaps to come to a place of relinquishing evaluations of good-better-best to God, if they need to be done at all. My goal is to confuse my own and your intellect.  

Jesus said to the man we call Doubting Thomas: “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” Paul defines faith as “being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.” My own understanding of my mystical experiences is that my atheism was so firmly entrenched that God knew I needed something radical to believe anything at all, and so God gave me a solid mystical “whack over the head” in a Meeting for worship I happened to be attending. In general, I would say that I have a hard time trusting in things unseen, though I am getting better at it. But I have a lot of respect for people who believe and commit to God without having been given that loving whack over the head.

My understanding is that open worship is for the purpose of allowing the Spirit to lead, not for us to expect something such as a mystical experience. We engage in idolatry if we set expectations that we expect God to fulfill. Then we have tried to put ourselves in God’s place.

Many faith development models hold that focus on the delight of spiritual experience often is a characteristic of a new or immature faith. These models see mystical experiences merely as the lure that God uses to draw us deeper into relationship. Mature faith, however, is about commitment and obedience.

The previous point about lure and delight makes me wonder whether we sometimes confuse delightful feelings with mystical experience? One of the things I know as a spiritual director is that a deeper relationship with God often frees and increases our range of feelings and our physical sensory range as well. Is it possible that we sometimes confuse our emotional and sensory experiences with mystical experiences?

Jesus did not say “feel me” or “experience my presence”, he said things like “sell all your belonging and follow me”.

Queries for prayerful consideration:

Do Quakers say directly or indirectly that mystical experience is the only authentic experience, expression, or practice of faith, or that it is somehow superior to others? When Quakers talk about mysticism in relationship to Quakerism, are we sensitive to the perception many people have of mystical experience as superior to others? When we talk about mystical experience in worship, are we sure we are distinguishing between mystical experience and delightful feelings? Am I sure I do not denigrate other forms of worhip, prayer, and faith commitment?  

What Is Quaker Prayer?

(See my other blog for more general musings about prayer.) 

What I understand Quakerism to say about prayer is that we can encounter God at any time, in any place, or in any circumstance. I get that from the Quaker refusal to designate any particular time, place, or person as the primary conduit of the Holy. And I get that from my favorite quote in the banner above: “There is one, even Jesus Christ, that can speak to thy condition.” What I understand this to mean is that we will be spoken to, whatever our condition. This means that there is no human condition in which God cannot speak to us. God can use any form – verbal and non-verbal, sensory and non-sensory, intuitive or tangible.

George Fox seems to me to be saying not that a mainline church service is necessarily wrong but that repetitive or required acts of worship have a tendency to dull our spiritual awareness. He disliked any priest who based his authority on something other than the Power of the Lord, but George absolutely believed that the Lord gave tremendous Power to the words and acts of someone who is animated by the Holy Spirit.

What this means for silent worship is that we can be in prayer when we sit in expectant silence, but that is not the superior way. Indeed, silent worship, too, can become a spiritually dead structure. Silent worship or prayer is not superior to other forms of worship and prayer.

What sets us apart as a denomination is that we are not surprised when we encounter God outside of the Meeting’s agreed-upon times and places of worship. As people who take the priesthood of all believers more literally than most denominations, we believe that any person or even any living being can be a “priest”, someone who draws us into an awareness of God’s presence.  

So although many of my deepest times of worship have occurred while sitting in expectant waiting in my Quaker Meeting, there are many other instances, too. Here are some of them:

Standing at the top of the Sears Building in Chicago, looking out on the city lights one night, I felt one of the most powerful urges to call upon God that I have ever felt.

A dozen Young Adult Friends were in the swimming pool one late night at Norway Yearly Meeting annual sessions, when quite spontaneously we fell into a deep worshipful silent communion.

While working at Swedish Hospital, an elderly Catholic gentleman asked me to give him communion and turned down my offer to call a Catholic chaplain. He said that being served communion by a Quaker would speak more powerfully to him of the nature of God, which is to transcend all human-made boundaries. When we both took the bread and wine in the name of Christ, the Spirit bound this woman, the gentleman, and Christ together with Eternity.

Listening to a sermon, when ideas that were separate suddenly come together or when an AHA! occurs – and new Truth is opened to my understanding.

During the World Gathering of Young Friends in Belgium in 1991, we had a silent meal at the centuries-old Catholic monastery where the gathering took place. I sat in the dining room, soaking in the presence of other Quaker men and women from all over the world, and tried to attune myself to my table companions in particular and know what they might need without them speaking or gesturing. We were One.

Tears of deep joy trickling down my cheeks as I understood the Christmas message in a new way in looking at my then two-month old daughter: The mystery of strength made perfect in weakness; salvation through giving oneself over to Life – both its joy and its suffering; and how God’s very essence can be revealed by human form.

Researching something in the Earlham College Library one day, I lifted my eyes up from the reference book to see a cherry tree in blooming pink splendor, and the Power of God filled my very core, so all words and thoughts fell away.

Sitting in private prayer one day, deeply remorseful over a mistake I had made, I suddenly was filled with the pride-stripping awareness that I was a human – neither better nor worse than a co-worker who had inhabited my thoughts for months because of her unrelenting insistence that I was a bad person. In prayer, I felt united with her in human-ness and was liberated so I could forgive her and attach my awareness to more wholesome projects.

Holding a dying woman’s hand, sadly being the only one to stand with her, I held her in the Light as her breathing slowed and then ceased.

Being a Quaker allows me not to be surprised – indeed perhaps to expect – that God may appear in any kind of situation and transform that moment into a moment of prayer.

Query for prayerful consideration:

What are my experiences of prayer? What is my understanding of prayer from a Quaker perspective?