Pages tagged "Worship"

The coming together (“confluence”) of Friends in silent worship is a rare and precious human experience. Even if other creatures have their equivalent merging with the Divine, Quaker worship is a distinctly human thing to do. It draws upon capabilities inherent in our human bodies, including built-in social senses usually active in family relationships and tribal rituals (like supporting your team in a ball game).

Here’s a challenge: Write a novel in which a Quaker business meeting is the dramatic pivot point . . . and make it a compelling read.

Friends would find the works of Anna Fritz worth knowing about simply because this talented folksinger and cellist is “one of us.” She grew up in Milwaukee Monthly Meeting; she’s highly active in Multnomah Monthly Meeting in Portland; she’s a frequent attender at the New Year’s Gathering of Young Friends, and she recently made a tour of Quaker meetings throughout Oregon and Washington. But listening to her album, The Gospel of Tree Bark (2013), makes it clear that Anna deserves to be known wherever Western Friend is read, because her music is truly ministry.

Marshall McLuhan, the late Canadian media philosopher, famously proclaimed, “The medium is the message.” For Quakers, the silent presence found in worship has no medium for its message. The message IS the message.

Excerpts from the keynote presentation to Intermountain Yearly Meeting; June 11, 2015; Ghost Ranch, Abiquiú, New Mexico

In the flurry of dozens of goodbye hugs before going home, I said to one Friend, “Well, I guess it’s back to the real world now.” He answered, “Oh no, no. This is the real world. The rest of life is what’s not real.” I had to agree.

Something about the process of capturing, editing, printing, and viewing images often leads me to think beyond the subject itself, to search what other meanings might be suggested by the subject matter, the lighting, the mood, or arrangement of items in the composition. When the process is internal, I think of it as offering visual queries. Sometimes, when I hang prints in the meetinghouse for others to see, I imagine the process as being visual ministry.

George Fox described himself during his early adulthood as “a man of sorrows in the times of the first workings of the Lord in me.” Shortly later, he stated, “After this did a pure fire appear in me, a spiritual discerning came into me.” By the following year, while he was 24, a major transformation had occurred, “In the year 1648, as I was sitting in a Friend’s house . . . I saw there was a great crack to go throughout the earth, and a great smoke to go as the crack went, and that after the crack, there should be a great shaking. This was the earth in people’s hearts which was to be shaken before the Seed of God was to be raised out of the earth . . . and great meetings we began to have.” He discerned the reason for this change was because “the Lord God had opened to me by his invisible power how every man was enlightened by the divine Light of Christ; and I saw it shine through all.”