NOTE TO THE READER:  Endnotes are indicated in the text by Italicized digits set in parantheses.  

1.  Dear Friends…

I actually don’t feel as nervous, standing here before you finally, as I had expected.  Something one of your Friends, who cannot be with us today due to illness, said to me once comes to my mind.  Some years ago, after I organized, upon a leading, the first border-crossing gathering for German-speaking Swiss and German Friends (which lives on presently on the Lindenberg in the Black Forest) and the participants started to arrive, I got very worried whether they would actually find what they might be hoping for, as if the responsibility for this rested entirely on my shoulders.  It was then that Christa Voigt said to me:  “Why are you so nervous, Heidi, now that we are all here?”  I can still see her amused and affectionate smile.  Immediately the burden was lifted from me.  This Friend taught me something essential about Quakerism by this word.  I often think of it.

After the first shock (and the surge of joy deeper down) of your invitation, a saying from the tradition of the so-called “Desert Fathers” presented itself to me.  Only a few centuries after the appearance of Jesus of Nazareth, some men and women began to withdraw into the deserts of Egypt, Syria, etc. to devote themselves to an ascetical life of prayer, in hopes of coming closer again to the pure Christian root, the way of Christ.  In time other seekers began to take pilgrimages to such purified souls, hoping to receive “a word” from them, approaching them - so I have read - with the request:  “Father - Mother -, give me a word… that I may live.” I suddenly saw that this was the request by which you had approached me, and it was its second part that made me tremble and quake.  Not just any word do you want from me, nor “what I have to say,” for what good would this be to you?  We need to live. 

What I want to say to you, dear Friends, is:  I am in need of this word no less than you.  I ask you to receive me among yourselves during this hour as one of you, to let me, as I stand facing you, inwardly look in the same direction with you, toward the Light of which we have need, for only in this way can I speak to you.

One more remark about words.  By your declared wish I am compelled to speak to you in words.  As you know, we Friends tend to trouble ourselves over that when it comes to an expression of the things of faith or “religion.”  We harbor, by inheritance, so to speak, a certain mistrust against it.  Now, only a few weeks ago a statement by an early Friend - Francis Howgill was his name - came before my eyes, according to which words are like a veil, concealing what we really mean to say.(1)  I was comforted by this image, for a veil, after all, is not a cement wall; it has little holes in it through which the light can pass.  I want to urge you, dear Friends, not to let yourselves be entangled in the veil if it should not be wholly to your liking.  Let us look together upon the Light that will be seeking us through the little openings that might offer. 

2.  Choice of theme

The theme of my lecture is focused in a Bible word, from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount in Matthew and Luke, which to me seems best to embody the basic atmosphere of these teachings:  “Do not be afraid.”

(the Bible word as a “mountain”:  three ways of engagement)
As you know, I come from a country of mountains, the Swiss Alps, and more recently also of very different mountains, in Phoenix, Arizona where I spent the last three winters, desert mountains, which came to play an important part in my preparation for this lecture.  A familiar Bible word is to me something like a mountain.  In my childhood in the lower lands of Switzerland, on the Rhine at the northern border, we often were made to hasten to a green hill called “Puck” (hump) with our father to view the wreath of alpine peaks which, by the influence of the Foehn (a wet wind falling in from the south side of the Alps) had suddenly appeared on the horizon.  “The mountains are visible!”, went the excited cry that had us drop whatever we were doing.  We were taught to recognize the distant peaks by their shapes and to remember their names.  For Swiss of that time, their mountains were personalities, each with a particular form and face, each recognized anew and greeted fondly upon reappearance, by name, male or female or even neuter.  That was how they were when seen from afar.  But if it should happen that a peak was seen from a very different side, it could appear wholly unfamiliar.

A second way to know a mountain impressed itself on me as a young woman one day in a solitary hike up the “Hoernli” (Little Horn) in the upper lands of the Canton of Zurich.  Suddenly I received an impulse to take off my shoes, and I proceeded to climb the mountain on bare feet.  What an amazing variety of surfaces, textures, temperatures I was made to experience in this direct physical contact, qualities my shoes never conveyed to me!  Grass, pebbles, pine needles, moist clay, water, loose shale, rock - hot, cold, tender, soft, sharp, stinging, hard…  The mountain’s figure and face had disappeared from my mind and no longer seemed relevant.  Its name was forgotten.  I came to know it in a wholly different way.  

A third kind of encounter happened years later in the U.S.  During a long, steep ascent up a forested mountain in the state of Vermont - again I was alone - I stood still in a spot where between the crowns of great trees an opening had appeared through which I could look across a valley to another forested mountain whose name I did not know.  As I stood gazing, suddenly I got an uneasy feeling that the mountain was looking at me, as if there were an eye in it, perceiving me.  The object had become subject!  I felt seen, recognized - and was startled, as if suddenly woken from sleep.  I am!

All this might describe how I experience Bible words:  from afar as object of my attention; in immediate contact and intimate connection; and, now and then, in feeling myself recognized, unexpectedly and terrifyingly, by a subject.

(my relationship to the Bible)
The Bible was present in my childhood.  I do not remember having any problems with it at that time.  My most beautiful and lively memory of it is how our mother sat with us in our large children’s bedroom at night reading the family stories from the first book of the Old Testament.  I identified intensely with these.  I can still see my mother on her little child’s chair, her woolen shawl wrapped around her in the unheated room, fluently reading from the high-German scriptures in her Swiss dialect, while I crawled under my featherbed to cry with Joseph who was thrown into the deep well by his jealous brothers.  I knew exactly how he felt!

What I appreciate most now in looking back on this my mother’s offering is that she never commented or explained.  Her reading was plain.  Stories do not need to be explained, least of all to children.  To this day I try to hear biblical stories with this childlike openness of mind.

Only later, in the time of my Confirmation in the church, when with instruction and catechism the element of “coercion” appeared in religion, Bible and “Christianity” became problematical for me.  The day of Confirmation itself appeared to me later as the “blackest” in my life (even the dress we had to wear was black).  For on this day, we, the adolescents of the parish about to be received into spiritual adulthood, were made to confess, in front of the gathered congregation, our love for the Christ Light, implying a promise to adhere to it for life, by a hymn of the 17th century German mystic Angelus Silesius which only many years later I recognized as one of the most personal and fervent testimonies of authentic spiritual experience.  Nobody, at that time, asked whether we were ready, or what had become of our childhood faith.(2)  Eventually I came to comprehend the experience of this forced and insincere public confession as a severe spiritual trauma, a rape of the soul (despite all good intentions of our shepherds, as I also had to eventually recognize).  Soon after this event I turned away from my religious upbringing and closed the Bible (after much inward turmoil and laboring - the confirming minister was also my father).  I may acknowledge that one of my elder sisters, very pious and active in Africa for the Basel Mission at that time, cheerfully encouraged me to this step.  In this I experienced a trust that accompanied me significantly during the next thirty years without formal religion or any religious affiliation.

At age 24 I emigrated to America.  For many years I was unaware of the intense religious life in this country.  My inward search took place on other levels, perhaps most in the arts and the contemplation of nature.  Not until I discovered, at the age of almost 50, the Quakers - following a major spiritual turn within - did I gain access to the Bible again, but now from a very different side.  I learned to approach it in the way of the early Friends, who found in the Scriptures a mirror of their own experience.  I discovered that something is true not because Scriptures say so; it became Scripture because it is true to human experience, including that with God.  Scriptures helped me to make sense of the new inward experience flooding me powerfully, and by this growing understanding my experience could clear, deepen, and expand.  From then on the Bible became useful to me, and finally dear.  “What canst thou say?”, I ask it.  To this experience of mine?  To my here and now?  To our situation?  How are you illumining it for me?  Not infrequently I open it upon an inward nudge to look back on a particular passage the Spirit seems to suggest, which then gives me unexpected, and often surprising, Light in a current situation.

I believe there is a “voice” in the Bible, as there was an “eye” in that mountain in Vermont at that moment.  And I have learned that this voice only reaches us fully when we are in a living relationship with the spiritual ground from which it speaks.  A relationship that requires cultivation.

(why this particular Bible word?)
I didn’t choose my theme as much as it was, to my feeling, “laid upon” me.  It was already present when your invitation came, having lived in me for some years already.  The whole of the Bible, the whole of (true) Christianity, the whole of Quakerism is contained for me in this word - that which all of this is about, by which we live.  

3.  A “telescopic” view of the “mountain”:  singling out its parts

First, as is often my practice when considering Bible words or passages, let us briefly focus on the parts of our theme sentence, bringing each sharply into our awareness so as to know what is there:

“seek”:  The first thing I noticed:  it doesn’t say “find.”  Or, for instance, “build.”  “Strive for” is also a translation offered.  I like “seek” because that was the word when this sentence was planted into me, in the English version,  “Seek first the kingdom of God…”  It connects for me with the early self-understanding of Quakers as “Seekers”, a term we still often use for ourselves today.

“first”:  This word has two meanings:  in the sense of time, and in the sense of priority.  Seek (the kingdom of God) before you do anything else;  and:  put this seeking above all else, making it your absolute priority.  It soon appeared to me that this little word might be the most important one in this sentence, inseparable from the first.

“the kingdom of God”:  Also (especially in Matthew):  “the kingdom of heaven.”  What I did not find in the gospels is the term “peaceable kingdom” which I’ve heard so often among Quakers. - Might this be a pointer that “where it comes from” (“God”) is more important for us than “where it aims” (such as our idea of “peace“)?

“all these things (which you need)”:  Need.  In the context of the Sermon which was addressed to poor people, Jesus seems to think of material necessities in this phrase, such as food and drink, clothing, etc.  Even in our culture of affluence, we are far more dominated by the concern for “these things” than we may often realize.  - And does this phrase apply also to the needs of soul and spirit?  

“will be given unto you”:  Given: this means, to my hearing, as a gift. Not in the way of a trade-off:  you do this for me, and I give you that in return.  Purchase, mercantile thinking, has nothing to do with it.

I also considered the verb forms:  “Seek” is active, “be given” is passive.  Not the other way around.  Not:  See to it that you first acquire everything you need (or think you need), then the kingdom of God will be added to it. - Sometimes I hear statements like:  “Faith is a part of my life.”  Religion, religious life, as an addition to "these other things.”  This puzzles me.

“and”:  The small word that connects the first part of the sentence with the second - how do the two hang together, in my experience?

4.   What is the “kingdom of God”?
4a.  In the New Testament

Having taken my theme word from the New Testament, I felt I should do some research on what is actually meant by the term “kingdom of God” in these scriptures.  So I undertook a study and meditation of all the places in the New Testament in which this expression occurs.  There is a great number of them, especially in the gospels.

It soon became clear to me that “the kingdom of God on earth” is the concern of the New Testament, the concern of Jesus and the heart of his sending.  

Many people in the gospels ask what is meant by this term, how this kingdom really is, and how one may get to it.  Jesus did not explain, in abstractly defining words.  He made the kingdom felt by comparing it to concrete objects and processes people were familiar with, in images and little stories, so-called parables.  “What can we compare it to?”, was his counter-question.

The amazing variety of images by which Jesus answered the question after the kingdom seems in itself to say something about its nature.  There is something akin in this to the Friends’ way:  We, too, have no fixed formulation for the “good news”, neither in words nor deeds, but know that only through ever new and personal receiving and proclamation in words and deeds can we do justice to it.  Jesus’ answers imply that our life itself is to become a parable for the nature of the kingdom of God among us.  We ourselves, our very person, shall become such a parable, for many.

“The kingdom of God is here.”  This seems to me the central message of the gospels.  It is here or immediately close at hand, and accessible to all people who turn to it, here and now.  

And this, too, seems unmistakable:  Jesus believed in the possibility to realize the kingdom of God on earth.  It is here, and at the same time it must constantly be realized.  

And finally, the “good news” of this message must be spread in “all nations” to the “end of the world,” both in the temporal and spatial sense.  Expansion without limits in time or space.  By our lived lives, with every part of them.  Spreading the message: the truth, the reality it means; not necessarily a religion later called “Christian.”

The kingdom parables of Jesus (3)
Note:  A list of these parables showing where in the gospels they occur is given in the back. 

Mustard seed - yeast - treasure - pearl

The shortest of these parables are little more than images.  Possibly the most beautiful and joyous of these is that of the mustard seed, the “smallest seed of all”, which somebody took and sowed in his field, and a great tree grew out of it, giving the birds a place to nest in its branches. - The kingdom of God is also like a morsel of yeast which a woman took and mixed into the flour, so that the whole dough was permeated and leavened by it. - Again the kingdom is compared to a treasure someone found in a field and hid again; in his joy he went, sold all he had, and bought the field. - Finally, it is like a pearl of highest value which a merchant discovered, perhaps among others of similar appearance; he, too, sold all he had in order to purchase the one.

What I noticed first about these images:  They denote something small, even very small.  But this small something has a potential.  Further, it is embedded in something greater.  There is also something secretive to it:  The yeast in the bread is not mentioned or considered by those who eat the bread; nobody thinks of the seed from which a tree grew once the tree stands.  And:  By itself the small thing does nothing.  Someone is needed who does something with it.  Its effect comes out of a connection.  The kingdom of God is here and at the same time as if non-existent until someone answers it.  Until a woman - some ordinary but faithful woman - takes the yeast and mixes it into the flour; until a merchant seeks and recognizes the finest pearl and buys it with all he has.  The kingdom of God is, and at the same it needs to be answered by an act on our part in order to be.

I am reminded of the famous admonition by George Fox we quote so often:  “Answer that of God in everyone.”  Only then is it activated and becomes effective.  To suppose its presence, to believe it, to respect it, or even to proclaim it, is not enough. 

Sower - wheat and weeds - fishnet - free growth in the earth

The kingdom of God is as when someone walks across a field and sows the good seed.  It falls on many kinds of ground, and not all seeds go up.  Among those that do, not all of the young shoots survive, for there is much that works against them.  But where the seed falls on good soil and is not hindered in its growth, it brings fruit, a hundred-fold here, sixty-fold there, thirty-fold in yet another place.

In another field also wheat is sown, but overnight weeds also spring up, sowed by another.  And the servants of the lord of the field want to pull them out.  But he orders them to leave them alone, lest they pull out the wheat as well.  At the time of the harvest the weeds shall be eliminated and burned.

Again the kingdom of God is like a fishnet bringing up all kinds of fish, good ones and inedible ones, until the net is full, for later sorting-out and separating.

These images speak of inclusiveness, of the successful as well as the unsuccessful, the useful as well as the useless, that which furthers life and that which hinders it.  They speak of trust, of confident waiting for the time when the right order will arrive.  They make me feel that trust is more than “tolerance.”  The patience they speak of is engaged, attentive, and directed.  The following parable of the free growth of the seed in the earth disarms with its beauty:

“He also said, ‘The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how.  The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head.  But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come.’”

Jesus’ doctrine of forgiveness can be felt in these parables.  Trust has to do with forgiveness.  Patience has to do with forgiveness.  Inclusiveness has to do with forgiveness.  The kingdom of God is based on that forgiving attitude which does not deny or renounce justice but leaves the judgment patiently in God’s hands.  

Only two of these gospel parables are “explained” by Jesus, to those who were immediately around him and asked him for it:  that of the Sower and that of the Wheat and the Weeds.  I was surprised to see how he interprets the “good seed” in the latter story:  as the “children of the kingdom of God.”  We ourselves are the sown, but, as the story of the Sower compellingly bears out, the seed does not necessarily bring fruit.  It is not automatic.  Much can interfere.  We do well to meditate these parables and their explanation often in self-surveillance.

Workers in the Vineyard - parables of life in the kingdom

These stories represent the relationship between the “lord of the vineyard” and the workers in it, the different attitude of this lord and the different life that results from it in the kingdom, as well as the difficulties of the workers who are not used to this.  They don’t expect, for instance, that one who came to work late should receive the same reward in the end as one who was present from the start of the day, and they rebel against it (Mt 20,1).

This story also strengthens my (often tremulous) hope that God refuses no one, not me either, whatever our qualifications, if we desire sincerely to work in his Vineyard. - In another of these stories we hear that, in this kingdom, those who say “no” to the invitation but do follow it by deed are more pleasing to the lord than those who say “yes” but do not follow in deed (Mt 21,28).  -The story of the “rebellious tenants” reminds us that our work in the Vineyard must bring fruit, but it is not ours; it must be given over to the lord of the Vineyard who will distribute it as he sees fit (Mt 21,33; Mk 21,1). - Lessons we do well, now as then, to absorb again and again.

Banquet - oil in the lamp - augmentation of entrusted goods

The banquet or festive meal is another image for the kingdom of God - sitting at table together -, an image every culture understands.  But the expected guests can refuse the invitation, believing they have more important things to do and are lacking time, so the lord of the feast has to call “the poor” from the streets who are ready to come.

In the famous parable of the ten virgins expecting the groom in the night, with only half of them having oil in their lamp which they hope he will light for them, we are reminded of the importance of inward and outward preparation, readiness and vigilance, a basic attitude of preparative expectation. - What is the oil that must be present when the divine flame draws near, for instance in the religious gathering (an event so powerful for earlier Friends that some understood it as the “Second Coming” or “Return” of Christ)?  Our good works?  A prayer life that keeps us inwardly connected with the expected and hoped-for?  Our way of life?  Something, in any case, that the coming one “recognizes” because it is of him, and which, when he brings himself, the flame, to it will make the Light flare up in us, for ourselves and others (Mt 25,1). 

I was always too afraid of the parable of the “talents” (a currency of the time) to ever examine it closely.  Here the lord entrusts his money to his servants while he goes away for a time, to each according to his ability, that they may increase it.  Upon returning he lauds the two who doubled their measure and promises to put them in charge of greater things.  But he deals harshly(4) with the third who, out of fear of his lord’s displeasure if he should fail, simply buried his talent and gave it back unused.  In my study I became aware for the first time that this lord sees more than one way to increase the good:  not only by “trading” with it, but also:  “You ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and on my return I would have received what was my own with interest.”  What did Jesus mean by “banking”, a quiet and hidden way of augmentation? - Only “burial,” denial or ignoring of the entrusted potential is not acceptable.  The kingdom of God is not enough as something that merely exists; it must be increased.  Where it does not grow, we lose it.(5)

Other references to the “kingdom” in the gospels

There are other hints about the nature of the “kingdom”  in the gospels, outside of the parables,  which I found powerfully affecting.  

To whom is the kingdom given?  First and foremost:  to the children.  “Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it” (Mk 10,15).  What do I see when I think “child”?  Trust:  A baby sleeping with total abandon and peace in a stranger’s arms.  A child walking on his father’s hand in conversation with him and lifting his face up to his again and again, making sure unity and connection are still intact, without needing to know in detail who this person is.  Purity of heart, authentic being, humility:  Awareness of one’s dependency, in happy acceptance; loving, non-judgmental attachment.  “If you do not become like children…” Become: I have noticed, in some people, that we can.  

Further, the kingdom of God belongs to those who keep the two highest commandments, equal to one another and comprising all the others:  to love God with all one has, and one’s neighbor as oneself (Mk 12,34).  Those who DO the will of God (Mt 7,21). - Who is hindered from entering it?  We hear it with reluctance:  the rich (Mt 19,24; Mk 10, 23-25; Lk 18, 24-25); one must be lean to pass through the “narrow door” (Lk 13,24).  Also, he who “puts a hand to the plough and looks back” (Lk 9,62).  And (confirmed not least by the experience of Friends):  those who “cannot drink the cup” (Mt 20,22).  

When will the kingdom come, and how?, people wanted to know.  “Not with things that can be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’, or, ‘There it is!’  For the kingdom of God is among you” (Lk 17, 20-21). - A word about the spreading of the kingdom also arrested me:  “And he sent them out to proclaim the kingdom of God and to heal” (Lk 9,2).  To proclaim it, preach it, in all our discourse; and to heal what needs to be healed:  one not without the other. -  About the possible costs of the kingdom, also, some weighty words are said, disconcerting and encouraging (Lk 18, 29).  

Instructive also is the prayer Jesus gave to his closest followers, upon their request (“Lord, teach us to pray,” Mt 6,10), come down to us as “the Lord’s Prayer”, prayed in all Christian churches the world over still today: The first petitions are for the kingdom of God on earth.  Out of this open the right requests for the things we have need of to live in this kingdom.

4b.  The “kingdom of God” in the understanding of early Friends

Just a few weeks before the date of this lecture I received, from a New Hampshire Friend mindful of my theme, a thick scholarly article recently published, about the concept of the “kingdom of God” among the early Friends, from which I gained much.(6)

The term appears very frequently in the writings of the first generation, especially Fox.  Friends rediscovered Jesus’ concern for the kingdom of God on earth.  Like Jesus they believed it could be realized.  According to the author of this article, this expectation of Jesus’ had been progressively lowered by the Church over the centuries, presumably because the commandments of the Sermon were experienced as “too difficult” for human weakness, and also because they went against the growing power interests of a Church become a state institution.  More and more the “kingdom” was moved to the “other side,” beyond life on earth.  Some theologians advocated that the time for its realization on earth had not yet come.  Friends felt this as apostasy, a falling-away from Truth.  They were determined to return to the message of Jesus in the way he meant his “Follow me.”  

The central mystical experience of George Fox (“There is one, even one, who can speak to thy condition”) affirmed for him the gospel message that the kingdom of God is among us as well as in us and that we can live in accordance with it.  Friends’ meetings for worship and what happened in them - often a very intense experience for participants - were understood both as a manifestation of the presence of the kingdom on earth, and a method to seek and realize it ever more.  What we call today our “peace testimony” was not separated or separable from the kingdom of God in all its aspects.(7) 

Early Friends also knew, from their own experience, that we can lose the kingdom but that it can be regained again and again.  There was no “once and for all,” neither in losing nor in winning it. 

Strong also was their consciousness, through the experience of shared waiting worship, that the kingdom of God is realized only by community, the “gathered people.”  And, of course, that it is meant for “all nations.”  

The rediscovery of the kingdom as livable now here on earth liberated early Friends from the paralyzing fear of the end time and the “Last Judgment” which was strong in the Puritanism of their period.  This may explain the great energy set free in them for their laboring in God’s Vineyard.  

I was surprised not to find the expression “The kingdom of God is within”, which I had heard many times, in the New Testament in just these words.  Early Friends, however, were clear that this understanding is very strongly implied in the teachings of Jesus.  They believed that the realization of the kingdom in the outward follows from its realization within, and that the kingdom must first be liberated in the heart.  For them the way to its outward realization was inward transformation.  They loved the words in Jeremiah 31,34:  “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God and they shall be my people…”  They were so passionately convinced they “felt it in their bowels”, as they put it in their shame-less language.  

A word, finally, on the “kingdom of God” in the gospel of John, the fourth, written somewhat later than the others and called by some the “Quaker gospel”, perhaps because of its emphasis on the spiritual.  There are no parables in John.  Jesus teaches there in another language.  Much emphasis is put on the inward rebirth of man.  The term “kingdom of God” occurs only twice, in the same passage and to similar effect:  “Nobody can see the kingdom of God without being born of the Spirit” (John 3,3, Jesus in conversation with the Pharisee Nicodemus, who had a high position among the Jews and came to Jesus by night, a seeker).

HOW DOES THIS BIRTH COME TO PASS?

5.  “Seek - first”
5a.  Point of departure

(“stand still in the Light”)
The word “seek” implies to me that we are coming from somewhere, a place of need, a condition of lack or distress, a longing.  I’m calling this our situation the point of departure. (8)  We begin in this place and strive, we hardly know toward what.

For us Friends, the point of departure seems to be especially significant.  We do not begin (for instance, in our meetings for worship) with pointers toward that which we seek, neither in words nor in music, nor in images or objects or ritual acts.  We bring only ourselves in our condition as it is in each one, sit down together, and - wait.  

This, to my knowledge, is unique among religious communities that have sprung from the Christian root.

It takes courage to begin where we are.  It means, first of all, to acknowledge our present place:  “Here I am.  This is the place from which I will proceed.”  How much easier it would seem to say:  “There is where I want to go,” confused or misguided as my ideas of the envisioned goal may be.  “Anything - as long as I get away from ME - my here and now!”, seems the dominating impulse in us most of the time.

In our tradition, the act of “standing still” where we are is called waiting.  Possibly the Quaker word par excellence.  Although we do not mean the kind of waiting one does at a train station, for a certain time span to be up and the train to arrive at last.(9)

Our worship does not begin when something waited or hoped for arrives or happens, but when we have begun to stand still.  We often experience this as a gradual letting-go of images, thoughts, and concerns that may have held us captive in past moments, as well as ideas of what is to come.  I am reminded of the German Friend Eva Hermann’s statement in her testimony about her long captivity in a Nazi prison:  that after a certain period an internment ceases to be a waiting for liberation and becomes a form of life - in which one discovers that liberation is already present. 

Our waiting worship makes room for life.  Not the life of many thoughts that distract us, but a life which secretly - perhaps without our noticing at all - transforms. This is what is meant by George Fox’s oft-repeated injunction, “Stand still in the Light.”  Perhaps I cannot see this Light, or even feel it.  But with continuous practice of this silent expectant waiting with others who do the same, a conviction and trust will form in me which prompts and enables me to seek this chair again and again and to want to sit on it.  

This continual return to the point of departure, our ever fresh willingness to stand still in it and let ourselves be happened to, is, to my mind, the most important form of seeking for Friends, and the most important for me in my personal journey.  

(fear)
I remember how this began for me - after, at the age of almost 50, the seriousness of human destiny caught up with me and I discovered, in Massachusetts, the Quakers.  Almost immediately I was seized by an immense desire for this practice of sitting, and the week between First Day meetings came to feel unbearably long.  A few other newcomers in the Meeting seemed to feel similarly, and for a while we would meet during the week also in some place or other.  In this tiny circle I experienced, at the beginning of the silence, being overcome by a constricting anguish so strong that I could hardly stay on my chair, so great was the urge to run away.  I also remember how I first tried to practice this sitting alone at home, and broke out in sweat and a sense of terror so threatening I called the clerk of the Meeting to ask that I may join her in her private morning worship I knew she held in her home.(11)  Then, at my first attendance of the yearly meeting, I heard, out of the mouth of an experienced Friend, the words:  “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Hebrews 10, 31)(12), and I knew I was no longer alone.

Why this fear?

A few years ago I let myself be accompanied for a while by a little Buddhist book I had happened upon at a Friend's house.  “Growing comfortable with uncertainty,” is how I remember its title.  Perhaps I was drawn by the image on the jacket.  It showed long wooden stairs leading down a steep dune or cliff, and down below a violently agitated ocean, and a person who had descended the steps and stood at the bottom, looking quietly on the terrifying and dangerous waves.  I expect that fear of what we might discover in the quiet of “standing still” - in ourselves, in our lives, in our social environment or the wider world - may keep many from choosing the form of waiting worship.

Friends of earlier periods, and even into our own time, did not picture the meeting for worship as a merely peaceful and restful hour.  The Journals (diaries or spiritual autobiographies) written by especially active and spiritually developed Friends - such as John Woolman - testify to this.  Over and over we find in them expressions such as “I was brought very low,” or, “I was heavily exercised.”  We can only try to guess what may have been going on in those souls during those moments, but the consequences of these “exercises” - inward kneadings, examinations of conscience, and processes of purification - were clearly positive.  These Friends stood still in this place of departure also, trusting in the Light which not only showed it to them but would also lead them out and onward.   

A young preacher named Anne Wilson once stood up in the silent meeting for worship and, pointing a long finger at a young man sitting there possibly dozing, cried:  “And you, Friend!  You go from this worship exactly as you came in!”  The shock this young man experienced in this sudden conviction woke up his spirit and changed his life.  He became a highly developed Quaker who traveled extensively in the ministry and wrote an excellent book about the “Qualifications Necessary to a Gospel Minister”, where I read this story.(13)  

(lost)
I had been used to quiet sitting and waiting, without much intention - especially at the start of the day - already for some years before I came to Quakers, without thinking much of it or understanding it as a religious discipline.  It seemed to come naturally to me.  I had - the misfortune, I long believed; the good luck, I might say now - to often feel utterly lost upon waking up in the morning, independent of my life situation.  Everything that had been in me only just the day before seemed gone; all conviction and faith, everything that normally seemed valuable to me or could excite me or had supported my life; all appetite to do anything or go anywhere; all idea of what I should do that day and in this world (even if there was a long list of tasks waiting).  But above all, I was devoid of any sense of who I actually was.  For many years this phenomenon disquieted me: if everything I had gained in faith, conviction, hope and clarity could be wiped out over night, how reliable could it be, how real - even if the next day it was built up again?

Gradually, and surely with the help of steadily attending Friends' meeting for worship (and of Friends' writings), I came to understand that it is a loving hand that wipes away all that is of me and which I desperately try to hold.  That God’s mercy and respect for me as a human being, and His greater plans for me as a being of far-reaching destiny, are expressed precisely in the fact that He keeps taking from me what I have acquired and believe to possess.

The Old Testament has a story, from the time of the 40-years walk of the Israelites through the desert, an image Quakers have returned to again and again in description of the above experience.  The image of the manna, a mysterious kind of nourishment which in times of famine fell from the sky at night and could be gathered from the ground in the morning.  There was a commandment attached to this gift.  The people were not permitted to stock it for the future.  If kept overnight, one would find it the following day “rotten, full of worms, and stinking”. One had to get up every morning, leave one’s tent, and, as the first act of the day, gather the gift anew.(14)

Seek first the kingdom of God:  a gift that is present, but must be sought by us anew on every new day.

(emptiness)
I want to speak of the fear of emptiness, not only because the experience of emptiness has played a great part in my life and was my special challenge, but because I believe it may be this fear more than any other that holds us in bondage today.  The prospect of emptiness may fill us with dread even more than the wild "surf" we might discover in ouselves in the process of waiting.  It is very important to understand about emptiness.

A "formless void" is how the biblical creation story describes the state of the earth to which the Creator Will was drawn.  Only this void could attract God to the earth and induce His act of creation, and does so to this day. Unoccupied ground.  Vacancy.  Freedom from pre-occupation, notions, ideas.  In the New Testament, in the Sermon of the Mount, Jesus calls this state “poverty of spirit” - the first station on the path laid out in his so-called Beatitudes in Matthew 5, toward the destination of peace and peacemaking.  Poverty of spirit, or spiritual poverty, as the point of departure. 

The following excerpts from two of many personal letters I wrote over the years from this inward state may give a sense of my experience of it.  One letter, of about eleven years ago, tells:

“Other than that, there is not much to report about me.  My life is hard physical work and (because of a change of management at my place of employment) mental stress, and rest in the apartment of my hostess and in my small shady room.  I feel absolutely no motivation and energy to go anywhere or do anything else.  At times there seem glimpses of ‘important’ things that might be going on in my soul; perhaps this is where my energy is absorbed.  Then again I don’t know.  I feel quite sure that I must wait, in attention, until my spirit feels called.  Much of my life has passed this way, and I remember those periods now vividly as especially rich and blessed!  The course is set anew, and is newly righted, during those periods if one submits to them in awakeness and patience, and does not fill them artificially with ‘excitements’ that have nothing to do with what is going on.  To do the latter, I have found, is much more painful than surrender to an ‘empty’ time of waiting.”  

The second letter, written just this past winter, includes a quotation from a text I have been carrying with me for years.  First, my own voice:

“A time of emptiness for me (not for lack of tasks), as I feel the withdrawal of my engagements here, especially those in our local Friends meeting.  One feels the need of the meeting, and it is happy (though it felt trying) to minister to it, and it can feel almost cruel to have to give this up when the need continues, or even worse, when small germinations seem to have begun that seem in need of nurture.  My only hope is that the God who calls me to this withdrawal is the same God who is ‘all-sufficient for the pilgrimage of his people,' as Woolman also needed to remind himself, and will look after its need.”

To accept the emptiness is to trust.

The quotation in this letter, from a text by the abbess of a Trappist(15)  community in Canada, speaks of the “life-giving emptiness” of right waiting: 

“It is the Spirit who, by the very force of the desire for nothing but God, hollows out this living emptiness, this divine space within us.  It is likewise the Spirit who fills this emptiness with the fullness of God.  Hence becomes immediately apparent the ultimate spiritual tragedy that inevitably results from all attempts to fill that emptiness ourselves.  The emptiness is our treasure; from it wells up spiritual being, the fruit of God’s own fullness poured forth into our heart.”(16)  

 Let me repeat this last sentence in my own words: 

Our spiritual poverty -
poverty of spirit as our point of departure -
is our treasure.
Out of it springs what we really need,
the fruit of divine fullness
which is poured forth in our heart
and sends us forth into the world.  

(nothing)
Ultimately, our fear of “waiting upon the Lord” is a fear of nothingness, annihilation, non-being.  It impacts our lives more deeply than we may be aware.  And it is precisely the practice of this waiting that overcomes this fear.

This exactly was the personal experience of George Fox, so engulfing and convincing that he could not stop talking about it, in an urgent desire that others, too, may come to this direct and personal encounter with the living and saving power.  In one of his epistles, for instance, he says:

“Stand still in that which is pure,
after you see yourselves;
and then mercy comes in.
After you see your thoughts, and the temptations,
do not think, but submit;
and then power comes.
Stand still in that which shows and discovers;
and there strength immediately comes.
And earthly reason will tell you what you shall lose;
do not listen to that,
but stand still in the light that shows you,
and then strength comes from the Lord,
and help contrary to your expectation.
When your thoughts are abroad,
then troubles move you.
But come to stay your minds upon that spirit
which was before the letter;
stand still in that power
which brings peace.”

									1652(17)

I have come to believe that the world is healed in the human heart.  In the same place where it was broken.  

5b.  The “point of departure” as fundamental attitude of faith

In time our practice of waiting begins to extend itself to all of our life.  “The point of departure” becomes our basic attitude in all of our living.

How am I experiencing this?

Out of the waiting comes sending.  I am sent into the tasks of my day, which may be the usual ones, but freshly filled with sense and the energy of the fresh manna.  I may also be sent, now and then, into a new and different task, which can be unexpected and fear-inspiring, or long-awaited in half hope and half dread.  I remember an especially long period of such waiting in which I was virtually crying out for a task I sensed was approaching but could not yet see.  A work in God’s Vineyard that would be clearly recognizable.  

(the cry)
Often, out of our waiting rises a cry.  “O Lord, my God, I call for help by day, I cry out in the night before you!”  “Out of the depths I cry to you, Lord!  Lord, hear my voice!”  “Do not let me be put to shame!”  The psalms have taught me to cry.  

Crying out, wailing, lamenting.  Kurt Wolff, who wrote the psalms in personal language out of our own time, prays in one of them:  “I’m not whining, Lord, I’m not whining - I’m lamenting!”  What happens in rightful lamentation from the depth of the heart?  What is the effect of sincerely crying out from the depths of human pain?

In my cry I acknowledge my situation as I feel it, and my helplessness, all the way, holding back nothing.  In it I open my heart to a reality I can no longer deny.  And:  the cry opens a space which extends beyond me and my trouble.  It bursts the prison of the trouble, so to speak, in which I am stuck.  In my cry I stretch myself into this greater space.  I grow by my cry.

The cry expresses faith, a faith I may not have known I had.  I wouldn’t cry out when falling into the deep waters if there weren’t, deep down in me somewhere, a faith that there is salvation, whether in the form I imagine or another.  

Mother Theresa said:  “Pray as you can, not as you can’t.”  And to one who wrote her he would like to pray, but how could he since he didn’t believe in God, she answered:  “You don’t need to believe in God to pray.  Just pray, and you will find response.”  

If we feel threatened by the world‘s present condition and are anxious to know what our response should be as Friends, have we cried out?  Have we entered into this double blessing of the cry?  Who are we, midgets in God's universe, that we want to find the answer in the constriction of our anguish?(17a)

(the task)
Two things I have learned of prerequisites for receiving the yearned-for personal task in God’s Vineyard:

I must be willing to do that which God asks of me.  To accept the task that I recognize as the God-given one for me, even if (at first) it seems to contradict my personal expectations and desires.  I have experienced great surprises in this respect, which caused me pain.  But the joy lay beneath, at the root.  

I can give, and am authorized to give, only what is given me.

The second insight came to me out of the mouth of a child at a yearly meeting of Conservative Friends in Ohio.  One evening a little girl told us what she had learned during the day in her children’s program.  “When we need something, or have a wish, we may tell God, and then we must wait.  And while we wait, we must do what we know we must do.”  

This has become for me one of the most useful advices I have heard from Friends.  In our zeal and striving for the task we desire, we tend to overlook or depreciate the task that is given, stretching ourselves after a more “important” assignment by which we hope to effect “greater things.”  To do faithfully, from all our heart and to the best of our ability, what is given us to do according to the measure of Light we have received, prepares us for receiving more Light, perhaps toward the task for which we are yearning.  

(busyness)
A few days before the date of this lecture, I woke up with a phrase by the German poet Rilke which I had pondered as a young person:  “… to increase our treasure of invisibility…”(18)  I hadn’t thought of it in a long time.  An exhortation that seems addressed to the people of our time.  

We all know about that busyness which barely leaves us time and collectedness to attend to the essential.  In the pause-less pursuit of things visible our spiritual eye grows blind.  We pass by the things we should do,  and what we are doing becomes meaningless.  We overlook the divine pointers, and rush past open doors without noticing them.  Our dynamic, multi-dimensional lives become, at the core, uncreative.  Meaning is lost.  Inward refreshment escapes us.  We speak of burn-out.

It is with trepidation that I offer you these excerpts from one of the most radical pieces of spiritual writing I carry with me, a letter by the American Trappist monk Thomas Merton(19) who, by his many books, created a bridge between the spiritual alienation of modern man and that which every soul most deeply yearns for.  The letter, public by now and sent to me years ago by a Friend in my Yearly Meeting, is addressed to one who was active in a position of leadership in an important peace organization and turned to Merton in exhaustion, overextension, and discouragement.  After several empathic remarks regarding the writer’s condition and some practical advice, Merton says:

“Do not depend on the hope of results.  When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on…, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect.  As you get used to this idea you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself.  And there too a great deal has to be gone through, as gradually you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people.  The range tends to narrow down, but it gets much more real.  In the end, as you yourself mention in passing, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything.”  

He goes further, nearer the root of the problem:

“The next step in the process is for you to see that your own thinking about what you are doing is crucially important.  You are probably striving to build yourself an identity in your work and your witness.  You are using it so to speak to protect yourself against nothingness, annihilation.  That is not the right use of your work.  All the good that you will do will come not from you but from the fact that you have allowed yourself, in the obedience of faith, to be used by God’s love.  Think of this more and gradually you will be free from the need to prove yourself, and you can be more open to the power that will work through you without your knowing it.” (20)

Without your knowing it.  That is hard.  Hard to accept that I cannot see, or only to a small extent, how I am useful in the world, how God works through me, through my deeds and my person.  I might call this the greatest challenge of my life:  to accept this invisibility, even while allowing its increase.  To give up affirmation of myself by the visible.  Only then, I think, can we really find our path; only then do we become really free to it - the path that is inseparable from our person.

(burning bush)
It brings to my mind an experience of spiritual breakthrough I had some years ago.  On my way up a forested hill to the church of a monastery in which, passing through, I had spent the night (the state was Connecticut, the town named Bethlehem), my eyes fell on a little ordinary shrub at the side of the path, and it hit me suddenly that whatever it was the bush was giving off in my perception at this moment was nothing other than - the bush.  And it broke out of me:  “I am the ministry!  I am the ministry!”  I am the message. 

It was not grandiosity.  It was humility.  That humility into which we are brought when we suddenly find ourselves standing before God.  “I am who am.” (21)

I can only be useful in the world, God’s Vineyard, through what I am, and what I become when I “let myself be used by God’s love.”  And I cannot see myself in this, as the little shrub could not see itself and its impact on me.  The fruit is for others.  Something I have learned and am learning with difficulty.  Our salvation is not in beholding ourselves, but in being one with God.  

(rhythm)
Over some years I experienced my life as a rhythm of times of waiting in quiet and periods of fresh outward activity.  For a long time I felt pressure that a decision for one or the other of these modes may be asked of me.  A letter of about five years ago describes my experience of this rhythm:

“I must allow God to ‘reel me back in’, as a fisherman reels the fly he has cast far out into the waters back in after its errand is done, with a catch or without one.  God knows the time.  I enjoyed the work!  But the return, to be alone with God again, must be more to me than the work.  Completeness is there, though at first it can seem like an emptiness and a deprivation.”  

A Quaker friend who had been very active in a certain ministry for many years wrote to me one day that she was feeling her ministry being withdrawn.  “I can hardly wait to see who it will reappear in next,” she wrote.  I knew that giving up this work was not easy for her.  Her joyous submission, in awareness that God works through community, not just individuals, moved me deeply.  “Not to extend the gift” is another advice of earlier Friends I keep needing to remember.  To examine the call from time to time to see whether it still holds.  

“How can my times of withdrawal and waiting be useful for others?” I often wondered.  The letter just quoted offers this image:

“A fountain in the midst of fields where laborers are toiling.  In all their time in the heat and dust of work, they are inwardly aware of the fountain to which they will walk when the time comes to refresh themselves. When they come, the cool drink they need has to be there for them.  If the fountain is unfaithful, dislodging itself from its foundation and trudging after the laborers to ‘help’ them in the fields, they will not be refreshed.

“I am not the water, I am the fountain, the vessel, the well the Spirit digs, deeper and deeper, so it can gather the water.”

(progressive descent)
Increasingly I experience that our inward “waiting on the Lord,” in quiet listening for the “Voice” that guides us, can continue right through our active times without diminishment.  I think it is what is meant by the term “inward peace”, which is felt by others and takes an effect of healing.  It is, I believe, what Jesus meant by “the one thing necessary,” unum necessarium, in the story of his visit to the sisters Martha and Mary in Luke 10 (referred to for centuries in the contest over the question of the more noble vocation, a life of charitable outward activity or of pure contemplation).  Jesus did not mean to lift up Mary’s occupation of sitting in quiet listening “at his feet” over Martha’s busy care for the needs of the body; he meant to remind Martha, amidst her anxious activity on behalf of others, that she was in danger of falling out of inward waiting and listening for the Voice which instructs, heals, safely leads, and orders our lives.(22)  I have experienced persons who have come into this uninterrupted inward “waiting” as poles of tranquility in the midst of upheaval, fear, and desperate busyness.  It is they who receive clear vision and far-reaching insight, and (often in Friends meetings for worship or business) find the right word at the right time, and can act with firm sureness where others are as if paralyzed.

Our practice of waiting is progressive.  The Light penetrates deeper and deeper into us, down to the “oppressed seed”, to use an earlier Friends’ term, which it seeks to liberate.  “Places” of darkness and death, “frozen parts” on the globe of our soul, are progressively redeemed.  Through this action of the Light we become, gradually and without knowing it, saviors and redeemers of others.  The Journals of earlier Friends offer wonderful examples of this.(23)

“To change the world” is to liberate the divine seed of all that depresses and oppresses it, obstructing its growth - the Seed of the Light within every person and in all creaturely situations.  

(return and release)
The return to the “point of departure“ has been classically known, in the Judeo-Christian tradition from which Quakerism sprang and in the English language, by the term repentance.  “Repent!  Turn around!  Convert your ways!” is the prophetic cry ringing through the writings of a great variety of historical periods and situations in the Bible.  The motion that brings renewal and opens the way forward is, immediately, a turn “back.”(24)  “Turn around - for the kingdom of God is here!”, in the words of the New Testament.(25)  It always was - we only walked away.

No other story in the Bible conveys to me the nature of this return-in-the-Light more clearly and precisely than the famous parable of Jesus about the “Prodigal Son” who had requested his inheritance from his father to squander it in the world and end up in a pig sty, where, one day, he resolved to return.  And as soon as he took the first step on this path, his father came to meet him.

The son had expected to take the lowest place now in his father’s house, a humiliating, degrading position for him as the rightful heir, a slave’s position, believing himself not to deserve any better.  Instead, he found himself lifted into the highest place, of greatest joy.

Why are we so hesitant to return?

We fear the humiliation which acknowledgment of our reality might mean.  Regret might overcome us, guilt feelings, collapse of our existence as we have seen it, mourning, tears (which bring so much release).  We are afraid of inward acts of punishment, self-rejection and self-condemnation.  We dread the experience of the “low”, a place we have so industriously sought to avoid.  Early Friends called the event of spiritual return “conviction”, in the sense of conviction of a crime; a “convinced Friend” originally meant a person convicted of sin by the inward Light.  They said this was the first thing the Light would do.  They interpreted the clause which, in Matthew, follows the term “kingdom of God” in our theme phrase - “and his righteousness” - to mean that God’s righteousness or justice first of all had to be implemented in ourselves, beginning with this personal conviction by the Light.(26)  As in the “cry“ we spoke of, we can only find out who God is by taking the step of returning.  As soon as we set our feet on “the way back,” we find ourselves in arrival.

Martin Buber, German-Jewish philosopher of religion and friend of the Quakers, whose seminal work I and Thou accompanied me during this summer among you, concludes his profound reflection on the central role of relationship in man’s religious and social life with a powerful prophetic statement I feel describes both the spiritual process of the individual and the process of humanity’s historical development(27):

The tragedy
grows more crushing
with each eon,
the return 
more profoundly liberating.
Theophany
moves ever nearer,
approaching ever more closely
the sphere between beings, the kingdom
that lies in our midst, in the in-between.
History is a mysterious course
of approximation.
Each of its spirals leads us
ever more deeply into
peril and to more radical
return at the same time.
But the event
whose world-side we call 
return is on its God-side 
redemption. 

6.  “…and all these things will be given unto you” 

How, then, do the two parts of our theme sentence hang together?  What is in the little word and that connects them?  Is there a causal relationship, or was Jesus’ meaning merely, “Only attend to the kingdom of God faithfully - because all these other things you worry about are given you anyway”?  

When in my preparation I came to the second half of our theme sentence, it came over me that there was nothing left to do for me but sing.  Of an experience which reaches beyond explanation and causality, as true gifts will, beyond all “why” and “what for.”  I look around - and what do I see?  How is life in the kingdom of God?

(the "heavenly economy”)
My song celebrates what I have come to call “the heavenly economy.”  Is there such a thing?  I do not wish to introduce a new dogma or para-scientific theory.  I cannot prove anything, nor do I wish to, and I am offering no recipe.  I experience that, where I seek the kingdom of God first and faithfully, not only my tasks, not only my ways, but also the means necessary for them are given, including material ones.  Doors open which I didn’t even know exist.  I become aware of the abundance that is, with amazement, and find myself free to use it, creatively, in right action.  The “oil in the jug” I find, never runs out.(28)  As already mentioned, it’s not a matter of tradeoff - pursuing the "kingdom" to receive "these things" -, not of mercantile transaction.  Nor of magic.(29)  Rather, it is as if in striving faithfully after God’s kingdom we were stepping into a stream which contains and yields all that our work, our life, in the kingdom requires.  Any idea we may have secretly held on to that by putting God’s kingdom first we will miss out on what we need as humans falls away.  The opposite is true.  We learn what we should pray for, and experience that our needs can change and many fall away painlessly.  Our life becomes ordered and strong with a lean strength. 

Not only are we given what we need - we may come to feel that we do not need what isn’t given us.(30)  We begin to appreciate and love life as the permanent and open crisis it is.  “Crisis” means “decision”, and it is asked of us minute by minute.  In every decision I make I can choose that perfection which early Friends thought possible (according to the word of Jesus, “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect,” Mt 5,48), for every moment offers me the possibility of the “return.”(31)  

“Miracles” are no longer old wives’ tales, or “proofs” of supernatural intervention inacceptable to reason.  In the kingdom of God they are the norm.  We experience the miraculous sufficiency so powerfully expressed in the story of the Feeding of the Five thousand (Mt 14,13), and the truth of Jesus’ word, “My nourishment is to do the will of him who has sent me, and to accomplish his work” (Joh. 4,34).  

Even in the worst situations which our faithfulness and the world’s response to it may get us into, we are uplifted and nourished by the truth the Friend Eva Hermann recognized during her terrible imprisonment under the Nazi regime.(32)  It was her experience, no longer just an accepted faith, “that we have access to a reality infinitely greater [than our trouble and suffering]; that the ocean of darkness truly is overrolled by the much greater ocean of Light” (in the image of George Fox).  

Another anguish that burdens many of us - about continuity of authentic religious life and our own Religious Society - gives way to the clear-eyed certainty the prophet Elijah received in his moment of despair when he believed himself to be the last person in Israel still adhering to the living God:  “I will leave seven thousand in Israel who will not bend their knees before the Baal or kiss his image.”  (1 Kings 19,18).  And we will meet such friends of God over and over. 

Equally, we are delivered from falsely pressing for “community”, crying out for it as we are, and desperate attempts to “build” it by false means, in the growing recognition of the true source of that community which indeed is God’s will for us.  In Martin Buber’s image:(33) 

[The continuity of a religious community consists in]
people’s relationship
to their true Thou,
the radii
reaching from all the I-points
to the center,
creating a circle.
Not the periphery,
not community
is the first thing,
but the radii,
the relationship to the center
held in common.
It alone
guarantees
genuine continuity
of the community of faith. 

Finally, we are redeemed to preach the kingdom of God freely and justly, in all the world, as is asked of us and as early Friends did with great passion.  By our deeds and by our words, down to our everyday conversation. Vigilance, guardianship of the tongue that can sow so much strife, becomes our practice.(34)  We experience the almost indescribable joy of true encounter when we learn to seek the kingdom of God in the other first, and feel how “the child is leaping” in the other person’s spiritual womb at our greeting, to use the image of Mary’s visit to Elizabeth in Luke 22.

Our view of the world, our poor, suffering, corrupt world, changes in this blessed service.  Not that it is less in need of us, with its oppressed seed.  Yet lines from the Tao Te Ch’ing I’ve long carried in me are increasingly opening their truth to me:(35)

Do you want to improve the world?
I don't think it can be done.
The world is sacred.
It can't be improved.
If you tamper with it, you'll ruin it.
If you treat it like an object, you'll lose it.

We learn to walk with the world in faith, with the communities we are part of, rather than trying to “correct” them.  How different this companionship is, how much more fruitful!  With joy we recognize our privilege of being present co-creatively in the continuing formation of true community.(36)  In the “greater space” of God’s kingdom we come to love life and our fellows on a different basis than that of narrow and anxious concern for our own immediate wellbeing, material and spiritual.  Our peace work becomes a work of peace.

(the right tool)
A few weeks ago, on a visit to one of your Friends and her family, I found on a bookshelf standing in the city square where anyone could add or take away any book they wanted, a small collection of short and simple folk tales.(37)  One of them seemed to me to express perfectly what our short theme sentence and my long commentary mean to say.  I wish to conclude with this “children’s story”:
A peasant dropped his ax
into a river.
Sadly he sat down on the shore
and wept. 
The Waterman heard him
and took pity on him.
From the deep he brought up
a golden ax.
“Your ax?” he asked.
“No,” said the peasant, “not mine.”
The Waterman showed him an ax of silver.
Again the peasant replied:  “Not mine.”
Now the Waterman brought up the right one.
The peasant said:  “This is my ax.”
The Waterman made him a gift of all three.
ENDNOTES

1  Gerard Guiton, “Recovering the lost radiance:  The kingdom of God, the early Friends, and the future of Quakerism,” in Quaker Religious Thought, Nr. 113, Dec. 2009, p. 42:  “Acknowledging that words could never fully describe the ineffable, Howgill affirmed them as mere sounds, veils that covered the true beauty and meaning of this spiritual ‘habitation’ or the ‘treasure house of wisdom.’”

2  “The Church” at that time in Switzerland was more solidly still the “state Church” than it is today.  In our area, it was the “Swiss Reformed National Church” (whose founder was the Zurich Reformer Ulrich Zwingli, a younger contemporary of Martin Luther); in some other areas it was the Roman Catholic Church.

3  A note for American readers:  One reason why I told many of these parables in this lecture in some detail (though in shortened form) is that, in the present “secular” condition of European society affecting Friends, knowledge of even the more prominent Bible passages can no longer be taken for granted, especially (as the youth worker among German Friends told me) among the young.  It was part of my hope that Friends might be encouraged to read some of these parables (again).   

4  Several of these parables end with a harsh, even condemning judgment over the person who did not live up to the truth the story represents, which may seem to contradict a desirable image of Jesus and his doctrine of forgiveness.  Jesus did not deceive his hearers regarding the actual consequences (even here on earth) of human action and life.  I personally read these passages as parables of the spiritual process as I experience it, the inward disturbances and torments and outer blockages and confusions I get into when, for instance, I fail to forgive, or become aware that I am wasting the good entrusted to me - even the gift of life itself.  The “punishing lord” is for me simply Truth which, gazing upon us from within, reminds us again and again of who we really are - what our destiny is according to our potential. 

5  This parable about the importance of increase recalls the saying by the British Friend Caroline Stephen (1789-1859) that is a favorite among Friends:  “Live up to the measure of Light you have received, and more Light will be given you.”   The increase happens by faithful response to what we have been given. 
 
6  See Note 1.

7  The U.S. Quaker Ken Jacobsen has suggested to me that the so-called “Beatitudes” in Mt 5 can be understood as a path of spiritual development which leads step by step to the goal of an attitude of peace and the habitual practice of peacemaking.  The final step cannot be won without the other.  I found this a worthwhile meditation.  
 
8   In the German version I’m calling it “die Ausgangslage.” 
 
9   The German language presents a certain difficulty, mentioned now and then, with the translation of the English word “wait” as Quakers use it in their religious context, because its equivalent, warten, only has the meaning of “to wait for.”  An equivalent of  “to wait upon”, as in “to wait upon the Lord”, does not exist.  

10  Eva Hermann, Gefangen Und Doch Frei  (“Imprisoned yet free”).  This deeply moving testimony has been translated into English and published by the American Friends Tracts Association.  I recommend it highly.  

11 She said no - fortunately for me, as I realized later, because it would have meant to “run away.”  
 
12  Cf. also the words of  German Friend Marie Pleissner upon her release from a long internment at the Ravensbruck concentration camp:  “One cannot fall lower than into God’s hands.”  From:  “Lebensbilder deutscher Quaeker waehrend der NS-Herrschaft 1933-1945“, p. 79  (Short biographies of German Quakers during the Nazi regime 1933-1945).  

13  Samuel Bownas (1676-1753), “A Description of the Qualifications Necessary to a Gospel Minister:  Advice to Ministers and Elders Among the People Called Quakers.”  1750, London; 1989 Pendle Hill Publications, with an Introduction (incl. Samuel’s biography) by William P. Taber Jr, where this story from Samuel’s Journal is quoted in this form:
[In a First Day worship late in 1696] “… a young woman named Anne Wilson, was there and preached: she was very zealous, and fixing my eye upon her, she with a great zeal pointed her finger at me, uttering these words with much power: ’A traditional Quaker, thou comest to meeting as thou went from it (the last time) and goes from it as thou came to it, but art no better for thy coming; what wilt thou do in the end?’  This was so pat to my then condition, that, like Saul, I was smitten to the ground, as it might be said, but turning my thoughts inward, in secret I cried, ’Lord, what shall I do to help it?’ and a voice as it were spoke in my heart saying, ’Look unto me, and I will help thee;’ and I found much comfort, that made me shed abundance of tears.”
I did not have this book with me in Europe while preparing this part of the lecture and quoted the story from memory.  Bownas’ book (“Qualifications”) was fundamental in my Quaker “formation.”  H.B.

14 Exodus 16.

15  Cistercians of the Strict Order, a contemplative Catholic monastic order whose members live in silent community (except for the shared liturgical prayers of the hour).  In the mid-90s, I spent much time as a retreatant in such a community of women near Boston.  

16  Jean-Marie Howe, OCSO, “Spiritual Journey - The Monastic Way.”  

17 Selection and arrangement, including slight adjustments of language and emphasis, by H.B.

(17a)  The theme of this yearly meeting was, in keeping with the theme of the upcoming FWCC Triennial:  "Global Change:  Perception - Relationship - Our Witness." FWCC had invited Friends worldwide to think about what Friends' specific answer may be to the current world situation. 

18 Quoted from memory and in my translation.  The original may be slightly different, such as, “to increase our store of invisibility…”  I think the phrase occurs in Malte Laurid Brigge. 
 
19 Merton does not seem to be known in Europe as he is in the U.S.  

20 From a letter to James Forest, 1966. 

21 Exodus 3. 

22 He had come.  A Friend in my Monthly Meeting pointed out to me once that Mary took the opportunity to listen to Christ while he was present, laying everything away. 
 
23 James Gough, an 18th century Friend, describes such an experience in his Journal:
“If it should happen that several of those who are meeting together should begin to stray in mind and depart from the grace that is in them, even though they are outwardly silent, and someone comes in, or is present, who is watchful and in whom the life has been raised to a great measure, he will feel a secret travail for the others.  It will be a sympathetic response to the seed which is oppressed in them and kept from rising by their meandering thoughts.  If he remains faithful and waits in the light, continuing this divine work, God often answers this hidden travail and works through the breathings of his own seed in such persons.  The rest find themselves secretly smitten without words.  The faithful person becomes like a midwife whose inward travail brings forth the life in them…  He is like a pump which brings up water by the bucketful when it has been primed with a cup or two.  The useless wandering of the imagination is discontinued and the life becomes raised in all.  Those who have been helped are aware that such a person has ministered life to them without words.”   
(Quoted from the unpublished doctoral dissertation by Kathryn Damiano, “On Earth as it is in Heaven:  Eighteenth Century Quakerism as Realized Eschatology.” )

24 During the three years of my preparation for this lecture, I have meditated again and again on the story in 1 Kings 19 which tells what I called “Elijah’s journey” or “journey of conversion.”  More and more this tale became for me a comprehensive metaphor of man’s “spiritual journey”, or his life with God, and for a long time I considered telling my own essential life journey with the aid of this story and its images.  The “low place”, the “cry”, the “lamentation”, stations so familiar to me, are shown here vividly and  illuminatingly, and what moved me in the end above all was the discovery that God, who hears and sees all this and receives it silently without criticism, answers his discouraged, self-critical, but devoted servant only by a further sending,  into his next task.  But before he does that, he helps him to execute his “return” by strengthening him with food and drink for the long march to Horeb, the “mountain of God”, where Elijah disappears in a dark “cave.”  The fresh summon comes after the prophet hears God calling him by name in the darkness, has brought forth his complaint, and followed God’s order to step outside the cave and meet God, in the “sheer silence” following the turmoil of earthly disturbances.  

25 Mt 3,1;  Mk 1,15.  
 
26  Cf. Note 1, article by Gerard Guiton; p. 39.  

27 Translation by H.B.  Buber’s creative German is not entirely easy to read even for a German native, much harder to render in another language.   I therefore add this powerful passage here in the original:
“Das Verhaengnis wird mit jedem Aeon erdrueckender, die Umkehr sprengender.  Und die Theophanie wird immer naeher, sie naehert sich immer mehr der Sphaere zwischen den Wesen, naehert sich dem Reich, das in unserer Mitte, im Dazwischen, liegt.  Die Geschichte ist eine geheimnisvolle Annaeherung.  Jede Spirale ihres Wegs fuehrt uns in tieferes Verderben und in grundhaftere Umkehr zugleich.  Das Ereignis aber, dessen Weltseite Umkehr heisst, dessen Gottesseite heisst Erloesung.”  

28  From the story in 1 Kings 17 about the prophet Elijah’s visit to the widow of Zarepath, who believed she was about to starve to death along with her son.  After she used her last oil and meal for a cake to feed the starving “man of God”, she found that the oil in her jug and the meal in her jar never ran out. 

29 As to “magic”, Martin Buber writes:  “It wants to work without entering into the relationship (with Thou, the “center”) and practices its art in a vacuum.  [It does not step] ’before the face’ in the realization of the holy foundational word [Thou] which signifies mutuality.”  (From I and Thou.  Translation H.B.)

30 Several of the Chassidic tales collected by Martin Buber speak of this, as for example this one:  Rabbi Pinchas said: ’ Since I began to truly serve the Creator, I have not striven to get anything, only taken what God gave me.  Because the pupil (of the eye) is dark, it takes all light into itself. 

31 The Philadelphia Quaker and author Hannah Withall Smith has given me an interesting hint in one of her books.  She points out that the Bible asks not so much for a process of inward transformation as for purity of heart.  This signifies - and my experience seems to confirm this - that the “perfection” early Friends valued and believed in is achieved not only through a life of faithfulness over time, but can also be gained over and over in moments of “return” (right decision).  The author states that every phase of our spiritual development can be fully pure and perfect, as the apple blossom is no less perfect than the ripe apple. 
  
32 See Note 10.

33 From I and Thou. 

34 This was much emphasized in the Journals of 18th century Friends.  One of them, Sophia Hume, radically asks:  “Is thy conversation the gospel of Christ?” 

35 From the translation by Stephen Mitchell. 

36 A Friend in my Yearly Meeting has described this “walking with” (in reference to the challenges very small Quaker Meetings face) in this way:  “However small and challenged a spiritual community is, it exists - it is not  a ‘future something’, it is an actual organism now, and the best way to build towards a more vigorous future is to make sure its present life is being nourished, in the ways that it can be.”  (From a personal letter.)  

37 Collected for children by Leo Tolstoy. 

 Parables of the kingdom of God in the gospels

1)    Mt 13,3, also Mk 4,3			The Sower

2)    Mt 13,24					The Wheat and the Weeds

3)    Mt 13,31, also Lk 13,19			The Mustard Seed

4)    Mt 13,33					The Yeast in the Flour

5)    Mt 13,44					The Treasure in the Field

6)    Mt 13,45					The Pearl of High Value

7)    Mt 13,47					The Fishnet

8)    Mt 18,23					Forgiveness of the Debt (the Cruel Servant)

9)    Mt 20,1					Equal Reward for Each Worker in the Vineyard

10)  Mt 21,28					The Yes-Sayer Who Does Not Follow, and 
							The Nay-Sayer Who Does
11)  Mt 21,33, also Mk 21,1			The Rebellious Tenants of the Vineyard

12)  Mt 22,2					The Uninterested Wedding Guests

13)  Mt 25,1					The Virgins with the Lamps

14)  Mt 25,14					Different Uses of the Entrusted Good  (“Talents”)

15)  Mk 4,26					Free Growth of the Seed in the Earth

No parables in the gospel of John