The Conservative Friend

Many Friends find it useful to learn a particular way to center in Meeting for Worship: how to begin, how to deal with distractions, how  to gain perspective on their experience of group worship or their own spiritual discipline.

Centering Prayer, which is an updating of contemplative practice in the Christian tradition, is not only a technique that provides practical help in the use of silence but is based on a profound understanding of the human relationship to the Divine and what is involved in a long-term commitment to spiritual growth.

The Ohio Yearly Meeting Friends Center recently hosted a weekend workshop on Centering Prayer, hosted by Chris Ravndal.  Chris retired after 15 years of teaching at Pendle Hill, a Quaker retreat center near Philadelphia, USA.  He taught courses there in prayer, the Gospel of John, and the letters of Paul.  He has taken a prayer course at Pendle Hill and at Duquesne University.  He has attended a ten-day Centering Prayer intensive and was certified as a teacher of Centering Prayer after an eight-day intensive with Thomas Keating.  He has offered numerous prayer workshops in diverse locations for various Friends organizations and local Meetings across the country.

Two participants, Barbara and Bill o'Dell, have kindly provided a summary of the weekend based on their personal journals.  They are members of St. Paul's United Church of Christ in Sidney, Ohio, USA, and were able to attend with the help of Quaker friends in Sidney.

For more information on future programs of the Friends Center, click on our
Friends Center Page.

Day One

Other guests began to arrive.  We gathered in the living room.  Dinner was ready but first we formed a circle holding hands and bowing our heads.  Expecting a dinner prayer, Bill and I were surprised when nothing was said.  We waited and still nothing was said.  Eventually we caught on that nothing was going to be said and gave thanks silently for what we were about to receive.  Suddenly people on either side of us gently squeezed our hands as an ending sign.  We had just been initiated into our first Prayer of Silence. We conversed and got acquainted as ample food was served and enjoyed by all in the basement dining room.

Everyone helped with the serving and doing the dishes.  We took seats back in the living room and the first lesson began.  Our leader, Chris, was a retired Olney/Pendle Hall teacher, his wife, Janeal, a social worker and seasoned activist. We began with another silent prayer.  This time the soft resonate ‘ping’ sound of a Tibetan Singing Bowl brought us gently back to a state of total awareness.

Lesson one.  We learned how to listen…. Really listen to another person.  The listener… no emotions shown… only concentrated listening and observation of tone, body language etc.  We split up into groups and practiced, taking turns as speakers and listeners. Afterwards we were asked what it felt like to be really listened to?...  And what did it feel like to be the listener and show no emotion and really observe and listen?

Up the stairs and to bed.  The anticipation of what was to come was growing inside me...

Lights out.  Eyes still wide open.       Silence….. Get used to the Silence.
 
Day two

We all settled in the living room feeling like we had already known each other for a while.  Chris began to speak about Centered Prayer.  But first a quiet silent centering worship time ending with a ‘ping’.

Centered Prayer the process…

Choose a word…. your very own personal word, a symbol of ‘consenting’ to center on God then ‘just let it be’… what ever thoughts come let them sail on by…. Return to your centering word triggering your consent to ‘just let it be’

The thoughts will keep coming and we keep letting them float by, returning to our special word and consenting to be with God and ‘just let it be’.  We are basking in Grace.  We are asking for nothing, striving for nothing, forcing nothing,…  floating our thought boats away and returning again and again to our centering word, triggering our response to just let God be God…. Softly the bell pings.

We were finding that a pattern was beginning to establish itself.  Our minds were beginning to easily return to the comforting special personal word we each had chosen.

Break time...10 minutes

Centering Prayer with a twist.  We picked a comforting image of our desired relationship with God instead of a word.  We repeated the process using our chosen images.  Image… Drifting… drifting thoughts …. Return to image…. Thoughts …. return to image …. The bell  pings.

Yet another twist.  Divine Breath.  We concentrated on our breathing.  In… out… in… out…. in… out….  The bell pings.  Training in Centering Prayer ends
 
Next Chris discussed the role of the tension that exists between our realities and our visions or goals.  He explained how a person accomplishes more by persevering ever forward toward their goals rather than allowing inevitable tensions that come with that striving to bring the goal back toward us (lessening the goal)… in other words, selling ourselves short.  Our goals may never be attained, but the point is always to make progress.  When we do reach a goal, another goal will be there to take its place.
 
Chris also explained the difference between Consolations and Desolations (both of which come into our lives).  He warned us that Consolations, pleasant as they may be, are not an end in themselves and are only meant to encourage us.

Afternoon break

We took a tour of the grounds.  The campus was beautiful. The air was brisk.  Mostly brick buildings with white trim. Historic Olney School (home to 70 students from all over the world…. college prep) had been Lois’s high school.  Classes were canceled for the weekend, so we met only a few teachers.  Down a wide oak molded and giant doored hallway, the ghosts of past students nodded respectfully as we walked by.  The notes played on a Grand Piano could be heard off and on.

We admired a rare Gingko tree and a new walking bridge over the picturesque pond before we returned to Morlan for a shower and a quick afternoon nap.  Next session in one hour.

4:00

We reassembled in the living room refreshed after having large doses of anti-dozing fresh air.  We stood and learned an Exercise Prayer.  It was like a tai-chi dance movement.  It was easy, graceful and felt good.

Welcome, Welcome, Welcome….. Chris taught us how to use irritating distractions during prayer times to our advantage by welcoming them.  The process was discovered by a man held in a prison camp during the war.  The man realized that life in the camp represented a miniature of life in the outside world. Chris showed us how the skill could make life easier in our day-to-day living by making irritations less stressful and more meaningful.

We immersed ourselves in silent prayer and experimented with using distractions as welcoming opportunities to learn, grow, and help us to understand others.

Day three...meeting

It was time to attend a real Quaker Meeting!  I could hardly wait!  We climbed the hill to the big Stillwater Meeting House.  Prayers have been rising from the spot since the seventeen hundreds.  The main room was so big!  The tall narrow doors, high windows, rows of dark wood and yellow-green padded pews, soft white walls acking any decoration….. LOOK UP!  A curving wooden ceiling so high….. the panels led to the balcony behind us.  Susan said “You see that wall to the right?  When that wall is moved, there is another room just like this one on the other side.  During Yearly Meeting both sides can be filled.”  The vision of such a large expanse filled with people sitting in hushed prayerful silence awed me.  I thought a silence such as that must be deafening!

It was a cold morning and the main room was not heated, so we returned to a smaller room and took our seats. . Other people gathered, taking their seats and praying in silence.  We retreat participants did the same using our new techniques, drifting into spiritual community with each other and God.  The depth of prayer seemed stronger with more people around us.  All was perfectly silent for a long time.  Later we became aware of the sound of a young girl turning the pages of a book she brought.  We used our training to welcome the distraction and incorporated it into our concentration.

The soft whimper of a baby in the back row sounded eerily like the sound the kitten had made in my dream the first night.  I experienced the soft comfortable feeling of just hanging out, spending time with God and waiting….. waiting for what?... a message?... a vision?... a scent?... a touch? Or simply consenting to letting God be God and allowing him/her/it/them to do whatever was intended…..

Slowly legs began to be stretched, backs were adjusted, eyes began to open.  One of the men facing us stood up and proceeded to welcome everyone.  Fran asked that we retreat members stand up and introduce ourselves.  We felt welcomed.

As the meeting ended Bill and I toured the collection room and saw many artifacts of Quaker history.

We walked back down the hill toward Morlan with a sense of sadness.  The partings were almost upon us. We felt like we had been there a long time.
 
Our final meal

It was hearty and so were the feelings we all were having toward the weekend experiences and each other.  As the dishes were being washed and dried for one final time, we took turns hugging and promising to keep in touch.  The idea was tossed about to do another retreat and learn some other new things.

As our car pulled us back through the white pillars, we could feel the beauty and human warmth of the Olney experience following us.  We talked and remembered things all the way home.  We sensed that we had been changed in ways the future would reveal…..

Silence
 
 

13-14 October 2007

Look at the photographs.

Well. we made it there and back.  We have just returned from the “2007 Universal Light Expo--Guardians of Light,” in Columbus, Ohio.  For years, this has been billed as a universalist New Age convention, in which 300 booth vendors and various speakers explain to the public why what they believe is important.  Until this year, there has never been an outreach presence of the Religious Society of Friends at this event-- Liberal, Conservative, Evangelical or other.

Our booth was a combined missionary and merchant operation from Gypsy Bees Company.  We pay our bills through the sale of beehive products and all-natural lotions, skin creams, and such, but at this event about half of our space was devoted to literature from the Religious Society of Friends.  We had several books available for sale, such as Bill Taber’s Eye of Faith and the OYM Statements Against War, but the rest of our literature was free for the taking.  It included Pendle Hill and FGC Bookstore catalogs, Tract Association pamphlets, Wider Quaker Fellowship literature, material from the FWCC, various documents from our own outreach library, and OYM publications such as our Discipline, Advices and Queries, and so on.

Our work is focused on outreach, and each pamphlet had a small sticker on the back listing the URL of this website.  In addition, we placed the same sticker on the back of every jar of honey that we sold, as well as on our larger beeswax candles.  The pamphlets that we print ourselves also listed the official OYM web site.  Whenever a customer purchased a jar of honey or a candle, we also dropped into their bag a small Tract Association pamphlet of some sort that discussed Quakerism in general terms.  Each of those pamphlets also listed our web site.

One of the most critical aspects of outreach at an event like this is engaging strangers in conversation.  Several OYM members were there to talk to people and also simply to project a friendly presence.  As usual, one of the most frequent comments we heard was simple surprise that Quakers still existed.  Among most 21st century Americans, the Religious Society of Friends is a hidden and secretive world, and the Conservative wing is completely unknown even among many Liberal and Evangelical Friends.

The people that dropped by were a cross section of our culture today.  There were ordinary people who came for a entertainment, postmodern seekers looking for New Age solutions to their spiritual journeys, ex-schoolteachers from Quaker high schools, postmen, shopkeepers, rock and mineral collectors, musicians, local priests from a nearby Protestant church, and various people that we see in other contexts every day.  Some of the people we spoke with were explicit Christians. who were looking for a mystical context for their faith that has been traditional among the Society of Friends, but of which they were unaware.  One of our booth workers commented that many of the people he talked to were Quakers in their religious outlook, but were unaware that the Society of Friends had pioneered a way to Christ three hundred years ago that had already answered many of the questions that they were asking now.

Anybody who stopped by our booth was asked if they had any questions about Quakers, whether they had ever heard of the Society (many had not), and whatever else we could think of.  We tried to make sure that nobody left without some sort of reading material, and a pointer to our web site.  A few people were uninterested in Friends, but the vast majority (99 percent of those who stopped in) were curious and wanted to know at least a little more.  Nobody was hostile.  Nobody was dismissive.

We also gave away extra Bibles that we have accumulated.  We had various KJV (large print was very popular among the elderly), some NIV versions, a few study Bibles, and so on.  We put them on the table with a sign on them that said “Free,” and they steadily disappeared.  One young girl in fashionable black Goth clothing asked, “What kind of Bible are they?”  Shawna said “Christian Bibles.”  She asked if they contained the Psalms.  We told her that they did, and she picked one up, turned to one of the Psalms, read it, and then exclaimed, “Yes!”  She thanked us and disappeared into the crowd with her companions, clutching her new Bible in her hands.  We gave away at least ten Bibles to strangers like her.

One of the most thought-provoking aspects of the event were the Yellow Hat Buddhist monks from a north Indian monastery.  These exiled Tibetans visit the Universal Light Exposition every year as a spiritual exercise, witnessing for their faith in a way that we Friends should pay attention to.  They maintained a small booth explaining what they believed and selling a few T-shirts, but their most obvious activity was the creation of an intricate sand mandala on a table top in the middle of the Expo.  This beautiful piece of devotional art was about five feet across, and was made by trickling almost microscopic amounts of colored mineral sands onto a slate topped table while passers-by watched from a few feet away.  The six monks took most of two days to construct the mandala, and then at the end of the Expo performed a public dedication of the work to what they called “the deity,” and then casually swept the work off the table into plastic bags, some of which they handed out to the spectators to deposit at their own homes.  The rest they ceremoniously poured into the nearby Scioto River, blessing the river deities and all bodies of land that the water contacted on its way to the sea.  The point of the careful construction and destruction of the mandala was to demonstrate to Americans that first, all we create is ephemeral and destined for inevitable destruction, and second, that such tasks are worth doing anyway.

These Tibetans visit the United States every year for this expo, making the journey at great inconvenience all the way from the foothills of the Himalayan Mountains.  They see it as worthwhile religious outreach.

The organizers of the event were delighted to have us there, and said so.  They gave us a prime corner spot for our booth, and invited us back next year.  We made enough income to cover most of our expenses, and were greatly helped by several donations made to us for the project from individual OYM members.  We will be back next year at this event.  We are also planning on making this outreach a regular part of our Farmer’s Market-style practice.  There are many more events like this throughout Ohio and the United States, and we have the experience and the interest to make this form of outreach a regular part of our work.

The 194th session of Ohio Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends was held 14 through 19 August 2007, in Barnesville, Ohio, USA.  We used the old Stillwater Meeting House, the Olney Friends School nearby, the various buildings in between, porches, swings, old brick walkways, and several kitchens.

Rather than put up an account here on News and Events, we're going to direct you to our 2007 Yearly Meeting Page.  We had the Agenda up on it earlier, but we plan on adding a lot more material as we have it available.  Go there for a set of master links to what we have.  You can start with the photographs. And if you have some pictures that you are willing to share with the world, please send them to us at k.d.roberts@hotmail.com, and we will put them up.

On 12 August through 14 August 2007, the Ohio Yearly Meeting Friends Center held a conference on new and isolated Friends' meetings and worship groups.  Its purpose was to allow Friends from new, newer and isolated meetings and worship groups to gather together to worship the Lord, to hear presentations on relevant topics, and to explore together matters of mutual interest and concern. Ohio Yearly Meeting through its committees, monthly meetings and concerned individual members has in recent times been active in supporting, encouraging and nurturing new Christian Friends' groups that have begun to meet in areas beyond OYM's traditional geographic area. As the number of these new meetings and worship groups has grown, there has been a growing need to develop and refine effective ways for these meetings and groups to prosper and succeed while avoiding the pitfalls and difficulties that have too often in the past led to their downfall, with the discouraging loss of precious individuals and families from the faith to which we are called.  It was hoped that this would provide opportunity for many involved in this effort to gather together and from the interaction with each other further our abilities for effective effort in this important task that we are about.The following is a report from Robert Hopper, of Friends Gathering in Jesus Christ Worship Group,  Evanston, Illinois, USA, on the workshop.  Robert can be reached at USA 847-733-7226,  friendrobert61@sbcglobal.net

This consultation, organized and convened by Jack and Susan Smith of Rockingham Monthly Meeting, brought together Friends from near and far, to share, to learn, and to build fellowship with one another. We worshipped, we had Bible reading, we shared in the preparation of our common meals and the clean-up chores, and we also had unstructured time to enjoy the surroundings and one another’s company. There were eight sessions held over the two and a half days of the consultation, with several topics covered in the first six sessions, each led by one of the participants. Among the topics were: The history of new meetings among Conservative friends; Recognizing and encouraging spiritual gifts, and how much structure is needed? To what extent should new groups be part of a big picture?; What is the role and place in the group of the convener, and the role of the sponsoring established monthly meeting?; What are the responsibilities of the new group? There was time in each session for questions and sharing. The last two sessions were left open for discussion and sharing on previous topics, and the discussion of topics arising as a result of what had taken place in the previous sessions. It became apparent during the sessions, and in our discussions during times of common labor and fellowship, that we shared some common experiences in-spite of having such varied and unique circumstances, and even that which was unique to the experience of another was encouraging to all, for it confirmed that the Lord does not use a cookie-cutter approach to how we develop as branches of the true Vine.

The Ohio Yearly Meeting Gathering of Conservative Friends was held 22-24 June near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, hosted this year by Keystone Friends Meeting of OYM.



Click to go to the report on the Gathering.

Click to go to the photograph album.

On Friday through Sunday, June 22-24, 2007 the YFNA/WGYF held a reunion on the grounds of theStillwater Meeting House in Barnesville, Ohio, USA.  We were at the gathering of Conservative Friends in Lancaster, Ohio, USA, but here was there program:

For decades, YFNA brought together Friends from all branches of Quakerism in a rich spiritual community.  If you were part of Young Friends of North America or have attended a World Gathering of Young Friends, you know the power of being in community with Friends from different traditions.  Is it time for a new version of YFNA?  This will be a weekend for past, present, and future young adult Friends, where we can share memories, stories, plans, and visions for the future.

The meeting has been reported by Micah Bales, on his blog entitled The Lamb's War.  Look it over.

24-29 June 2007.  "Quaker Camp at Stillwater"

Here was their plan:

"We invite all Friends hungry for spiritual community, of all ages, to spend time in worship, reflection, conversation, and play. We hope to bring together Friends from all branches of Quakerism, to share what Spirit-led Quakerism is about at its core--and to experience it together. We hope young adult Friends will continue their community building during this week."

Our van split a transmission cooling line at the Gathering and we spent a day or two splicing and bending a replacement, so we didn't get to QuakerCamp as often as we wanted.  Read Peter Blood-Patterson's report on the event.

The echoes of the 2007 QuakerCamp continue to have an effect among Friends.  Peter Blood-Patterson recently posted summaries of two evening presentations made during the sessions:

• Susan Smith of Rockingham Monthly Meeting, Ohio Yearly Meeting, spoke on Friends’ Business Meeting, as Conservative Friends Experience It
  
  
• Jack Smith of Rockingham Monthly Meeting, Ohio Yearly Meeting, spoke on his interpretation of The Scriptures as Understood and Used by Conservative Friends
  
  

Both Susan and Jack and have been associated with Ohio Yearly Meeting for many, many years, and their opinions are well-respected among Conservative Friends.  Check them out for yourself.