Yesterday, I spent that time meditating on health and light for the two of us, and when done, left us with little halos of light above us, watching over us.

Today, I reflected on silence, stillness, and listening. Immediately after that, I watered the plants while watering the plants, that is, mindfully.

I now have four new post-its on my monitor–The Four Agreements by don Miguel Ruiz:

1. Be Impeccable With Your Word
Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean. Avoid using the word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others. Use the power of your word in the direction of truth and love.

2. Don’t Take Anything Personally
Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won’t be the victim of needless suffering.

3. Don’t Make Assumptions
Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want. Communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings, sadness and drama. With just this one agreement, you can completely transform your life.

4. Always Do Your Best
Your best is going to change from moment to moment; it will be different when you are healthy as opposed to sick. Under any circumstance, simply do your best, and you will avoid self-judgment, self-abuse and regret.

The IMYM Spiritual Formation Program invites its participants into a deeper experience of God’s presence through retreats, devotional readings, spiritual community, and individual daily spiritual practices. Spiritual Formation provides a structure for people in our busy culture to turn to God with their minds through spiritual readings, with their hearts through daily spiritual practices, and with their human relationships through spiritual nurture and accountability groups.

If you seek a richer spiritual experience, or yearn for a deeper spiritual community, the Spiritual Formation Program may be for you. The Program serves Friends (and Meeting attenders) who are at many stages of their spiritual journeys. Those who are new to Friends, find that the Program is an effective way to learn about Quaker spirituality and to form personal friendships within the Meeting. Long-time Friends turn to the Program for spiritual renewal. This may be especially welcome to Friends who are experiencing a period of spiritual dryness or who have become burned out from committee work.

At the end of the weekend, we were broken up into small Spiritual Nurturing and Accountability Groups. Each SNAG consists of 3 or 4 people who meet once a month to update each other on their progress and process in the spiritual realm. Two SNAGs meet together once a month to respond to that month’s readings, chosen from among various contemporary and historic Quaker, Catholic, and Buddhist authors.

In November, we are reading:

• The Miracle of Mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh, and
• Introduction and Chapter 1: Foundational Personal Practices in Support of Listening for God of Listening Spirituality by Patricia Loring.

For more on Quaker Spiritual Formation, see:

• Baltimore Yearly Meeting
• Philadelphia Yearly Meeting
• Intermountain Yearly Meeting

One major difficulty in assessing Quaker procedure is that no conventional term adequately expresses the phenomenon of decisional agreement in a Quaker meeting. Some people describe all decisions as unanimous on the grounds that any objecting member could prevent action. But this is a misnomer because it implies that all participants are satisfied when a decision is reached — a point hardly true of many Quaker decisions. Other people speak of consensus, thereby underscoring that the bulk of those present agree even if one or two objectors remain. But this, too, is misleading. Quakers are simply not satisfied to know that even the overwhelming majority are in agreement.

Given this verbal difficulty, many Friends adhere carefully to the term “unity” rather than “unanimity” or “consensus.” This term, too, can be misleading if one makes it a synonym for unanimity. Unity, however, has the advantage of being widely used among Friends and has historical roots in the understanding that the one Spirit of Truth leads all to unite in what the Spirit reveals. Hence, the common expression, “I can unite with what Friend Smith has said.”

Another early Quaker term was “concord.” Edward Burrough exhorted his brethren in 1662 “to determine of things by a general mutual concord, in assenting together as one man in the spirit of truth and equity, and by the authority thereof.” The Oxford English Dictionary defines concordance in this same sense of harmonizing various accounts.

The melodic image is useful. It suggests that the sort of agreement found in Quaker decisions is not an identity of view such that every participant ends up on the same note. Instead, they remain on different notes but blend them as the pianist blends conplementary (sic) notes into a chord.

My life flows on in endless song;
Above earth’s lamentation
I hear the sweet though far off hymn
That hails a new creation:
Through all the tumult and the strife
I hear the music ringing;
It finds an echo in my soul—
How can I keep from singing?

What though my joys and comforts die?
The Lord my Savior liveth;
What though the darkness gather round!
Songs in the night He giveth:
No storm can shake my inmost calm
While to that refuge clinging;
Since Christ is Lord of Heav’n and earth,
How can I keep from singing?

I lift mine eyes; the cloud grows thin;
I see the blue above it;
And day by day this pathway smoothes
Since first I learned to love it:
The peace of Christ makes fresh my heart,
A fountain ever springing:
All things are mine since I am His—
How can I keep from singing?

Poking around in Google, I find that Bryan Schott was at the dress rehearsal on Friday night to see this performance. Read his account of it here.

When it becomes available, this week’s episode of A Prairie Home Companion will be posted here. Martin Sheen’s performance is early in the second hour.

Buddha, as quoted in Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life by Thich Nhat Hanh

The transcript of that show is available here.

Other links of interest on the subject of Carlton Pearson:

• Bishop Carlton Pearson, Bishop Carlton Pearson’s website, for his book, the Gospel of Inclusion.
• The Gospel of Inclusion: Reaching Beyond Religious Fundamentalism to the True Love of God, Pearson’s first book, on Amazon.
• Bishop Carlton Pearson on myspace.com.
• New Dimensions Worship Center, Pearson’s church.
  
• First two chapters of his upcoming book, God is Not a Christian.
• What is inclusion?
• 2004 article about his censure for heresy on beliefnet.com.
• CNN Newsroom Transcript from June 24, 2007. Look for (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) about 1/3 down the page.
• This American Life Radio Broadcast #304: Heretics, from November 17, 2006.

Synopsis of American Life/NPR report:

The story of Reverend Carlton Pearson, a renowned evangelical pastor in Tulsa, Oklahoma, who cast aside the idea of Hell, and with it everything he’d worked for over his entire life.

Prologue.

Carlton Pearson’s church, Higher Dimensions, was once one of the biggest in the city, drawing crowds of 5,000 people every Sunday. But several years ago, scandal engulfed the reverend. He didn’t have an affair. He didn’t embezzle lots of money. His sin was something that to a lot of people is far worse: He stopped believing in Hell. (2 minutes)

Act One. Rise.

Reporter Russell Cobb takes us through the remarkable and meteoric rise of Carlton Pearson from a young man to a Pentecostal Bishop: from the moment he first cast the devil out of his 17-year-old girlfriend, to the days when he had a close, personal relationship with Oral Roberts and had appearances on TV and at the White House. Just as Reverend Pearson’s career peaked, with more than 5,000 members of his congregation coming every week, he started to think about Hell, wondering if a loving God would really condemn most of the human race to burn and writhe in the fire of Hell for eternity. (30 minutes)

Act Two. Fall.

Once he starts preaching his own revelation, Carlton Pearson’s church falls apart. After all, when there’s no Hell (as the logic goes), you don’t really need to believe in Jesus to be saved from it. What follows are the swift departures of his pastors, and an exodus from his congregation — which quickly dwindled to a few hundred people. Donations drop off too, but just as things start looking bleakest, new kinds of people, curious about his change in beliefs, start showing up on Sunday mornings. (23 minutes)

Meeting for Worship isn’t about silence. It’s not about being quiet in that “Shh! Be quiet!” parental way. It’s not about silencing voices that need to speak; nor is it about having a quiet, peaceful time.

Meeting for Worship, like all forms of prayer, is about a conversation, a conversation between the mortal and the immortal. Silence in a conversation — when it’s a good, open conversation — is a waiting for the other to speak, or a time to reflect on what has been said.

It’s not a silence of emptiness, but of fullness.

The Friendly Funnel · Late Night Thoughts

I have written as if I myself came in each of these groups [having particular ideas on the nature of God], and of course there are many intermediate positions I have not described. Yet when it comes to the point, the various attitudes are incompatible. Individually, we cannot believe more than one of them, and to believe one to be true is to hold the others to be untrue.

Or is it? Have we not got here a classic example of exclusivity, of the desire to classify as either/or? We know, by experience, something of God, and we know that this is a shared experience. We can hardly conceive of there being, so to speak, several prospectuses of God, of which one is true and all others are false, with no distinguishing feature whereby one can tell the true from the false. Our limited direct knowledge of God prevents us from accepting any of the theologies which imply a salvation limited to the elect. Whatever else it is like, the Kingdom of Heaven is not like a ‘rights’ issue on the Stock Exchange, available only to existing shareholders.

But if we cannot reconcile our direct knowledge of God with the exclusivity of many of our thoughts about him, can we not now reconcile the diversity of our views with the diversity of ourselves? We, the bodies and brains in which the Holy Spirit is planted and through which God must work, are the product of complex evolutional and environmental processes. We are–as we know–all different from one another, alike only in this essential centre where we own God. So, I suggest, God is available to us in the form in which we need him, in whatever form is reconcilable with our individual defects of understanding. The totality of God embraces all forms, and all symbols and all appearance; for any individual there is only one aspect of this totality which carries meaning, which strikes to the heart, and so God is manifest to him in that form.

…This universality is the quality of transcending space and time, of not being constrained within the dimensional framework of the material world. Moreover this God, we know, is love, and desires that all creation be brought into unity with him. When I say we ‘know’ this, I do not mean that we are told it in Scripture or that it is preached at us, but that we know it directly, from any awareness of God we attain, however limited. Is it not then conceivable that God will be aware (and these anthropomorphic expressions are utterly inadequate) of what are the needs and limitations of our individual personalities, and will offer himself in a form we individually can recognize and turn to? This form, moreover, may change as we change, always leading us closer to the transcendent reality.

80-81

It puts forward what is perhaps another of the general characteristics which replace beliefs as the distinguishing characteristics of a Quaker; namely, an awareness of and concern with the universality of the spiritual element. It is not to be found only in certain places at certain times, nor recognized only in certain people, but at all times in all places and in all people. We cannot say, of any situation, ‘Don’t let’s bring religion into this’ because it is already there. Everything we do, or fail to do, every thought we think, has a spiritual significance. Every time I fail to do what I know is required of me I need forgiveness–not to clear my spiritual bank account or to ensure ultimate admission to Heaven, but to liberate me from the burden of guilt and failure so that I can go forward to the next moment and the next action free; able to devote all my energies to the present test. Whether I derive that forgiveness from formal absolution, from prayer in the accepted sense or from an unformalized awareness that God does not blame and that forgiveness is in my hands is a question of what sort of person I am, not of what sort of God God is.

 

93

By the late fifties some Friends were becoming concerned as to the way they should respond to the problems of young people who came to them for advice on sexual difficulties, particularly those of young homosexual men. A group came together to discuss this; it contained four psychologists, four teachers, a housewife and a barrister.

They prepared their pamphlet carefully entitling it ‘Towards a Quaker View of Sex’…and doing their best to make it clear that they were trying to help the Society of Friends to formulate its views and not in any way claiming to express a view already accepted by the Society. The pamphlet was published under the auspices of the Home Service Committee in 1963.

[...]

The basic attitude is founded on the acceptance of the definition of sin ‘as covering those actions that involved the exploitation of the other person and of a ‘…Christian standard of chastity…’ as not ‘…measured by a physical act, but…a standard of human relationship, applicable within marriage as well as outside it’.

[...]

As for rules — the old rules are gone, and there is no bringing them back. We have to go forward from where we are. As a starting point there are two rules which have been proposed and which can certainly be endorsed — never bring an unwanted child into the world; never exploit another person. Beyond this come the positive injunctions, ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind’ and ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’. These two rules say nothing about who should sleep with whom — which is perhaps not as important as we imagine — but they say everything about human relationships.

from Chapter 4