The Invisible Places
I can’t remember the poems, but I remember the complaining. In a rural high school in Pennsylvania an English major is passing out copies of a Robert Frost poem. Once settled a student is asked to read a few lines aloud, “He is that fallen lance that lies as hurled, that lies unlisted now, come dew, come rust, But still lies pointed as it plowed the dust.”
The English teacher looks out into the classroom of students, and with hopeful exhaustion asks, “Now, what do you think Robert Frost is saying here? What metaphors do you see playing out on the page?” Their exhaustion is amplified by the sound of silence, we students hardly ever wanted to play the way the teacher wanted us to.
I can remember a few brave souls that would shoot their hand up to display to some kind of defiance rooted in boredom, “You know, maybe Robert Frost didn’t want us to sit around and dissect his poem, why does there always need to be some kind of hidden symbolism?”
I now have more appreciation for the English teachers of my adolescence, especially because they were attempting to bring a poetic disposition to a rural population already skeptical of academic “nonsense.” Needless to say, there were no poetry open mic nights in my hometown.
And still, a lover of poetry, of metaphor, or symbolism and imagery emerged from that creative dessert, secretly loving listening to the weary English teacher talk about the cultural circumstances that Nathanial Hawthorne was responding to when he wrote The Scarlet Letter.
Having been an incognito appreciator of poetry in a town that seemed to have no time for frilly words, I grew up reading the Bible through those practical, hard-working lenses. The Bible was a life-manual, giving us the do’s and do not’s, and if it got metaphorical on us, we’d let the experts interpret the true meaning of it, and they’d tell us what thing we were or were not allowed to do.
This practical and uniquely protestant way of approaching our spirituality likely made Early Quakers sound all the more unhinged. When Quakers entered the fray, they brought with them a new vocabulary to try to explain a mysterious, and sometimes wild inner-reality for them…that the Light or guidance of God was available to each person, and could offer them words or images that spoke to their condition.
We can see, from its inception, how dangerous of a theology this was…to allow common people to commune with God themselves and to speak of God’s working in their own words, using their own life and stories to make sense of it all. That God could still speak to people in a language they’d understand meant that God was not done speaking to us.
Obviously there is beauty in this way, but there is also challenge. If God’s Spirit is still speaking to us, how can we know when we are hearing the True Spirit of God instead of something else?
Last week I spoke about John Woolman, and other early Quaker abolitionists who struggled, for a long time, to convince Friends of following the wrong spirits of colonialism, and of racism that allowed us to participate in the cultural and physical genocide of Native peoples, and to be some of the earliest beneficiaries of the transatlantic slave trade. During waiting worship a Friend shared this:
“If we have any hope to more closely approach unity with the Divine, we must seek to be transformed by that measure of the Light that is only available to us through someone else.”
This week, as I prepared to offer another message I sat with this Friend’s ministry, and the beautiful reality that we Friends gather in this Spirit of listening and following our inner-guide in community with others who are doing the same.
This Friend shares that if our hope is to become one with the Divine, that we will need to listen to that of God, as it shows up and speaks through another person. The task of Friends, in listening to Spirit, is to share what they sense God is saying to them. What an incredible opportunity this is, but also, a daunting one!
If we, here at West Hills Friends gather with the belief that God will guide us, then we will need to frequently talk with one another about what this process is like for us. When we’ve been asked to enter into silence and discern the movements of the Divine, what does that feel like to you?
For the first few months on the job here at West Hills, I was curious how this would work. When we went into open worship, would the voice of God be clear to me? When someone spoke in open worship, would it be clear when God was speaking through a person, especially if they said something like, “I am sensing God is leading me or us to….” and fill in the blank.
If, when we gather for worship with attention to the business we have together as Friends, we say that we are listening for guidance from Spirit for things like our budget, or commitments we are making together, but I feel like we rarely talk about what entering into the quiet inner-space is actually like for us.
Early Friends seemed to be aware of the radical realities of this for newcomers. A Quaker historian, Gerard Guiton writes,
“The newly convinced (Quakers) were nurtured by the group and were often accompanied to a smaller gathering, usually in a private home, where they could share their struggles…This, in turn, afforded a greater awareness of the enmity they had had with God and sparked opportunities for increasing their knowledge of divine ways. Here, at this inner holy of holies and in holy awe, they were able to take possession of [what they called] ‘the Seed’ and…to hear Love’s language. Energy would flow upwards from this act of creation to enrich their spiritual growth and, through it, their Meetings whose prayer-life and unity they sought to deepen.” He concludes, “Convincement, therefore, involved an objectification of what was subjective, the invisible was brought into the visible and returned again to enrich the invisible and so on.”
Me thinks that my English teachers, were they here this morning, would stand up and shout, “SEE! I told you reading Robert Frost and breaking down the metaphorical implications mattered!”
Because, the gift of the artist is that an invisible reality is brought forth into the visible and returned again to enrich the invisible in us. So it is with the work we each do of listening to Spirit each time we gather. We bring that which is invisible into the light in our vocal ministry, in our singing, in our business, and it touches the invisible in us, and inevitably that which is invisible in another speaks to something that has felt invisible in us, and we feel less alone, and more in the presence of something overwhelmingly Divine in nature.
Early Friends gave poetic language to describe these places that seem to resist easy description. We describe this inner reality with dark and light images, of being in a river or stream, or discovering the seed. When Early Friends entered into these profound places of Divine unity, it was deeply moving and apparent, and did their best to describe the feeling of it.
As West Hills Friends, it seems important for us to continually practice and describe the work we are doing of communing with the Divine as we seek to follow God’s movement among us.
Here are some queries:
What is it like when you attempt to listen to God/Spirit/Divine? Do you have descriptive language to describe what it feels like when you sense you are in the Spirit, in the flow with the Divine? How does it feel in your body? What do you notice?
When have you experienced the invisible in another speaking to that which is invisible in you? When this happened, how did it change you?