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(This was the 2021 Quaker Lecture presented at Western Yearly Meeting Sessions. It is long. Consider it bedtime reading!) Friends—thank you for the invitation to be with you again for your annual sessions. I used to believe in our Quaker testimony of good discernment, but the fact that you asked me back for the second…

(An earlier version of this was first published in Quaker Life, v.5, no. 2, 2020) In one form or another, the well-known “Jesus Prayer” dates back to the early 5th century. Particularly prominent in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, this short, simple, repetitive prayer has been used by dessert mothers and fathers, some of the more…

When was the last time you saw the glory of God?Saw it and knew?Glimpsed it and marveled? The poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning once wrote: Earth is crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God: But only he who sees, takes off his shoes. The rest sit round it, and pluck blackberries… I can’t…

“Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher of the Book of Ecclesiastes.“Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.”What do people gain from all their laborsat which they toil under the sun?  Ecc. 1:1-3                                I have this photo of Albert Gyorgy’s sculptureMelancholy as a screen-saver photo for mycomputer. It is one of several mixed-emotionsI keep in front of me throughout the…

“Father in Heaven, what are we without you?What is all that we know, vast accumulation though it be,But a chipped fragment if we do not know you?What is all our striving?Could it ever encompass a world, But a half-finished workIf we do not know you?You, the One who is one thing and who is all. So…