04.23.08
Remembering a powerful three-word ministry
I’m settling into Sacramento County, but trying not to settle in too well, since what I’m here for is to conduct a job search that could take me almost anywhere. But while I’m here I thought I’d get acquainted with the local blog-and-internet scene.
I found a local magazine, called Prosper, which did an online story last fall about Walt Kersey, a Friend I remember fondly from my sojourn here in the 1980s. It brought back a wonderful memory.
Walt Kersey delivered the most powerful three-word message I’ve ever heard in a meeting for worship. It violated a common rule of Friends’ ministry, which is that one shouldn’t directly respond to the ministry of another, especially to correct. But rules, schmules, Walt did exactly the right thing.
I was the one corrected, or amended, or whatever we may choose to call it. And you can’t understand Walt’s message without understanding mine.
In considerably more words than this, I said that day in worship that perhaps we would all get closer to God if we would simplify our lives more.
And after a couple of minutes of silence, Walt Kersey stood and said, “… and perhaps vice-versa.” And sat down.
It was one of those genuinely life-changing messages. I don’t remember how long it took to sink in. I might have resisted it for a time, or it may have happened right away, I truly don’t remember. All I know is that it has stayed with me.
Not only was Walt right, but in six syllables he had corrected not merely an idea of mine, but my whole orientation toward God. I am eternally grateful to him for it.
God isn’t something I can find if I look hard enough. God isn’t a goal I might achieve if I really really put my mind to it. God isn’t a fussy spirit who’ll respond if I get the invocation just right.
Thomas Kelly put it this way: “…we imagine that we are the initiators and God is the respondent.” Kelly and Kersey have it just right: we are the initiators of our Godward journey only in our imaginations. The best of our seeking is itself a response, and if it is sound seeking it will lead us to realize just that, that God has been calling us, leading us, beckoning, burning within us, while we have wandered in a wilderness of our own making.
It is God who gives the simplified life, not the simplified life that delivers God.
I well remember hearing of a simplification-of-life movement among Friends that took place before I had arrived in Quakerdom, and which had generated a great deal of resentment among Friends by trying to tell everyone exactly what a simplified life would look like. I seem to remember it involved the idea that everyone should make their own bread, by hand.
To add bread-baking to one’s routine because someone else tells you you ought to is not only the opposite of simplifying one’s life, but is also the opposite of “making room for God.” (The latter may not have been the group’s intention anyway.)
My own experience is that giving myself to God involves letting many other things fall away. More precisely, it involves standing ready to let all things fall away, and finding that God permits some things to remain. And what remains always has another smell, fresh and new, beyond what words can utter.