How, then, shall we lay hold of that Life and Power, and live the life of prayer without ceasing? By quiet, persistent practice in turning of all our being, day and night, in prayer and inward worship and surrender, toward Him who calls in the depths of our souls. Mental habits of inward orientation must be established. An inner, secret turning to God can be made fairly steady, after weeks and months and years of practice and lapses and failures and returns.
Our first single glimpse of Jesus’ interior life must be got without the help of any actual word of His. It is given to us in the gospel accounts of His discovery of His mission. How long the consciousness of mission had been gestating we cannot tell. What books He read, if any, are never named. What ripening influence the days of toil in the carpenter shop may have had, is unnoted.
Fasting was commonly practiced [by Quakers] as a spiritual aid in the mid seventeenth century. Hogwill fasted when in prison in Appleby, Nayler had been fasting prior to his “sign” in Bristol, and Farnworth issued a challenge to a fast in the course of a debate at Cambridge.
I have occasionally found the experience of sitting before an icon to be startlingly similar to the experience of intentionally opening myself before God in prayer and worship. If the attention stays with the visual object, that object may become an idol: that which intervenes in the place of God. As something that opens, leads or guides to God (another meaning for icon in the early church), it can be a legitimate starting point for prayer.
The Disciplines allow us to place ourselves before God so that he can transform us… The inner righteousness we seek is not something that is poured on our heads. God has ordained the Disciplines of the spiritual life as the means by which we place ourselves where he can bless us.
In the above painting, 19th century British prison reformer and Quaker Elizabeth Fry reads the bible to inmates at Newgate Prison. At Newgate, Fry established a school for children imprisoned with their parents, worked to get sentences commuted, and successfully campaigned for men and women to be separated to improve women’s safety. She taught female prisoners handwork skills to help them earn an income while incarcerated.
Discipline, strictly speaking, is activity carried on to prepare us indirectly for some activity other than itself. We do not practice the piano to practice the piano well, but to play it well.
I came to Experiment with Light by accident, almost, because I was not into things like meditation or spirituality at the time. I was very much an intellectual. I was happy; I was a university academic. But I was getting stuck on some very important aspects of my own life. My personal life, but also my understanding. I was doing some research on the Quakers, and I wanted to know, what do they mean by “the light of God”? And “that of God”? It’s a strange phrase. What do they mean by that? So I said, “Alright, I’ll find out.”
The purpose of journeying together in spiritual friendship and spiritual community (whether there are just two of you or whether you are in a small group) is to listen to one another’s desire for God, to nurture that desire in each other and to support one another in seeking a way of life that is consistent with that desire.
The great spiritual traditions suggest that the relationship with God is cultivated like other relationships: as we turn our attention toward God we open the possibility of a fuller relationship. Entering into this relationship does not so much require a change in our behavior as a shift of attention.
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