Quaker Life

“The truest end of life, is to know the life that never ends.”— William Penn

“‘Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.’” [Mark 8:34]

The idea of life after death is a central precept of Christianity, founded as it is upon the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Yet most followers of Jesus wrestle all our lives to understand the nature of the cross and the meaning of resurrection. The authors in this death and resurrection issue of Quaker Life focus on a wide array of perspectives on death, the meaning of death for the living, and the meaning and possibilities of resurrection.

Julie Rudd writes that, while she usually feels more centered in the eternal after participating in the liturgical observance of Ash Wednesday, she was appalled this year to find her infant twins drawn into the service when ashy crosses were traced upon their heads. Yet she reminds herself that, even though the babies are so young, they, too, are mortal, and that it is precisely within and among the Friends of her faith community that she is assisted in navigating between “the ephemeral and the eternal, the shakeable and the unshakeable.”

Bill Eagles and Andy Stanton-Henry, though in very different circumstances, also write about the encouragement that can come from other human beings at times of spiritual difficulty. Eagles writes about how a prison guard, by recognizing him as a fellow human being, eased his fears and gave him a measure of peace. StantonHenry considers how we need to find other people who can discern with us what parts of our social or institutional structures have fallen apart, which pieces need to be let go, and how to build or rebuild what meets our present needs.

In his Bible study, Kelly Kellum writes about the dark time between Good Friday and the resurrection, and how we sometimes find ourselves in that same sort of spiritual space—with our lives on hold and all of our certainties turned upside down. In the story of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, he finds three tactics for waiting through the darkness.

As a woodturner, Michael Sherman finds himself particularly attracted to uncommon pieces of wood—to trees or beams that have experienced insect infestations or fire or rot, or the places in a trunk where limbs intersect each other and intertwine. The evidence of the wood’s struggle lends beauty to its patterns—in the same way, he says, that persons who suffer may become more beautiful in their ability to become God’s kingdom.

Along similar lines, Brian Drayton discovers, in an often-overlooked work by the Renaissance humanist Erasmus, an explanation for why death—especially the death of our worldliness—can lead us to more abundant life. And Marlene Pedigo writes about the experience in Cabrini-Green that led her to understand that she could not minister in a violent environment without nailing her own fear to the cross and undergoing the “transformatory death” of which Drayton writes.

Kathy Kellum and Travis Etling reflect on different aspects of their work as chaplains at life’s end. Kellum reflects on how her experiences with people near death have undergirded her certainty that life and death are a continuum, that existence continues on the other side of mortality, and that God is also present in that new life. Working with the dying and their families at the time of the Covid pandemic, Etling comes to see grief and love as two sides of the same coin, and to recognize that the pain of a loved one’s death is easier to bear than the social and biological distance engendered by the pandemic.

On Ash Wednesday, a couple weeks ago, I packed up the babies and headed to St. Patrick’s Episcopal Church in Lebanon for their midday service. In the Quaker tradition we don’t “do” Ash Wednesday; still, it’s the beginning of the church season of Lent in which people often adopt specific practices or short-term fasts as spiritual preparation for the joy of Easter. I’ve been spending enough time at the altar of our diaper-changing table that I didn’t feel the need—or the capacity—to take on some other new spiritual discipline, but I needed to practice transporting the twins on my own and I do love the Ash Wednesday liturgical experience.

“Love” seems like an odd emotion to feel about a service centered on phrases like “from dust you were made, and to dust you will return.” It intrigues me that so many people, every year, show up to be marked with ashes and told that they’re going to die someday. Mortality is a fact we all know, on an intellectual level: all of our bodies are going to wear out and stop working. We spend time and money trying to postpone mortality with vegetables and exercise and supplements. But every once in a while, it does us good to look at mortality face-to-face, on purpose rather than by accident.

Easter, our great celebration of resurrection and renewal, requires grounding in the reality of death in order to make sense, because it’s a study in contrasts. The promise of abiding life only matters against the backdrop of death, so people get in line every year to receive the ashy reminder that none of this is going to last. It’s all fading away faster than we can make pictures of itand yet, running through it, we can trace the thread of everlasting love.

That’s what I would say if I were preaching an Ash Wednesday sermon, anyway. Like I said, it’s a remembrance that appeals to me. So I sat in the back of St. Patrick’s Episcopal Church in Lebanon, listening to the service and rolling our giant two-seat stroller back and forth a bit to keep the babies quiet.

Gardenia stayed asleep, but George got bored and started to fuss. He got a snack, and then got burped (successfully, in the middle of the sermon, to the amusement of everyone sitting toward the back), and then was just hanging out with me. When it was time to go get my ash cross at the altar, I left Gardenia snoozing in the stroller and carried George down with me.

And this, Friends, is when I received an unpleasant theological revelation. The priest marked me with the cross, reminding me that I’ll return to dust someday, and then re-ashed her finger and motioned for me to bring George’s forehead over.

Well. That’s just completely unacceptable. I’ll return to dust someday, sure, but I’ve put a lot of work into making that chubby little boy. Surely this doesn’t apply to him, right? But there he was: looking up at me with my own eyes and a reminder on his giant forehead that he’s human, and human means heartbreakingly mortal.

I was not one bit sorry when he immediately smudged the cross off onto his burp cloth. But then the priest came back after the service and gently gave Gardenia her cross, not waking her up, and it just sat there on her tiny perfect forehead. Took me two diaper wipes to get it off, when I couldn’t stand looking at it anymore.

I’d love to pretend that I spent the rest of the day considering this, monk-like, and I have something to share about the experience that you’ve never considered. That’s not how it works, though. We left the church and the dog needed to be picked up at the vet, and warning lights came on in my car, and we were back in the stream of stuff to do.

For that moment, though, I felt suspended above the stream, seeing it as the ephemeral stuff that it always is, flowing away faster than I could ever hope to dam it up. George and Gardenia will probably get eighty to one hundred years out of these bodies, and then to dust they return. Even now, time’s a-ticking. From the perspective of eternity, they’re beloved transients just like the rest of us. Those ashes on their faces dislocated me, temporarily, making me pay attention to the big picture around us.

“You have not come to a mountain that can be touched and that is burning with fire. You have not come to darkness, sadness and storms. You have not come to the noise of a trumpet or to the sound of a voice. When the people of Israel heard the voice, they begged not to have to hear another word. They did not want to hear the command: ‘If anything, even an animal, touches the mountain, it must be put to death with stones.’ What they saw was so terrible that Moses said, ‘I am shaking with fear.’

“But you have not come to that kind of place. The new place you have come to is Mount Zion. You have come to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem. You have come to thousands of angels gathered together with joy. You have come to the meeting of God’s firstborn children. Their names are written in heaven. You have come to God, the judge of all people. And you have come to the spirits of good people who have been made perfect. You have come to Jesus, the One who brought the new agreement from God to his people. You have come to the sprinkled blood that has a better message than the blood of Abel.

“So be careful and do not refuse to listen when God speaks. They refused to listen to him when he warned them on earth. And they did not escape. Now God is warning us from heaven. So it will be worse for us if we refuse to listen to him. When he spoke before, his voice shook the earth. But now he has promised, ‘Once again I will shake not only the earth but also the heavens.’ The words ‘once again’ clearly show us that everything that was made will be destroyed. These are the things that can be shaken. And only the things that cannot be shaken will remain.

“So let us be thankful because we have a kingdom that cannot be shaken. We should worship God in a way that pleases him. So let us worship him with respect and fear, because our God is like a fire that burns things up.

“Keep on loving each other as brothers in Christ. Remember to welcome strangers into your homes. Some people have done this and have welcomed angels without knowing it.” [Hebrews 12:18-13:2]

The Epistle to the Hebrews contains an extended passage that starts out by describing that same sort of experience of being suspended above or beyond the stream of daily ordinariness: the children of Israel gathered around the mountain, receiving the sacred law, seeing the fire on the peak and smelling the smoke, hearing the voice of the Almighty One; the people of God in the author’s own time, meeting with the living God, finding this love to be both the one who judges them and the one who transforms them into glory.

Be careful, the author says, and do not refuse to listen when God speaks.

The name “Quaker” was initially a derogatory one.

In simple meetings for worship, Friends found an unmediated connection with the Spirit that they had not found in their regular church services. In the presence of the holy, and especially when they felt called upon by the holy to share a message out of the silence, they were prone to quaking.

This immediate connection was both entirely good and entirely terrifying, just as the author of Hebrews describes. It gathers us together in joy, and it also delivers a warning. To live in the light is to be both enlightened and exposed, which in the end are the same thing: that within us that isn’t yet in the light can be exposed and judged and brought into greater wholeness and joy.

But if you think that’s an easy thing, something that shouldn’t make you quake, you may not have met it yet.

Everything that was made will be destroyed. These are the things that can be shaken. And only the things that cannot be shaken will remain.

I used to think that meant something like the Rapture. Everything that was made will be destroyed: all creation gets the torch, and the redeemed fly away—oh, glory. Now, I think it’s more about the ephemeral stream of shakeable things and the everlasting thread of love that remains.

Ashy crosses on my babies’ faces mean that I’ve got to teach them that difference, how to navigate the stream of shakeable things without losing sight of the everlasting thread of love. And since I already know I can’t do that myself, what I need is a holy kayaking community, people all around them who are paddling, capsizing, stuck in the weeds, getting oars tangled up with each other, pointing out the herons and the frogs and the joy of it all . . . a community of people navigating the stream of shakeable things, together, following and celebrating the unshakeable mercies of God beneath it.

That’s my best definition of what church is. And by “church,” I mean this fellowship but also the global fellowship of Christ in all its broken and beautiful forms, all the places where you can walk in the door and find people trying and failing and trying again to follow in the footsteps of Jesus.

Gardenia was in the NICU for a month, and I spent most of that time staying in Columbus, Ohio, at the Ronald McDonald House, resting in the hospitality offered by donors I’ll never meet and eating meals prepared by people whose names I didn’t even learn. We had George wrapped up in blankets because he was just too small for even the smallest baby clothes we had, and a family we’ll never see again bought bags of tiny clothing for both babies: they were dressed in gifts from strangers.

There was a church in walking distance of the Ronald McDonald House, if you don’t mind walking in the cold, which I don’t, and for that month the church took us in: cooed over pictures, put us on the prayer list, told George he was the handsomest boy, and made space for us in the rocking chairs in the last row when we came back to introduce them to Gardenia. I don’t know that we’ll ever see any of them again, but they welcomed us in as strangers.

And maybe in doing so, they entertained angels. Not that the four of us are angels; angels don’t spit their pacifiers out on purpose and then look at you and grin. That’s thoroughly human behavior.

The word angel just means messenger, though, and there’s something about both welcoming a stranger and being a stranger welcomed that delivers a message about what really matters, about unshakeable things. The welcome may consist of ephemera—a bulletin, a plate of cookies, restaurant recommendations that you won’t follow up on—but the practice of open doors beneath the ephemera is a saving grace.

Let us be thankful because we have a kingdom that cannot be shaken. Our God is like a fire that burns things up. There’s beauty in the fleeting burnable things, but hope is built on the rock beneath the river, on that which cannot be shaken.

In church, we’re opening our hearts and our hopes and our hands to that shaking. We’re opening our communities to that shaking, to the possibility that dead branches will be knocked aside and new life will sprout from the unshakeable beneath.

So be careful. Do not refuse to listen. And be thankful. You have come to the city of the living God, to angels gathered together in joy. Only the things that cannot be shaken will remain.