by Janaki Spickard Keeler
Like many meetings, Chestnut Hill Friends Meeting (CHFM) is wrestling with how to respond faithfully to this present moment. As part of the meeting’s 100th anniversary year, they asked member Katy Hawkins, whose ministry of embodied Quakerism is held under the care of the Worship & Ministry Committee, to craft a retreat to ground this discernment in the Spirit. Katy and Rebecca Ruhlen, both members of the Participating in God’s Power 2024-25cohort, led a day-long workshop helping retreatants to get in touch with the meeting’s history and identity, open their whole selves to Spirit, and explore how Spirit might be calling them to show up for this moment of extreme polarization.
CHFM has a history as a meeting of spiritually grounded experimenters. One of the first United meetings in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, it started as a group of mostly young couples with children, some Orthodox and some Hicksite, who were mockingly called the “fire worshipers” by the yearly meeting because they eschewed the culture of elders on facing benches and instead pulled chairs in a semi-circle around a fireplace in a room of a neighborhood warehouse. Over the years, the meeting was heavily involved in rehousing refugees from Eastern Europe, offered sanctuary to an undocumented immigrant in the 80s, hosts unhoused families every summer, and is home to a James Turrell skyspace.
Katy and Rebecca engaged the metaphor of the Seed to understand how we open to the leadings of Spirit. In a living experiment, they used Paulette Meier’s chants to experiment with practices for each of the three elements required for a seed to grow:
- Rich soil that needs to lay fallow: “Give Over Thine Own Willing” to introduce Centering Prayer
- Light: “Stand Still” and the Refiner’s Fire of discerning the call of the True Self as distinguished from the needs of the False Self, to introduce the Welcoming Practice
- Water: “The Wellsprings of Life” to introduce a breath practice with which to experience water metaphors like the Living Stream, the Fountain, the Wellspring
This moved the retreatants into the question of how collective discernment proceeds from our individual work of opening and “preparing room.” After some work around identifying individual gifts and reflecting the gifts of others in the meeting in worship sharing, we created mandala of nature objects standing in for spiritual gifts, to have a visual representation of how the gifts in our community combine.
Rebecca and Katy introduced and modeled the Spiritual Companioning process. Rebecca was brave enough to model being the one in the hot seat, in front of a huge group of strangers, and Spirit answered her bravery in a clear message—“MORE!”—asking her to do more of this kind of group facilitation. It was deeply moving. Everyone broke off into groups of three to experience the power of the collective in amplifying the clearness of a call to action. Rebecca led the closing “Brainyheartstorm,” recording ideas of where the meeting could go from here.
This offering was very well received and continues to reverberate in the meeting as conversations about showing up in a spiritually grounded way continue. It was an opening for Katy and Rebecca to share their own spiritual gifts as well as disseminate the learnings from the Participating in God’s Power program.
An example and model of seeking to live fully into our gifts, I am grateful to these dear F/friends and to the community that welcomed them. Spark on!