Step by Step

by Joann Neuroth

Asked once whether a non-theist could be a Quaker, my friend Lloyd Lee Wilson memorably replied, “Well, Quakers have pretty much bet the farm on the Inner Teacher. We leave belief to be built by experience. So, all are welcome. The tent is large and there’s no card-check at the entrance.” My mother – coming from a lifetime of pastor-mediated, sermon-based teaching –put it another way, more dubiously: “Well, I suppose it [Quaker practice] COULD work, if everyone does their homework.”

Quakers’ radical reliance on inner guidance is what I believe to be our gift to the world. And, indeed, my mother was right: there’s “homework.” One good example of the counterintuitive way this guidance works is my call to co-teach “God’s Promise Fulfilled: Encountering and Embodying Grace in the Shadow of Empire,” which is being introduced this month in Snapshots.

The School of the Spirit board had been asking for guidance since 2019 about next steps for the “On Being a Spiritual Nurturer” program established by the founders. While we did not feel released from the call, things weren’t lining up to allow continuation. By 2023 I, for one, was exasperated and beginning to demand from God either release or a way forward. It was in the middle of that kind of a mental/spiritual rant during one of our discernment sessions that I heard “What if the teacher you’ve been looking for (for four years) is YOU?” Clearly, this Quaker guidance comes on its own timetable, not on-demand, and one must persist in seeking it.

Another thing I’ve learned from my Spiritual Companion Group practice is that guidance hardly ever comes “right sized.” At times the next right step is so trivial or mundane that I think, “Well THAT can’t be Spirit talking.” (Like “Call your sister” or “Get those piles of paper organized so you can find stuff when I ask you to do something.”) Or else, as is the case here, so big it seems impossible: I was clerking the School of the Spirit board where we’d been trying for years to discern a successor and there was none in sight. This would take me away with no replacement. But when I experiment with faithfully taking the steps I’ve been given (either too big or too small), they turn out to open up possibilities I hadn’t seen. The board, hearing my tentative call to refresh/relaunch On Being a Spiritual Nurturer, calmly said “Bring us a seasoned proposal; leave the rest to us and Spirit.”

It comes one step at a time. I groped for a place to begin. Should I look for a teaching partner so we could envision the course together? Should I see first what my own vision was? With no partner in sight, did I need to become willing to teach it alone? Really? Marty Grundy, who by that time I’d recruited as an elder, was clear: “Begin doing the work you’re called to. And talk about it – be visible and interactive and consultative. See who’s attracted to the same work. If you’re faithful, whoever you need will come.” And she did. I listened to Adria Gulizia’s Earlham School of Religion lecture Becoming People of the Promise and got in touch to thank her; we discovered we couldn’t stop talking, and that each other’s ideas reshaped and enlarged our own. Together we’ve envisioned a sequence of what SotS founders called “prayer and learning” that we think will be as transformative as the original. Now we wait for more guidance: offer our leading, be visible and wait to see who God will raise as a cohort to travel it together. If we’re faithful, it’ll come.