In the elder days, Friends would sometimes refer to themselves as a “peculiar people.” By “peculiar” they did not mean that they were odd, though they were odd, and I think they knew they were odd. Rather, they meant that they were a a distinct people, a chosen people; they had been gathered by Christ as a people of God for a purpose. This identity as a chosen people appears in the passage in the gospel of John from which we get our name as the Religious Society of Friends: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay do ..read more

Casting out the spirit Jesus’ answer to the problem of society’s possession by a violent and oppressive spirit is not to assault the man who is possessed, but to drive out the spirit that possesses him. To do this, he forces it to declare its name, its true-name, if you will—what it really is. What is our Legion’s name? I woke up a few mornings ago with a name in my mind: Teufelvolksbefolgengeist (pronounced toy’-full-folks-be-foal’-gen-gicest). (I love the German language for its capacity for creating compound nouns that say something concisely that you couldn’t say any other way, like zeitge ..read more

Spirit-possession in America America has become like the town of Gerasa in the gospel of Mark (5:1–20 and parallels in Matthew 8 and Luke 8): we have a man with an evil spirit who roams the dead places in our society crying out blasphemies and repeatedly escaping from those who would bind him.  Now it would be easy to conclude that I’m talking about Donald Trump, and yes, he fits the description. But, like the Gerasene demoniac, this spirit possesses not just one person; it is legion. Mark tells us the demoniac kept cutting himself with stones. Stoning was the prescribed punishment for bl ..read more

A Metaphor for the Gathered Meeting The gathered meeting is like a hurricane of peace that has formed as a swirling pattern of astral spirit-breath-wind that has gathered over the sea of Light around the eye of our deepening silence. Okay, maybe “hurricane of peace” is an oxymoron. But let’s ride the paradox a little further. Hurricanes form when an area of low pressure moves across warm ocean water. Air moves into the partial vacuum of the low pressure zone, picks up warm air full of moisture from the ocean, and rises; this draws in more air behind it, catching up more moisture. The air rises ..read more

This has nothing to do with Quakerism, but I am so taken with it that I want to share it with somebody. I’ve been reading William Wordsworth’s “Prelude,” an (extremely) long poetic autobiography, so excellent in its self-exploration and commentary on so many things. This is from Book Seventh: Residence in London, in which the young Wordsworth comes to the big city from his idyllic home in the Lake Country not far from the geographic fountainhead of Quakerism, and after finishing college at Cambridge. My title: In our time of trial (pun intended) Pass we from entertainments, that are such Profe ..read more

Encountering Spirit—An Opportunity Friends General Conference is sponsoring a retreat in April titled Encountering Spirit. I will join Marty Grundy and Stanford Searl in a panel and following workshop on The Gathered Meeting on Sunday, April 14. So I’m doing what I can to get the word out. Information Retreat website: Encountering Spirit. Workshop schedule: Workshops. When: Friday, April 12, 2024 – Sunday, April 14, 2024. The Gathered Meeting Plenary: Encounter in Community—Sunday, 1 pm Eastern. The Gathered Meeting Workshop: Sunday, 3–5 pm, Eastern. Who: Steven Davison, Marty Grundy, Stanford ..read more

I’ve been watching The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s frightening how contemporary it is, how it corresponds to our time and reality more than it did when the book was released in 1985, and even more than when the show began in 2017. Of course, we do not need a television program to show us what man’s dominion over women’s bodies looks like, or patriarchy’s control of female and human reproduction, or what state-sponsored sexual slavery looks like, when a woman can be forced to have sex with a man through brute personal force and then be forced to carry and give birth to his child through the force of ..read more

Martin Kelley, editor of Friends Journal and author of the Quaker Ranter blog, recently posted about an article by Windy Cooler at FGC titled “What is a Public Minister?“. Windy Cooler’s article is the first in a series and I eagerly await the next posts, as I think this is a really important subject. In fact, I was led to reply to Martin’s post and would have done to Windy Cooler’s, but FGC’s site offered no such option. So here is what I would have said: Like Martin, I, too, have been a “public minister” for decades, doing workshops, giving presentations, and especially, writing a lot. And f ..read more

Marina, the life partner of another friend of ours, Claudio, was killed in a bicycle accident a few days ago. She was hit from behind by a young person who was distracted while driving—not sure exactly how at this point.  This circle of friends, who live all over the place, meet every few months by Zoom, and we met night before last. Claudio spoke for a long time about their relationship, what he knows about the accident, his emotional state, the days following; he was visiting family in Italy when the accident occurred. He said several times that he was not “spiritual,” it was Marina who ..read more

Dear readers: I have published three books of poetry and a fourth is about to come out. You can learn more about them on my personal website, stevendavison.com. The book. The first book is actually a hybrid book of poems, photographs, personal letters, short essays, and other elements. The poems in The Road to Continental Heart: Befriending, and Defending, the Spirit of North America were written for a friend who walked across the country with a group of environmental activists, one poem a week for nine months, most of the poems incorporating research I had done into the landscapes and places ..read more