Skip to main content

An Experiment in Scriptio Divina (Peter)

This came out of something we did last month in NEYM’s ministry and counsel working party on spirituality and sexual ethics. That group has been charged with promoting discussions at monthly meetings about sexual ethics, and also going through a process of deep and spirit-led discernment ourselves to draft a sexual ethics statement of our own, with the ultimate goal of bringing the results of all of this for consideration at the Yearly Meeting level.

Last month, one of the things the working party did was to go into worship and, from that place of worship, write down questions each of us would have had about sexual ethics and sexual behavior when we were younger. It turned into a sort of written worship sharing—not something I’d ever done or even heard of before—and it was pretty powerful.

I decided to try writing during my regular meeting for worship at Mt. Toby. Call it “scriptio divina”—divine writing. Or call it written ministry, analogous to vocal ministry. Or call it, as the subtitle of QPR says, “blogging in a spirit of worship.”

It felt like what I wrote was coming from Spirit. Not just that, it felt (like vocal ministry often does in a really good covered meeting) like it was tapped into the same Spirit that had us all gathered. I was on the fence about standing up and sharing it aloud during meeting. In the end, I didn’t, but I’m sharing it here. The first and second drafts both came during meeting. The second is more writerly, the first perhaps a little closer to the root.

LET LOVE BE THE FIRST MOTION.
SPEAK FROM LOVE
BE SILENT FROM LOVE

SPEECH WITHOUT LOVE IS AGGRESSION
SILENCE WITHOUT LOVE IS SHUNNING

WE ARE NOT CIRCUMSTANCES IN ONE ANOTHER’S LIVES;
WE ARE PINPOINTS OF GOD’S LIGHT.

WE CANNOT BE HARMLESS
ANY MORE THAN THE SUN
BY WITHDRAWING ITS HEAT
WOULD CEASE TO CAUSE HARM TO THE EARTH

LET LOVE GUIDE OUR SPEECH AND OUT REFRAINING FORM SPEECH

And the second draft…

HARMLESS

Speak form love.
Be silent from love.

We cannot be harmless
As if we were circumstances
In one another’s lives;
We are pinpoints of God’s light.

We cannot be harmless
Any more than the sun
By withdrawing its heat
Could cease to cause harm to the Earth.

Let love guide our speech
And our refraining from speech.

Image credit: Scribe Writing, posted without attribution at Manuscript Anxiety.

Comments

Erik said…
This seems to me very True.

Overall I feel the edited version overall flows very well, but I do miss the directness of the simple statement "we are not circumstances in each other's lives...". (For what it's worth!)

Thank you for sharing this ministry.
Joanna Hoyt said…
In either version, I find the reminder that we can't be harmless helpful and necessary. Thank you.
Chris said…
wow, this is really great.
Yewtree said…
I like it.

Can't resist saying, "Mostly Harmless".
Peter Bishop said…
"Mostly harmless," indeed! (*Groan*)

Thanks for the comments, though.
natcase said…
lovely,
David Pollard said…
I wonder how this writing fits with the Wiccan Rede ('An it harm none, domwhat ye will.)

Popular posts from this blog

Fame

(Note: there were so many thought provoking comments in response to this post that it generated a second-round of ideas. You can read the follow-up post here .) I have a confession to make. I want to be famous. Well, sort of. I don't want to be famous, famous, and ride around in a limousine and have to hire security and that sort of thing. I just want to write a book, have it published by somebody other than my mother, and bought and read by somebody other than my mother, and maybe even sign a couple of autographs along the way. Mom can have one autographed, too, if she wants. It has to be a spiritual book. A really moving and truthful book, that makes people want to look deep inside themselves, and then they come up to me and say something like, "It was all because of that book you wrote! It changed my life!" And I would say, no, no, really, you did all that, you and God/the gods --I'm a little fuzzy on whether the life-changing book is for Pagans or for Quake

Peter on Grief and Communities

Well, that was unexpected. For the last year, ever since my mom's health took a sharp downturn, I've been my dad's ride to Florence Congregational Church on Sundays. That community has been important for my dad and the weekly outing with me was something he always looked forward to and enjoyed, so I didn't mind taking him there. It meant giving up attending my own Quaker meeting for the duration, but I had already been questioning whether silent waiting worship was working for me. I was ready for a sabbatical. A month ago, my dad was Section-Twelved into a geriatric psych hospital when his dementia started to make him emotionally volatile. I had been visiting him every day at his assisted living facility which was right on my way home from work, but the hospital was almost an hour away. I didn't see him at all for three weeks, and when I did visit him there, it actually took me a couple of seconds to recognize him. He was slumped forward in a wheel chair, lo

There is a Spirit Which I Feel

I was always a "rational use of force" gal. For most of my life I believed that the use of force--by which I meant human beings taking up arms and going off to war to try to kill one another--was a regrettable necessity. Sometimes I liked to imagine that Paganism held an alternative to that, particularly back in the day when I believed in that mythical past era of the peaceful, goddess-worshipping matriarchal societies . (I really liked that version of history, and was sorry when I stopped believing in it as factual.) But that way of seeing reality changed for me, in the time between one footfall and the next, on a sunny fall morning: September 11, 2001. I was already running late for work that day when the phone rang; my friend Abby was calling, to give me the news that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center in New York. So? I thought to myself, picturing a small private aircraft. Abby tried to convey some of what she was hearing--terrorists, fire--but the mag