Category: Spirituality
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Looking Past the Great Dying to the Next Great Living
by Allen McGrew. Six months before I joined Quaker Earthcare Witness Steering Committee, I was stricken by a nasty infection that got into my blood and precipitated a near-fatal cascade of platelet death, septic shock, that plunged my blood pressure to 35/50, overwhelmed my kidneys, and induced a heart attack…
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Flipping the Narrative to Earth Regeneration
by Sheree Cammer. On a train trip back east last year, my cousin and his wife introduced me to the Wild Winds Buffalo Preserve in Fremont, Indiana. Bill “Three Paws” Elias drove our tour in a pickup truck. I had the best seat: front seat passenger. The herd was placidly…
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Holding Space for Ecological Grief
by Hayley Hathaway. In fall 2022, QEW launched its first 10-week course on ecological grief. The course came after organizing two popular online workshops on the topic: over 200 Friends registered from across North America. At these workshops, Friends shared about feeling alone with their emotions of dread, fear, and…
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Simplicity and Right Relationship
by Bill Cahalan. I agree with Wendell Berry, who wrote in his 1977 book, The Unsettling of America, that the United States is an unsettled country. We, not only in North America but in all the industrial world, are disconnected from our natural sources. So most of us only vaguely…
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Witnessing the Sacred Depth of Nature
by Mary Conrow Coelho. There are remarkable discoveries now offered to Quaker Earthcare Witness that can greatly strengthen its work and witness. One evening in the early 1990s, a small group gathered to listen to a talk in a video series describing the changes in worldview brought by discoveries in…
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Young Adults’ Workshop: Exploring Ecospirituality
Join Hayley Hathaway, of Quaker Earthcare Witness, for Exploring Ecospirituality: Old & New Ways to Imagine & Transform, a workshop for young adults (ages 18-40). The workshop will be held online, Thursday, February 17, 7:30 – 9 pm Eastern Time. “The world is not a problem to be solved; it…
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Web of Care for the Earth
Dear Friends, As our beloved outgoing clerk, Mary Jo Klingel, writes: “If the past two years of virtual meetings, workshops, and worship sharings have taught QEW Friends anything, it is how very precious our Earthcare community is.” She continues: Those who work every day for QEW, those who…
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Greetings on the Solstice!
I love this part of the winter holidays—when our sense of wonder and light corresponds to the natural pivot point of the solstice. Since June in the northern hemisphere, days have been getting shorter and shorter, with the shortest day today, on December 21. From this point on, days will…
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Opening to Our Direct Connection with the Divine
by Marcelle Martin. When I was in my mid-twenties, my graduate school program was not meeting my great longing to understand the nature of reality. I began to seek inwardly. Yearning to know what life was about, I paid attention to my inner experience in a new way. I would…
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From the Clerk’s Table
by Mary Jo Klingel, Clerk. “Art thou in the Darkness? Mind it not, for if thou dost it will feed thee more. But stand still, and act not, and wait in patience, Till Light arises out of Darkness and leads thee.” – James Naylor I know that…
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A Vision From Our Divine Source
by Jennie Ratcliffe. Any and all of us who’ve held a vision of transformation grounded in what really sustains us—remembering that we don’t live by bread alone, but by the divine All That Is, that bread is sacred too, and there is no ultimate separation between them—are being called to…
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Awakening to Earth: An Earth-Body Meditation
by Bill Cahalan. Bill Cahalan is an eco-psychologist. His booklet, Awakening to Earth, is currently being updated by Quaker Earthcare Witness and will be available to share and download. This meditation is an excerpt. Bill writes, “Here is one version of a guided experience which I have used with weekend…
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Spiritual Ecology: My Journey and Our Journey
A Talk by Shelley Tanenbaum. I am deeply grateful to the Southern Appalachian Yearly Meeting’s (SAYMA) planning committee for bringing me here – and for asking me to talk about eco-spirituality and my personal journey. I’ve been asked to talk about what it has meant to me to connect on…
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Truth Is Something That Happens
by Louis Cox. DO YOU SWEAR that the testimony you are about to give is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you, God?… Early Quakers were known for their refusal to take such oaths in a court of law (often at the…
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Review: Coming Back to Life: The Updated Workbook to the Work that Reconnects
by Quaker Earthcare Witness. Coming Back to Life by Joanna Macy and Molly Young Brown is expanded and updated from their book of the same name published in 1998 (New Society Publishers, 2014, Gabriola Island, BC). The Deep Ecology work of Joanna Macy, also called…
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The Spiritual Basis of Earthcare
QEW’s PROGRAMS and publications stem from a conviction and consciousness that the global crisis of ecological sustainability is at root a spiritual crisis. Even as individuals in our network or our steering committee support political and social action in numerous areas, such as globalization, population, genetic engineering, and toxic pollution,…
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In the School of the Shipwreck
by Noah Merrill. Editor’s Note: Noah wrote this piece in spring 2020 and his reflections speak to us still. These are the only genuine ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce. —José Ortega y Gasset JUST OFF THE shore…
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Practicing Earth Activism
By Ruah Swennerfelt (Updated 2021 by Hayley Hathaway). To become more active on behalf of Earth, start by making yourself aware of the issues. Learn from sources in addition to the conventional news reports. Begin examining ways you can reduce your purchases, buy local, rather than transported, goods, walk or…
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Earthcare, Energy, and the Right Use of Things
Visualizing the Better World That Is Possible by Louis Cox TURNING OVER A NEW LEAF. While casting about for ways to introduce this article about changing wasteful lifestyles, one of my favorite movies broke to the surface: A New Leaf (1971, **½) is about a middle-aged playboy…
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Love in the Wilderness: A Path for Climate Action
By Mey Hasbrook. LOVE SPEAKS OUT to me from the Biblical account of Exodus as a way to face climate breakdown. I hear this as someone of Cherokee Celtic-Irish descent and a Quaker carrying a ministry about Right Relationship, connecting care of the Earth and human communities. The mythology tells…
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In Uncertain Times: Wisdom for the Pandemic
By Mary Jo Klingel. I HAVE HEARD the conventional wisdom that the business community needs certainty to function, and that the stock market needs certainty to grow. When I hear that, I think, “Well, what you are really saying is that you need to know that you will continue to…
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Collective Evolution in the Face of Climate Crisis
By Keith Runyan. FROM THE EMERGENT PATTERNS of a monarch butterfly’s wing to the fractal branchings of a mycelial web, we find ourselves, as 21st-century Friends awash in a fundamentally beautiful world, unveiled. We find ourselves not in the universe, but of it, in a state of interbeing. Every day…
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Book Review: Nothing Lowly in the Universe: An Integral Approach to the Ecological Crisis by Jennie M. Ratcliffe
By Ruah Swennerfelt. MANY, MANY YEARS ago, after having a deep-felt conversation with my father, who wanted to blindly trust his government, I gave him Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner. I chose that book because Dad lived in Southern California, a desert turned into a false oasis of millions of homes using…
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Interfaith Earthcare Touchstones
Compiled by Beverly G. Ward. “A touchstone transcends any one religion, thought, or spiritual tradition and serves as a guide. These touchstones provide examples of specific prayers, passages or scripture, or inspirations from various sacred texts or philosophical writings associated with diverse traditions.” Last year I joined faith leaders at…
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Listening to Roots, Walking in Beauty
By Mey Hasbrook. IN THE MEADOW, I gave thanks beside a beech tree. Sunset neared after a beautiful day with Swarthmoor Area Meeting of Southwest Cumbria, England. This area is called “the cradle of Quakerism” and brings to mind The Valiant 60, the 17th-century law-breaking mystics and traveling ministers from…
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Beckoned by Living Trees
By Marcelle Martin THE FIRST TREE that beckoned me silently, long ago, was a sapling on the far side of a lawn. When I investigated, I discovered it was being strangled by an orange plastic band encircling its trunk. After the sapling had been purchased from a local nursery, the…
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The Call and Response
By Mey Hasbrook. THIS SUMMER at the Friends General Conference Gathering’s Earthcare Center, I spoke on “Transformative Earthcare: 18th-century Benjamin Lay for Today.” I shared how this third-generation Quaker lived a radical life at the intersections of concerns that continue to weigh upon us today. In the 2017 biography The…
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An Easter Reflection with Joanna Macy
By Sara Jolena Wolcott. “What do you envision for the future?” Joanna Macy—Buddhist eco-philosopher, scholar of deep ecology and systems theory—asked me last night, over a dinner of orange yams and tofu and lemon broccoli. Every time I visit her in her Berkeley home, she feeds me these bright orange…
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Awaking Across the Branches of Friends
By Shelley Tanenbaum. SOMETHING SPECIAL happened at the March 2019 Friends World Committee on Consultation Section of the Americas meeting. Friends from across the branches of the Religious Society of Friends came together to express our love for the land and our dedication to environmental justice, with each of us…
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Finding Peace in Troubled Times
By Jay O’Hara. ON CHRISTMAS EVE I went out with my in-laws to church service in upstate New York. The big crowd gathered in the chapel on the campus of Cornell University, and the minister hit all the right notes for this presumably liberal crowd: alluding to the occupant of…
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Meeting for Mourning: New England Friends Worship at Power Plant
By Hayley Hathaway. ON SATURDAY, JULY 28, 2018 I joined about 30 Friends from five New England states at the gates of the recently opened Salem Harbor Station, a natural gas (methane) power plant on the coast of Massachusetts. We gathered for a Meeting for Worship for the purpose of…
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Sweet Balance with Earth
By Ann Marie Klaus. I have to admit, I do not harbor a wish to save Earth or reverse the process she is undergoing. Nor do I worry for her. Earth, in my mind, is a powerful, exquisite being, undergoing the same process of expansion that every bit of the…
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Rooted in Reverence: Reflections on the Climate Pilgrimage
By Honor Woodrow. I AM WRITING TO SHARE a reflection on my experience of the recent Climate Pilgrimage, where Friends from New England and fellow travelers spent six days walking the 60 miles from the Schiller Station (which burns both coal and wood) in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to the Merrimack…
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Ecological Guidance and the Sense of the Divine
By Keith Helmuth. The fate of the human now hangs on our engagement with ecological guidance; the task Thomas Berry calls “the Great Work.” The sense of guidance provided by the ecological worldview is not unlike a new revelation, perhaps even a new sense of the Divine. We may not…
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What’s Emerging?
By Sara Wolcott. What is it that Quakerism contributes to my ecological journey? I am vexed by this question. Five years ago, when my primary sense of religious belonging was nestled deep within the Religious Society of Friends, it would have been easy for me to answer. My confidence that…
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Our Birthright: The Night Sky
By Shelley Tanenbaum. I’m not one to believe that the universe owes me (or anyone) anything. But, after spending five nights camping in semi-remote places between Denver and San Francisco, seeing what appeared to be an infinite number of stars and the Milky Way every night, I am moved to…
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Book Review: Our Life Is Love
By Judy Lumb. I have admired and been inspired by the writing of Marcelle Martin in Friends Journal, so I was very happy to learn that her book was released. It is a very effective juxtaposition of vignettes from the lives of early Friends and contemporary Friends. She divides the…
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Ecological Integrity and the Light Within
by Louis Cox and Ruah Swennerfelt. Ruah is the former General Secretary of Quaker Earthcare Witness IN THE COURSE of our travels to present on behalf of Quaker Earthcare Witness, we search with gathered Friends for ways we all can “walk more gently on the Earth” and…
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Sustainability and Truth
By Louis Cox. THE TERM “SUSTAINABILITY” came into fashion with the modern environmental movement, particularly after the 1992 UN Earth Summit. The concept has offered hope in the face of relentless bad news by highlighting things that ordinary people can do that would make a big difference if enough…
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Peace on Earth, Peace with Earth: Living in a Radically New Way
By Kim Carlyle. Living in a Radically New Way SINCE 1955 when he registered as a conscientious objector, Karl Meyer has been an activist for peace, advocating nonviolence, organizing demonstrations, and refusing to pay taxes to finance war. Over the years, he has come to realize that an…
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Living in Right Relationship
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY QUAKER John Woolman called for living in the “right relationship” as he witnessed to his generation against the evils of slavery, oppression, and materialism- which he warned were causing injury to future generations. We discern a similar dynamic of greed and thoughtlessness in today’s global environmental crisis.
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