Connecting Spirit to Spirit: Becky Jones’s Path to Prayer

A Quaker author chat. Becky Jones’s “The Intimacy of Prayer” appears in the December 2025 issue of Friends Journal.

Becky Jones discusses her journey from growing up in a nominally Presbyterian household to becoming a chaplain. She shares her experiences with prayer, emphasizing its broad definition and personal significance. Becky reflects on moments of spiritual connection, both in nature and through her work as a chaplain, highlighting the importance of being present and holding space for others. The conversation also touches on the power of communal support and the various forms prayer can take in different contexts.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Prayer and Personal Background
02:46 The Role of Prayer in Chaplaincy
07:00 Practices of Remembering and Holding Others in Prayer
09:10 The Nature of Prayer and Community Support
12:35 Broad Definitions of Prayer and Personal Experiences

Bio

Becky Jones is a longtime member of Northampton (Mass.) Meeting. She served as the interfaith chaplain in her local hospital and led bereavement writing workshops for 20 years. This essay is part of a larger collection of stories and reflections about life as a chaplain and as a person experiencing life’s challenges, losses, and grace.

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Transcript

Martin Kelley:

Hi, I’m Martin Kelly and we do Friends Journal podcast of authors. And today I’m very happy to be here with Becky Jones. Welcome, Becky.

Becky Jones:

Thank you for having me, I appreciate it.

Martin Kelley:

Becky has an article in the December 2025 French Journal, The Intimacy of Prayer. Now this issue is all about what Quakers believe and talking about prayer is definitely an important one. Becky, let me just introduce you here from your bio. Becky Jones is a longtime member of Northampton Meeting in Massachusetts. She served as an interfaith chaplain in her local hospital and led bereavement writing workshops for 20 years. This essay is part of a larger collection of stories and reflections about life as a chaplain and as a person experiencing life’s challenges, losses, and grace. Which is all very impressive, but I was really moved by your description of growing up mostly kind of unchurched without prayer. You know, not something, a background you would expect for a chaplain. So tell me a little bit about your early life in prayer.

Becky Jones:

About the growing up. So I grew up in a very nominally Presbyterian household and I really didn’t go to church very often and as I said in my article prayer was just the thing that happened by the minister at the front of the room and something that you didn’t want other people doing for you. When I look back at my early life, I think one of things that I would say is that prayer didn’t have that word for it but prayer would be that sense of wonder that I felt sometimes as a kid in connecting with nature or with people.

And I don’t remember if I say this in the article, but when I was a teenager, I had an experience out in nature, a really low point in my life and the beauty of the seeing in front of me felt like God somehow reaching out to me. And I felt held and not that anything changed in my life. It didn’t magically get all better and rosy, but I felt accompanied.

That kind of accompaniment I often feel in journaling or in writing. Like there’s an audience that I’m writing to. Even if I don’t name the audience, I feel heard and seen in that process.

Martin Kelley:

Yeah. Well, that’s wonderful. I mean, I grew up sort of similarly. And I remember prayer was, you I said a little grace before eating. I said a little prayer before going to bed. I think the same one you mentioned there. And I rolled through them so quickly that I didn’t even actually know the words. like, you know, I was 20 and I was like, what were those words? And Biddy Best was part of it. And I was like, by thee be blessed. Like for me, it was just a scramble of words that I didn’t incorporate. So how did you then start coming to prayer? And especially sort of professionally as a chaplain?

Becky Jones:

Right, right. I sort of laugh at myself that it didn’t really occur to me that prayer would be something that would be required as a chaplain. think I had this sense that just being with people was sufficient. And I think in many ways that’s true, but the quality or the manner of a makes a difference, I believe. If I, if I myself feel like I’m trying to fix something for somebody else or like it’s, like somehow it’s mine to do, then I just feel like a habitual trying to fix it person. But if I can turn it over to some higher thing.

And I don’t always use the word God, but spirit or presence, then I feel much easier about just being a holding presence in the middle of a hard situation for people. And for me, that has often felt like that itself is prayer or that we, there’ve been some times when I feel in a counseling situation where I’ve spent time with somebody over time, one on one, that somehow it just, there’s a moment that something shifts. And even though we’re still just talking to each other, we are in a different realm and feeling supported and cocooned in a way in a…

And that there’s a shimmer to the words that we’re using or there’s some recognition or realization that a person makes and that just like you want to just stop. Yeah, and that for me has felt like prayer.

Martin Kelley:

Yeah, I’ve experienced that sometimes, you know, meeting that’ll happen or just, you know, someone will share something they’re going through just even in worship. And, you know, you can just feel the whole room just kind of center and, and focus. one thing I appreciate going to other churches is sometimes they’ll have like a moment where the pastor will be upfront and ask for prayers for people. and I guess I’m sure there’s quicker meetings to do that. Mine doesn’t, but I always. I kind of crave it actually to have this time where we really think about each other and have that chance to share. Does your meeting do that? Have you been able to incorporate anything?

Becky Jones:

We don’t do that. We have talked about doing that, and every once in a while, somebody who’s closing worship will invite that.

We tend to have a long enough time after worship of, because we always have the habit of introducing everybody. And then, so that a newcomer doesn’t feel singled out, so everybody’s hearing everybody’s names. So it takes a while, especially the meeting has been growing in recent months, not surprisingly with the condition of the world.

Martin Kelley:

That’s a good thing to happen. Yeah.

Becky Jones:

And then announcements seem to go on too long. So it doesn’t happen as a practice, but I always appreciate it when somebody in either in when they’re introducing themselves or they’re we’re having announcements if there’s a if somebody asked to be held in prayer or for us to hold somebody in the light. I have a practice: as I settle into worship of looking around the room and on the screen now and naming each person. I hold you in the light, please hold me in the light.

For a while I was trying to pick up on something that Amanda Kemp talks about in her Say the Wrong Thing kinds of workshops, which is, I accept you unconditionally, please accept me unconditionally. And that always feels a little bit more, a little bit more of a stretch because I don’t always accept people unconditionally. I sort of aspire to that and I decided to stop that. So I wasn’t bumping up against it, but I do it to myself too. I, at the end, like I turn to myself inwardly and say, I hold you in the light, please hold me in the light. And that I think is acknowledging. The bit of the spirit in me and also the multiple parts of me that I’m more than just any one facet of me.

Martin Kelley:

Yeah, that’s, that’s beautiful practice. the sort of intentionality of thinking about people is, is great. I’m a list maker, so I have a list on my phone, you know, prayer list. And anytime someone has something, I, I write it down and my goal is to go through every so often just to be able to remember that person. preparing for this this morning, I went to it and I haven’t put anything down since 2024, since over a year. I was really surprised and I stopped and I went through the last couple of years and it was just really wonderful to stop and do that.

So I want to, you know, restart that list, but how do you have any, you know, either mechanical ways of remembering people or like how do we remember the loved ones in our lives and just really hold them in this kind of a prayer state?

Becky Jones:

You know, I think I, like you, I sort of fluctuate about how diligently I do that. I have to do lists around me. It hasn’t occurred to me to make a list on my phone. I used to have a little basket that I would write somebody’s name down in and put their name in the basket. And that I haven’t done that for a while, so I’m grateful for that kind of reminder.

Becky Jones:

When somebody’s on my heart and I’m thinking about them, there’s a time doing the dishes can become the opportunity to hold somebody in prayer or to hold them in the Light. There’s a sort of I could dedicate the dishes to to to the person who’s having surgery next week or to the person who’s recovering or

So I think I don’t have very good systems and that’s not just around prayer life, it’s around my entire life. So I’m not a very good, I have many, many to-do lists and then I lose the to-do list and make another one. And then occasionally find them and put them together. So your question may prompt me to be a little bit more intentional about.

Martin Kelley:

In the end, what we have in this life of ours is one another, so it is good to remember and always in the busyness of life, nice to settle down. Any other insights about prayer that you might share with friends watching?

Becky Jones:

Well, two things come to my mind. A few years ago, a woman in our meeting, shared her spiritual journey. she brought in a couple baskets full of stuffed animals. And she had us pick out a stuffed animal. And get to know it a little bit, spend a little bit of time with it, and then introduce it to a friend, to another person. And then we, the pairs of us, would introduce the other person’s stuffed animal to the group, to the gathering group. And then we put them all in a circle in the middle of the room, as if they’re holding meeting for worship. And then we all sat around them, watching them. Holding them as they’re holding worship. And the thing that has stuck with me all these years was the kind of affection that I felt for each of those stuffed animals from hearing how people were introducing them and watching, you know, like one animal’s like off to the side and one’s got placed a little bit outside the circle. And just noticing my own affection and wish for them like I wish that one were more felt more like they could be part of the circle and my image that I’ve taken with that is that like that’s when we’re in worship we’re like those stuffed animals and my affection for each particular personality in the room is deepened when I hold that image. And then the sense of us being held by the spirit as we’re holding worship, the spirits, container in which we’re having that has always felt like a really lovely.

And then just, think the other thing is my reference to Jan Hoffman saying that prayers can travel not only across distance but back and forth in time and that that I don’t even know what that means, you know, in terms of efficacy of prayer. but I know something shifts in me when I remember some, you know, that moment of, I forgot to hold somebody in prayer, or I hear about something after the fact, and I can sort of project myself or prayer backwards to wish for somebody to be accompanied all the way through. I think that has an impact, at least in my own personal life and hopefully in the spirit realm that it has some impact.

There is for me a power when there’s a group of people holding the concern for someone. It just feels like it increases the amount of love in the world to do that.

Martin Kelley:

Good. Well, we should try to find ways of doing more of that, you know, in our individual lives, in our meeting lives. We did have one time a couple of years ago where someone was, you know, diagnosed with a cancer and we all kind of circled around him and I was close to like, we should put hands on. We’re a little bit too uptight of a meeting maybe to have done that, but I think, you know, we were really there holding him in the light. And I think it helped. We were really, I think, invested in his healing and in what he was going through, through that. And, know, every week, you how are you doing? You know, we will keep in track with that. So it was a really, I think, powerful thing to do.

Becky Jones:

Clearly from my essay people will get that I have a very broad definition of prayer and that it doesn’t need to look like any one thing. There just so many times in my chaplaincy where I felt like there was some interaction with somebody that was not prayer itself, but worked to that effect. So making little castings of an infant who had died, their hand. That’s one of the essays that I refer to in my article.

And there’s another one of my going out to buy Kaluwa for a patient’s family to give a final toast to their loved one. And that felt like the perfect kind of prayer for that family. If I had come in and offered a prayer to them, they would have sent me away. So I went out and got Kaluah and came back and we used little medicine dispensing cups to toast this person who was dying.

Martin Kelley:

And it was appropriate for them and for the family and what they needed. It’s beautiful.

Becky Jones:

Yeah.

Martin Kelley:

Well, thank you, for joining us today and for writing for Friends Journal. The Intimacy of Prayer, it’s in the December 2025 issue of Friends Journal, an issue devoted to what we believe. So again, thank you, Becky.

Becky Jones:

Thanks so much, Martin. I appreciate talking with you. Take care.

Martin Kelley:

You too, bye bye.