Healing What Breaks Our Hearts
It had been many years since I had been part of any Quaker gathering. After 30 years of living and breathing Friends’ practices, traveling in ministry, and clerking my yearly meeting and various committees for the yearly meeting and Friends General Conference (FGC), I had grown weary and in need of a different kind of spiritual nurture. I had found nurture and unexpected spiritual gifts in a Black Apostolic church in my hometown. My new friends helped open my spirit to praise; song; dancing; shouting with abandoned joy; and allowing the Holy Spirit to fill all of me, body, mind, and soul. I have been very happy there for the last five years.
So, it was a big surprise when after receiving an invitation to Quaker Spring 2025 in Barnesville, Ohio, I felt the strong inward nudge to go. Quaker Spring is a multi-day, hybrid gathering of unprogrammed Friends who listen together to the Inward Christ. The 2025 event took place in late June. Even though Christ is at the center of my spiritual experience, I had never attended.
My husband, Peter Wood, a Universalist and Buddhist meditator, agreed to accompany me to Olney Friends School and Stillwater Meeting, which is part of Ohio Yearly Meeting. We later learned that Quaker Spring has no formal program, apart from daily Bible study and worship. Each day is discerned according to how the Spirit leads. So when we arrived, after a long day’s drive through rain and windstorms, no one was about. They had been led to worship in another nearby meeting. We found our way to our camping spot and fell into a welcome sleep.
The next day we ate, discerned, studied, worshiped, shared, and discussed with this body of Friends who were surprisingly diverse and included some old friends. Some of the attenders were present in person, having traveled from near and far in the United States. Others from Britain, Kenya, Venezuela, and other places attended online portions of the day. Part of the discernment that day was to hold a meeting for healing.
No one there knew how active I had been years before in advancing meeting for healing among Friends. Beginning in the early 1990s, Richard Lee, a Friend from Red Cedar Meeting in Lansing, Michigan, was responsible for bringing Friends’ meeting for healing to the United States and Canada. Richard learned the practice from his English Quaker grandmother and faithfully brought meeting for healing to local meetings, yearly meetings, and to FGC Gatherings during a 30-year ministry. I assisted him in holding workshops and authoring articles, especially in the beginning. Meeting for healing became a cherished application of Quaker worship all over the continent because it was so needed. Many Friends took healing and comfort from it in the years that I accompanied Richard. It was no different at Quaker Spring.
People wanting healing would spontaneously rise, one at a time, to sit in a chair in the middle of our circle. Friends then would lay on hands, pray to Jesus, read bits of psalms, make their hearts vulnerable, share songs, whisper, shed tears, and find hope. Meeting for healing is healing to everyone, not just the person in the center. And so it was for our group at Quaker Spring.
The next day the community discerned that we would have another meeting for healing, but this one would focus on the sufferings of the world: on all those terrible global situations and within our own country that break our hearts. I surprised myself by offering to help shape the meeting and ended up clerking it that evening.
We assume that the purpose of a meeting for healing is to bring us eventually beyond these initial emotional reactions to the fruit of the Holy Spirit, including love, courage, joy, and inner peace.
These are some assumptions that help a meeting for healing what breaks our hearts carry out its intention of healing.
We assume that there is a spiritual power that is greater than thee or me. George Fox named that power Jesus Christ, as do I. In his Journal he wrote, “I heard a voice which said, ‘There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition,’ and when I heard it my heart did leap for joy.” You may name that power differently. When confronting the forces that are currently shaking up our world, however, I believe that we must recognize the spiritual power of Good, which is greater than any human power.
We assume that the power of good, the power of God, is greater than the power of evil, sometimes known as “the Adversary.” Fox wrote about this, as recorded in his Journal, when he shared his vision of the oceans of light and darkness: “I saw also that there was an ocean of darkness and death, but an infinite ocean of light and love, which flowed over the ocean of darkness. And in that also I saw the infinite love of God.”
We assume that praying for or holding people or situations in the Light, especially when they are confronted by evil, is substantively real and has real consequences in the real world. In fact, there are times when we are called upon to engage in spiritual warfare. “[T]he mighty power of God goes along with you, to enable you to stand over all the world, and (spiritually) to chain, to fetter, to bind, and to imprison, and to lead out of prison; to famish, to feed, and to make fat, and to bring into green pastures” (George Fox, Epistle 55).
We assume that it is necessary to begin where we are. What seems naturally to occur in emotional healing is a period of lament, a period of anger, and even a period of hopelessness. We cannot skip over our heartache. “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven” (Ecclesiastes 3:1 [KJV]). Or as Pema Chodron says, “Just where you are. That’s the place to start!”
We assume that the purpose of a meeting for healing is to bring us eventually beyond these initial emotional reactions to the fruit of the Holy Spirit, including love, courage, joy, and inner peace (Gal. 5:22–23). We leave that transition in the hands of the Spirit, and we’re ready to receive the fruit when it is given.
In our meeting for healing what breaks our hearts at Quaker Spring, we worshiped together over the sufferings named below. There were other sufferings that we could have prayed for. But these were the concerns of the people in the room (and online) over which their hearts were breaking: conflicts among Quakers, especially involving harsh judgment of each other; children who are being starved and killed through genocidal policies; conflicts and poverty on the continent of Africa, so much of which can be traced to colonialism; attacks on immigrants and migrants to the United States; destruction of environments, habitats, and biodiversity for the sake of greed; and attacks on Indigenous people.
As we prayed, there was a discernible movement in how we responded to these heartbreaking conditions of our world. Initially, we lamented. How can our hearts not break at the thought of innocent children being targeted by genocidal politics; being starved, bombed, and separated from their families? There were tears and expressions of helplessness, and undoubtedly some of those present had feelings of discomfort with this. But expressing these difficult feelings was not a bad thing. The frozen logjam of paralysis was breaking open.
Next came a bit of anger. This is not how the world was meant to be! No Bible passages were shared at this time, but I could not help but think about the prophet Micah who describes God’s anger at greedy people:
Doom to those who plot evil, who go to bed dreaming up crimes! As soon as it’s morning they’re off, full of energy, doing what they’ve planned. They covet fields and grab them, find homes and take them. They bully the neighbor and his family, see people only for what they can get out of them. God has had enough. (Mic. 2:1–3, The Message)
Next came resolve. Someone ministered, “In the power of Christ, I stand against the spirit of greed! In the power of Christ, I stand against the spirit of domination! In the power of Christ, I stand against the spirit of violation!”
And then came the naming. A gentle Conservative Friend stood and named exactly that thing that we were afraid to think about. He related how the “enemy of humankind” had once tempted Jesus in the desert. The deal would be that Jesus would give his allegiance to the enemy in return for absolute temporal power: world domination. He noted that Jesus repudiated the false promise, but he feared that there were leaders in the world today who had consummated that deal.
And then a Liberal Friend from an FGC-affiliated meeting stood. He rebuked the enemy of humankind with a voice of certain authority, declaring, “Hands off! You can’t have our children! You can’t have our immigrants! You can’t have our hearts and minds! You can’t have any of it!” The energy in the room erupted with determination, courage, and hope. The Spirit was boldly present among and within us! I heard “Amen!” and “Yes, Lord!” and “Thank you, God!”
When we had settled, I called us to speak into the silent center of our gathering snapshots of the healed world: our vision for God’s creation as it was meant to be and would be again. We spoke with love, with hope, and with peace in our hearts as we offered up the images: well-fed children, peacefully asleep in their mothers’ arms; people working in jobs that are meaningful and pay a living wage; Quakers being patient with and curious about their differences; all people receiving necessary healthcare; nations at peace; celebration and dancing with joyful singing; green, fecund, luscious Mother Earth; Quakers acknowledging when they have harmed each other, taking responsibility for their actions and seeking reconciliation; economies that serve all the people’s needs; schools that are safe for children and teachers; every child receiving an excellent education; every human being having what is materially needed to live comfortably; open arms welcoming the stranger; and clear skies and clean water.
And then the meeting closed. We were so happy and energized that we had to celebrate with dancing and singing! What a transformation! At the start of the meeting, we had been a people who had felt relatively powerless, and now we were a people who, in the power of Christ, had gazed upon the evil; had not flinched; had taken on the suffering of the disempowered victims; and had received the love, hope, and courage of the Spirit to engage in the battle.
I think that the power of this meeting may have flowed from our unity in the Spirit of Christ, but I could be wrong. There might be a way that nontheist Friends and Universalist Friends can also find their way to this healing Power. I hope you try. It will take courage and flexibility, lots of patience, and even more love.
Afterward, some of us talked together about our experience. We considered that while we often say that we believe in the power of prayer, this meeting for healing helped us more fully realize that truth. We had embraced in a way that we had not done before and had felt the capacity of the power of God to actually heal the world, with our communal cooperation.
As for myself, I think that it was no accident that I, who was intimately familiar with clerking meetings for healing, was present at the Quaker Spring during which a meeting for healing was spontaneously discerned to be needed. Because my life history includes the personal confrontation of evil and the spiritual gift of courage being given in the face of that evil, it was also no mistake that I was available to clerk a meeting for healing that would take on the task of spiritual warfare. In these synchronicities, I see the hand of God.
This is how it happened for us at Quaker Spring in June 2025. I don’t know how it will happen for you, should you hold a meeting for healing what breaks our hearts. I think that the power of this meeting may have flowed from our unity in the Spirit of Christ, but I could be wrong. There might be a way that nontheist Friends and Universalist Friends can also find their way to this healing power. I hope you try. It will take courage and flexibility, lots of patience, and even more love. But I know that we unleashed a significant power for Good that night. Imagine what we could do together if we engaged in such spiritual warfare on a regular basis.
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