A Spiritual Journey

A spiritual religious blog from the perspective of a new attender at a Quaker meeting Main blog: @flowercrowncrip

[searching4light]

On 24th August 2025 I attended my first Quaker meeting as an adult and it was a profound experience that really feels like the start of a major new journey in my life.

I’m starting this blog to reflect on and document the spiritual journey I feel like I’m only just beginning. I don’t fully know where this journey will take me or what I will learn along the way, but I wanted somewhere to share and hopefully to connect with others along the way.

[quakerism]

Think it possible that you may be mistaken.

Advices and Queries 17

[searching4light]

I was umming and ahhing about going to online meeting for worship tonight. I’m going through a rough patch and feeling quite spiritually empty and wasn’t sure what to expect as God feels quite distant for me right now.

But I remembered advices and queries “10. Come regularly to meeting for worship even when you are angry, depressed, tired or spiritually cold...” and decided it was worth giving it a go.

It was hard to focus and I didn’t really manage to centre down but I left feeling reminded that God is still there even when I struggle to find them, and that I don’t have to be perfect to be loved and held by God and by others.

[searching4light]

I gave spoken ministry for the first time tonight and it was a completely unexpected and totally new experience.

As such a new attender I think I was feeling a bit too comfortable in my assumption that I’m too inexperienced to be called to speak. I came into the meeting looking forward to listening and reflecting in silence to the wisdom coming through more experienced Friends.

But I found myself given a strong message, which has happened before, but I felt then that the message was meant for me alone. But more unusually I also received the words to express the message with as well as a gentle but very persistent feeling that they were to be shared with the meeting. No matter what I did, I couldn’t move beyond it.

I was worried about getting it wrong and about doing the wrong thing. But after sitting with it as long as I could, I spoke. It was short, only a few sentences, and while speaking I saw someone smile and nod like my words connected with them. And then I felt a feeling of peace and a sense that the message I’d received was somehow complete having been shared.

[searching4light]

I’m seeing so many people celebrating death right now. The death of someone they hated, someone who hated them.

I can’t feel any celebration over an act of violence like this. Any violent death is a tragedy, the end of possibility from a taken life is hard to even imagine. A dead person can’t change. They can’t regret. They can’t learn. They can’t grow. They can’t love. And they can’t apologise.

I don’t see how this can help anyone – all I can predict is further polarisation and violence. Violence by other vigilantes, violence by governments and violence from police.

[searching4light]

I’ve just got to a quote in Quaker Faith and Practice (Britain Yearly Meeting) from Bernard Brett (1935-1982) who is described as living with severe cerebral palsy and as someone who worked tirelessly to help others.

And I’m in floods of tears right now because I never ever expected someone with a disability like mine to be quoted in a religious text before. Someone whose experiences of disability, depression and faith – that I can relate to in spades – is seen as important enough to be in not just a published book, but such an important and central text is just such a powerful thing.

This is a man with severe cerebral palsy was valued and listened to enough for his words to survive in print. And for this to be sometime before 1982 – over ten years before the disability discrimination act in the UK – I genuinely have no words for what I’m feeling right now.

I’m so used to having to carve out a place at the table – but with Quakers, both at my local meeting and now also in the wider community, I feel like there’s already room for me exactly as I am.

[searching4light]

Transcription : “There is little point in praying to be enabled to overcome some temptation, and then putting oneself in the very position in which the temptation can exert all its fascination. There is little point in praying that the sorrowing may be comforted and the lonely cheered, unless we ourselves set out to bring comfort and cheer to the sad and neglected in our own sur-roundings. There is little point in praying for our home and for our loved ones, and in going on being as selfish and inconsiderate as we have been. Prayer would be an evil rather than a blessing if it were only a way of getting God to do what we ourselves will not make the effort to do. God does not do things for us - he enables us to do them for ourselves.

Elisabeth Holmgaard, 1984”

2.28, Quaker Faith and Practice 5th Edition, Britain Yearly Meeting

[flowercrowncrip]

Underwater Candle

ID: a digital painting of a blue candle burning underwater. The candle flame is yellow with a hint of blue and is surrounded by a bright blue halo /end ID

[searching4light]

I painted this based on my experience at the Quaker meeting I attended a couple of weeks ago.

I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect in the quiet or whether I was supposed to do anything specific with my mind while waiting. But it turned out that there was nothing really to be worried about.

I settled into the quiet surprisingly well. Despite being uncertain of what to expect and in a room of total strangers, a feeling of complete calm came over me. I closed my eyes and saw an ocean with great rolling waves, which was pleasant but also unexpected as I wasn’t trying to imagine anything.

It felt like something within me had joined with something much greater. Like a droplet of water returning to an ocean, both held by the waves and part of them all at once. I felt a profound connection with everyone in the room, and with something much greater – it really felt to me as if the Holy Spirit was there with us.

[goldensunset]

they should invent 7 hours between 10pm and midnight

[searching4light]

I’ve attended my local meeting twice now and I’ve just been blown away with how kind people have been, and how many people have active sought out to connect with me as a person.

I have a fairly significant and very visible physical disability, but people have really made an effort to include me. They go out of their way to make sure that I can shake hands at the end of the meeting, they come up and talk to me – and never in an awkward or patronising way either.

These aren’t people who necessarily know lots about disability justice, many of them fairly clearly don’t spend much time with wheelchair users. But it’s so obvious that they’re coming from a space of seeing the Light in everyone and it’s been really inspiring and welcoming to experience.

I can tell I will learn a lot from becoming part of this community.

[bebsi-cola]

if you argue against someone by accepting the premise they've proposed as true then you have already ceded ground to them

we can use ableism as an example to understand this. bc you can't use the logic of ableism to undermine it. if someone says "disabled people are worthless because of the resource costs" you can't counter by mentioning disabled people who contribute because that accepts the ableist premise of "people's worth can be measured by resources or production". the fact that the defence leaves out a large swath of the most vulnerable disabled population is also true, but the problem is accepting the premise at all as a legitimate arguement