I’m always startled to hear people say they can pursue spirituality without any teacher or community. Nothing in my experience, as a yogi or a Christian, supports that. If you point to George Fox’s time of sitting “in hollow trees and lonesome places,” and his recognition that among the priests (and preachers) he consulted, “there was none among them that could speak to my condition,” and his eventual proclamation of discovering “the pure knowledge of God and of Christ alone, without the help of any man, book, or writing,” the fact remains that he was stimulated by that early dialogue and, once he’d experienced Divine Revelation, did not keep it to himself but was instead drawn out to others who were having similar transformations.

I would point, too, to the spiritual support he received initially from Elizabeth Hooten – whom I consider the first Quaker and who, incidentally, came across the Atlantic in her advanced age to Dover to minister among Friends here — and later from Margaret Fell.

One reason we need community to accompany our spiritual deepening and expansion comes in the ways it can counter tendencies toward self-deception, human weakness, laziness, or distraction. In the practice of our faith, we instruct, encourage, acknowledge, embrace, correct, inspire, comfort, guide – even rebuke – one another. These are matters the New Testament calls discipleship.

Lloyd Lee Wilson has reminded us there are no Quakers apart from the meeting, which is another way of saying each Friend needs to be part of this interactive dynamic. I remember my shock in picking up a book on leaders of the Confederacy and finding three Quakers indexed; “Impossible,” I muttered, until seeing in the text that all three had been raised in Quaker households but resided far from any meeting – and its corrective discipline – when the war erupted.

Try dressing Plain and adhering to Plain speech without a circle of Plain Friends at hand, and you’ll discover just how hard it is to continue even an outward practice. Maintaining a witness is no less difficult. Moreover, I find it’s hard to keep from being overwhelmed by the negative influences around us. Maybe part of the restorative answer is right in front of us all along – Society of Friends, plural.

Or in some other, similar circle.