Inward Guidance, Outward Action

By Kat Griffith, Winnebago Worship Group

Editor’s note: The following article was originally presented as the keynote address at Northern Yearly Meeting’s annual session on Saturday, May 25, 2024.

So, I just re-read the description – written way back in February – of my talk, in which I promised voices, mandalas, dreams, butt-kicking failures, and deafening God-silences. That sounds like quite the weather system moving in, and now I have to deliver! I can definitely promise you voices, dreams and God-silences. You might have to buttonhole me for some of the rest because it didn’t all fit in a 25-minute talk.

So, I’m going to tell you a bunch of stories that I’ve sort of strung together around six lessons I have learned about leadings.

Lesson 1: When you are seeking guidance about a course of action or decision you have to make, be clear and honest right from the get-go about what you want or think you need. Why? Because if you don’t invite your own desires in through the front door and ask them to introduce themselves, they are likely to sneak in the back door instead. Wearing a disguise – all decked out as “a leading.”

It took me a long time to learn this lesson. I have lots of powerful wants! But I have learned to be suspicious of a leading that looks just like what I wanted to do all along. Doing what I want to do may be just fine, but if I interpret my desire as a leading, I am apt to be very judgmental of people who thwart me. They’re thwarting the will of God after all! Me being self-righteous… that never ends well.

And the good news is, we are in good company when we come clean about what we really want as part of listening for guidance. Jesus did this. When he was on the Mount of Olives in Gethsemane before he was taken captive, he knew what was coming – a bitter cup. And he said so, out loud, to God. “Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me; nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.” (Luke 22:42).

That’s what I aspire to: first be honest, then do whatever I’ve been called to do whether I get what I want or not.

Lesson 2: If you get a really clear command, take it seriously!

Sometimes I am praying for help or guidance, and a leading hits me like a flying meatball – bam! Call Laura right now! Tend to the tailpipe! Draw a mandala! Invite that guy drinking out of a paper bag in the library to have lunch with you! Do the labyrinth on your knees! (Ouch, she said parenthetically.) These actual commands were unexpected answers to some prayers, and in a couple of cases, I wasn’t praying at all. I was running for cover!

I’ll tell you the story of one of these commands. I was up in the U.P. by myself with three kids. We’d just been cross-country skiing for several hours and we were pooped and really needed to get back to a warm house and dinner. It was dusk. I turned the key in the ignition, the car started, and then it died. I kind of freaked out. I think I did one of those perfunctory panic prayers, not necessarily believing that divine intervention would be forthcoming in such a situation, but not having any more practical ideas. I don’t know anything about cars! Suddenly, this utterly unexpected command came to me: CLEAN THE SNOW OUT OF THE TAILPIPE!

Now, it had never occurred to me that snow might get in a tailpipe, and I had never heard of cleaning one out, but without any better ideas, I went around to the back of the car. Sure enough, the tailpipe was full of snow. I had backed into the snowbank while parking, and then pulled forward a bit before turning off the engine. I found a stick, poked it into the tailpipe, and managed to extract most of the snow. I turned the key in the ignition, and voila! The car started and kept going! It still just astonishes me that I could get a leading about what to do about my car’s tailpipe, but that’s how I read it!

I’ve had a few commands like that, and I treasure them – always unexpected and surprising in their clarity and specificity. Obeying them has always turned out very well.

But the truth is, much more often, even if I’m praying like crazy for help, I don’t get an obvious leading, much less a command. I’ve learned that silence is the most frequent response to a request for guidance. After countless experiences with silence in response to my earnest entreaties for guidance, I’ve learned to accept silence as a form of guidance. Let’s call that:

Lesson 3: Accept silence as a form of guidance. God is not a gumball machine where you can insert a quarter or a prayer and out comes your gumball or leading.

I have figured out some helpful ways to work with these silences.

Lesson 3A: Sorry, the past eight years of estate work for family members who died have actually changed my personality. I am now ALL about lists and bullet points and have gotten really anal about tracking things like “Revelations 3A through 3D”. So here it is — Circumstances might not be aligned for certain things to happen yet. Keep preparing yourself for when the time may become ripe.

Once I was working with two other NYM Friends to draft a letter about making a donation to Friends General Conference to help with their institutional assessment on racism. There was something I really wanted to say in the letter, but the other two members of the committee were clear that it should not be included. So, we left it out. I was kind of disappointed, but I also trusted them. Some weeks later we presented the letter at Interim Session and proposed a donation for approval. One Friend raised an objection. She felt strongly that the issue needed further discernment. At that moment, the words that I had wanted to put in the letter came back to me forcefully and I raised my hand. The clerk recognized me, and I spoke those words and sat back down. After a brief silence, the clerk checked to see if he correctly read the sense of the meeting – that we were ready to move forward with the letter and the donation. We were. I believe that had the words been in the letter, they would not have had the same impact as they had spoken in response to the Friend’s objection. It was a good lesson to me that what I thought was a genuine leading could also need to be corralled by someone else’s leading and await a better moment for expression. I believe that what happened was the best way it could have gone.

Lesson 3B: Sometimes I have to be made ready for something before I can receive guidance and an opportunity to follow it.

Honestly, since I was about 12, I had always wanted to teach, but I never could make my peace with the bureaucratic, rule-driven, conventional world of public schools. I found little teaching gigs here and there and homeschooled for 9 years. When the call came out of the blue one day from our local high school offering me a job teaching Spanish 5, I was ready to do it. I think by the age of 48 I finally had the absolute minimum requisite level of tolerance for the institutional realities of the teaching profession, and if that call had come about 15 minutes sooner, I would not have had the chops to do it! I had a wonderful fourth career as a teacher.

Lesson 3C: Sometimes a period of God-silence is a chance to collect data. That data often modifies what I want, what I pray for, and what I think is even possible.

I am not a naturally patient person and waiting for a message that doesn’t come drives me crazy. So, I use the waiting time actively. I research things, I talk about them with people, and I set up experiments to generate data for myself. Sometimes this data turns out to provide really crucial information. Teaching homeschoolers Spanish and writing and Great Books was an absolute joy, giving me the data that I really did belong in a classroom. The main thing is, I don’t take silence as a sign that I should necessarily sit on my hands and do nothing.

Lesson 3D: Sometimes a period of God-silence reveals an utterly unexpected opportunity that never even occurred to me.

Some years ago, for various reasons I felt I wanted to work on LGBTQ advocacy. I kind of asked God for permission to do this. Instead, I got the most deafening God-silence I had ever experienced. Ordinarily, I feel free to carry out my little experiments and tinker in the margins and take small actions. This time, I didn’t. And then one day, something happened that changed the way I thought about my role. I was talking with a new attender at our worship group about my many “Is homosexuality a sin?” conversations with my evangelical homeschooling friends. He listened quietly and attentively, not saying much. I later remembered that he had been raised in the Baptist church and had married into the Falwell family, and I was concerned that I might have said something that felt uncomfortable to him. I called him up to let him know that I hoped I had said nothing that would make him feel unwelcome. He said that I had not – that while he did in fact disagree with me, he had also experienced me as fully respectful and welcoming.

I realized something really important in that moment: that the Spirit had truly reshaped my heart. I had spoken with genuine love and respect of people whose beliefs I felt were in error and had authentically welcomed the “other” into what was a sacred place for me – our little worship group in our living room. I came to believe that this was the role I was called to play – keeping my heart open to all, holding space for encounters across our differences.

I fully recognize that this is MY role, MY leading, and that others might have equally authentic and powerful leadings that look very different. But as much of my life in the last 25 years has made clear to me, I thrive in political, cultural and spiritual ecotones – places where different kinds of people encounter each other and have a chance to interact across differences. I now know to look for these places. I have been powerfully shaped by them, and they are often where I do my best work. They are also often where I have my most powerful encounters with Spirit.

But that’s not the end of the story. About a decade into my God-silence on the issue of LGBTQ advocacy, an opportunity arose to take action in support of a gay student. I felt powerfully called to do so. I took action and got in a lot of trouble for it. After some months of upheaval, the Department of Public Instruction sent a lawyer who grilled me for three hours regarding my action. At the end she exonerated me from wrongdoing, and said, “I wish these conversations always went like this!” Then, to my astonishment, she said, “Can I have a hug?” The lawyer wanted a hug! The school Superintendent lined up for one too!

The ultimate outcome was the creation of a Gender and Sexuality Alliance that is now the biggest student club at the high school, and a new policy that allows LGBTQ teachers to be out. I believe things might have gone quite differently in this relatively conservative town – I especially don’t think there would have been any hugs! – had I not been shaped by the previous decade and obedience to what I understood was being asked of me.

Lesson 4: There are a lot of thought police in my head, and sometimes God has to use subterfuge to get past them. Dreams are a really important avenue for messages I need but might not be willing or able to hear in another form.

I’d like to share a few of my guidance dreams.

Background: I was 25 and wandering my way through Central America in search of a life for myself. My mother had died, and my father had banished me from his kingdom, and I was trying in fits and starts to figure out how to break into doing economic development work in Latin America. I landed in Monteverde Costa Rica and kept finding things to do that kept me there for – at first – a few more days, then a few more weeks, then a few more months, and eventually, several years! After a few months in the community, some fragile, tender shoots of faith were starting to grow in me. I was surrounded by good and loving people who were showing me another way to be in this world.

One night I had a dream. I was at a conference, and the moderator asked us to please stand and introduce ourselves one by one. I immediately started rehearsing my credentials – my degree, my awards and honors, blah blah blah. I was looking forward to introducing myself! The first man stood up, and he looked a bit doddering. He said he was a professor of education at a not-particularly-selective little college I knew of, and I prepared to be unimpressed. Then he said, “I am a man of God, and I come in love.”

There was an embarrassed silence, with people looking down and shuffling their feet and coughing, you know the way they do, and the moderator tried to reassert control. “Well! Could you please tell us the two most important things about yourself.” The man replied, in his doddering but insistent way, “Yes, I am a man of God and I come in love. Those are the two most important things.”

I woke up, and burned with shame at who I was. What could I say to that? I’m a woman of the world and I come in confusion? That old guy turned the hierarchies of my childhood upside down. There I was, a university brat from Boston with a social standing meter calibrated to detect nanoparticles of prestige surrounded by people of God who came in love and couldn’t have cared less about whether I even went to college, much less which one.

That was the first time I recognized the Spirit reaching me through a dream. Since then, I’ve often gotten guidance from dreams at pivotal moments.

Here are another couple of examples. As many of you know, my sister committed suicide in 2016. I knew, as soon as I learned what happened, that I would be staying in Portland with my niece until she finished high school in the spring. Leaving my husband, my teaching job, and my life in Wisconsin to take care of a hurting teenager and my sister’s affairs was daunting. But I had a series of dreams that first week after Sonja died that gave me the guidance I needed.

In the first one, I dreamt I was in a huge old house, and while I was watching out the window, men with big sticks were running after a group of mothers who were fleeing. The men were beating and clubbing the women. The children were all in the house and had no idea what was happening. They weren’t seeing what I was seeing. I understood that I had somehow been spared – the men didn’t know about me – and that I would need to take care of the children. I knew I would need to hide during the day and come out at night to be with them in secret. I found a hiding place and began to think about what I would need to have with me so that I would be okay. I found a yoga mat and writing materials and a light of some sort. I was strangely calm and resolute. I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I had an important job to do – loving those children – and that with a meaningful task like that ahead of me and some ways to take care of myself while I was hiding, I was going to be fine.

In the second dream, I got a call from the secretary of the high school. She said I had been suggested as a chaperone for an eight-hour party for 200 special needs children the following Sunday. I was aghast and said I couldn’t do that. I didn’t have the relevant experience and besides, I went to Meeting on Sunday. She insisted that someone had spoken highly of me, and they were having trouble finding people. She said it started at noon. I said with relief, oh, I can’t do it then. I’m with my worship group until 2 and I can’t miss that. She said come at 2 then. I was exasperated but realized that as long as I could attend my worship group – I really needed to do that! – it was going to be okay. I could in fact chaperone this crazy party for six hours.

In the third dream, I was at my mother’s funeral. She too, in real life, committed suicide. In the dream, suddenly someone approached me and said, you ARE going to take care of the children during the service, right? I said no, I was not. This was my mother’s funeral and I planned to attend it. They looked very worried and said, but we were really counting on you. We really need you. I said again, no, I’m attending my mother’s funeral. They were so insistent and so distraught I finally, very reluctantly, gave in. But I looked them straight in the eye and said, here’s the deal. If I have to do this, I’m doing it my way! I’m going to decide what to do with them and what to feed them, and I am NOT going to make them eat organic peanut butter on wholewheat bread! I’m just not fighting that battle!”

This still makes me laugh. But together those three dreams told me what I needed to hear: A child needs you. You will find great meaning in nurturing her. You know how to take care of yourself as well as her. You need to worship with your F/friends and tend to your spiritual life while you do it. You have permission to do it your way.

And that all turned out to be true! That spring in Portland was a blessed time full of gifts and children, including with special needs and capital F Friends, right there in the cohousing community my sister lived in!

And if you’re thinking that in those dreams I had pretty crummy boundaries about saying no, you would be right. And right about now, I bet you anything members of the Children and Youth and Nominating Committees are nudging each other and thinking they just found the sucker of the century. My answer is no! Don’t even THINK of asking me to take on upper elementary!

But seriously, I had to meet some of my own needs and do my own grieving, for both my mother and my sister, later. I don’t regret the timing.

Now, I cannot just summon a dream out of thin air when I need one. But there are things that I can do that increase the likelihood that I will get a helpful dream, and that I will remember it if I do. I found last year that doing a daily Wheel of Awareness meditation gave me an extraordinary series of vivid dreams. I also write about my important-feeling dreams as part of my daily spiritual practice. I commit them to paper before the distractions of my day begin.

I’ll tell you one short one from my Wheel of Awareness period. I dreamt I was flying through a spectacular starry night sky, among millions of luminous, shining bubbles as well as the stars. It was incredibly beautiful. I floated, exhilarated, through it for quite a while. When I came down to earth, I bumped into a friend of my son’s. We said hi, and he looked at me funny and said, Kat, why are you wearing garbage? I looked, and son of a gun, I had a pile of garbage strapped in place on my chest with a child’s life jacket! I woke up and burst out laughing. What kept me afloat as a child was now just freighting me down with a bunch of old garbage! This led to some very specific insights about old lessons and behaviors that I needed to ditch!

Lesson 5: I have to be intentional about making space and time for God to guide me.

There is usually a lot of stuff going on in my head and I suspect it’s pretty hard for God to get a word in edgewise a lot of the time! There are several practices I have that help me open up space for guidance.

First is my daily spiritual practice. I have experimented with a bazillion different things over the last 25 years, but my most robust practice has been a simple, four-part sequence of prayer and journaling. I start with gratitude, then move to confession, then petition, and then intercession (praying for others). So often, this simple practice illuminates an issue I need to pay attention to. For example, there are days when I just choke on gratitude and my angry little soul refuses to start there. Sometimes when that happens, I just write “RANT” and underline it, and let it rip. At least it shows me pretty clearly my spiritual state! Which illuminates what I need to pray for, which opens my mind and heart to receiving guidance. I find that just being available and receptive like this – every day – is really important.

Here’s the kind of thing that can come out of this daily practice. In the weeks before and after the April election, I noticed that a lot of my gratitude was about people saying nice things about me as a county board supervisor and giving me positive feedback on my monthly articles on county affairs. Very gratifying! And then I noticed that a lot of my confessions had to do with being such an approval seeker. So, I decided, just as an experiment, to combine my gratitude for approval and my confession of my desire for it into a single category: gratifessions. I was curious to see how long this category would last and how big it was. Spiritual data, right?

Another practice I’ve found helpful is the Experiment with Light. It’s kind of the spiritual equivalent of flossing your teeth. If you don’t do it, crud builds up – accretions of thoughtless habit like plaque on your teeth. The sheer wide openness of the practice sometimes leads to startling outcomes and unexpected leadings! And our own Al Bellg hosts an Experiment with Light meditation online the second Tuesday of every month. (See https://experiment-with-light.org.uk/calendar/).

I’ve recently started exploring DailyQuaker.com for a daily reflection, query and practice. I love the range of things they provide, and it takes me to some unexpected and lovely places. Check out Dailyquaker.com!

Lesson 6: It’s really important to have companions on the journey!

I get so much from a weekly zoom Bible study I attend with Friends from Portland, a weekly spiritual nurture group our worship group has, and our weekly discussion hour after Sunday worship. I also belong to a monthly letter-writing spiritual nurture group. Wow, what a privilege to get a front-row seat to the spiritual journeys of three other women over a span of 25 years!

Sharing stories with others, hearing their struggles and journeys, being introduced to their favorite spiritual authors and podcasters, getting totally different perspectives on Bible passages… it’s incredibly rich and gives many people who are further on the path than me a chance to enlighten me! I will especially put in a plug for the Twelve Step people I encounter on a weekly basis. What a gift! If you’re looking for companions on the journey, find some Twelve-Steppers to explore with!

I’d like to end with a poem that grew out of the year after my sister’s death. I had so many deep mystical experiences of union with the divine that year, and Rilke’s poetry really spoke to me. One of my practices was to take lines from Rilke and write my own poems based on them. Here is one. The first five lines are his, and then I start my poem with his first line.

If I had grown in some generous place—
If my hours had opened in ease—
I would make you a lavish banquet.
My hands wouldn’t clutch at you like this,
So needy and tight.
(Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours I, 21, p. 83.)

If I had grown in some generous place—
If my heart had opened into gentleness and welcome—
I would never think to doubt you. 
I would trust your grace to fall like the dew 
And rise like the sun
And come in like the tide.
I would hear the expectant silence as pregnant
with you
Not as the emptiness of your absence
I would hear the space between your heartbeats
As the gathering energy ready to burst forth
And pulse through the universe
Rather than the doubt... oh! Could it be death?
I would feel you as a compass
Always pointing toward the true north
And would not restlessly seek signs and assurances.
If I had grown in some generous place
My heart would expand and fill with you
Until there was no part of me that was not you
And I would be a pulsing emanation of your spirit.

Queries for Small Groups

Suggested Queries for Day 1

Describe a turning point or an “aha moment” on your spiritual journey.
Have you ever gotten a leading that startled you, that felt deeply right, yet that felt like it came somehow from beyond or outside or very deeply inside you? What did you do?
What have you learned about leadings and testing leadings? How do you discern whether a leading is true versus just a personal urge or flash-in-the-pan idea?
Bonus query: Do you find that you are more likely to access Spirit or receive guidance in moments of joy or awe or moments of brokenness?

Suggested Queries for Day 2

Do you cultivate attentiveness to the Spirit through regular spiritual practices? Describe your experiences with any spiritual practices you have tried. If you have not tried any, what might you consider trying? Possibilities: meditation; prayer; reading sacred texts; regular self-examination through journaling/prayer; fasting; reparations, almsgiving, or tithing; regular service of some sort; a spiritual nurture group; a 12-step program; yoga.
What do you do in the silence of Meeting for Worship? Do you have practices for preparing for worship, for settling in, for meditation, for prayer, for attending to others in the room, for opening yourself to guidance, for personal examination, for cultivating gratitude or awe or humility?
Do you ever test leadings with your faith community or companions? Have you ever had a clearness committee meeting? How have others helped you get clarity on leadings?
Bonus query: Have you ever felt that you got spiritual guidance from a dream, a physical ailment, or from a source such as music, a piece of art, a stranger on the bus, or a physical practice?

Suggested Queries for Day 3

How do you seek companions for your spiritual journey? Describe a person who has influenced your spiritual journey and what you learned from/through them.
Are there parts of your spiritual life that mainly happen in solitude? Are there parts of your spiritual life that mainly happen in community or interaction with others?
Have you had spiritual friendships – relationships in which you regularly talk about your spiritual life? What gifts have you received?
Bonus query: What is your favorite thing that has ever happened in Meeting for Worship?