[John Calvi, a Friend from Putney, Vermont, has been working with people surviving traumatic experience since 1982. A certified massage therapist, John began this work with women survivors of sexual abuse and AIDS victims. Later, he worked with inmates, tortured refugees, ritual abuse survivors, addicts, and hospice. John’s spiritual gift as a Quaker healer is the release of physical and emotional pain following trauma. The following article is a transcription of a talk that John gave at Intermountain Yearly Meeting in June 2004. For more about John and his ministry as a Quaker healer, see www.johncalvi.com.

Dear Great and Holy Spirit,

Be with me now as I do this work. Help me to be a vessel of your love that we all may receive comfort, healing, and protection.

Friends, I am honored to be with you this week. It is a blessing for me to be back at Ghost Ranch, back here with even more Quakers than I was with last time. I am also very grateful to the elders who are sitting and holding me in the Light as I speak with you today. Dennis Barrett, Bev McCauley, Pelican Lee, and Rebecca Henderson have been holding me in the Light and keeping me in prayer. And I feel very ready to speak with you.

I am not a scholar. I am not a learned, weighty Friend. I am, in short, nothing fancy. But I do lots of travel among Friends and I began to notice in my travels that there are Friends that you can sit next to in Meeting for Worship and feel them go into prayer. You can feel their centering. You can feel their deep faith and their capacity to generate light begin to change themselves, the people around them, and the room that they’re in.

A couple of years ago I began to talk with old Friends—of course, old is a dangerous word, isn’t it? [laughter]— "old" seems to be about fifteen years older than yourself, at least. After talking with several Friends older than me, I began to pose the question: how do Friends bring their spiritual life deeper in so it isn’t just skin level, it’s not just intellectual? How does it come to be that someone reflects their connection with the Divine in Meeting for Worship, their communication with the Divine, in an ongoing way, with their breath, with their walk, and with the way that they respond in everyday living situations.

I am not talking about weighty Friends, the kind that you hope might accept the job of clerk of your Meeting. I am talking about people who are power generators of the Light. I am talking about people whose spiritual life is so deep that you can feel it when they say, "Good morning." I am not talking about heroes or saints, but very plain people. It might be that their house is a mess. It might be that when you think of them you think, "Remember the apple tart that she made? My God, it was dog’s lunch, wasn’t it?" [Laughter.] I am talking about those Friends who carry and work with and live in the Light most of the time.

Now "schlepping" is a wonderful old word, which means "to drag." It means unceremonious. It means no drama, no romance; it means everyday and common. So, I’m looking to understand the Friends who have the most grace with the least effort and the least fanfare.

I once saw this very clearly. I was in a room where a young man began to weep and an old Quaker woman just scooped him up and held him and rocked him until he was done weeping. She then went back to prayer. It was a simple, beautiful act. It was especially beautiful because this happened in prison. I was teaching energy work and as I was working on this young man, he suddenly became aware of what had happened in his life and what the consequences were. He had murdered someone to impress his girlfriend. He was 20 years old and had been convicted to 25 years in prison. And as soon as he got to prison he got a letter from this girlfriend that said, "Oh, never mind." It took him a while to really understand all the implications. He was embarrassed to be weeping in front of all the other prisoners. So what he needed was a hug and a kiss and then some detachment. It took a great deal of Light to let him go after he was done weeping.

I spoke mostly to Friends who were in their eighties. One of them was a young 55. Two of them were in their 90s. One of them was 96 and talked about taking a horse and buggy to a wedding at someone’s house in Iowa where the Quaker ladies all wore hats and the men were in dark clothes. It gave me a much longer sense of perspective.

I am really talking about a rare condition. I am not talking about something each of us should be aspiring to. We all have many different gifts. But it is important to be watchful of those people who can sink down deeply into the Spirit in a way that other people can feel. It is important to be mindful of this because these people are generators of Light. Without talking about it and without noticing it, they are important to every spiritual community.

The first thing that I heard from these Friends, is that it takes a really long time to grow up. There is an idea that you become an adult in your 20s. You go out in the world, make some decisions, and make your own way. You remember the story about the young man who thought that his parents were so dumb? He left the farm and went into the city to make his own way, and he had a hard time doing it. He came home a year later and he was shocked to find out how smart his parents had become. [Laughter.]

Friends told me that if you were lucky and did your homework, you would be awake in your 60s—if you worked really hard, maybe in your late 50s. But if you were really going be awake, if you were going to live in the Spirit, you had to wait until later because it took a long time. It took a long time to get a broader view, to get more discernment. It took a long time to get out of your own way.

One lovely Quaker woman told me about the idea of being able to flip perspective within your mind. If you had a strong feeling about something, maybe about a group of people or a situation, would you then have the flexibility to think about the people on the other side of the line or the other end of the equation and understand and have mercy and compassion for their understanding of the circumstance? To do this in a regular way took a long time.

Also the idea that you could grow past that ongoing question of "why me?" If you stick around long enough and surrender to the Light, apparently the answer to that question becomes: "Why not you? You were standing here like everyone else. It’s your turn."

What a lovely simplicity!

Friends also told me that they came to a lovely place of being "tired of righteousness." I’m speaking of the righteousness of the loud, passionate thumping of the chest, which is full of ego, and has very little mercy and compassion.

Friends told me that this came largely through the luxury of time. When we are young, working jobs, taking care of children, and tearing around the world doing things, there really isn’t very much time. There isn’t time to wonder.

Other Friends said that there is a lovely place of being the patient observer—to sit back rather than do, to get the overview, to watch, to do maybe a few small important things behind the scenes. To become very important glue in ways that people generally didn’t notice.

Most of the Friends I spoke with expressed no fear of dying. Two of them said directly, "Oh, there’s lots worse things than dying." [Laughter.] I remember a lovely old Quaker lady in my Meeting in Putney, Vermont, and she had a very late birthday. I asked, "Alice, do you want to live to be a hundred?" and she replied, "I just want to stick around as long as it’s fun." [Laughter]

In helping hundreds of people who were dying in the AIDS epidemic, I found that to be the most perfect criteria in the world—just stick around while it’s fun.

Friends also expressed to me how their concepts of God would change over time. As their spiritual life deepened, they found that there was almost no presentation or representation that was human-made that fit their understanding of God. One woman said to me, "Now that I have time, I have done a lot of reading and I have read mostly spiritual books. I’ve been reading about other religions. I find that I have a greater idea and fewer words as to what God is. And if I told the other people in this retirement home what I was thinking, they would run away screaming. It’s just gotten looser and more wild and has less and less to do with words."

When my grandmother was a little girl in Italy, she confessed to a priest that she had considered calling her mother a bad name when she was angry one day. The penance that the priest gave her was to drag her tongue along the floor from one end of the church to the other. This was when she began to understand organized religion. [Laughter] Her ideas of God became much clearer and of who was actually and should be in charge.

Another large topic that came up was humility. It seems if you stick around long enough, you get to think about your place on the landscape and other people’s place on the landscape. Many Friends said that one of the markers for them about having their spiritual life grow deeper was they had less judgment of other people, less judgment of themselves, and more mercy. There was also a better capacity to set aside those parts that did not honor their best, to rearrange themselves for groups, so they could fit the place that was needed. They became more aware of the quality of surrender. Not the idea of giving up, but the idea of finding a flow, finding a divine tide and surrendering to that.

There is also the idea of being more comfortable with oneself as a fool. Maybe not intending to be a fool, but certainly we have lots of examples to work with.

In preparing to speak to you today, I thought of all the foolish things that I have done as clear and concrete examples. I ran out of paper on the third day. [Laughter.] So let me tell you about a time when I was just so foolish that it’s hard to look back at it.

I was on a kayak trip going down a river. Nighttime came and a rainstorm, so I pulled my kayak onto a little island. This is when there became a large hole in one end of the kayak, which was accomplished by my stepping into a gopher hole and a large stick going through one end of the kayak.

So I set up my tent. It was much too wet to start a fire. As I lay in my wet sleeping bag in my wet clothes, I felt all of the ticks crawl up the sleeping bag and into my beard. They were giving thanks [laughter], they were so grateful that breakfast had arrived!

Eventually I said, "I think I have to leave." So I put everything back into one end of the kayak so the other end with the hole would be above the water line. I paddled out into the night and could see nothing. I couldn’t see the island, I couldn’t see the water I was paddling in, and I thought to myself, "I can’t see the edges of the river, I can’t see schmutz. I’m just going to go out and the first light I see will be someone’s porch and I’ll paddle towards that." So I’m paddling and I’m paddling and by and by, thank God, there was a light. It was way far away. So I started paddling towards the light thinking, I’m saved! I’m paddling and paddling and after a while, I heard a chug-a-chug-a-chug-a, and I couldn’t figure out what that sound was. How strange, and the light’s getting a little higher. I’m paddling, and I hear the sound again.

I was about 20 feet from the oil tanker when I thought, "Oh my God, there’s going be a captain about a hundred feet above me looking down, and saying: "Look at that, we hit a box of Kleenex!" [Laughter.]

One of things that Friends talked about with regards to humility was how much we don’t know. Becoming comfortable with the idea that what we don’t know is much larger than what we do know. When we are pushing, when we are insisting, it might be a good idea to keep in mind all that we don’t know, which remains fairly large.

They especially mentioned that in their prayers, the deeper their spiritual life became, the longer they were here, the less specific their prayers became.

There was also a very strong and clear effort to try and balance their understanding of competency with their humility. The idea that we want to own what it is that we are good at, at the same time that we are keeping track of those things we don’t know well—we keep both of these in mind as we go along.

Another strong idea is what I have to call God time. There is a rhythm and a pattern to life, a movement and a flow, which we rarely see and understand from our own egos. There is a synchronicity of events unfolding, and it takes quiet observing to see where you fit into this plan. There is divine intention. If you make your spiritual life deeper, your capacity to listen to the timing of the Divine, to listen more deeply, will grow. Our capacity to trust how things are unfolding and how it is we should be involved in that flow—these will also become larger. Noticing when way opens and when way closes. This is very often a nonverbal sense. It takes a fair amount of stillness and a fair amount of quiet, and again that luxury of time, for wonder, for noticing, for being close, for feeling how something is changing, maybe within us and maybe around us.

One of the ways that this sense grows is that we are noticing what has happened in the recent past. What have the patterns been? What has changed that we can then look back in retrospect? Retrospect is a very important part of the study. What have we already seen that has taken place which will inform us about the next part of the pattern?

(End of Part I. Next month: Finding our gift and growing in the Light.)

Dear great and holy spirit, be with me now as I do this work. Help me be a vessel of your love that we all may receive help, comfort and protection.

It is a blessing for me to be back here in Ghost Ranch. I am grateful to the elders who are sitting and holding me in the Light. Dennis Barrett and Bev [name?] and Pelican [name?] and Rebecca Henderson have been holding me in the Light and keeping me in prayer. And I feel very ready to speak with you today.

I am not a scholar. I am not a learned, weighty Friend. I am, in short, nothing fancy. But I do lots of travel among Friends and I began to notice in my travels that there are Friends who you can sit next to in Meeting for Worship and feel them go into prayer. You can feel their centering. You can feel their deep faith and their capacity to generate light begin to change themselves and the people around them and the room that they’re in.

A couple of years ago I began to talk with old Friends—old is a dangerous word, isn’t it? [laughter]— "old" seems to be about fifteen years older than yourself, at least—anyway, after talking with several Friends older than me, I began to pose the question: how do Friends bring their life deeper in so it isn’t just skin level, it’s not just intellectual? How does it comes to be that someone reflects their connection with the Divine in Meeting for Worship, their communication with the Divine, in an ongoing way, with their breath, with their walk, and with the way that they respond in everyday living situations. I am not talking about weighty Friends, the kind that you hope might accept the job of clerk of your Meeting. I am talking about people who are power generators of the light. I am talking about people whose spiritual life is so deep that you can feel it when they say "Good morning."

I am not talking about heroes or saints, but very plain people. It might be that their house is a mess. It might be that when you think of them you think, "Remember the apple tart that she made. My God it was dog’s lunch, wasn’t it?" [Laughter.] I am talking about those Friends who carry and work with and live in the Light most of the time.

Now "schlepping" is a wonderful old word which means "to drag." It means "unceremonious." It means "no drama, no romance"; it means "everyday and common." It means "Friends who have the most grace with the least fanfare."

I once saw this most clearly. I was in a room where a young man began to weep and an old Quaker woman just scooped him up and held him and rocked him until he stopped weeping. She then went back to prayer. It was a simple, beautiful act. It was especially beautiful because this happened in prison. I was teaching energy work and as I was working on this young man, he suddenly became aware of what had happened in his life and what the consequences were. He had murdered someone to impress his girl friend. He was 20 years old and had been convicted to 25 years in prison. And as soon as he got to prison he got a letter from that girlfriend that said, "Oh, never mind." And it took him a while to really understand all the implications. He was embarrassed to be weeping in front of all the other prisoners.

So what he needed was a hug and a kiss and then some detachment. And it took a great deal of Light to let him go after he was done weeping.

I spoke mostly to Friends who were in the eighties. One was them was a young 55. Two of them was in their 90s. One of them talked about taking a horse and buggy to a wedding in someone’s house in Iowa where the Quaker ladies all wore hats and the men were in dark clothes. It gave me a long sense of perspective.

I am really talking about a rare condition. I am not talking about something we should each of us be aspiring to. We all of us have many different gifts.

But it is important to be watchful of those people who can sink down deeply into the Spirit in a way that other people can feel. It is important to be mindful of this because these people are generators of Light. Maybe without talking about it, and without noticing it, they are important to every spiritual community.

The first thing that I heard from these Friends is that it takes a really long time to grow up. There is an idea that you become an adult in your 20s. You go out in the world and you make some decisions and you make your own way. You remember the story about the young man who thought that his parents were so dumb. He left the farm and went into the city to make his own way, and he had a hard time doing it, and he came home a year later and he was shocked to find out how smart his parents had become. [Laughter.]

Friends told me that If you were lucky and did your homework, you would be awake in your 60s. If you worked really hard, maybe in your late 50s. But if you were really going be awakened, if you were going to live in the Spirit, you had to wait until later because it took a long time. It took a long time to get a broader view, to get more discernment. It took a long time to get out your own way.

One lovely Quaker woman told me about idea of being able to flip perspective within your mind. If you had a strong feeling about something, maybe about a group of people or a situation, would you then have the flexibility to think about the people on the other side of the line or the other end of the equation and understand and have mercy and compassion for their understanding of the circumstance? To do this in a regular way took a long time.

The idea that you could grow past that ongoing question of "why me?"

If you stick around long enough and surrender to the Light, apparently the answer to that question becomes:

"Why not you? You were standing here like everyone else. It’s your turn."

What a lovely simplicity!

Friends also told me that they came to a lovely place of being "tired of righteousness." I’m speaking of the righteousness of the loud, passionate thumping of chest which is full of ego, and has very little mercy and compassion.

Friends told me that this came largely through the luxury of time. When we are young and working jobs and taking care of children and tearing around the world doing things, there really isn’t very much time. There isn’t time to wonder.

Other Friends said that there is a lovely place of being the Patient Observer. To sit back rather than do. To get the overview. To watch. To do maybe a few small important things behind the scene. To become very important glue in ways that people generally didn’t notice.

Most of the Friends I spoke with expressed no fear of dying. Two of them said directly, "Oh, there’s lots worse things than dying." [Laughter.] I remember a lovely old Quaker lady in my Meeting in Putney, Vermont, and she had a very late birthday. And I said, "Alice, do you want to live to be a hundred," and she said, "I just want to stick around as long as it’s fun."[Laughter]

In helping hundreds of people who were dying in the AIDs epidemic, I found that to be the most perfect criteria in the world. Just stick around while it’s fun.

Friends also expressed to me how their concepts of God would change over time. As their spiritual life deepened, they found that there was almost no presentation or representation that was human-made that fit their understanding of God.

One woman said to me, "Now that I have time I have done a lot of reading and I have read mostly spiritual books. I’ve been reading about other religions. I find that I have a greater idea and fewer words at to what God is. And if I told other people in this retirement home what I was thinking, they would run away screaming. It’s just gotten looser and more wild and has less and less to do with words."

When my grandmother was little girl in Italy, she confessed to a priest that she had considered calling her mother a bad name when she was angry one day. And the penance that the priest gave her was to drag her tongue along the floor from one end of the church to the other. This was when she began to understand organized religion. [Laughter] Her ideas of God became much clearer and who was actually and should be in charge.

Another large topic that came up was humility. It seems if you stick around long enough, you get to think about your place on the landscape and other people’s place on the landscape. Many Friends said that one of the markers for them about having their spiritual life grow deeper was they had less judgment of other people, less judgment of themselves, and more mercy. There was also a better capacity to set aside those parts that did not honor their best, to rearrange themselves for groups, so they could fit the place that was needed. They became more aware of the quality of surrender. Not the idea of giving up, but the idea of finding a flow, finding a divine tide and surrendering to that. There is also the idea of being more comfortable with oneself as a fool. Maybe not intending to be a fool, but certainly we have lots of examples to work with.

For myself in preparing to speak to you today, I thought of all the foolish things that I have done as a clear and concrete example. I ran out of paper on the third day. [Laughter.] So let me tell you about a time when I was just so foolish that it’s hard to look back at it. I was on a kayak trip going down river and nighttime came and a rainstorm came so I pulled my kayak onto a little island. By then there was a large hole in one end of the kayak which was accomplished by my stepping into a gopher hole and a large stick going through one end.

So I set up my tent. It was much too wet to start a fire. As I lay in my wet sleepingbag in my wet clothes, I felt all of the ticks crawl up the sleepingbag into my beard and they were giving thanks [laughter], they were so grateful that breakfast had arrived!

Eventually I said to myself, "I think I have to leave." So I put everything back into one end of the kayak so the other end where the hole was would be above the water line. I paddled out into the night and you could see nothing. I couldn’t see the island, I couldn’t see the water I was paddling in, and I thought to myself, I can’t see the edges of the river, I can’t see schmutz. So I will just keep paddling until I see a light. I paddled and paddled until by and by I saw a light way far away. So I started paddling towards the light thinking, I’m saved! I’m paddling and paddling and after a while, I heard a chug-a-chug-a-chug-a, and I couldn’t figure out what that sound was. How strange, and the light’s getting a little higher. I’m paddling, and I hear the sound, and I was about 20 feet from the oil tanker when I think, "Oh my God, there’s gonna be a captain about a hundred feet above me looking down, and saying: ‘Look at that, we hit a box of Kleenex!’"[Laughter.]

One of things that Friends talked about with regards to humility was how much we don’t know. Becoming comfortable with the idea that what we don’t know is much larger than what we do know. When we are pushing, when we are insisting it might be a good idea to keep in mind all that we don’t know, which remains fairly large.

They especially mentioned that in their prayers, the deeper their spiritual life became, the longer they were here, the less specific their prayers became. There was also a very strong and clear effort to try and balance their understanding of their competency with their humility. The idea that we want to own what it is that we are good at the same time that we are keeping track of those we don’t know—we keep both of these in mind as we go along.

Another strong idea is what I have to call God time. There is a rhythm and a pattern to life, a movement and a flow, which we rarely understand from our own egos. There is a synchronicity of events unfolding and it takes a quiet observing to see where you fit into this plan. There is a divine intention. If you make your spiritual life deeper, your capacity to listen to the timing of the divine, to listen more deeply, that will grow. Our capacity to trust how things are unfolding and how it is we should be involved in that flow. These will also become larger. Noticing when way opens and when way closes. This is very often a nonverbal sense. It takes a fair amount of stillness and a fair amount of quiet, and again that luxury of time, for wonder, for noticing, for being close, for feeling how something is changing, maybe within and maybe around it.

One of the ways that this sense grows is that we are noticing what happens in the recent past. What have the patterns be? What has changed that we can then look back in retrospect, retrospect being a very important part of the study? What have already seen that has taken place that will inform us about the next part of the pattern?

My healing gift is the release of pain.
I am an imperfect student of that gift. I am still learning after 22 years of surrendering to that gift. When I first began, I had very specific concrete ideas as to what I thought it might mean. I kept receiving messages from the Divine to go across the street to the Salvation Army and buy suitcases. I was slow to respond. I wanted more information. By and by, I went and bought a suitcase. I got another message to go and get another one and another one and another one until I had six suitcases. I am sitting in my little room without enough money to fill up the car with gas saying, "We’re not going anywhere, are we? Are we going somewhere? Is this right?" My husband [Marshall Brewer] later told me that maybe it was a divine message just to get a grip. But after I had these suitcases for a while, I began to receive invitations to go around the country and teach, so I used those suitcases. I ended up with twenty suitcases that I used for traveling and teaching. The universe has a wonderful sense of humor, and we want to be open to that.

Thank you for this day and for this life. Please help me to be ready for more. p