bility of falling into dead passivity,
I voluntarily discontinue the practice of waiting and turn my attention
to other concerns. I may summon to mind a vital problem that confronts
me or one of my friends, trying to see the problem by the inward light,
seeking the decision that would be best. I may bring into consciousness
someone I know to be suffering. This may be a personal acquaintance or
someone whose plight I have learned of through others, or people in
distress brought to my attention by an article in a newspaper or a
magazine. I call to him or them in my spirit, and suffer with them, and
pray God that through their suffering they will be turned to Him, that
by their very pain they may grow up to Him.

Hardly a meeting passes but what I pray that I and the members of the
meeting and people everywhere may have this experience: that our wills
be overcome by God's will, that our powers be overpowered by His light
and love and wisdom. And sometimes, though again rarely, I find it
possible to hold my attention, or, rather, to have my heart held,
without wavering, upon the one supreme reality, the sheer fact of God.
These are the moments that I feel to be true worship. These are the
times when the effort to have faith is superseded by an effortless
assurance born of actual experience. God's reality is felt in every
fibre of the soul and brings convincement even to the body-mind.

I would not give the impression that what I have described takes place
in just this way every time, or that it happens without disruptions,
lapses, roamings of the mind, day-dreams. Frequently I must recall
myself, again still the mind and turn it Godwards, again practice
waiting. All too often I awake to find, no, not that I have been
actually sleeping, but that I might as well have been, so far have I
strayed from the path that leads to God and brotherhood. And I must
confess, too, that during some meetings I have been buried under inertia
and deadness and unable to overcome them. Having meant nothing to
myself, it is not likely that my presence meant anything to the others.
My body was but an object, unliving, filling space on a bench. It would
have been better for others had I stayed away. A dead body gives off no
life; it but absorbs life from others, reducing the life-level of the
meeting.

As I am one of those who are sometimes moved to speak in meetings, I may
indicate how this happens in my case. First let me say what I do not do.