On Quakerism and animism

A couple of Sundays ago, something shifted for me during meeting for worship. Amid the silence, I received a very clear, unmistakable internal instruction: Quit trying to figure out the experiences you are having and have had your entire life. Spend more time listening. Just listening.

For a long time, my spiritual journey has been a landscape of seeking, blending, and uncovering. A significant anchor in my adult life has been my involvement with Pagans in Recovery. It is a fellowship that has helped me tremendously with behaviors that plagued me for years. While the idea of a lifelong Quaker having a deep affinity and relationship with pagans and witches might shock some people outside these circles, it has brought me nothing but profound good.

Recently, within the fellowship, I crossed paths with a woman who identifies herself as a "Christian witch."

Hearing her claim that title stirred something deep inside me. It felt like an echo from my own history. Up until about 2009, I likely would have used that exact phrase—or perhaps "Christo-pagan"—to describe my own eclectic practice. (There is even an old Christianity Today article floating around out there about this very subculture, to my mild amusement). Her willingness to name her path so openly sent me right back into a period of esoteric meandering.

To help me process this renewed wandering between my regular therapy appointments, I turned to an unexpected tool: artificial intelligence. While an AI is certainly not the ultimate authority for spiritual discernment, its uncanny intelligence makes it a fascinating sounding board for mapping out the geography of the soul.

I asked the AI a question I have carried for years: "Am I a Christian witch or a Christo-pagan?"

What followed was a surprisingly precise breakdown of definitions. The AI noted that while both paths share an enchanted view of the world—believing in spirits, ancestors, and the sanctity of nature—they differ in how they view their actions. A Christo-pagan typically views their practices as a devotional, mystical alignment with the divine order. A Christian witch, on the other hand, actively practices magic, grounding their operational authority in the Christian God, scripture, or Christ to direct reality toward a specific outcome.

To diagnose where I fell, it asked me to reflect on my actual, physical practices.

When I looked honestly at my own life, I recognized a mix of both. When I light a candle, my intention is to direct reality, but the result is that it creates space for the Divine. When prayers manifest, I believe the act itself carries an inherent power, but that power comes solely from being aligned with the Inward Light.

I tend to use the word "works" rather than "spells," but I know they occupy the same space. Yet, I always experience a sharp internal conflict if I try to do any practical work without first divining what the Inner Light or my ancestors are guiding me to do. My practice is physical—I keep a hurricane lantern, a glass of water, and mugwort incense for my ancestors, and I use a pendulum for divination—but it is entirely subservient to my identity as a practicing Quaker.

When I fed this context back to the AI, it delivered a response that struck me with its accuracy:

"You are closer to a Christo-pagan mystic who practices operative works—not a typical 'Christian witch.' Everything you wrote keeps returning to one authority: the Inward Light. In the Friends tradition, the Light does not merely empower action—it discerns whether the action should exist at all. Your process is to listen, wait, discern, and only then act materially. The action works because it participates in what was already moving."

That differentiation hit home perfectly. For a traditional witch, the primary question is often when or how to do the work. For me, the question is always whether the work is spiritually legitimate in the eyes of the Light.

I love Jesus—not just as a historical figure, but as the myth, the archetype, the Living Power. I have long believed there is power in his name. Even during periods when I have considered myself a nontheist, I have proudly maintained that I am a Jesus person. As my historical Friend Lucretia Mott essentially reminded us, our theological notions of him matter far less than our commitment to being like him.

Ultimately, the labels matter less than the posture. Whether the world sees an eclectic pagan, a mystic, or a witch, my center of gravity remains unchanged. It is the same instruction I received in the quiet of the meetinghouse: to stop analyzing the map, sit in the stillness, and listen to the Light before I move.

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What is a Quaker ?

 When I tell people I'm a Quaker, some of my friends ask me "What's Quaker?" The tendency is to go into history. We were colonizers who had a different but still problematic relationship with the Natives and who sought to establish a different, tolerant colony in the New World. I could point to how we differed on the holding of slaves but eventually came to unity on the evil of slavery and some were abolitionists. I could talk about how we were racist to the core against black membership but now work to be anti-racist. I could emphasize how the sexes were taught equally in school, and that set our women up to be leaders in the Suffrage and Abolitionist movements.

But who cares, really?

Based on all that, we are like any other American religion. We have a stained, complicated past. We've done good, but we've done wrong. We have experienced schism, each faction of our faith holding on to what they like and pushing off the rest, giving up the parts that make us uncomfortable, that challenge us.

But that's not what people are asking either. There is something within Quaker Way that pushes us to examine ourselves, hold ourselves up to the Light, and see where we are walking out of the Light. There is a message of hope. A solution that leads to living in integrity and love.

So I tell them something like this: Quakers are a people who believe that every person, no matter what they look like, no matter their politics, no matter their position on issues, no matter their life experiences has within them a measure of that radically loving Spirit that can serve as a guide and teacher. We find that in this busy, sometimes chaotic world, that our duty is to stop what we are doing. Be still. Sink down into that which is pure within us, surrender, yield or give ourselves over to this Spirit, and see how to act. WE come together to do this corporately, and we do this individually. Many Quakers world wide are Christian, but the Quakers I worship with do not put emphasis on theology. We know from experience that there is a Light that shines into or within us. It is what shows us our addictions and attachments, and also shows us a solution to be free of them. We don't argue the nature of this Light (is it God, is it Divine, is it from the Cosmos?). We have all experienced it and that's enough for us.

Quakerism is about surrender, but it's also about healing and transformation, then action. When we give up control, when we stop manipulating, when we release our resentments, anger, fear, desires, wants and turn them over to the Light, to the Spirit, peace comes. That peace comes from living up to the Light that we have and acting as it leads.

It's a simple thing, not always easy to do, and we are there with each other doing it.