Deepening at the Root: Tending the Source of Our Worship & Witness.

May 5, 2023 | Publications Videos

The 2023 Walton Lecture, presented by Christopher Sammond.

The problems facing us today, climate disruption, resource depletion, species extinction, white supremacy and endemic racism, to name but a few, are vast, multifaceted, and complex. We cannot live in the midst of them, do nothing, and be fully spiritually alive. And our own best ideas alone will not be adequate to address them. If we are to have a meaningful impact, and not burn ourselves out, we need to be clearly and powerfully led.

Central to our spiritual understanding as Friends is the reality that we each carry the Light, a small piece of the Divine within. How we tend this most precious dimension of ourselves directly impacts the spiritual force, or lack of it, that we bring to our worship and our witness. When we are aligned with it, this Divine Spark empowers, guides and sustains us.

In living questions on how I can better connect my spirituality and my activism- my experience of living more fully in the Divine Center and concerns I carry for the world- I kept hearing we need to go to the root which underlies them both. How do we do that? What does that look like?

Speaking out of the Silence, Christopher Sammond shares what he has learned about opening to and following this tender and vulnerable dimension of ourselves, how it empowers our worship and our witness, and questions he still carries about how to better make room for the power of the Divine to work through us.

Christopher Sammond has led workshops and retreats on deepening worship over many years at the FGC Gathering, Pendle Hill, Powell House, and Woolman Hill as well as for monthly, quarterly, and regional meetings, and online workshops and retreats. He is trained in spiritual direction and the spiritual formation of whole congregations, and served New York YM as their General Secretary.

One of Christopher’s greatest joys is to help people into a deeper experience of the Divine and he is passionate about the potential for Quaker worship to be a vehicle for encountering the Living God.

Christopher is a member of Poplar Ridge Monthly Meeting, NYYM, and lives in central New York with his wife Barbara and cats Harriet and Lil.