The crucial missing ingredient for linking aspiration and vision with reality, for linking profession and possession, is a method for moving from where we are to where we hope to be. We need a practice to follow, but one that allows us to recognize that in this work, it is God who gives the increase, cultivating and guiding, judging and enabling, step by step along the way. “It is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves” (Ps. 100:3).

When early Friends felt themselves to be in communion and harmony with the Holy Spirit, they said that they were “in the Life.” To feel the Life in our own tradition, our roots must be fixed in the experience of being worked upon by the living God. Friends from the beginning have spoken of this process as living in the Cross. What a loaded phrase!

I have been trying to come to terms with the meaning of the Cross for a long time. By “come to terms,” I mean to approach, in some perceptible way, what it might possibly feel like actually to dwell in the Cross and to feel where it brings me to joy and to the freedom and abundance of the Gospel, as promised and indeed reported by so many witnesses among Friends.

I have found it useful sometimes to regard this “dwelling” as a method, a “Quaker technology” (to borrow a concept from twentieth century Friend William Taber). This approach can help us understand the uniqueness of Quaker spirituality.

–Brian Drayton in Pendle Hill Pamphlet 391: Getting Rooted: Living in the Cross, A Path to Joy and Liberation