The Door was Always Open

by Gary Lewis
Hudson Meeting

Quakers often describe waiting in worship to ”hear God’s still voice.” I have learned that stillness of mind is not something just for worship, but rather it is a habit that can be cultivated and experienced at any moment throughout the week. Once a state of sustained stillness is achieved, there are a myriad of ways to experience “God’s still voice.” For me, a very important channel of this universal wisdom comes through song lyrics.

When I first started attending Quaker worship in my early forties, the first message I ever spoke were the lyrics of a John Hiatt song, “Come Home To You”: 

There’s a meanness inside and it shivers my bones

That’s the thing about mercy I guess

There’s no man so wicked he cannot come home

Nor so good he passes each test

As the fire of memories burn me

The grace of your love returns me

To this most traveled of highways

Where I’d do anything just to come home to you

I was raised in a Christian home and when I gave this message, I would have said it was a message of redemption from sin, a return to Source through grace. Fast forward to my late fifties, I was reading through an issue of Spark when I came across an article by Friend Pamela Boyce Simms, introducing a new transformational community, then called Quaker Pathways Forward, Rekindling the Fire of Fox, that she was convening while at Pendle Hill on a Cadbury grant. I joined and have remained an active member of this on-line community, now called Community Supported Enlightenment (CSE).

Through participation in this community, I have come to experience the Source in a whole new way. One of the first things Pamela introduced me to was the Akashic Records which is something like a database where everything that has ever happened in the universe is recorded and which you can query to obtain spiritual guidance. I was faced with a difficult life decision and so I followed some simple instructions and “submitted a query” to the Akashic Records. The next morning I received a clear answer to that query in a song on a Spotify playlist. I chose the direction the lyrics suggested and it was the first step on a life-changing journey for me within this community. Since then, I have experienced hundreds of clear messages coming to me directly from Source through song lyrics.

As for redemption, I find the notion of “realization” or “waking up” to our True Nature to be closer to my own experience. What I once considered to be a return to God from a separation I caused by sin, has now been replaced by a sense that there never was and can never be any separation from Source. Source is simply who I am and it is who you are too. As I was coming to this realization, Spotify placed a song in one of my playlists from an unheralded singer/songwriter named Joe Pug. As if to reinforce the point, the title of the album was called Messenger, and on the album cover was a man dressed like a messenger with wings on his back and with the top part of his head open and doves flying out towards heaven:

I waited for the sun

But it was already dawn

It was already dawn

Breakin’ fast all along

…

So it seems I’ve spent a lifetime

Arrested and beholden

Standin’ on the threshold

Absolutely frozen

Waitin’ on some God above

To tell me I was chosen

Instead I spoke myself

The door was always open