This year I entered into Lent feeling discouraged, hopeless, and depressed. Problems in my life consume me. My prayers during Lent seem to center in repentance and my daily struggle with sin and selfishness and it has led me to a very dark place these days. This is what Lent is about, but I find myself too tender, too vulnerable and too self-focused.

I thought I needed a distraction from all this self focus. God obviously thought I needed clarity.

Several weeks ago, one of the members of our meeting gave to the archives of the church an original 1882 portrait of a distant relative, James Moorman. Moorman was a single, childless, Quaker banker in Winchester and a faithful member of our meeting. He built an Orphans Home for the county, he built the second highest War Memorial in Indiana in honor of those who fought to free slaves in the Civil War, and he donated the land on which our meetinghouse sits to build a Quaker meetinghouse in this city.

His portrait is a great addition to the archives of the meeting and I decided I needed to write up the story of “Uncle Jimmy’s” life. What a great distraction! I’ve been lost in trying to find out as much as I can about his family and his life. While I thought I remembered that he donated the land the meetinghouse sits on, I could not find the place where it was actually written. So I dug out all my research from the historical marker several years ago and began to search for proof.

I finally found the reference in a small pamphlet written in 1935 of a history of Winchester Quarterly Meeting. I ended up scanning through the entire pamphlet hoping to find more references to James Moorman. At the very end I found words that changed my Lenten experience.

“It is true that since the war, there have been fewer meetings set up. Detroit was the last in 1919. The World War and its repercussions are still with us. There has been no great revival tide that has swept the country as in the beginning the Quarterly Meeting. However, there has been a revival – a revival of Paganism, sweeping over everything that the Christians have held sacred, challenging every Christian human relationship of life, of home, church, school, state, nation, race, and business. Souls are unsettled and wander here and there seeking salvation at this altar and then at another; and the church suffers a deluge of denunciation within and without. Yet in this flux of twisting currents of thought and attitude, the nineteen local meetings are still standing. It is true there have been fewer members present at the hour of worship; perhaps fewer responsible in the activities of the church. Yet the “spiritual discovery” of George Fox has in a measure been verified in the experiences of these nineteen meetings. George Fox went far and near seeking spiritual consolation: but he found the Christ nigh at hand, able to speak to his condition.

Who knows whether the sacrifices of these Friends in the past were greater than those of the present? The times have brought new problems. Then, as now, it is the lives of all, lived out to their deepest convictions, as these have been fitted into the pattern of the whole, that count most. The Life poured out on the Middle Cross still lives! The convictions of Friends are living. They are not dead, or worn out. Every testimony, query, principle and practice, every point of the discipline, points to the Middle Cross – the eternal symbol of the Way of life - with its long beam upward in love and faith and obedience to the Father of all mankind nigh at hand, and its shorter beams outward in good will to the neighbor on the left and to the neighbor on the right, nigh at hand. For this is the Quaker religion.”

A Short History of the Winchester Quarterly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends from 1874-1935

These two simple paragraphs changed my Lenten experience. First of all, there is nothing new under the sun and I needed to be reminded that being overwhelmed with the problems of the world, the church, and my life are nothing new in this world. But something in the image of the “Life poured out on the middle cross” captivated me in a new way this season and pushed me to a new place during Lent. I believe in the depth of my soul the “Life poured out on the Middle Cross still lives” and it pushes me upward in love and faith and obedience and outward in good will to my neighbor on my left and on my right. That is my deepest conviction. That is my religion.

This is a better place to be.