Have seen the expression "sea change" in the news lately, and am wondering if it applies to Friends adrift. Perhaps it helps to get our bearings by recalling those, called Latitudinarians, who rejected both the High Church and Puritan factions in England. In addition, England's Greenwich becomes Swarthmoor Hall, as the longitudinal focus for the prime meridian, or standard, of Quaker mooring.

So, can we equate our eclectic propensity in Universalist Quakerism with the ecliptic poles of celestial latitude and longitude?

We are far, by any calculation, from a fixed point in our history. The biblical chaos, represented by the sea, is still spread over much of the ground swell of Earth Quakers. The distance, east or west, to human solidarity bends, as an arc, under the strain of our humanitarian activism.

Riding the ever-changing winds of sentiment and navigating the revolutionary currents for change, the spirit of the age is haphazardly uncharted for setting a course forward.

Can our worship be steered any longer by Heaven, when clouded vision and murky Meetings prevail in our Religious Society? Can we once again find "The Way", as both life jacket and refuge in this global storm? And, can rusted Testimonies be counted on to guide and anchor our journey or, at least, to relieve the fear of shipwreck?

Like the Quaker-influenced Walt Whitman lamenting the loss of our country's truest leader, I beckon "O Captain, my captain" - yet what is this I read: "I saw also that there was an ocean of darkness and death; but an infinite ocean of light and love, which flowed over the ocean of darkness. In that also I saw the infinite love of God, and I had great openings..."