"Have you had the experience of being carried and upheld and supported? I do not mean the sense that God is upholding you, alone. It is the sense that some people you know are lifting you, and offering you, and upholding you in your inner life. And do you carry some small group of acquaintances toward whom you feel a peculiar nearness, people who rest upon your hearts not as obligations but as fellow-travelers? Through the day you quietly hold them high before God in inward prayer, giving them to Him, vicariously offering your life and strength to become their life and strength."

*Thomas Kelly, b. 1893 (Quaker, Society of Friends)

When I am upheld by another or others, that is the upholding of Divine Presence, or Grace. I need an upholding community, one of one-hearted, prayerful persons. Simply religious or outstandingly moral persons is not enough. We do not have to agree in the matter of ideas, as much as in the matter of Life Itself. I do not seek a fellowship honoring mere conformity, but transcending conformity in a higher expression of Love. The unity that I need is not of the mind. This oneness arises into the mind in the grace of including a diversity of thought, even in disagreement. That we turn toward the Inner Light, the Christ, means in some sense mysterious but real and embodied that community is transformed into a living Communion, bodies into a living Body. This we could call the Rite of Community. This is a breathing Rite, not in books or presided over by a priest or other religious official, but in and outside pulsing flesh. And the bond of this Intimacy is Love Itself, which is to say "Christ." As words attributed to the early Christian apostle Paul, in Colossians 3.14, read, "And above all these put on love, which holds all together in complete oneness." Without this love, or Love, there is not this Communion. Love Itself creates the bond, and the bond is Love. And the Communion is Love loving Itself through this prayerful intimacy of one-hearted persons."