by Tilden Edwards

Jerry visited me in my office one day in late 1973, referred by a mutual friend. He was a young psychiatrist just moved to the Washington area from Lancaster, PA. There, in the drug treatment center where he worked, he had discovered that the only clients who really seemed to become free were those who had some kind of spiritual transformation.

That awareness, among other things, had launched him into a fresh spiritual quest, both for himself and for his work, which now was in a Maryland prison, as well as with private patients. He wanted to explore how he could join me in my own deeper spiritual quest, in the Shalem group that had recently begun.

Over the next 32 years of his life that quest found a home at Shalem: a soul home and a work home, and given his irreverent spontaneous sense of humor and prankster habits, also a fun-house home!  Some months after joining the first contemplative group, I asked Jerry if he would be one of the leaders for future groups, to which he readily agreed. As Shalem grew, he became more and more involved, until by the mid-80's he joined me full time on Shalem's program staff, along with Rose Mary Dougherty. He had already written three books by then, including one commissioned by Shalem, and his great books were yet to come.

I have learned a lot about God's sense of humor and means of stimulating growth and love through the way he put and kept Jerry and me together all those years, literally for thousands of hours altogether. We were two people who couldn't have had more different personalities and sometimes strongly different instincts about organizational and personal issues. However, when it came to our sense of the essence of contemplative awareness and the spiritual journey, our more peripheral differences collapsed and we spontaneously shared an overlapping spiritual heart. I could recognize my sense of inner spiritual truth in his words and prayer, and I think usually vice versa as well, even as we provided a mutual challenge to greater clarity and inclusiveness of vision at times. On a more personal level, we were mutual spiritual companions monthly (an hour for him, an hour for me), for 20 years. Those intimate times together regularly transcended our differences and sank us into the larger gracious Presence for one another.

I always greatly valued Jerry's evolving perspective of the spiritual journey, even if my own direction veered away a little from his in the later years. I always looked forward to his comments about drafts of articles and books I was writing and often was struck by the instinctual, effortless "orthodoxy" of his comments and writings, in the sense of their being so consonant with the writings of great contemplatives of Christian (and sometimes of other) traditions, whom he often quoted.

Eventually I began to keep a special "Jerry file," where I brought together some of my notes from his seminars, as well as letters and notes to me that were part of our mutual wonderings about the nature of the spiritual journey (most of which I think eventually entered into our published works). In looking through that file recently, I was reminded of how central love became to him in his experience of God and understanding of the journey. In one handwritten note to me, where he was speaking of the classical spiritual paths of knowledge, devotion and action, he wrote the following:

"Real formation, I began to sense, moved toward something encompassing all the ways, encompassing both self and no-self, quiet mind and active mind. And with the brain study "love" became the all important thing-not just the feeling of love or the action of love or an attitude of love, but the totality of lovingness. Nothing but love and grace transcended the neurons. Nothing but love could beat them, or bypass them, or transform them....So...I have recently come to see spiritual formation as growth in love. My reading of the Masters seemed to affirm that that's what counts. Also it was in reading the Masters that I "caught" the idea that spiritual formation is God's work, through grace, with our assent-and that God has been working all along, and that God can work through our desires, not against them."

Since that time Jerry's own experience of that mysterious divine love continued to deepen toward the most delicate sense of God's loving intimacy and vulnerability, including right through all his suffering with cancer, congestive heart failure and related illnesses. His trust in God's living presence could enable a certain inner lightness through much physical heaviness, and help to preserve his incredible humor, and sometimes lead to songs of faith and praise (some of his own composition) accompanied toward the end by an Indian drone, his beloved "shruti" box, which his family has given to Shalem.

In Quaker tradition one speaks of "weighty Friends," those who command an inner spiritual authority, experience and wisdom. Jerry was certainly a spiritual and human heavyweight, whose presence virtually always left an imprint on whoever was present, be that liberating, challenging, threatening, insightful, or tenderly loving. He was a pioneering spiritual leader of our time. He will live on mightily in the hearts of those who were touched by him in person and in his writings. For me personally, I will always be grateful for the grace that brought him into my life, into Shalem's life, and into the world's life, where there is so much need for the loving, contemplative and, yes, irreverent wisdom with which he was so gifted. Now he has entered fully into the heart of true Love, which he knew so well beckons us all day by day.