y brother, Russell, and I were jamming away one afternoon nearly 30 years ago when the improvisation took a turn. We both felt a sense of being taken over by the Spirit, of being played. In the music, we heard a sound of a tune we both knew, and, all of a sudden, we found ourselves moving into an improvisation around that song. As we were playing, we both experienced three waves of light passing through and among us. My eyes were closed, but I saw and felt a warm, powerful light passing through my body and the room. Russell said that he was looking at the linoleum-tiled, flecked floor, when one of the white flecks jumped off the floor, expanded to fill the room and passed through his body. In that moment I experienced a musical and spiritual breakthrough. I was taught the musical concept of modal improvisation and I was given tangible assurance of divine reality. Along with the waves of light, I heard various other instruments and voices of a great orchestra and chorus joining our song. Or, perhaps more likely, we were joining that song.

Music is a metaphor for my spiritual journey. In my life, music has moved from a place where I retreat, to fill my soul, to a place of prayer, where my soul overflows. For a number of years in the 1970s and early 1980s, I tried to "make it" as a professional musician. From 1972 to 1979, my brother and I were part of a rock 'n roll, art-band in the Santa Cruz/San Francisco, California, area. We lived together in a commune on a 400-acre property in the Santa Cruz Mountains. After that band broke up, we joined a group with a deeply spiritual songwriter. All the music was love songs to and about God.

As music became prayer, I found it more and more difficult to see my life's work contending with the flash and commercialism of the music industry. In 1982, that band broke up around me. A close friend in the network of West Coast Young Friends had asked me if I wanted to join him and four others on a Quaker bicycle peace pilgrimage. This was during Ronald Reagan's massive nuclear arms build-up against that "evil empire," the Soviet Union. The pilgrimage's mission was to listen to the American people about the spiritual basis for nuclear disarmament. During a meeting for worship I had a vision that I was to join the pilgrimage. That very night, after I had come to clarity, I was asked to rejoin the band. The band eventually played at the going away party for the pilgrimage, but that was my last gig as a professional musician. The bicycle pilgrimage was one of my first acts as a Quaker minister, traveling under a minute from my local and yearly meetings.

In recent years, I continue to play music. I love to accompany singing on guitar and still jam away at my violin. Now there is jamming, or improvisation, with a group and then there is doing scales. Spiritual discipline, individual prayer is like playing scales. Meeting for worship is like jamming together with Friends. I cannot control the ways in which God's grace is offered, but I can work on my receptiveness to that grace. The experience of the waves of light passing through my brother and I was grace. The preparation to receive that grace took a lot of scales.

Jonathan Vogel-Borne is Field Secretary for New England Yearly Meeting and a member of Cambridge (MA) Monthly Meeting.