In 1973 we moved to D.C. to be a part of the Church of the Savior. I was amazed and delighted to find a lot of radical Christians who seemed to be largely free from the language of Zion. We spent 10 years there and were then “promoted!” to Langley Hill Society of Friends. There we found much of the same, and more; in the many other meetings we’ve visited since then we have found a notable absence of the sort of language used by conventional Christians.

I became aware of the fact that an unspoken division exists between christocentric and other Quakers. Under these circumstances oddly enough I felt a strong inclination to use the language of Zion– perhaps to be provocative. In the past 20 years I’ve used it freely in many meetings, and not yet been called on it.

With this little paper Ellie has given us the gospel without the holy language. For a student of the Bible it would be easy to provide close analogues of most of her statements in biblical language. So we have here two languages setting forth the same realities.

They concern the material and the spiritual world. Years ago Ellie worked as a mainframe manager for a government agency. Among her associates one attractive young man had just married an equally attractive young women when she almost immediately suffered a terrible and crippling auto accident.

Ellie often had occasion to relate to him, professionally and personally. Once she told him that we are both bodies and spirits, and that she was primarily a spirit. He replied that he was primarily a body.

Ellie’s paper can be found at Ellie’s Divine Economy. In it she frames a portal between material and spiritual discourse.