Conspiring for Goodness with Rachel Doll O’Mahoney

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Discussion Questions

1. The sermon redefines “conspiracy” as “to breathe together”. How does this new definition change your relationship with the word? Can you recall a time in your life when you were part of a “conspiracy for goodness”?
2. When faced with a confusing parable, Rachel says “parables are all about playing with the text” and that we should “go snooping around for goodness and love” within them. How do you approach spiritual texts or ideas that you find difficult or morally ambiguous?
3. Near the end of her message, Rachel asks, “What are we conspiring for?”. After hearing this episode, what is one small, practical “conspiracy for goodness” you might be inspired to start?

Rachel Doll O’Mahoney  

In our worship as Quakers together, we contemplate. That is, we sit here with the holiness in the room. We sit with the presence of God, of the Divine. And in our worship, as Quakers, we also conspire. That is, we breathe together with God and with one another.

Zack Jackson 
Hey friends. Zack Jackson here. Every few episodes, we like to take you inside a Quaker meeting for worship to hear a vocal ministry that was given and introduce you to the meeting where it was given.  

Today, we’re heading to Indianapolis, Indiana, to visit with Rachel Doll O’Mahoney, who is pastoring at Valley Mills Friends Meeting. This is a meeting with deep roots. Their meetinghouse was built back in 1856, at a time when it was a simple building in the middle of rural farmland. Today, that world is gone. The farms have been replaced by an airport, warehouses, and the sounds of a bustling city. And yet, while the world around them has changed dramatically, the deeply essential, simple call to community within the meeting has remained the same.

Valley Mills is a semi-programmed meeting, which means their worship is a blend of two traditions. About two-thirds of the service has programmed elements, like hymns, a scripture reading, and a prepared message. But it always concludes with a period of unprogrammed, open, waiting worship.

Rachel and I connected the day after she gave her message while it was still fresh on her mind. 

Zack Jackson
Good morning Rachel! Thanks again for taking the time to talk, and for sharing your message with us. I’d love to learn a little more about what makes Valley Mills Meeting special. What would you say is the sort of core conviction that drives the meeting?

Rachel Doll O’Mahoney  

The core conviction at Valley Mills is care for each other. Step up and care for each other, and that the person who gets to determine what that care looks like is the recipient of that care. So that is a real guiding force for them. I’ve never I’m gonna be honest, I spent a lot of time in my 20s and 30s looking for a faith community, and I didn’t really believe, right before Valley Mills, I said, I don’t think churches are communities. I think that’s a false narrative. I don’t think that’s true anymore. I don’t believe it. I’ve never we have joined so many faith communities and tried to be parts of small groups and gone to so many dinners, and none of that has led to any friendships, and Valley Mills has made me eat my words, and not because Valley Mills fulfills every single social need I have, but because I think they really care.

Zack Jackson: So for a total stranger, what is that experience like? What should someone expect if they just walk in off the street?

Rachel Doll O’Mahoney: You know, you can just slide right in and sit down and everyone will ignore you if you want, or you can introduce yourself and say “what’s going on”, and somebody will explain to you how Quaker worship works. And I think with newcomers, it’s a tricky dance to figure out who wants what. I’ll often just say, “Would you like someone to explain this to you, or do you just want to slide in and slide out?” And this is where I think Valley Mills gifts are. The Friends of Valley Mills are so good at coming up to any guest and asking, what brought you here, tell me about yourself, and really getting to know that person very quickly. I’ve never been at a church or any other friends meeting, or any honestly, faith community of any kind, where people were so genuinely, just like interested in who was who was there, and somehow they do it without being intrusive. And they are just really, really exceptional at welcome.

Zack Jackson: So we have this picture of a meeting that’s a blend of programming and silence. But after your four years there, what have you learned about the people that make up the meeting, and what sort of role do you have in pastoring them?

Rachel Doll O’Mahoney: There is so much wisdom in that room, and it’s wisdom born of rich and beautiful lives. It’s wisdom born of being Quakers since they were babies and wisdom, born of people who made choices to become Quaker after, you know, a life traversed in its own, varied religious path. I feel like one of my roles is to just say out loud the amazing things I witness in them. You guys are exceptional at holding differences which they are exceptional at the holding our various, various political differences to remind them, like you’re really good at this, like you care for each other and show up, and that’s what actually matters.

Zack Jackson  

After the break, we’ll take you to Valley Mills Friends Meeting where Rachel helps us to wrestle with one of Jesus’ more confusing parables, and shows us how to truly conspire for goodness. Then afterwards, Rachel reveals her raw, honest reaction to her own message, and the profound lesson she learned in the silence that followed. Stay tuned

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Zack Jackson 
Imagine a school where young children learn to ask big questions, where Meeting for Worship is part of each week, and where curiosity is celebrated every day. That place is Westtown School in West Chester, Pennsylvania.

In Westtown’s Lower School, serving Pre-K through 5th grade, learning doesn’t just happen at a desk. Students explore forests, meadows, and streams on the 600-acre campus. They plant and harvest in the organic garden, conduct science experiments outdoors, and study ecosystems at the 14-acre lake. Teachers help them connect what they discover in nature to what they study in the classroom—turning curiosity into knowledge.

As students move into Middle School, that curiosity deepens. They take on more challenging projects, from ecological field research to robotics and engineering. They also grow as leaders—serving as Student Clerks, participating in the Work Program, and helping guide the life of their community. 

This fall, you’re invited to see these programs in action as they are hosting events for the Middle School on October 30th and Lower School on November 5th.

Discover how Westtown helps children grow into curious learners, thoughtful friends, and compassionate leaders. Learn more at westtown.edu. That’s w-e-s-t-t-o-w-n-dot-e-d-u.

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Rachel Doll O’Mahoney  

Last Thanksgiving, I had a little cold. It was a mild cold, but it went to my lungs, and my lungs got all irritated, and my asthma got really bad. I was using my inhaler every couple of hours, and I even, you know, drug our nebulizer machine out from under the sink and found the medicine, but it wasn’t enough. There I was at 2am on Thanksgiving morning, trying desperately to take a deep breath. I was kind of freaking out, and once you freak out, your breathing gets worse. I woke up Sean, who happened to also be sick with pneumonia. It was great. It was great holiday. I gotta, I gotta go to the ER, I said, I can’t, I can’t catch my breath. Jon stayed home, and off I went to sit under the aggressive bright lights of an ER still unable to breathe, I required three breathing treatments to get things under control, and they gave me a couple of new inhalers and a steroid, and I was home in bed trying to sleep again by 7am. 

It’s wild how much we take for granted a deep breath, the freedom to move around and be able to catch our breath again, the capacity to fill our lungs. I will always have deep empathy for folks with lung issues, so this seems like a great time for all of us to just take a deep breath. 

How many of us have sat in the dark, unable to breathe? I mean this metaphorically as well as literally, sat in anxiety, sat with a pile of bills, sat with a shattered sat with a shattered relationship, sat as a caregiver next to vulnerable ones. How many of us have sat under the bright lights of shame or exposure and been unable to breathe? Probably all of us, a time or two for various things, and it’s awful. It’s awful. 

Last week, I offered a message about contemplation. Today, I want us to consider conspiracy. What wait to conspire at its Latin root means to breathe together. Con is the Latin for with inspire means to breathe. Think respirate. I don’t have to tell you that the word conspiracy is all over the place Tiktok and Facebook and the media and all the politics. I’m not going to talk about conspiracies, but I think that so many of us are latching on to some conspiracies, and myself included, because we are looking for a way to breathe, to breathe in the world that seems so complicated and hard, where the weight of the world in our lives sits on our chest. I want to be able to take a deep breath and know that things will be all right, or know that I haven’t figured out I get it. If we can’t rest in the goodness of the world, can I rest in a sense of knowledge or control? When I need a deep breath, I don’t care if the air is toxic, I just want to breathe. 

An APA review of 107 studies with over 150,000 people studied indicate that people are motivated to believe in conspiracy theories by a need to understand and feel safe in their environment and a need to feel like the community they identify with, community they identify with, is superior to others. Conspiracies give us a sense of safety and control, a sense of identity. I’m good. He’d be even better. I got this. Conspiracies let us breathe together with people who think like us, friends. I wonder if it isn’t time for us to conspire to breathe together, to belong together, to conspire for goodness, to do what we can to make sure nobody’s sitting in the dark or harsh light of life unable to breathe. So let’s breathe for a moment together if you’re able breathe a deep breath in and out and in and and out. Look at us already conspiring. 

Let me tell you a personal conspiracy story and talk about the Scripture a bit, and then we’ll see what God has to say to us. But I want to tell you, tell you about a conspiracy. I was a part of my senior year of high school. There was a person, let’s call her Fidelma, who had been a bully for four years now. She wasn’t really bullying me because I had a wicked sense of humor, mostly underclassmen. She was mean and crude and rude and always just the worst. She was smart mouthed and cruel. Cool and laughed at the nastiest things. She was awful to underclassmen and seemed to take great pleasure and in the power that she wrought with her biting words and throwing her shoulders into the small freshman boys in the hallway. 

At some youth group event through the Methodist church, because the 90s I went to with my friends, sometimes a group of seniors, including me, decided just to be unabashedly loving and kind toward her. We decided to invite her to things, to take an interest in her, to as a group, pursue knowing her. It seemed kind of silly and maybe risky, but it was also the kind of thing that a senior can do, that a freshman can’t. So we did. We conspired together in the present day sense of the word, and befriended Fidelma Friends, to explain how much that changed her is inadequate. Over the course of a couple months, this person became as funny and unpredictable as before, but the cruel edge wore off. She let her kindness show and revealed actually underneath there a really easy going nature. She became generous, giving rides and bringing snacks, which is basically giving away gold in the currency of high school. Honestly, Fidelma was just fun. 

She had a much more complicated family life than my 18 year old self, of course, had imagined. And then her friends got swept into the conspiracy as well. They became kind and fun and funny, which they probably always were. We just didn’t see it. And honestly, it changed my whole sense of community that year. We all got along. Now there were only 96 kids in my high school class, but I was changed too. I had gym class with Fidelma and her friends, and I really got to know them, and I enjoyed them genuinely. I thought they were great. I realized how much I had written Fidelma off. Realized how much I hadn’t taken an interest in her, how much I had failed to see who she really was after a while, it wasn’t a conspiracy. It was an easy but casual friendship. We were breathing together, laughing and telling silly stories and playing badminton and pickleball in gym class, breathing together. It was a kind of conspiracy that brought new life into the world.

Today’s Bible reading is also about a kind of conspiracy. The manager conspired against the rich man. Now if you find this gospel confusing, you are among good company. Theologians from Luther to Augustine have scoffed at this and even argued if it should even be in the Bible. Surely the Lord isn’t telling us it’s okay to steal. The Gospel itself seems uncomfortable with the text in the verses, following which I didn’t include. Luke seems to try to explain what’s happening, but he doesn’t do it very well. 

So let’s review. There’s a rich man, rich enough that somebody else manages his finances and his property. Maybe he, you know, threw a lot of money at Goldman Sachs or WAMU back in the day, then the manager is caught squandering the rich guy’s property. The manager knows he’s caught and he’s getting fired. Oh, he feels sorry for himself, too, his plantar fasciitis, so he has that so he can’t hold stop signs at construction zones, and he will just die if he has to beg. But as he packs up the photos on his desk, an idea comes to him. I know, I know I’ll make friends, and with all the people who owe my boss money, he’s excited, yeah, yeah, that’s it. I’ll make friends with them, and they’ll help me out. If I help them out, he grabs the ledger books, make some calls, come into the office right now, the debtors show up. How much do you owe? 120,000 great. Why don’t you pay 60 deal done? How much do you owe? 100,000 Okay, great. How about you pay 80 deal? Great. Love it. Story makes sense so far, right? We can track that. I get it. We’re waiting for the lesson. And then the rich guy comes back, and what does he do? He praises the manager for acting shrewdly. What? What who saw that coming? Did you is this story saying that stealing and lying are okay? Is Jesus saying, screw the big guy? Are we? Happy the rich guy is getting a bad deal. But even if that is the case with the rich guy, why is the rich guy so happy about this? Is he the fool? What is going on? 

Well, 2000 years of tradition cannot settle what this parable means. I think it’s a conspiracy. But secretly, I love that we can’t settle on what this means, because parables are all about playing with the text. If we knew exactly what any parable means, then it’s probably a bad parable. We should interpret parables from a number of perspectives, and this particular parable asks us to sit with it and keep sitting with it and come back again and again and listen for wisdom. Go looking for it. Hunt around where’s the truth, like a conspiracy theorist. Go looking for clues. Look deeper, play with it, analyze it, slow it down, and snoop around. But unlike conspiracy theorists, we aren’t looking for a dark underbelly in the story. We’re looking for God’s revelation. 

Let me look at the story, and I want to posit that maybe that’s what we should be doing in the world with our neighbors, with current events, looking for the holy and the unfolding. Let’s go snooping around for goodness and love. Let’s sneak around and pursue God in our midst, breathing in, breathing together, the divine presence in the world, where we can, bearing God’s presence to my gut tells me this parable is about how God shows up in friendship. The rich man finds that his manager has conspired for friendship. The manager is making friends and conspiring to save his tush. But this isn’t a trick. The bills have really been paid or altered, and the relationships have really been built. Does the rich man delight in what the manager has done? Because, frankly, he looks pretty good too. Has the manager built some friendships for him too. 

In the life and ministry of Jesus, he conspires all the time for unusual friendships. One of the wildest, it’s one of the wildest things Jesus does, is that he forms relationships with people of all different social classes. Rich women and lepers are hanging out fishermen and Pharisees Roman centurions and prostitutes, the morally problematic and the morally upstanding. That’s radical. Let’s conspire for friendship and connection. Jesus says in his ministry, Look folks, the parable tells us, even the Rotten Scoundrels and the cheaters can see how important friendships are. And friendship was the highest form of love in the Greco Roman world, in friendship, people didn’t just watch football and come to birthday parties. It was friendship in that world. It was our friends that took care of us when we were sick or dying. It was our friends that saved us when we were homeless or hungry. Friendship was the social safety net. 

What if we did this? What if we conspire for friendship and connection? Conspire to build connections that are beyond sensible. What if we look for the Fidelmas and overwhelm them with love and care? What if we conspire to free people to breathe better under the weight of life’s challenges? What are we conspiring for friends? What are we breathing together for? Could we conspire for some sort of goodness in the world to really decide, really, that we want to conspire to support the kids at Valley Mills elementary school, or conspire to make our little piece of property a place for native plants and birds or conspire to make life easier for parents or caregivers or young adults, conspire to house some homeless folks downstairs. 

I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what we should do, friends. I don’t know honestly, if we could, are we willing to breathe together? Possibly, maybe there’s something you need us to conspire for in your life, in our worship as Quakers together, we contemplate that is, we sit here with the holiness in the room. We sit with the presence of God, of the Divine, and our worship. As Quakers, we also conspire. That is, we breathe together with God and with one another. When newborn babies share a room with someone else, the risk of SIDS declines. Apparently, the sounds of another person breathing nearby keeps their brains from falling into a dangerous kind of sleep. Babies are listening and syncing up their breath even when they’re asleep. Let that perhaps be a prayer for our worship time that we too may sync up our breathing together with one another and stay awake to God moving among us.

Zack Jackson  

I love that. Thank you. So I want to, I want to transition a little bit. In a few minutes, we’re going to listen to the vocal ministry that you gave at Valley Mills. But I’m wondering if you can tell us a little bit about what it feels like. What does it feel like in your body to give this sort of message?

Rachel Doll O’Mahoney  

I I finished, I sat down and my first feeling in my body, which is not that common, but not as uncommon as I liked, I just wanted to lay down and hide under the bench. I’m going to be very honest, which is my like, dark self, my unhealthy voice, it’s like, you did a bad job, and that was there yesterday, not because I rationally, I’m like, Oh, that was fine, but it just because I’m a human being, and I have stuff like everybody, but it’s inappropriate to crawl underneath the facing bench and curl up so I didn’t do that. I’ve yet to do that. And I mean, gosh, what a gift then to say, okay, like, let me honor that feeling in myself, and also, look for the other stuff in me, and to sit with God right now, and so to have then 10 minutes to be with the person next to me on facing bench, breathing together, conspiring together, and I could kind of release that and let that go and remind myself like I’m not in charge of where any of this lands in anyone I’m not I am not in charge of this community. I am pastoring. That’s a verb. I am not the pastor. I am pastoring and our worship, our waiting worship, was very quiet yesterday, that time to just, I don’t Know, be kind to myself, was a real gift.

Again, I don’t decide how it lands at people like, sometimes the messages that I think, oh, gosh, that was a train wreck and a half. Like, what I wouldn’t give to rewrite that sucker. And then somebody comes up and says, Can I talk to you about that? That was I really need to, like, that was really moving, and that landed in me, and you’re like, really, how does that possibly, like, you have to hold yourself back, because that is part of my being, like, it’s not mine. Like, it’s not it’s, it’s, I’m part of a dialog between this community and the presence of God and myself, it’s there’s a dialog here. So I don’t get to decide what it is actually I’m part of that, but not ultimately.

Zack Jackson  

What an important lesson in humility to know that you’re not necessarily the one bringing the Word of God to someone, but you’re setting the table for the Word of God to come to someone

Rachel Doll O’Mahoney  

Thank you for articulating that. I think that that is exactly what I feel like my role is, and what I really find very it’s just so moving about pastoring a Quaker Meeting is like, it’s not my job to tell you what God is up to it is not my job to tell you what to think or believe or do it. I really feel like my role is to invite you to consider some things in light of the Scripture, in light of the world, in light of what it is to be a human being. And then you and we bring that to God,

Zack Jackson  

Thank you for listening, and thank you to Rachel Doll O’Mahoney and everyone at Valley Mills Friends Meeting for allowing us to join you today. Check out our website at Quakerpodcast.com for discussion questions, a transcript of today’s episode and links to more resources. Make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss a thing this season. This episode was hosted, produced and edited by me, Zack Jackson. Jon Watts, wrote and produced the music. Thee Quaker Podcast is a part of Thee Quaker project. We are a nonprofit Quaker media organization dedicated to giving Quakerism a platform in the 21st Century. If you like what we’re up to, please consider becoming a monthly supporter. You can go to Quakerpodcast.com and click support in the top right window. It takes less than five minutes, and we really appreciate it. And now our daily Quaker message as read by Damon Williams.

Damon Williams

N. Jean Toomer, 1947. When compared with bodily action, what could seem more inactive than waiting upon God? The modern world asks, Where will that get you? Young people say we want action, yet, as we have seen, it was precisely through this and other apparently inactive means that the early friends came into a power of whole action that surpasses anything that we experience today.

Zack Jackson  

To get Quaker wisdom in your inbox every day, go to dailyquaker.com that’s dailyquaker.com.