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What do we do when life interrupts us without warning? Midway through this conversation, recorded at the Wild Goose Festival in North Carolina, a tornado warning forced host Ellen Corcella and her guest, Will Rogers, to stop and move to safety. That unexpected pause became a living parable: our lives can be upended at any moment, and resilience often begins with knowing where to turn for shelter.
In this episode, Will shares the story of his spiritual transformation and his journey into the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). He reflects on the solace of silence, how making room for stillness allows the Spirit to do its quiet work, and the grounding practices he returns to in times of disquiet and disturbance. As a nurse who pays close attention to networks of care, Will also speaks to how community sustains us when the storms come.
Part of the Thriving in the Wilderness series, this conversation invites listeners to consider what grounds them when disruption arrives and how silence, faith, and community can carry us to safety.
About Our Guest: Will Rogers
Will Rogers is a nurse and a Quaker whose work centers on networks of care. At the Wild Goose Festival, he facilitated the conversation “Divine Interruption: Early Quakers interrupted church services to disagree with priests and gather new Friends. Is it time to revive this practice?”
Guided by his Quaker faith, Will advocates for the abolition of prison and war through evidence-based prevention, de-escalation, and transformative justice practices. He lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, on lands traditionally stewarded by the Eno, Shakori, and other Native peoples.
Connect with Will Rogers:
Thriving in the Wilderness Series Episodes
• Episode #13: Resilience: Your Path Through the Wilderness
• Episode #14: Dr. Natalie Hamrick: How Faith Transforms Our Response to Stress and Illness
• Episode #17: Out of the Wilderness: Sophie Cunningham, Kelsey Mitchell and the Return of the Indiana Fever (Revisited)
Listen to the Faith & Resilience Podcast
Find the Faith & Resilience Podcast on your favorite podcast platform, including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Amazon Music.
About Ellen Corcella
Ellen Corcella is an ordained minister with the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), author of Walk with Me: A Journey through the Landscape of Trauma, and host of the Faith & Resilience Podcast, which explores paths toward healing and hope while examining the sacred values that anchor us through life’s challenges.
Connect with Ellen:
• Website: www.ellencorcella.com
• Newsletter: Sign up at www.ellencorcella.com
• Email: Chaplain_Ellen@ellencorcella.com
• LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/ellencorcella
• Trauma Informed Resources: www.ellencorcella.com/help-ptsd-grief-trauma-suicide
Ellen’s Book: Walk with Me: A Journey through the Landscape of Trauma
• BookBaby: store.bookbaby.com/book/walk-with-me2
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Produced by: Loren Richmond, Jr. Resonate Media Production
Copyright: © 2026 Faith & Resilience Podcast
Until next time, may you be resilient in the struggle, and faithful in the serving.
#FaithAndResilience #Quakers #QuakerFaith #SpiritualTransformation #WildGooseFestival #Silence #TransformativeJustice #Resilience #EllenCorcella
Creators and Guests
Host
Ellen Corcella
Ellen writes and speaks about the intricate relationships between faith, spirit, trauma, and resilience.
What is Faith and Resilience with Ellen Corcella?
Ellen writes and speaks about the intricate relationships between faith, spirit, trauma, and resilience. Aiming to unearth pathways for deeper faith integration and heightened resilience in times of adversity, she urges us to embody love, mercy, courage, hospitality.
Ellen (00:00)
Hello and welcome to the Faith in Resilience podcast. There's so many times in this podcast and in our lives we've felt lost in the wilderness. We've discussed it, and we've talked about the ways that we can rebuild our resilience. And one of those is finding community. And community doesn't mean necessarily some long term institutionalized place where it that we belong to.
Community may form in an instant or may be repeated at different times during the year. But one community that I'm glad that I have joined is the Wild Goose Community. It's a community that encourages spirit through faith and lectures and music and yoga and all sorts of things. So I have a special episode for you here.
it is an interview I did with Will Rogers. He is a young man who I joined in conversation that he was leading about the Quakers and their emergence from a eighteenth century practice of divine interruption. But what really struck me was his own sort of peacefulness and groundedness. And so I wanted to talk to him later.
And have him tell us about what led him to the Quakers. And so you're about to hear about his own transformation into a community that felt spiritually right for him, better alignment with him, and is a place where he anchors himself when he is facing the complexity of his life. So as you know, the Faith and Resilience podcast does exactly that.
We try to illuminate paths towards healing and hope by examining the sacred values that anchor us to who we are and who we can be despite the turbulence, trauma, and anxiety of our contemporary world. So, if you are interested, and I think you will be, you will find out that the Wild Goose Festival is not just stories of transformation, but it can be a little bit wild. As this interview was interrupted.
in this open air place by warnings that there might be a tornado about to develop and come through our area. So if you hear the brief or and quick interruption, that's just part of the wildness of life. So here we are with Will Rogers.
Ellen (02:42)
Hello everybody. This is Ellen Corchella and I am live here at the Wild Goose Festival. If you've listened to my podcast, you know I was here last year, and it's been just as great. And I continue to meet wonderful people here, and some of those people I'd like to share with you, my listeners, about their spirit, their lives, their transformation. And we here have here today Will Rogers. He lives in Greensboro, North Carolina.
But he's lived in Texas, he's lived in California. And I met him at a small conversation table where we were really talking about divine intervention and Quakerism. And I was really impressed by his embodiment, I think, of the peaceful nature that we know that the Quakers and and those Mennonites really exhibit and want for the world. So I'm gonna ask Will.
Would you introduce yourself a little bit to the listeners? Yeah. So I I gr grew up in Texas in an evangelical community where the the question in Tyler is always, you know, where do you go to church? You know, we went to Bethel Bible Church. It's a church that they wouldn't describe it this way, but
But the core fundamental belief is that the Bible is holy, that the Bible is perfect, that like that is the unquestionable authority that that everybody goes by. And there's also these side beliefs, one of which was that we had the Holy Spirit in a way that that non believers did not. And that was a real thing that made made us feel special, made me feel special, that we had something to offer the world.
I'm just sort of getting into my story now. Is that okay? Is that good? Yeah. no, please, Tyler. That's what I w that's why I c I tapped you and I I don't like to interrupt too much because I think your story's really worth having. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, sure. yeah, this will be better. Yeah, and Tyler is the name of my hometown. you're good. We'll so
I switched to public school at age fifteen, thinking that I was going to be bringing the light of Christ to the non-believing world. And even within Tyler, Texas, they all go to church for the most part. We thought that our church was better though. We thought that like even, you know, even like the Episcopalians and the Methodists were like suspect, right, that maybe they're going to hell and that they need what we have, you know, the light of Jesus. And
Over time, you know, conversation after conversation came to learn that the thing that I had, I I couldn't in good conscience tell myself that it was fundamentally different than the thing that somebody else had. You know. Even I one time had the opportunity to sit next to a Mormon man who was on his way home from his two-year mission, and we had this long plane ride together, and he was
so ready to tell me everything about, you know, his belief system and I I walked away from that encounter believing that he and I prayed to the same God, you know.
So I mean that sort of broke me at my core because I was like all of these things I've been hearing and learning were I couldn't trust it anymore. And also this in the background, we've got like the invasion of Iraq happening, and George W. Bush was this Christian president, also from Texas, you know, and I'm like, what I can't believe any of this. It didn't make sense to me anymore. I I entered into
what I consider a spiritual desert at that point and was really lost, pretty lost for three years, never really believing that there wasn't a God, because I had experienced the divine directly in ways that I couldn't deny, and and believed in the power of prayer, but but just very very confused and without a a community grounding.
until I found Quakers. I found Quakers in 2006. So at that point I was twenty-one years old. and it felt like I was joining the people who were practicing the religion that I had been trying to practice by myself, you know.
Yeah, and so that's yeah. So that's how you get to Quakerism. And I think that and I've come to believe 'cause I've been a Catholic and then I I was ordained as a minister in the Christian Church, disciples of Christ. And I've really begun to believe that to be f totally I didn't even talk to you about this before, but to be totally spiritually okay, you kinda have to go to different churches in a way. Because sometimes one church is not gonna fill all the elements, but that's
sounds really like out there. But I think that's why the Wild Goose works is because you can encounter people with different spiritualities, but somehow it you feel theirs. So would you give us a little background on Quakerism? You gave a little bit when I met you the first time, and then how the practice of Quakerism has helped you sort of ground yourself, we call it on this podcast sacred values, but
what steadies yourself by being a Quaker? What allows you to be oriented better to the world and to yourself?
Quakerism got kicked off some like 370 years ago in England, when a small group of people were really compelled by this idea that there is God in everyone, that the clergy did not have a monopoly on the divine connection, divine communication. And so
The earliest Quakers would show up to services and upon hearing the minister say something that was objectionable and feeling the spirit moving them to speak, they would stand up in the middle of the service and interrupt it and and you know create this whole other dynamic of a dialogue that was totally foreign to most people in that space. And
Of course it was unwelcome and they got kicked out and many of them were imprisoned and you know, barred from ever entering some of these churches again. But over time they they gained a following. They gained more members of people who would listen to this bit of dialogue and think, like, actually the thing that that person said, I I agree with. And and the thing that they're embodying of like, my God, like the spirit can move through all of us and maybe I've felt that before. So
That's kind of how Quakerism got off the ground. When they started having their own meetings, instead of just interrupting other people's meetings, they had a format of they developed a format of sitting in a circle and operating in in silence. And silence being sort of the base of what happens in that space. And sometimes a whole hour will go by, everyone just sitting in silence.
Whereas other times when the spirit has moved someone to speak, they'll stand if they're able and speak. and sometimes we'll have fifteen people speak, and sometimes it's zero, and you just don't know, and and people are encouraged to not prepare things beforehand, but instead just to prepare themselves to listen and to to respond. it's a really special thing that the Quakers
offer to world religions through this practice of micrometing.
Yeah, and I think that's one of the things that we've lost is and and you see people trying to retrieve it through mindfulness, breath work or whatever, is being able to encounter the spirit and to know when it's working and when it's not. And that actually became part of my transformation before I went to seminary was finally recognizing when, this is this is something different.
Than what your one really experiences. So so now that we know the history and the silence, and I know you told me you've practiced it for quite a while, how does that rejuvenate you? how does that ground you? Are the particular practices you use either in the meeting or outside the meeting that help you stay true to yourself?
it's such a it feels like a
an edge question for me in a good way where it's like this is where my you know where I find groundedness is like when I'm feeling ungrounded. These are the things that I reach toward. You know, the breath, the the the just pulling into my body. Lately I've been and this is very recent, just really imagining my energy as a you know sphere around me or like a like a you know a shape.
around me and and really monitoring its boundaries because I have a tendency to overthink and to just think, think, think, think, think. And my energy can just like go up and out through my head into the cosmos. And to ground myself into my body can help to just like bring myself back to to center, back to who I am and where I am. And
There are ways of grounding in the five senses as well that I find really helpful, of just asking myself, what am I seeing? What am I hearing? What am I feeling? What am what can I taste if anything? What can I smell if anything? And and and these are things that we can practice also within Quaker Meeting. there's a lot of, you know, recognizing thoughts and noticing them as thoughts and and
As lovingly as possible to myself saying, you know, come on back to the breath, you know, like this is you you can think, but like that's not really why you're here. You're here to listen. You're here to to have this opportunity for the spirit to move through. those are practices that that come to mind im immediately, yeah. Great.
I think the listeners would also like to know you're a nurse, practice as a nurse. and you told me you worked in palliative care and and you c what going back to what he was saying, you cannot see Will because we're not doing a video podcast, but from the moment I saw him you you you could sense it that there's a peacefulness about him. I hope you take that in a good way. and that's why I invited him mostly on the podcast. he had some good things to say too, but you know.
No, that's just selling.
Ellen (14:21)
But Okay folks, we're back. we were rudely interrupted by threat of a tornado, but hey, that's what happens at the Wild Goose Festival. The first word is wild. So anyway, I just want to conclude our conversation by thanking Will and being grateful for him
taking some time out to talk to us. So Will, will you kind of any final words and
Would you tell people where they can find you? And I believe you also have a podcast if you would tell them about that as well. Yeah, thanks. it's it's crazy that we were talking about grounding practices when the weather hit. It's like with climate change, I think we're going to find ourselves needing to rely on the things that keep us grounded and the things that keep us centered because the the
Impulse to panic can get so strong. this has been a really delightful honor to me to be on your podcast and I'm really grateful to you for this opportunity. my podcast is called The Oregano, and it's pretty experimental. Every season is sort of a different thing. And then I have a
News we're just for context, we're all sheltered in this big auditorium now. They they gathered everyone in the festival to this one safe spot. And the newsletter that I have for elder care is at story dot compostmodernist dot org. so that's the thank you.
The crowd love that, Will. That was great. So thank you all again for tuning in to the Faith and Resilience podcast. You know where to find me at my website, EllenCorchella dot com. And I'll provide some links to Will and to other things you might enjoy. for now, be well, be safe, and know that God loves you.