After The Manner Of a Quaker

What is Quakerism and what is its mission today? Integrative Summary

2012-01-17T19:12:00.002-05:00

I imagine that the purpose of this summary is to tie together the conversation I have been having with this question over the last few weeks. After reading the previous eight essays, I am back to the beginning, at the personal response. There I ended with the statement that “We are all trying to come to terms with our common human inability, so far, to help God create heaven on earth - though we keep trying.” That about sums it up for me.

In the last essay, I came upon the idea that Quakerism is Quixotic. I like this. It is. We are optimistic about our origins, seeing our being-ness as basically good. Given the collective state of humankind, this seems an irrational stance. Fully one half of the world population lives in desparate poverty. Twenty-two thousand children die every day from causes due to poverty. It must be madness to think that humans are basically good, since we humans surely have the power and resources to fix these problems, yet we fail to do so.

The dissonance of these views comes from the fact that we unprogrammed Quakers are also in the elite of the world. We are part of the twenty percent that earns seventy-five percent of world income. We can afford the luxury of spiritual questing.

Most of the time, most of the unprogrammed Quakers that I know are mindful of our privileged status. Our Meeting has one of the highest proportions of ex-Peace Corp Volunteers of any group I know. We have underpaid lawyers who work on behalf of undocumented aliens and death row prisoners, teachers in alternative schools, home-schoolers, and underpaid professionals of all kinds, in fact, in service to others in some way. A grand life style for us is to own a house free and clear (as I do).

The point is that, while we happen to be part of the so-called First World, we recognize ourselves as world citizens primarily, I believe. Our Meeting staffs and pays for part of a medical clinic for internal refugees in Bogota, Colombia. We aid undocumented aliens and refugees seeking asylum in the U.S.A., and work on behalf of death row inmates, many of whom are from poor or immigrant families. The Meeting conscientiously seeks to break down prejudices, in ourselves and others.

We could not do these things, and face these facts, without our basically optimistic stance. Our Meeting is only about one hundred fifty people. We have children, lives, jobs, and bills that need attention. Thus, we seek to use our privilege for the benefit of others as much as for ourselves, and we try to instill these ideals in our children. We don’t have time for arguments over doctrine, which we view as distractions. We choose to accept people as they are, as much as possible, without forcing theologically defined behaviors beyond basic human kindness and respect.

We could not do these things without love and belief in the power of love. As complicated as our lives are, our desires are simple. We want a saner world, one where people have a fair chance. We seek balance. We do what we can, and, for the rest, we pray for guidance, mercy, love, grace, and understanding. All That Is Holy help us.

What is Quakerism and what is its mission today? Supervised Ministry Response

2012-01-17T19:08:00.001-05:00

If I have to answer in a different way from my answer in the denominational essay, then I fear I have little to say. My ministry setting is my room in Cadbury House, where I write a book about theology, Christianity, and Quakerism. I am trying to write in such a way that those who have been alienated by Christian thought might find some healing. I am trying to move people deeper into Quakerism so that they can relate better to non-Quakers, to their former religions (if they joined us from other religions), and to themselves. In some ways, what I am trying to do is to add the liberal end of the dialogue to Brian McLaren’s reframing of the evangelical side of Christianity. I am not certain that I will be successful.

For me, unprogrammed Quakerism is a way of life and a theory of evolution, if you will. Can we evolve away from our genetic inheritance, in which physical and psychological dominance determines who survives, procreates, and defines the cultural surroundings, toward a life defined by love, peace, and equality? I am optimistic enough to say, why not? At least most of the time. I am also realistic enough to doubt the sanity of this optimism at times - which is also fine, because I like Quixotic quests.

For whatever reason, I believe that I receive guidance at times, guidance that appears not to have a rational, physical basis. I attribute this guidance to the Spirit, the inner light, the workings of God. Of course, this experience may be the result of a complex physiology, but I don’t think so. Very occasionally it is a shared experience, and I have received confirmation from other people of their similar experience. This, for me, confirms the foundations of Quakerism experimentally, as George Fox would say.

So, from my ministry setting, unprogrammed Quakerism is a group of people who choose to explore some of their existential questions together, whether directly, in conversation, or indirectly, through worship. It is also where we practice love. My love drives me to try to articulate answers to hard questions, and to learn how to help us all blunder through life’s dissonances with the least possible damage.

My basic stance in life is that a benevolence has caused us to alive, that death cannot be a tragedy since it is part of life, and that, while I may never know very much, I sure do love being alive most of the time. I am fortunate to have natural curiosity that makes many things interesting to me, and I have been blessed with basically good health for most of my life. So, while many of the circumstances of my life have been less fortunate, I cannot complain. On the overall, I bounce back to a basically happy position, given very minimal encouragement. How could those givens have been created by something not benevolent?

It is my experience that many unprogrammed Quakers share this basic stance, at least in outline. We see our mission as incarnating love. If that sounds naive or simple-minded, well, it’s good enough for me. It’s also a courageous act, and I like that too.

What is Quakerism and what is its mission today? Writing Emphasis Response

2012-01-17T19:06:00.001-05:00

Unprogrammed Quakers are underrepresented in the world of letters. Thus, those few that we claim, we treasure. Rufus Jones we consider a hero. Thomas R. Kelly’s Testament of Devotion is almost required reading among us, as is everything by Howard Brinton. Beyond these, we are subjected to reading “in translation.”

Many Quakers seek reading with the Buddhists (Tibetan, Zen, Classical Dharmapada, Western a la Suzuki), the Hindus (Gandhi, Deepak Chopra, The Bhagavad-Gita), New Agers and the like, Sufism, and mystical Christians.

We view our religion as akin to scientific study (as Howard Brinton describes in Friends For 300 Years). We seek “experimentally,” to find guidance from the Spirit (or from God, Christ, Buddha nature, whatever is holy). Thus, reading and writing are valued for what we learn, not just passively, but in the action. While reading, I learn not just what the words convey, but also, in my reactions to those thoughts, I learn where my fracture lines are, what I might know that is similar or different from the content of the reading, or I might gain an insight unrelated to it. In other words, reading is one way to slow down my internal processes enough to examine them, and to hear messages I would not ordinarily notice.

The act of writing, like the act of teaching, informs us of what we think. For me, the act of writing is a voyage of discovery. I truly do not know what to say until, somehow, I write it. This is a religious practice, then, for me. My tiny conscious mind is only aware of part of a subject. What floats into consciousness as I am writing is amazing, leaving me speechless, ironically. I continue doing it, trying to understand where insight originates. Because I surely do not know.

Quakers also have written, and continue to write, memoir. Spiritual autobiography was one of the ways that early Quakers traded insights with each other. Because of the close association between spirituality and psychology, these memoirs were therapy as well as education to others, as is all autobiography, I imagine. Many Quakers find journaling helpful. My own practice in journaling is spotty - sometimes prolific and then long periods of silence.

The Quaker blogosphere has become one place where unprogrammed Quakers are active. Because our interests are counter-cultural and often chided, we find little outlet in the mainstream press or in large publication houses. In the general climate of reactionary politics, the web is one place where liberal thought can flourish, along with everything else.

In conclusion, I would posit that our reliance on silence, our sense that ministry is primarily doing social action, our reluctance to proselytize, and the private nature of much of our spirituality, few unprogrammed Quakers turn to writing to express their religious views. I am doing so because (1) I have to write, and (2) someone has to.

What is Quakerism and what is its mission today? Cultural Response

2012-01-17T19:03:00.001-05:00

Unprogrammed Quakers are arguably a counter-cultural phenomenon. This has been true since its inception in the 1650s. George Fox and the early Quakers found themselves in the middle of social chaos, after three armed rebellions, now called the English Civil War, the beheading of King Charles I, and the exile of King Charles II. The Scottish Church split from the English Church, breaking the Anglican hegemony over religion in England.

Into this social unrest, various religious people started their own forms of worship, among them George Fox and the early Quakers. This was a rather ragged affair, with groups and people traveling around the country to gather support, to learn what was happening, and, possibly, just to see what was there. The early Quakers formed what, to them, was a sane response to unjust uses of power. Thus, one of the firm convictions that they held to was equality between all people. England’s caste system segregated people, on the basis of birth, into rigid economic classes. Until this time, social mobility was limited to minor changes in trade and to the fortunes, whims, or generosity of one’s Lord - he who owned the land in the region. Thus, the Quaker stance of equality was countercultural and radical at the time.

Modern unprogrammed Quakers continue this tradition. Social mobility is less an issue now (though not entirely a non-issue). Modern Quakers focus more on peace and other matters of justice. War is seen as a symptom of unjust dealings leading to the greater injustice of “collateral damage.” The roots of war are greed, most generally, and Quakers protest the use of power for economic ends, as they protest the basic unfairness in taking advantage of conflict of interest.

Indeed, many unprogrammed Quakers see their mission as voicing counter-cultural ideals. Whether this involves interrupting abuse of power (e.g. the death penalty with its problematic assumptions, its blatant bias towards punishing those already economically disadvantaged) or disenfranchisement due to social prejudice, unprogrammed Quakers seek ways to create equality and tolerance of difference, values not held in high esteem in most modern cultures.

For these reasons, unprogrammed Quakers are politically liberal, socially progressive, and, some would say, somewhat difficult to silence. Nonviolent communication and action form the basis of many of their programs - AVP (the Alternatives To Violence program); NVC (nonviolent communication program); vigils for peace, against the death penalty; interfaith dialogue; medical missions to places that modern medicine ignores; education programs which seek to equalize opportunity; immigration rights programs; legislative lobbying; feeding programs in times of war or economic dislocation.

Many unprogrammed Quakers refuse to pay “war taxes,” the portion of income tax that supports military budgets, or to own cars, in order to decrease their carbon footprint. Most attempt to apply the values of peace, simplicity, equality, integrity, and forthright speech in their daily lives. This action alone, sadly, is also highly counter-cultural.

What is Quakerism and what is its mission today? Denominational Response

2012-01-17T19:00:00.002-05:00

Our Meeting settles into the definition of our worship together as “in the manner of Friends.” Anyone who wishes to join us are welcomed if they agree to worship in the manner of Quakers. By this is meant that we will be largely silent and still, hoping to receive messages from the Spirit which will inform our lives or the lives of others.

We invite any who do receive messages, and who discern that these messages are meant for the good of all present, to stand and share them during our worship services. There is no restriction on who may speak, though persons who abuse this privilege, who “outrun their guide,” or who are disruptive may be asked to leave the meeting room to speak with Worship And Ministry outside.

For us, Quakerism forms a deep association within, an identity, that is committed to peace, peaceful means, fairness, and truth. Of course, most religions provide a kind of identity to members. Ours is not unique in this regard. We regard ourselves unique solely in the means through which we do this, which includes non-hierarchical organizing principles, absence of conflict of interest with regard to both spiritual and material matters, and heavy reliance on conscience in matters of discernment.

Because we depend on what the early Quakers called the “Inward Light” for guidance and inspiration, ours might be called a mystical religion, in the tradition of Christian mystics since the Desert Fathers and Mothers. Personal accountability, restraint, moderation, and capacity for diversity are important to us, as is a capacity for ambiguity. Paradox is often a subject in vocal ministry, along with Love, Peace, and Light.

On the more practical side, unprogrammed Quakers devote themselves to Quaker principles which are similar to the Buddhist formulation of the Eightfold Noble Path: right understanding, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration. These embody the ideas of wisdom, ethical conduct, and mental discipline which can also be seen in the Quaker testimonies of peace, simplicity, equality, integrity, and honesty/forthright speech. For us, it is less important to use “correct” or canonic or strictly Quaker words to describe these ideas than to use the formulations which will bring about these results. Thus, we have unprogrammed Quakers who define themselves as Buddhist-Quaker, Sufi-Quaker, Christian-Quaker, Jewish-Quaker, or just plain Quaker. We have those who prefer a NonTheist outlook in their devotions, wishing to break strong associations with patriarchy and militancy often associated with Theist formulations.

Because we are tolerant of diversity and because we do not require specific belief statements, some, even some others who call themselves Quakers, regard our religious stance to be inadequate, a “weak” theology, and our very nature to be “relativist” (John Punchon) or less than fully faithful (Wilmer Cooper). I find this amusing most of the time, due to the very high requirements we place on ourselves for ethical conduct and honest speech, and to the way that we hold ourselves accountable to each other.

At other times, I am deeply saddened that modern religion itself, especially conservative forms in Christianity, seems to foster unfair comparison, political sloganism, and intolerance that leads people who would be devout into militant, self-contradictory, even sinful, positions. We unprogrammed Quakers find ourselves off the mark quite often, but rarely do we need to disparage others in this way. I do it here to make the point that I have never read or heard unprogrammed Quakers making statements like this about or against anyone, but have had to endure many directed against us during my seminary work.

Our theology and our capacity for devotion are equal to any. Our tolerance for others is high, but we are intolerant of intolerance between people. We will confront it, speak it, witness before it. That is part of our mission as Friends.

What is Quakerism and what is its mission today? Theological Response

2012-01-17T18:56:00.000-05:00

Most religious bodies define themselves by their theologies. That is, they propose and accept a set of concepts for what they consider to be divine, construct verbal statements about those concepts, and then may form various kinds of ritual, song, or other communal activity using those verbal statements. Generally, to become a member of one of these organizations, one conforms to the statements and activities that the group has constructed. In this regard, unprogrammed Quakers are like other religious bodies.

Our statements, however, are open-ended in nature. Instead of defining or bounding a sense of divinity, we choose not to speak, encouraging each member to do that within themselves. Instead of declaring a way of salvation, we ask members to struggle with Spirit.

The statement that we do make is that people have “that of God” within, and that all have the capacity to access some form of divine guidance directly, given humility and stillness. Beyond these simple concepts, stated in many different wordings, we do not require any other statement of belief. We do not define the word “God,” so that “that of God” may mean different things to different people. This is consistent with the writing and practice of early Quakers, and we believe that it is an honest appraisal of what we can know about the source of life.

We do not even require that one use the word “God” in their personal theological formulation. “That of []” is fine with us, though it does require some more words to be intelligible to others. Now, many of us do read and study the Bible, Christianity, and Judaism in order to understand early Quaker writings thoroughly. We teach these to Young Friends, though not always consistently, in order that they be able to make their own choices, when the time comes, and, in order that they understand the majority society in which we live.

The Quaker testimonies (peace, simplicity, integrity, equality, honesty/plain speaking) embody our minimal theology. They are a way to live in the world that recognizes the worth of all peoples, and they can be used as a path to God, for those so inclined. We use questions, called queries, for the sake of historical continuity, to prod ourselves to consider where we may be missing the mark spiritually. These are posed monthly to the Meeting as a whole, not as a form of coercion, but offered for each person’s consideration. Members are free to take them to heart, or not, at the time, as their lives allow.

I believe that most unprogrammed Quakers would say that the “mission” of Quakerism is love. This is not a quishy, fluffy “being nice” kind of love. It is a radical love of fellow beings, the kind that causes internal struggle, even dislocation at times. Most of us have not attained the security and balance required to actually see our fellow beings, much less to love them for themselves. We do not know how to replenish our internal spiritual springs well enough, fast enough, easily enough to meet the great need in our external world and in others. One way that we practice learning how to do this is in service to others. Thus, we have active concerns in which we work outside the Meeting, for justice, for peace, for equality, learning how to do each.

What is Quakerism and what is its mission today? Church History Response

2012-01-17T18:51:00.000-05:00

The Society of Friends emerged from 17^th Century English Civil War time. It is arguably another step in the centuries long Reformation of the Catholic Church, or Christianity, that is still taking place today. In another sense it is the result of centuries of mystical practice, outside of the Catholic Church, now taking a public place in the worlds of Christianity and, arguably, Islam.

Martin Luther’s challenge to church authority in the early 1500s led to the first Christian body not of the Catholic Church. Soon many alternative churches had formed. In England, which had been Catholic until the 1530s, King Henry VIII sought to reform the church, the monasteries, and the relationship between Pope and King. When the Vatican refused his terms, he broke with the Catholic Church, forming the Church of England. His daughter, Queen Mary, reinstated Catholicism in England, and her successor, Queen Elizabeth I, made England Protestant again.

By the time of the English Civil War, in 1642, religious struggle was part of the English experience of life. The beheading of King Charles led to the breakdown of many British institutions, including the Church of England. Civil disorder spread through the country, and many small religious groups formed. Out of this chaos, Quakerism emerged under the leadership of George Fox, James Naylor, and Margaret Fell, though Fox became the most influential spokesperson. He set up the structure Quakers use today - Monthly, Quarterly, and Yearly Meetings.

Fox articulated the Quaker mission as one of freedom of conscience and freedom from the tyranny of tithing, church mediated life events (infant baptism, funerals, marriages), and rituals that were not done from the spirit of Christ. He advocated spiritual equality between the genders and among all economic classes of all peoples, regardless of their native religion. Many of his followers traveled to Muslim, Jewish, and native populations to speak of this equality and freedom before God. (NOTE: They were not attempting to convert these populations, for the most part. Once they delivered their message, they left in peace to return to England or the American colonies.)

A second theory of the lineage of Quakerism follows the thread of mysticism from the Desert Fathers through the medieval mystics to the religious seekers of Fox’s time. Some have said that Marguerite Porete, who was executed by the Inquisition in 1310, was one of the first to articulate ideas similar to George Fox. Her ideas were read, assimilated, and published by Meister Eckhardt after her death. Her book, The Annihilation of Simple Souls, has been read for 700 years (unattributed until 1947, when an Italian scholar uncovered her authorship), and influenced people of all classes, including the Beguines and Beghards, many solitary mystics, and many monastics. The Catholic mystical traditions were affected by Islamic scholarship in southern Spain, and spilled over into the restless ferment during John Wycliffe's time, through to the Bohemian protests of John Hus and others, all of which influenced the religious movements of 17th Century England.

A modern understanding of unprogrammed Quakerism includes the mission of religious witness in the world without religious or other coercion, as part of the Peace, Equality, and Integrity testimonies. Thus, unprogrammed Quakers generally do not "preach what they practice," relying instead on social action and witness.

What is Quakerism and what is its mission today? Biblical Response

2012-01-17T18:37:00.002-05:00

The early Quakers based their thinking, speech, and worship on Biblical themes. They sought to return to what they thought was the original form of Christianity, the life and words of Jesus. Of especial interest was the gospel of John, which spiritualizes much of the Christian message.

All Biblical books were cited, including the First Testament. A fellow classmate, Rob Pierson, wrote a study of the Quaker use of Jeremiah in which he tabulated Biblical references from fourteen collections of early Quaker writings. Twenty-nine percent of the references were to the First Testament, seventy-one percent to the Second Testament. George Fox often cited multiple Bible verses within one sentence. (If you haven’t read Fox, you are missing something. His letters and sermons are thrilling.)

Unprogrammed Quakerism is based on the idea that Christ speaks to each of us today, if we will listen for it. Thus, worship consists of expectant silence during which one waits for the “still small voice” within. This voice is perceived to be the spirit promised by Jesus: “the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you.” (John 14:25)

Thus, unprogrammed Quakers’ original mission in the world was to try to live according to the words and actions of Jesus, without priests and without church hierarchies. Various testimonies developed which were thought to be distillations of these words and actions - peace, simplicity, integrity, egalitarianism, forthright speech.

Modern unprogrammed Quakers continue to hold these testimonies, though they have also allowed much of the Christianity behind them to fall away. This is largely due to the perception that much in Christianity appeared to negate these values - especially simplicity, peace, and egalitarianism - in their continuing evolution through time. Thus, we are Christian or not, but we firmly hold to what we perceive as Jesus’ message to us.

The testimonies are a sly device. They work on individuals, leading them to question personal decisions and actions, encouraging humility by the fact of our ineptness. They work corporately as we struggle to understand how to confront the modern world sanely, which often feels like an oxymoron.

The peace testimony leads us to oppose war-making or seeking employment in positions that support war efforts. The testimony of equality leads us to seek justice for those who are denied it on the basis of gender preference, economics, skin color, ethnic background, nationality, education, or other arbitrary personal characteristics. We seek to increase our capacity for diversity, for accepting those who are not like us. This takes place personally and corporately.

What is Quakerism and what is its mission today? Personal Response

2012-01-17T18:36:00.000-05:00

Unprogrammed Quakerism is a tradition that grew from the work of George Fox, James Naylor, Margaret Fell, and others (the Valiant Sixty) during 17^th Century England. This work described a worship process, and a way of life, that removes barriers between individuals and God, and that emphasizes one’s personal responsibility in creating a life free from conflict of interest, though it is not generally stated in these words.

My personal relationship to unprogrammed Meetings is longstanding and deep. As a Young Friend, I framed my identity around Quakers, even as I knew that I could not live up to their ideals. They offered me refuge, sanity, and recognition as a child of God equal to them, which changed my life. This Meeting was deeply spiritual and reflective, Christocentric but allowing of skepticism. To me, it is the best example of Quakerism, and I have struggled to find another like it.

As I traveled through schools, jobs, and life, I found that there is a large range in unprogrammed Meetings. That is, each Meeting has its own ethic and sense of mission. All of them that I have experienced are socially progressive, open and affirming to alternative lifestyles, interested in environmental work, committed to witness for peace, and self-questioning. The ways that they express these are eccentric to each Meeting - some are very active in their communities, some are more internally focused. All of them are attractive to me personally, in their desire to be inclusive and to celebrate diversity. They also drive me bonkers.

What I have missed is a sense of a spiritual path, a method or a teaching that binds the testimonies together and makes them into compelling personal challenges. Witness is very often outward directed, without the inward development that would ground their work in personal experience - the excruciating personal experience of transformation...that which they are often asking others to do. Yes, everyone follows things like the Peace Testimony to the limits of their consciences. But not everyone looks at how they fail to give up petty angers or at how they each can transform their personal use of power to create greater peace among themselves. I find little “tenderness” within present day Meetings.

For some time, I did not attend Meeting, going instead on Hindu retreats and practicing Vipassana meditation. Meetings felt too “social” or too chatty. I did not appreciate most of the vocal ministry, feeling it more to be folksy stories than compelling spirituality. I wanted insight. I wanted to feel the Spirit directly, and did not find this in Meeting. Thus, it became clear that my belief is that part of unprogrammed Quakerism’s mission is to encourage personal transformation, in order to ground social witness on secure spiritual values. To me, for example, it makes no sense to “march for peace,” if militancy itself is the problem.

One of the strengths of unprogrammed Quakerism is that neither I nor anyone else can define what its purpose is, beyond the central Quaker tenents. We must struggle with each other to find it. My opinions add to the mix. We are all trying to come to terms with our common human inability, so far, to help God create heaven on earth - though we keep trying.

What is the Church and what is its mission today? Integrative Summary

2012-01-17T15:10:00.002-05:00

Taken as a whole, it seems that we were all in agreement that “the Church” does not entirely live up to its charter as a teacher of Jesus’ ways. We had, on the overall, similar concerns with how the Church is seen, what it represents in contemporary America, and how its practice diverges from its ideals. What I realized during this process is that, even though Christians refer to “the Church” as if there were a central Christian body of Christian affairs, there actually is no such thing.

Maybe it’s just me, but I have had this fantasy, based on how the term is used, that “the Church” actually refers to something non-mythical. Maybe I thought that the national councils of churches indicated a sincere siblinghood of believers. Or something. But no, Christians have clutched this construct around them since the time of the medieval Catholic Church - all of them, trying to steal it for themselves, even as they have run as fast as possible away from each other.

Wow. I wrote in another paper that the Reformation continues today, that, in spite of our hyper-modern ultra-coolness, in some crucial areas we still think about the same as people did in medieval times. And here is an actual artifact! a true relic, if you will, still alive today!

In truth, it is time for this to change. Christians profess to a false unity, unfairly fluffing up their numbers, maybe for advantage in an increasingly multicultural world, maybe just because they really feel the need to look important. But they do it with mendacity, if the way that they treat each other is included in the assessment.

Secondly, I suspect that most Christians chauvinistically assume that “the Church” is their particular church. This is a kind of naivete generally associated with unsophisticated tribal groups who call themselves “the people” or “the real people.” If faith groups want to have high credibility with the general public, then this sloppy self-reference needs to be addressed. That, or actual unity needs to be felt and achieved.

In conclusion, since the term “the Church” refers to a prop being used to comfort people in religiously dangerous illusions, I will no longer use the term to refer to the set of Christianities that would claim it as their own. That is, I will now talk about “Christian expressions of faith,” in the plural. I will talk about how it is my opinion, based on study of the gospels, that Jesus never sought to start a church. That is, Jesus is not represented by any church, much less owned by one. And that any body that seeks to worship him needs first of all to honor his words, his instructions to us: love God, end wars, love each other, seek justice for all. This means, most of all, that

CHRISTIANITY IS NOT ABOUT PERSONAL SALVATION.

It’s something more like working tirelessly for our neighbors’ benefit. God help us. And me.

What is the Church and what is its mission today? Ministry Project Response

2012-01-17T15:08:00.000-05:00

My ministry setting is the upstairs, front room in Cadbury House where I live. My project is to write A Primer of Christianity For Unprogrammed Quakers, a short book that talks about what Christianity is and what it is not. I envision this as a similar message to Brian McLaren’s (A New Kind Of Christianity, The Justice Project, Naked Christianity, others). I am speaking from the liberal end of the spectrum, while he began in the evangelical wing. I believe that we meet in the middle, which is a huge comfort to me. The mainstream church, however, objects to Brian’s work. He is getting a lot of static for his recent books. They would hate mine, no doubt, because I am even more universalist than he is, and because I really, really don’t care if one professes a recognizably Christian belief system or not. I do care about justice, aligning with God, and inclusiveness - to me all of these are different ways of saying the same thing.

In my project, I am trying to explain to liberal Quakers that Christianity actually does not exist, not as a monolithic whole, that there are many Christian expressions of faith and many kinds of Christian practice, but that no organization owns the patent, defines the terms, or limits the scope of how one can view the life and impact of the historical person known as Jesus. This is what I most object to in most Christian talk: people seem to feel entitled to be proprietary about Jesus, to feel that they alone get to define his life and message. Is this really what the church was meant to do? How does this reflect Jesus or the Spirit of Christ? It seems to me that following Jesus, as he asked us to do, is a matter of finding one’s way to him, not to someone else’s picture of him.

From my ministry setting, then, I view the church’s mission to be one of inclusiveness. The aim of Christianity is not personal salvation. It is justice. It is not about winning a place in heaven. It is about creating ‘on earth as it is in heaven.’ Thus, my work is to explode the barriers that people have erected in their minds around what it means to “church” - to help to heal the wounds that many members of my Meeting feel in the wake of their former conservative Christian sects (many are “refugees” from other denominations) - so that all of us stand a chance of coming closer together, so that our witness in the world will be loving, open, and just.

I also hope to educate those of my Meeting who, in their liberal Quaker upbringing, did not learn much about what Christianity actually is. It would be a blessing if we could get to a place in our Meeting where Christian language would not feel foreign or oppressive, coercive or demeaning. Today, all of these things are unfortunately connected in members’ minds. This, I feel, is a result of “the church” not quite living up to its vision, and to our (liberal Quakers) not educating ourselves adequately in all aspects of our tradition.

What is the Church and what is its mission today? Writing Emphasis Response

2012-01-17T15:04:00.000-05:00

Our writing emphasis has been designed as a ministry, using that term broadly. In Writing As Ministry, Susan Yanos defined ministry as: “if you’re working on (writing about) your life, it is a ministry.” (sic) Another way to say this is: bringing meaning out of chaos is God work, assuming that that meaning is positive, life-enhancing, or somehow affirming rather than nihilistic.

If I apply this filter to answer “what is the Church?” I would say that the Church’s intention is to minister, to be a ministry. Where I differ with mainstream Christian churches is in the breadth of meaning that is created. That is, I believe that church members often bring meaning out of chaos, thus doing God work, but that very often this meaning is only relevant to themselves, to those within the church, which limits the God that is at work there.

There are four themes of writing, according to Susan. These are (1) the calling to be creative, (2) the craft of writing, (3) commitment to see it through, (4) doing the cost-accounting. All of these are important to making writing a ministry. I believe that the Church accomplishes the first three of these, but that, in the fourth, they only do partial work of it. Cost counting involves bringing out one’s inner darkness, examining one’s relationship to self and to others, and enduring the pain of tearing down old ways of thinking, acting, and doing things. This involves a certain amount of inner chaos, in service of the work. Now, I believe that some of the contemplatives do this kind of church work. But, I believe that most churches avoid it, big time, especially the inner darkness part. Thus, this darkness gets attributed to those outside the church, or, even worse, to those who are the object of their ministry (overseas missions).

One of my main peeves with how churches present themselves and their vision is with “religious works” produced as writing, film, or artwork, which are, for the most part, created with predefined messages, solely using technique or craft. They present faith without doubt. They present uncomplicated vignettes of social situations or vapid pictures of unearthly scenes. A writer who is ministering to others religiously owes them more than this. Without doubt, faith is tautology: God is good, God is love, God loves me because I am.

Thus, from my ministry emphasis, I would say that the mission of the church in our time is to engage hard questions about the kind of society we live in, how we depend on inequality for our comfortable lives, how we basically do not care about the lives of those outside our sphere. Only from this will come the God that we read about in our sacred texts.

What is the Church and what is its mission today? Cultural Response

2012-01-17T15:00:00.000-05:00

Sheesh, American culture. I am not sure that I know what that means any more. In many ways, I do not recognize the country that surrounds me today. Gone are some less just or democratic ideas - like the apartheid I lived with as a child or the assumption that date rape was manly that I encountered as a young adult - but also gone are some features of public life that I thought were our strengths - like journalistic effort toward seeing a big picture, public service as actual service, statesmanship as an art rather than a game.

I believe that our culture is not now formed by the preferences of the people but by the extreme form of capitalism that has developed over the past fifty years under the guise of “free market” ideology. Thus, the church, as well as everything from school systems to health care to the press to entertainment, operates now in a “winner take all” mentality of competition and, thus, inequality. So, as long as we fail to place monetary value on the stuff of living - water, air, soil - and, as long as we spend the largest percentage of our energy budget on transportation, we will live in a distorted environment, socially and ecologically. The church participates in this distortion, as do we all.

Thus, the church is one entity that currently survives in the milieu of an American capitalism that overrules all other cultural values. It is not clear to me how long or how comfortable that survival will be.

The church’s mission is thus to speak truth to power. Instead of allowing powerful interests to distract us with divisive causes, the church’s place is to remain centered in its proclamation of love towards others and self. Instead of encouraging cultural degradation in the form of polarizing rhetoric, it’s time to be simple and direct and unmoving in the service of love towards others and self.

Yes, issues like abortion, gay rights, immigration, and gun control are important. What, however, are the central issues of our cultural dilemma right now? Civil behavior. Courage. Refusing to support hate. Multiculturalism. Economic justice. These are religious, not secular, values. This is where the discussion needs to be. As long as the church allows itself to be caught up in silly, outmoded, undisciplined, ‘liberal’ versus ‘conservative’ ideological divisions, it will remain irrelevant to daily life and it will continue to be manipulated by cynical financial (need I say secular) power.

If the church truly wants to confront creeping secularism, it will live, embrace, embody its core message: love towards others and self. Love demands greater income equality, not less. Love demands universal access to health care, no? Care for those unable to care for themselves, no? Justice is not optional. But the church seems to view these issues as secular concerns, at least in their public face. If it continues to step away from religious values like speaking truth and social responsibility, it will remain as many tidy social clubs of well-meaning, nice people who assume that the actual practice of God’s message of love is, uh, too secular. As I said, sheesh. Give us some hope. Champion the underdog. Give up dreams of political domination.

What is the Church and what is its mission today? Denominational Response

2012-01-17T14:55:00.000-05:00

From an unprogrammed Quaker standpoint, we were formed to dissolve the Church. The early Friends felt that Christianity was not being well served by the Church, whether in its Catholic or its Protestant forms. Thus, Friends sought a “third way.” This was through taking refuge in the Word or the Holy Spirit, relying on Jesus’ promise that we would be given the Spirit after his death, on his statements that “where two or three are gathered, he would be with us,” and other forms of Biblical inspiration. George Fox wrote that this “inward Light,” as he called it, was Jesus’ Second Coming - Jesus come back to teach us, directly and immediately to us as particular people. Fox called on us to discover this “experimentally,” for ourselves, without the intercession of others though possibly with the help of others of like mind. Because of these beliefs, Friends sought to disrupt Christian Churches with their hierarchies, vestments, ritual, paid clergy, and centrally defined theology. Unprogrammed Friends seek to rid ourselves of the assumptions that lead to these religious trappings.

As such, unprogrammed Friends originally saw the church as having no mission, other than to disband their then current practices. In our times, I believe that many unprogrammed Meetings view the church in similar ways. We often have to deal with “refugees” from other Christian denominations, who report to us that they have been damaged by their former churches and who come to us for healing. We also struggle with internal power games, how to achieve non-hierarchical community, what it means to worship, how to educate without coercion - all of the things that confront churches; we try to do this without relying on what we view as social crutches, like central authority, doctrinal control of religious language, and a set-apart clergy.

At the same time, Meetings engage with Christian churches, as well as with other faith communities, in social action. We support domestic and overseas missions of direct relief, medical care, hunger prevention, disaster relief, education, resistance to war-making, political action, and other forms of social programs that promote justice and well-being.

As a side note, I will say that I can only speak about the unprogrammed branch of Quakerism. I do not understand how the term “Friends Church” makes sense, and I do not get why one would want to have paid clergy, as a professional status, within a Quaker setting, along with preaching and other Protestant forms of worship. But I celebrate that others find these helpful. In all, I am totally happy with the challenges presented via unprogrammed Quakerism, and find that to be fully enough to study and contemplate. So, please, there is no need to convince me otherwise.

I do ask for a higher level of respect from alternate forms of Quakerism toward our form of liberal, socially progressive, non-doctrinal, non-hierarchical religion. I have been disappointed in this many times, often enduring casual verbal slurs, “jokes,” and even occasional outright anger when I persist in my beliefs (yes, right here in seminary). I have to consider this to be an unacceptable side-effect or what I see as contamination by “the Church.” Please prove me wrong. End the culture wars. [In any event, though, I will continue happily in my liberal world.]

What is the Church and what is its mission today? Theological Response

2012-01-17T14:49:00.001-05:00

Theologically, “the Church” is often considered to be a synonym for “the body of Christ.” That is, all believers, taken together, are seen to define and maintain the church by the fact of their participation in the mystery (eucharist) of Christ or in Christ consciousness. In one sense, this is a tribal identification. In another sense, it is a statement of mystical communion.

I believe that there are at least three theological problems with this formulation. The body of Christ was Paul’s analogy in which different parts of the “body” perform different functions while all parts were essential to the life of the body. This is a nice thought, but it also invites some rather distasteful implications in how we view each other - after all, there are parts of the body that few would volunteer to embody. This creates the situation where all members consider themselves to be the ‘better’ parts, while relegating some undifferentiated others to the less desirable parts. Even if this is not a conscious function, I believe that it sets up a lack of humility that is implicit and very difficult to discern.

The development of the Western church was intertwined with social and political control. Thus, for seventeen or eighteen hundred years, church and state were combined into the same bodies. Hierarchy was built into the church to such an extent that it is difficult for modern people to conceive of a non-hierarchical church structure. This creates a theological dilemma within the group: all are equal before God, but some are “more equal,” or “more Godly,” due to their political position within the church. This contradiction is almost impossible to overcome in practice.

The third problem I find with the theological formulation of the Church is that it cannot be universal to all humans, by definition. We have the picture that all humans are God’s children, but formulating the Church as the body of Christ or as those who participate somehow in Jesus’ life means that, unless we convince or coerce all humans to accept Jesus, then we cannot create God’s kingdom, as defined by the Church. So, the very structure of the Church’s theology implies that wars and war-making will never end or will end only after massive oppression of non-Christians.

The church’s mission in our times seems to me to be honesty. If church members can honestly assess the theological implications of their belief structures, they will have to look at the Other differently. It is not just a function of viewing non-Christians as brothers. It is a matter of accepting that no belief structure can encompass all of God’s creation, that the divinity of Jesus somehow does not preclude other paths to God, that all of us participate in oppressing others in some ways. This means that (1) syncretism is a good thing when it allows individuals to move closer to God, (2) love of God implies loosening our proprietary hold on what “love of God” means, (3) acknowledgement that we are completely dependent on God at every moment of every day.

What I am saying here is that, as long as the Church defines salvation as a Church function, I believe that it contradicts Jesus' own basic tenets: to love God with all one’s heart, mind, strength, and soul, and to love one’s neighbor as oneself.

What is the Church and what is its mission today? Church History response

2012-01-17T14:43:00.000-05:00

According to church history, "the Church" is the result of the tradition that began with the Catholic Church that was formed at the time of Constantine. Before then, Christians worshipped in synagogues and in house assemblies. At about the time of the author of Matthew (85-95 C.E.), the Christian community was separating from the Jewish community and it appears that they then began building their own synagogues (Matt. 12 mentions “their synagogue” and Matt. 23 talks to the Pharisees about “your synagogue”). At the time of the Christianization of Rome, the power of the empire was used to enforce consistency across the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea, and I believe that this is when the Western or more modern idea of “the Church” came into being.

Thus, the Church was defined as the Catholic Church in Roman times. It split into Eastern and Western forms after the death of Constantine, when the empire was politically divided between his sons. For some time, the Eastern and Western forms of Catholicism drifted apart, over differences in theology and in how the “Pope” (Bishop of the capitol city) related to the Emperor. In the East, the imperial leaders maintained control over church leaders, and the Eastern empire continued several centuries beyond that of Rome. In the West, Rome was sacked in 410, and a power vacuum resulted into which the Roman Pope moved, taking control of state and church himself.

Western medieval Christianity then proceeded through various controversies (for example, Arianism is a heresy, and then, oops, Arianism is orthodoxy now that we have a new Pope). Since the Pope had state military forces under his control, enforcement of doctrine became militarized. This was unfortunate, in my opinion, and was not reversed until the Reformation allowed the formation of the first alternative church in Germany. This led to further schisms and proliferations of church bodies which continues today.

I have to admit that I do not know what the mission of “the Church” is in our times. It appears to me that the various flavors of Christianity compete for attention, influence, and power, in a continuing argument over empire, as if the Roman dream were still with us. Thus, missionary work continues in ambivalently imperial mode to this day, though postcolonials are beginning to make their voices heard.

It was not until the American Revolution that Western minds could conceive a separation between religion and state. This separation is still being contested today. Though I believe that the days of theocracy are finally over, until churches fully assimilate the idea and practice of diversity they will not be capable of emotionally embracing it. That is maybe the task (mission) for modern churches, though they themselves may or may not see it this way: learn to see the Other as neighbor and learn what love actually requires.

What is the Church and what is its mission today? Biblical response

2012-01-17T14:38:00.000-05:00

Even though the Gospel of Matthew quotes Jesus as saying that Peter would be the rock upon which the church would be built, I do not believe that Jesus sought to found a church. I believe that later redactors added the ideas of church building, church planting, and church hierarchy into the scriptures. Thus, my opinion is that the “church” came about more due to the needs of the Roman Empire than to the preferences of the Jesus movements of the early church.

Without the political pressures that the empire imposed at the time, I wonder how many Christian churches would have been formed – at least two to begin with, in my opinion, in Alexandria and in Antioch, and others in Carthage, Lyons, and Rome at the least. It is difficult to say what might have happened in Jerusalem without the violence and disruption that Roman rule caused; James and Stephen might have formed a lasting Jewish sect of Jesus people.

The Bible that we know was built into canon also largely in response to imperial pressures for conformity once Rome became Christian. Without the coercion of the empire, I believe that Gnosticism would have continued as a major movement, monasticism may have split off in their own directions, and the Christological and other arguments over the trinity, the nature of Jesus’ divinity and person, the nature of the eucharist would have led to several different churches. The papacy may never have developed as we know it today. In any event, the Bible might have become several different sets of scriptures used by several different “churches” instead of the four canonic collections of books (Jewish, Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant) that we have now.

Thus, I do not find substantial support within the Bible for the formation of the church as we know it or for its hierarchy. I think it likely that ‘Jesus people’ would have persisted as movements, though it is unlikely that they would have tried to centralize.

Matthew’s gospel could be said to be a “missional” document. That is, it appears to have been written to energize and strengthen the newly forming Christian community to undertake the mission of spreading the good news of Jesus. (idea from Dan Ulrich’s paper on the missional nature of Matthew). It could also be said to be the work of a man who regretted that his Jewish colleagues did not agree with him on the importance of the life and death of Jesus, and that this regret still contained the hope that there would be reconciliation with some part of Jewish tradition.

The exploration and empire building that Spain and Portugal began in the Sixteenth Century, and which England and France continued thereafter, used the Church as one of the tools of their expansion. This mixture of economics and religion initiated the modern sense of the word “mission.” Thus, I believe that the idea of “mission” is one that developed well after the formation of the Catholic church; “mission” is more of a Reformation than a Biblical idea, at least in the sense we know in the Twenty-First Century. Missionaries and evangelicals are more the product of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries than the First Century, and the practical support (funding) or energy that set these in motion was, in my opinion, more economic/political than spiritual. There were markets to build and resources to acquire. Churches were conscripted in this effort, or conspired with this worldview, and willingly went off to spread their influence.

What is the Church and what is its mission today? Personal Response

2012-01-17T14:32:00.002-05:00

My context is one in which the word “church” is not used. In fact, we witness that Jesus said that the Spirit would be with us, not because of being a member of a specific group, not because we confess specific articles of belief, not because we break bread in a certain way, but because we hold ourselves accountable to the Great Commandment, we strive to witness for justice, and we gather in holy prayer and thanksgiving for the bounty of our lives.

In our time, “the Church” has done a lot of damage in our society. Whether about abortion, gay rights, women’s dignity, respect for other religions (especially Islam), halting environmental degradation, other important issues, various churches have acted to divide us, to encourage hateful behavior, to allow some to think that they personally will be “saved” while their fellow humans will be condemned to eternal misery. I cannot agree that Jesus would sanction these actions (regardless of what is alleged as his words about judgment in the Gospels).

I also know that various churches have done much good in our time. My mother was cared for and included in a lovely way by her Methodist Church until she needed to go into a nursing home. They went beyond the call of duty for her, for which I will always be grateful.

On balance, however, I believe that Christian churches have not yet lived up to the Christian message. Thus, I see that they have only one mission: learn to live in peace and in love with others. Missions other than that – i.e. spreading the Christian message – should not be undertaken until or unless the first is well in hand. If we cannot love each other at home, what are we doing telling others about it?

I believe that the church’s mission is to stop using God to hurt others. [This wording came from Karen Roberts’ talk on her Master’s Thesis, 26 jan 2011.]

As humans, our mission is to actualize, or incarnate, the Spirit on earth as we are so led, praying for guidance of the Spirit, and seeking direction from our collective consciences, scriptures, minds, and hearts. We must witness to misuse of God’s gifts, recognizing that we are operating from ignorance ourselves. God help us.

Conversations on "the Church" and Quakerism

2012-01-17T14:23:00.000-05:00

During my last year in seminary, I took what is called Comprehensive Seminar, which was designed as a place where each of us answers two questions from eight perspectives. We were asked to write a one page paper from each perspective on each question, using what we had integrated from the previous three years of study. These were not meant to be research papers; rather we were to speak from where we stood. I have been asked to share these papers, and so am posting them here, as this is a convenient way to do so.

The first question we were to consider was given to us by the seminary, and the second question we were to devise ourselves. The eight perspectives were: personal response, Biblical reflection, church history response, theological response, denominational response, cultural response, area of emphasis response, and ministry setting response. The last two spoke to our selected areas of concentration while in seminary. My emphasis was Writing As Ministry, and my supervised ministry project was a writing project - a book on theology for the bewildered, for those who are interested in religious questions but not attached to specific theologies proposed by established churches. At the end of these eight essays, we were asked to write an additional integrative summary for each question.

The question given to us by the seminary was : What is the Church and what is its mission today? As you will see, this question challenged my Quaker principles, in that "church" is not a concept that works well for us. Thus, I asked that my second question be : What is (unprogrammed) Quakerism and what is its mission today? The following eighteen posts are my responses to these questions from these perspectives.

postmodern desert

2009-07-06T23:43:00.007-04:00

I am spending this summer at home from seminary, thinking about it all, reading, and hoping for clarity. My heart has indeed unlocked somewhat during this year, in spite of some painful family complications.

After seeing Serene Jones, Gary Dorrien (Union Theological School), and Jonathan West on Bill Moyers' last show, I went running to the UTS web site. Drs. Jones and Dorrien were talking about how their students differ from previous years, they demand what is 'real,' are breaking the old theologies and rituals, committed to social justice and love, matters of the heart. These professors seemed proud of this. I was excited - a lot of what they were expressing seemed to match my own inarticulate searching as a seminary student, and it is not clear if my own school is as enthusiastic about this emerging redefinition of religious activity.

What I do know is that there are people who are uncomfortable, dissatisfied, with the expression of spirituality that is possible within the current form of our Meetings and churches. Many new forms of 'worship' groups are appearing, experimental groups of people from all denominations across the U.S.

What I also know is that I am still a bit lost in terms of how I want to express my own spirituality. As soon as I start to put words to it, my mind starts complaining about lack of content while my heart shrinks back a bit. It is as if I am afraid to hope.

The World Of Being

2009-03-06T23:51:00.005-05:00

Less than 2 weeks after the last post, I applied for and was accepted into seminary. Since I am a member of a Quaker Meeting that does not use Pastors or formal Ministers, this is perfect. I have been practical for far too long. I have completed one semester and am about half way through the second, with no major mishaps so far, as far as I know.

This is a different world from the large multinational corporations I was used to. Ten people in the incoming residential class with about 15 in the 'remote' classes. I am getting used to having a name and face again. And I am remembering what it means to live according to conscience and heart instead of corporate policy, though, of course, a school is a corporate body and there are rules and things. This is actually a hard adjustment to make. My heart has been locked up for so long that it is unwilling to emerge quite yet.

At the time I wrote that last post, I had no idea what I would do with myself. Now that I am in school, the question is temporarily answered. In the longer term, though, I still have no idea what I will do, but somehow it seems less important a question. All I have to do is be. And that is the point of this post. We all of us really need to 'be' ahead of 'do' if we want to make a world that we can stand to live in, it seems to me.

Wow

2008-07-22T04:14:00.002-04:00

Well, I have been relieved of my job and career. In 11 years of odd jobs and 26 years of cpu (computer) design, I survived many rounds of layoffs. In the last 2 positions, however, I was laid off after less than 3 years each.

There are certain disadvantages to being someone like me in a competitive high-tech environment. The longer one works, the more one is expected to rise up into quasi-administrative, 'leadership' roles. These roles are, quite frankly, awful for one's health. I did not want to take them on. I do not dissemble very well, and so became less and less able to pass, as they say. My self presentation became pretty terrible as I lost respect for the current theory, to put it generously, of corporate structure and policy.

In short, my main objective for the past 10 or so years has been to remain employed while avoiding rising too high in the organization, and the game has finally played itself out. I am relieved, though grateful for the interesting technical work and good salary given to me during this ride. I worked hard to produce the technical results needed by the companies and enjoyed many of the people in them. The exchange has been fair throughout, and all benefited from it.

It has now taken me 3 months to figure out that (1) I don't have a job, and (2) I now have the opporutnity to make whatever I want out of the rest of my life. Wow.

I am still pretty much speechless about this.

Reality is ... what?

2008-04-14T03:04:00.002-04:00

For the most part, humans do not create the conditions into which they become conscious. Persistent consciousness, that is, processing of events, thoughts, and sensory input with persistent memory of same, does not begin until well after initiation of life for almost all people (allowing for extraordinary cases reported in Buddhist literature).

This interesting observation leads to the conclusion that consciousness is not essential to human life, much as we might forget this at times. Beyond that, as we go through our lives, we are often unconscious. We sleep. We daydream. We look at one thing and walk into something else.

We cannot pay attention to all sensory input at every moment, but must continuously select that part to which we attend. It has been said that, of the million or so inputs to our senses every moment, we attend to about 70.

Thus, one might say that we are mostly unconscious.

Ahem. This puts things in perspective, doesn't it? The only way to use our consciousness is to focus, or, in other words, to become unconscious of many other things.

So, then who/what is running the show?

[pause for reflection]

What, then, is consciousness? This part of us does not seem to be that connected to a massive part of our surroundings each moment.

Awareness seems to us to be continuous and organized, in general. We seem to be in control of our actions and, sometimes, our thoughts. We seem to form opinions on our own. We think we're pretty smart most of the time.

But we're also mostly unconscious.

This reminds me of the fact that solid materials are overwhelmingly empty of 'hard' substance, being made of molecules which are 99+% space in which tiny wave-particles fly about at indeterminate (sic) speeds.

Reality is not what it seems, it seems.

Are you a believer?

2008-02-10T15:06:00.000-05:00

All I can say is that I do not and cannot know the circumstances that led to my consciousness. The physical body I inhabit and the planet upon which I walk are an abundant vessel for this consciousness, supplied by some agency that is beyond my control and outside of my personal knowledge.

There are arguments between those who favor evolution as an explanation of all that lives and those who favor a divine entity as one who created this rich environment and our overactive mentalities. There are those who think that these arguments have substance. I do not.

I am awed by the possibility that I am part some greater whole than is apparent on Earth. I am equally awed by the thought that I might not be part of anything beyond the apparent senselessness of our daily struggle for bread, water, mental and physical procreation.

The only certain knowledge that I have is that I cannot be sure how thoughts occur to me nor where they originate. My efforts to generate clear thought are merely those of removing obstacles. They are not generative; I cannot set about to manufacture a line of thinking as I might, say, set about constructing an article of clothing. All I can do is to follow the thinking that presents itself to myself, assuming that I can understand its merit and remember the point long enough to make note of it.

Scientists tell us that the physics of our known universe indicates that less than 0.00000001 percent (sic - some very small number) of our personal space actually contains 'matter.' We are beings largely composed of empty space; our bodies are held up by mutually repelling forces of elementary particles standing aground the same mutually repelling force fields.

This is extraordinary, and should, one would think, lead a person to consider the equally extraordinary gulf between our everyday experience of human existence and its physical reality.

It occurs to me that this may be the only subject worthy of religious examination. This massive discrepancy in our perceptive apparatus indicates that we are apparently beings inhabiting force fields rather than 'solidness' and that we do not generally relate to this fact. Thus, humans, by this one fact, can be defined as belief generators, living in the belief that we are situated with a solid "physical" reality.

Once this is established, notions of higher beings are just more of the same, generated by a talent we cannot suppress nor avoid. There may be truth to these beliefs or not. Whether we conceive of personal gods or impersonal natural forces, they are constructed as part of the act of consciousness and as unavoidable as life/death itself.

So, yes, I am a believer, just as you are.

Entrophy

2008-02-08T23:32:00.000-05:00

Several converging threads of my life have together dampened my urge to write things for public consumption in this blog. The near death of a family member coincided with what I experienced as another deep disappointment with a beloved religious body. These, among other things, have left me without a place to stand, in terms of public discussion and inquiry. I can find little energy to offer thoughts, questions, and opinions. I do not sense that the endeavor will be fruitful.

Maybe this is the best place to start. I don't know, frankly. What I do know is that there is a better way for all of us to arrange our lives, our medical care, our politics, our economics, our nourishment, our use of resources, our interactions with each other. I think that this way is to tell the truth, to feel our disappointments, to give up competition, to feel our imagined humiliations, to stare into the face of the unknown. Simple things, done simply. Genuine things, done genuinely.

Maybe this is also the best place to end. I don't know, frankly.

Disjoint Necessities

2008-01-01T16:32:00.000-05:00

For the past 2 1/2 months, I have had the opportunity to study our American medical system in some detail. Spending time visiting a family member in Intensive Care, critical care units, rehabilitation hospitals, and skilled care rehabilitation units has simultaneously increased and decreased my respect for the quality of medical care in our fine country.

The one word that stands out to me in thinking about this experience is disjoint. Every aspect of the medical care is disjoint from every other. Doctors are disjoint from their institutions, each other, the nursing staff, the patients, and, of course, the patient's families.

Institutions are disjoint from each other. Medical priorities are reset at every transfer, and transfers are often done to satisfy non-medical priorities. Care givers change every day, even within one institution, and thus the patient is confronted with an interpersonal environment that is chaotic and confusing - especially bad for those with head injuries, memory and perception problems.

Some of the disjointness is due to the "Patient's Bill of Rights." Under this law, people are not allowed to talk to each other, to put it crudely. In order to avoid breaking patient confidentiality, communication is limited to 'need to know' which, IMO, cuts down on options presented to patients, for patients, and which forces family members to execute "Medical Power Of Attorney" for people who are temporarily incapacitated. This, in itself, is somewhat traumatic,for patient and family, possibly causing further disjointness.

All in all, I am humbled by the care with which all of the medical staffs have worked on behalf of the our patient, and by the quality of the medical decisions made at times. The medical care itself has seemed to be quite good, done diligently and with care and respect.

On the other hand, I am somewhat mystified at the medical system we have, in which every action is made into a commodity, weighted, measured, and doled out through distant invisible money agents through medical agents that are constrained in what they can say to others due to confidentiality and also due to fear of later lawsuit. Calling it a system is generous, being an impossible collection of competing interests.

Longer term questions are neglected - institutions can cherry-pick what procedures they want to provide - leaving the overall trajectory of the patient's care up to the family, who are generally informed enough to make those decisions only after the care has been rendered.

My family member is recovering, but, in the process, my family has become somewhat sick at heart, exhausted, and in great fear of ever ourselves needing critical medical care. This is less due to projected pain and suffering than to the prospect of being at the mercy of a mindless set of financial and legal strictures that possibly override our own best interests.

Profit motive is not good medicine.

Imagining Reality - Part 2

2007-10-11T22:13:00.000-04:00

In our modern, alert times, imagination, if it is considered at all, is considered to be a matter for leisure, play, the arts or is a suspiciously watched activity within research organizations.

This was not so for almost all of human history. For the larger portion of human history, images from imagination gave us meaning, truth, and clarity in a sometimes undeciferable world.

In Part 1 of this essay, I spoke about the prevailing mythology of modern times as that of the warrior culture, glorifying war, expressed as either a conflagration of weapons or as a purely internal struggle, but which is some form of a fight between good and evil.

I think that this is no mistake. We have been mired in a morality play for a few thousand years now, in my opinion. Are we good or bad entities?Do we add value to the universe or are we a scourge that badly needs re-education, reform, and a cosmically directed culling of the herd?

Somewhere, I imagine, as a species we internalized a significant trauma. Somewhere something so horrific was done to the planet and its life forms that the self-aware had little choice but to realign with a new paradigm that jettisoned earlier non-competitive forms of value and meaning.

That or our ancestors thought that they did something so horrific that they could visualize escape from its guilt only by adopting the mythology of struggle against evil.

In any event, in a distant, though still recalled, process, mythologies of fertility, magic, natural alignment, and collectivism were suppressed, even obliterated. Born were individualism, militancy, hyper-alertness, expansionism, a kind of twitchy dissatisfaction with ourselves as a species, and each other as individuals.

This is all written into our sacred texts quite explicitly.

Interesting. I would say that it looks like a massive case of post traumatic stress disorder.

But what is more interesting to me is looking at the relative poverty of our remaining ability to create meaning. Humans used to find great value in their personal relationships to the life-forms of nature. Vitalism animated everything, giving us a way to relate meaningfully to everything.

Once vital essence was removed from nature and representations of nature(idols), we lost the ability to relate positively to it. Once value was relegated to things beyond Earth, things of the Earth (dust) were considered only for their ability to serve our physical needs and comfort.

It is debatable whether we gained a higher moral stature by this. In fact, it appears that we became more willful, less compassionate, and much less sensitive to life force in general, through this change in attitude.

We lost our companions, but also did not find we could include each other in our immediate family. We instead had become obsessed with control, of ourselves, each other, and the natural world.

So look at this reality: we are stuck in a paradigm (good vs evil), looking backward, hoping for atonement. Think this is too dark?

We're definitely steeped in the culture of struggle, avoiding our deepest selves, afraid of truth. Our prophets have told us repeatedly that our eternal survival depends on love, starting with loving one another, but we somehow do not seem to be able to relate to this. It is like the thought keeps bouncing off our collective consciousness.

What can we do about this? Can we relearn how to create rich myths about the mysteries of our lives? Can we even imagine celebrating the bountifulness of our existence? Or are we stuck, world without end, in some tired paradigm of struggle with survival?

Can you imagine peace? Can you touch the source of your being, celebrate the bounty and purpose of your life?

Instead of our almost reflex urge toward comparison, which instantly depletes meaning, changing the subject from intrinsic value to struggle between relative values, can we pause, and appreciate the largely unknown nature of our physical existence?

In our modern, alert times, have we lost the ability to relate to the heart of energy and life?

Imagining Reality - Part 1

2007-09-28T04:57:00.000-04:00

I was thinking about Santa Claus lately, wondering what role this concept could possibly have played in human psyches to have grown into a cliche in modern life, and by what route did it become a symbol for the unreliability of belief.

And then I remembered that I am breathing. The sun is shining. Life abounds on all sides. Food and water are plentiful. I am blessed and live in abundance.

Some agency has arranged a miraculous creation all around me and I can appreciate that fact. Human bodies have very specific requirements for viability, and those requirements are met exactly, right here every day. The more I think about the probabilities of this, the more astounding it seems.

It makes no difference if one prefers to think of our circumstances as the endpoint of a non-directed evolutionary process set in motion through purely physical processes, or if one prefers a personified deity, a personal God, or other kinds of religious ideation to explain it all. It has been arranged that we live and prosper.

And one way to wrap up the whole concept is to celebrate an image of someone who arrives in the middle of the darkest, coldest part of the year bringing gifts overflowing.

I wonder how many layers of meaning and truth were compressed into this one image through the millenia, in storytelling around winter fires.

So, how did belief become attached to this image, which, on some level, describes pure fact? And why is it now an almost dead symbol?

Are we still creating rich images of the mysteries of our lives? Or are we killing them all off, allowing them to be subverted into commercial props?

Are we the same species as the one which created the original archetype of Santa?

I think that we are. I think that we need and want these rich images that live just at the boundary between hard physical reality and the intangible realms of idea, spirit, mind. I think that they are essential nutrients in a system of meaning, truth, and clarity that re-balance our psyches, reminding us that our circumstances are largely beyond our control, reminding us to honor the unknown.

We are, in fact, in the same position as our distant ancestors: what we know is far, far outweighed by that which we do not know.

As far as we understand, humans living just beyond the limits of history had mythologies involving cycles and fertility. Modern day mythologies generally involve warrior cultures (c.g. Star Wars) fighting over methods of control (centralized vs. democratic) using differentiating technologies (mass produced vs. eclectic, non-uniform).

Circles have flattened into straight lines. Fertility has become its opposite: warfare. Now, which is more primitive, a culture making rich images of its truths, or a culture which glorifies its interest in destruction?

Maybe human history is actually running backwards. Wouldn't that be a shock? After all, it occurs to me that, in our curved universe, circles are natural while straight lines are theoretically impossible.

So, maybe we don't actually exist, but are precursers of ancient humanity, a sort of nightmare before dawn, figments of their imagination, theoretically impossible.

Possibly Irreconcileable Differences (?)

2007-09-15T17:31:00.000-04:00

There is a split, rather a large gulf, separating some Friends in our Meeting from others. One would think that this split would revolve around some aspect of belief or belief content, but it does not.

As far as I can tell, this split between Friends originates from differences in the personal experience of internal 'voices,' for want of a better word.

My sense is that there is a big difference between Friends who seek deep interpersonal values and Friends who seek to discover the truth of their everyday existence.

Those second Friends might be described as perplexed about the contradictions of conscious life - being aware of one's self implies two entities, yet both are one - so that they wish to understand the facts of their existence. Or they may be walking a path to God, seeking Unity with the Divine. In any event, their search involves subtlety, personal humility, submission to forces larger than their consciousness, among other things.

The former Friends seem to be in the position that there can be little or no understanding of these things, so one should seek human contact and human goodness to the best of one's ability and leave off the rest. They may also be of the present condition that they do not have the luxury of earnest spiritual seeking at this time, and thus wish soley for comfort, solace, society. These Friends may be involved with morality, integrity on a social level, and communal sharing, among other things.

Almost everyone has had the experience of internal promptings which seem to push one in some direction or another, and, most certainly, almost everyone has had the experience of conscience.

There are some Friends who would describe this internal guidance as coming from something other than their consciously perceived self. These Friends sit with expectation, almost as if waiting for a lover, during Meeting For Worship, waiting for very subtle forces.

Other Friends state that they believe that the inner promptings and wisdom that they experience is either self-generated (or at least explanable that way) or given by God. There is thus no need for a more complicated explanation than the workings, possibly as yet not understood, of the material world, or the workings, unable to be understood, of God. These Friends sit in Meeting to become quiet, to lose the jangling complications of everyday life, to find peace for a bit of time.

[Of course, there are many other motivations and ideas about what people are doing during Worship. But I am trying here to articulate a problem that has been present in the Meeting for some time now. Please try to fit your ideas to my line of reasoning for a moment (only).]

This is all exceedingly ironic. The two ideas about what constitutes worship involves not whether God helps us (or is there), but instead is totally a difference in expectation. Friends who sit expectantly in Meeting may be looking for subconscious promptings to give them wisdom, may be attempting to take an evolutionary step forward in terms of extending human consciousness, may be waiting for the gift of God's messages to speak to their condition.

Those who seek peace, quiet, and human contact in Meeting For Worship want vocal ministry that is uplifting, enheartening, and possibly a bit entertaining, may wish to have their children present with them, may engage in inspirational reading or prayer or other forms of centering behavior. They may invoke God or not.

These two groups of Friends, while so similar in intention, are opposite poles from each other in practice, having divergent expectations of Meeting For Worship.

I am now quite sure that there will not be a way to overcome this kind of difference in expectation. For each, the entire point of Worship is invalidated by the other's point of view and behavior.

And yet, neither point of view is invalid. They are simply incompatible.

It may be damaging to all to try to force communal values in this case. I do not know. I only know that we have no vocabulary at present to use in attempting to understand each other, being separated by the common language of Quakerism, which rides serenely over the gulf of widely divergent expectation.

Horses and Carts, Chickens and Eggs

2007-09-04T23:38:00.000-04:00

I may have been on Mars for the past few years, but it is only very recently that I have come across the fact of people calling themselves NonTheist Friends, with their siblings the Theist Friends. Apparently, there has been conflict in some Meetings over the issue of whether one believes in God or not while acting after the manner of a Quaker.

Oh my. I hope that I am not asked whether I am a theist or non-theist Quaker.

One of the brilliant innovations in George Fox’s inspiration was that doctrine is not truth, regardless of content. I believe that he even said “stay with the experience of the life within you, and this will free you from a dependence on words.” (from Rex Ambler’s Truth of the Heart)

Yes, I understand that Fox was steeped in the theist traditions and that the vocabulary and interest of the early Quakers was rooted in Jesus and the Scriptures. But none of them defined what they meant by God, while all of them rejected the notion of a creed or a formal declaration of the content of one's belief, as far as I know.

So my experience says to me that to be or not to be Non/Theist is a matter of taste, since we have no idea what the words actually mean anyway. Since they are a description of experience, the words come later, it seems to me. If at all.

I do not aim to be divisive here, nor to be flip. I am actively concerned by Quakers who change focus from experience to conceptual doctrine.

I am neither a theist nor a non-theist Quaker, nor am I agnostic, nor atheist. I do not reject the idea of divinity - though I am also pretty sure that I cannot accept many, if not most, of the commonly used descriptions of God.

All these are just words.

What's beyond the words? Talk to me about that.

Understanding Acceptance

2007-08-24T23:27:00.000-04:00

It finally occurred to me that acceptance is not something done passively. It is an active decision to not overreact. It is the condition in which one takes the energy usually powering reactions and puts it into searching the situation for truth.

To achieve this, one has to make a decision to give up emotional attachments, and the attachment to one's unthinking exercise of emotions.

No wonder it's so rare.

And precious.

Warfare for God

2007-08-24T01:10:00.000-04:00

Christiane Amanpour's documentary on "God's Warriors" is quite difficult to watch if one is spiritually inclined. Why militancy has a part in anyone's religion is quite beyond me, but to have it becoming associated with spirituality literally defines blasphemy: offense against the sacred.

Part of my long ambivalence about organized religion stems from the imperialism of large organizations. Humans have again and again proved themselves incapable of organizing large groups of people without creating equally large opposing groups of people. Maybe that's why we have periodically had Prophets, people who would remind us of this fact, offer an alternative, and try to demonstrate this alternative.

But as a species, we're just not so smart. So far, we have not shown that much capacity to listen and learn.

A wit once said that human history is "just one damn thing after another." Yes, well, recorded human history is a catalogue of repeated and massive warfare, a record of just how far we are from the sacred, of how we have repeatedly damned one another and ourselves through violence and expediency (which are probably identical).

For some reason, there are lots of people who think that we should continue on this path.

So, I would say that, if one is truly searching for the sacred, run, run quickly from compelling speakers of any persuasion. Reject emotional appeals to self-serving causes like religious partisanship, any activism that creates divisions between people, and all hierarchies of people. Even patriotism is suspect. Reject any cause or creed that excludes anyone.

Now that's a challenge I can get excited about.

Everyday Life And Death

2007-08-14T19:40:00.000-04:00

A couple of weeks ago, my mother fell at her home and could not get up. She is 84 years old and lives alone now. A neighbor came to her aide, after several hours.

She is very much attached to staying at her home, in a small town in Maryland, To this end, her focus, for the last 10 years, has been to create community around her, something that is as surprising to her children as it has been spectacularly successful.

My family has never been known for its, uh, social abilities. We all tend to be somewhat reclusive, though this is due more to discomfort than to active avoidance of others. We have never been a cozy, happy group, and have never truly felt that we truly belonged anywhere, as far as I know. We have all been individually plagued with extreme social anxiety.

So my mother came up with an amazing ability to create a nurturing community about her, just as she came into the need for it. I am sure that this was partly a conscious effort on her part, but this does not diminish my admiration for her achievement.

She has neighbors who mow her lawn, take out her trash, and drive her to appointments when she cannot drive herself. There are members of her church who show up with food or offer to weed her prized rose garden. Her former singing group (Sweet Adelines) visit every week and another family includes her in all major holidays as part of their family.

In short, she has established herself as a part of people's lives, just by being there. I believe that this is partly because she supplies people with a reminder of their own mortality, a living example of gentle decline. She awakens people's compassion and love, giving people a chance, all too rare in modern life, to act from their better nature.

It is beautiful and heartbreaking. I love her very much.

The World Has Been Gentled

2007-07-23T00:28:00.000-04:00

On some Saturdays, a group of Quakers and Sufi students meet at my house to study the 99 Names of Allah. These are the qualities or attributes of God that are listed within the Koran, and they have long traditions of study associated with them.

Yesterday we studied Al Halim, a subtle quality of perserverance, forbearance in the sense that God "is forebearing in the punishment of the guilty." (The Name and the Named, Shaykh Tosun Bayrak al-Jerrahi al-Halveti)

We talked about this kind of patience and gentle waiting, and the nature of evil (is evil confined to human-generated action or is there an extra-human agent of evil?). We talked about the distinction between forebearing from witness verses the idea of witness by standing up to stop evil. When does one intervene in affairs to promote justice and protect life, and when does one forebear?

My opinion was that this distinction is a matter of discerning the heart of the person in question, and that it is pretty clear when a "bad heart" is performing actions that are evil as opposed to a situation in which people are acting badly through simple ignorance, fear, laziness, or greed. One just knows when to stand up to evil and when not to.

Even I do not fully understand this, a couple of days later, but I am still convinced that it is the case.

At some point during these meetings, we chant/meditate on the quality under study. This week, during the chant, I seemed to be moved into a separate universe. I saw a vision of a celebration taking place in India somewhere, in a village square. People were holding up a large model of a city or something which had many golden spires which sparkled in the sunlight. People were singing and dancing happily. They were celebrating because "the world has been gentled."

The vision left quickly, but the sentiment remained. In the future, the world will be gentled, and people will live to experience this.

Inshallah. God willing.

Pottering Around

2007-07-22T23:14:00.000-04:00

I have been reading the new Harry Potter. Well, in fact, I have not yet gotten to the new book, having had to go back to reread Books 5 and 6 in order to remember, er, the story. As my brother points out, "Pretty soon, you'll only need 4 or 5 books to keep you happily reading for years!"

It's scary that rereading this book, I have no memory of what happens next nor who is going to appear. My first thought is that J. K. Rowling has conjured an Improvization Spell on the books, so that each reading produces a new story...quite clever of her.

But, sadly for me, I fear it can't be so. Instead, I understand that my psyche has arranged a Mental Erasing Blodget to visit me randomly, creating the only thing more embarrassing than admitting that I like the Harry Potter books: admitting that I had had to read them more than once.

Free Won't

2007-07-22T23:09:00.000-04:00

On Friday I had lunch with a lovely, wonderful person. Our conversation was lively and engaging. We were speaking about our personal spiritual walking. I related how my mind says, "Yes, yes, I want to work for world peace, I want to be a holy person, I will strive to be peaceful and compassionate." Then I get down to the place where the implications of these grand sentiments begin to get clear and sharp: this means giving up some things, like maybe slobbing out on the couch every night after work, watching trashy tv and munching things.

I explained that this seems to me to be the place of "free will." This is the place we need to look. Not in the grand, glorious pronouncements of our intention, but in the small, sorry little places of personal capitulation, funny little ways we circumvent internal pockets of emotional quicksand.

My friend calls it "free won't." I agree. It's what we're not willing to do that defines the shape of our spiritual environment. It's the 'little things' we're refusing to do...

And yet, it is important not to do violence, to ourselves as well as to others and the environment. So, the work seems to be about those comforting little attachments we use for emotional stability, not so much about prohibiting them as about exploring them, coaxing out their secrets, finding how to persuade them either to join us or at least not to continue to oppose us.

A lot of "not's" in that story. Refraining from doing harm. We'seem to have many capabilities to do harm. Possibly the worst of them are almost trivial in scope, rather than the drama-filled scenarios of imagination and physical violence.

Rabia's Rooftop

2007-07-16T23:50:00.000-04:00

I spent the afternoon working at my desk. Quite a bit was actually accomplished, which is kind of amazing, as the entire time I felt a distracted longing. I found myself wandering down the hallway toward the vending machines, then sitting staring at the wall, then editing my work files, as if my afternoon were a set of still life pictures.

A completely wordless longing, it felt a bit like being hopelessly, helplessly in love, both happy and sad, not uncomfortable, yet not at peace, in a normal sense of that word. I was distracted, yet could continue to work in a normal way.

At some point, I remembered the stories of Rabia, the Sufi mystic, and wondered if this was maybe a little like the way she felt: happy to sit on the roof of her house wailing for God.

My mind and body were competently dealing with work and the material universe, while I, whatever that is, seemed to be in a universe of grief and longing. And I was content with all of it.

Stewardship and Renewal

2007-07-15T16:42:00.000-04:00

Today our Meeting held a Threshing Session to labor over the question of stewardship. It seems that we have proliferated committees of particular concern to the extent that our Stewardship Committee was seeking to understand the boundaries of their 'authority' and their purpose.

The Simplicity Testamony speaks to this amazing facility we humans have to complexify ourselves and our lives without even thinking about it. Because we don't think about it. Is this inherently narrow vision, or is it an inherent tendency to avoid thinking? In any event, it seems to be programmed into us, requiring counter measures like Quakerism.

So to the queries. The Committee asked us to consider 3 questions:(1) of what are we stewards? (2) for whom are we stewards? (3) for what purpose are we stewards?

At the announcement that we were to have this Threshing Session, I was a bit mystified...like, what's to consider? We have to take care of stuff, so what's the problem? At first the questions seemed to be, well, simplistic, and I had little hope that the session would be interesting. Maybe we would use our time better if we talked about the complicated structure we have built within the Meeting and how to Simplify, Simplify.

How wrong I can be.

The first query (of what) resulted in a range of answers from the material (House & Grounds) to the sublime (the spiritual environment in which we live). We are definitely stewards of our property and of our children (careful distinction between these was made, along with the question of how to avoid thinking of ourselves as 'owning' our children).

We are stewards of our relationships, our impact on the environment, our portion of world resources, which includes human as well as physical substance. We are stewards of the capacity to perceive the Inner Light (within ourselves), and of the actions we take in response to promptings received. Do they wither away or are they nurtured into life?

The second query (for whom) started with the Iroquois idea of considering the needs and desires of the seventh generation to come. We are stewards for ourselves, so that we are able to respond (recreating the sense of the term 'responsibility').

We are stewards for everything everywhere, in a sense, because of the integrated web that is life. We may not even know the influence of our actions, so in this sense we do not even know for whom we act.

We are stewards for Quakerism, as stewardship is a witness against expediency, against extreme capitalism, against violence that hurts the planet or its people.

It is difficult to imagine stewardship in the positive sense of the Testimonies: saying one is a Steward of Peace, Simplicity, Equality, etc. is a bit like proclaiming one's divinity. Maybe it's a version of truth, but going there involves perils to the soul which may overbalance even the humblest ego.

But we can be Stewards of our own witness in support of and for the benefit of Quakers and humanity. We in that way can be stewards of our contribution to the spiritual climate of the earth.

The third query (for what purpose) started quietly and slowly with the observation that 'less is more' and that we must be on guard, pay attention. We then traveled through the ideas that the purpose is to help each other with discernment, to learn to accept our limitations, to transform ourselves and the Meeting, avoiding stagnation. We then arrived at the realization that the entire purpose is to glorify God.

It is Love made visible.

Stewardship is how we give ourselves dignity. We are all little people with egos, annoyances, and problems with self-esteem. Quakerism offers many huge ideas, and how we take our place in that lofty sphere, along with the many giants before us, is to practise stewardship of our Quaker ideals.

Whew. Thank you, thank you Quaker Friends. A simple afternoon of simple statements made in humility before each other has moved me, readjusted my attitude, renewed my spirit.

In spite of my many years of Quaker activity, I am again surprised and delighted by the Spirit at work through our little group of Peculiar People.

You are my people and I am yours.

After All This Time

2007-07-14T21:25:00.000-04:00

Madame Blavatsky makes the statement: "You are not your body." For some reason, this simple sentence, heard in various forms many times before, set off a new line of thinking for me.

It occurred to me that vanity, attachment to one's physical traits, is discouraged in most religious traditions because it literally attaches one to the physical form, impeding spiritual development. Thus, Biblical commandments might be pure statements about direct spiritual peril.

My, oh my. I have spent my life hearing things about being a nice person, having good character, and not having vanity as, ho hum, moral statements about being a 'good person.' Never occurred to me that this rather political surface layer could be stripped away to find a fresh, direct and vital spiritual heart.

Still Small Voice

2007-07-13T01:32:00.000-04:00

I wanted to call this blog "Still Small Voice," but of course that name has already been taken up. The pun appeals to me: even after many years as a Quaker, I feel I am still a small voice, yet the beauty and mystery of that other still, small voice which emerges unexpectedly and randomly forms the ground on which I stand.

Several years ago I came across some information about an ancestor who lived during the time of George Fox. His name was Stephen Horsey and he had emigrated to the Eastern Shore of Virginia (and later Maryland) where he had been elected to the House of Burgesses. Even before he had taken up his seat, though, he was dismissed for acting "after the manner of a Quaker."

This is also a delightful pun: I have long hoped and wished to be able to find in myself the immense quiet and wisdom of the Friends who gave me respect and dignity during my Young Friends years decades ago. You could say that I search after the manner of a Quaker.