A question from a Friend...

A Friend sent me a link and a question.

The link takes us here.

the question:

"if we acknowledge there is no unitary "self", what does quaker integrity mean?"

I wrote back to him:

I think it means that one doesn't give in to serving that imaginary "unitary self" that is the source of all the noise in our heads. If we acknowledge that it doesn't exist it means that we stop feeding and protecting that made-up self. It means that, in old timey Quaker talk, we nail that insatiable and permanently restless self firmly to the cross and live, instead, in the guidance of the Light.

The point, as Penington wrote describing the "sum and substance" of the religion of Quakers, is to beat down (such violent metaphors from such peaceable people) that unskillful self in us and to raise up instead "the seed" in us--until the one is defeated and the other...you get the picture.

Authentic.

It's why my experience taught me to try to avoid local newspapers and television news; it's all designed to scare me and make me mad and I am scared enough and mad enough, already. I need to "starve" or "beat down" or "crucify" or "make a space to hold" that scared, angry self until it disappears and doesn't make me do crazy things, anymore.

Tolle said that he got to a place one day in his life when he found himself muttering over and over "I cannot live with myself."

I? Myself? Two different things?

Maybe they are.

But the "myself" in this construct is really a conglomeration of "should be's" and "might happens" that our culture gave to me--"should be" and "might happen" to which I spent a good part of a lifetime applying my fears and--voila! I felt inadequate. So I listened all the more carefully, intently, to what Don Henley called "those voices in your head."

Strong stuff.

The "myself" in this sense is not really "my" self, at all--it's "their-self," it's the person everyone with something to sell me or some other way to use me wants me to be and wants me to think I really am.

How much suffering do all of us do because our culture has told us (to pick an example out of the air) "you are a boy/girl and that means you do what's on this blue/pink list and not what's on this other one." How crazy do we make ourselves--and one another--trying to force ourselves and everyone else to be those "selves?"

As we submit to and obey the Light, as our hearts are softened and changed, integrity arises and we lay such things down.

Since "myself" is a destructive phantasm--a reality that becomes clearer as the testimonies of community and equality (but simplicity and peace, too) develop in us--then what could integrity mean except to be faithful to ignoring its guidance and looking, instead, to the LIght?

Integrity demands (and always gets) a grounding in reality insofar as we know it. As we come to know reality better (as we "wake up," sometimes on a pillow, sometimes on the way to Damascus) then integrity dictates that we change our behavior to reflect the new grounding.

Wear it, it is written, for as long as you can.

Progress and the Journey

As commonly happens, I read someone's blog and it started me thinking. Next thing I know I have too much to say to fit into a comment and what I want to say isn't really a response to what the blogger said, anyway.

So, in this way this blog post was inspired by, although is not a direct response to, a blog post that I would recommend to everyone.

I have not yet come to the wide-spread post-modern rejection of "progress" as a model for the human experience or human history. I can't say, one way or the other, whether things are headed in some pre-determined direction or, if it is, whether that was pre-determined by some super being or is a playing out of forces that are mutable or immutable. I just don't know.

Progress, however, in the sense of development (without a characterization of change as "good" or "bad" or "inevitable" or "evitable'), in the sense of progression--seems obvious to me.

While I don't know that "the world" or "history" is headed in a certain direction (how could I possibly know that?) I do know that my spiritual condition--my relationship with Christ and the ramifications of that for me and others--is developing in a predictable direction. That same process, heading in the same direction, is described by Friends (and others) historically and contemporaneously.

I find that maturity--sanctification--perfection--is usefully described and characterized as a journey. My experience also indicates that the destination, as an individual human condition, is also well described and understood in the literature. That condition is summed up in a lot of ways by different people, but each summation is a paraphrase or restatement of the others.

Some do use "journey" in the sense of a seeking something not yet glimpsed or even glimps-able, celebrating seeking as a permanent vocation that is based on the assumption that one will never "find." That is not a description of what I refer to, here. My journey is not a perpetual wandering with the idea of a destination being irrelevant to that up to which I am.

I cannot say, as I say, much about the "human condition" in the general sense, but I know that human beings do progress spiritually, in predictable directions, over familiar terrain. I know that because it is something I experience, something that others have described as what they have also experienced, and something I see people around me going through.

I cannot say that I know, in this same way, what I know "means" in the context of some one or the other larger thought-system about where things came from, how they were made, why they were made, the character of the God in charge, if indeed one is, or what that God may be up to. That's all notional, by my light, and not very important or useful to me.

But I do know there is progress in individual human lives, that it goes in predictable directions, toward predictable destinations.

Too long for an answer to a comment--to one of my own blog posts!

This is a reply to Ashley's comment on one of my previous blog posts. I think it is the eighth comment, down, and as of this moment it's the last one. To understand the rest of the post you are now reading, and to be fair to Ashely (as what I write may be a straw man if I did not understand her well), one might want to read her comment before reading this.


Hello, Ashley

I am grateful for the comment, even though 'belated,' especially because your view appears to be different than mine, and from that of the relatively small number of Friends at the interest group at annual session in July. Perhaps those in attendance were not a cross section of the yearly meeting and may have been pre-disposed to the idea. Self selection sometimes brings together diversity of view and sometimes it does not.

It is also possible, however, that you and I don't really disagree and the underlying unity of the yearly meeting is radical inclusiveness--albeit an imperfect one.

You are right that there is an uneven "tolerance" of the diversity of belief in the yearly meeting in the sense that there are those who don't think that non-theists, atheists, deists, Buddhists, pagans, Jews, sexual minorities and so on "belong" in a Quaker meeting.

There are also people who do not believe that evangelicals (a category into which some small number of these will place anyone who uses the word "Christ" except as a swear word) are a part of "our tradition," and that what they call "Christo-centric" language is inappropriate among Friends because so much hurtful "baggage" is attached to it.

There are times both views get expressed openly and the uneven nature of the "tolerance" you cite is then apparent.

Friends have strongly held beliefs--strongly held beliefs that make up their personal "creeds" and strongly held beliefs about the beliefs that make up the personal "creeds" of others.

Because I am the clerk of the Committee on the Discipline/Faith and Practice I have both sought and been sought out during these last three and a half years by Friends to talk about these (and, oh! so many other) issues and how they should be addressed in the Faith and Practice.

I've yet to meet or talk to a Friend who has said that there are beliefs to which one must adhere to be a member of this yearly meeting. I have certainly, however, encountered many who have expressed with a great deal of certainty and determination that the language of their own personal creed (which they might regard to be "Quakerism") should be the one used in the Book of Discipline for North Pacific Yearly Meeting, and that their personal beliefs about the nature (or non-nature) of the D/divine should be its frame of reference.

There are no doubt Friends here, as elsewhere in the Society, who were first attracted by what they understood to be "Friends beliefs" (or, perhaps, the freedom from them). And there are no doubt some for whom propositional belief (or non-belief) is supremely important.

What has been opened to me, however, is that most Friends with whom I speak have remained Friends because they have been greatly edified (or "fed" or "nourished" or "enlightened" or "matured" or whatever) by the experience of being here, by doing the "Quaker Stuff" we all do, here. Whether they call it "Quaker process" or the "faith and practice of Friends" or "living out spirituality in the manner of Friends," this "Quaker way" (with waiting/silent worship as its center piece and its epitome) is what is central to most.

This would mean that "Quakerism" is not a set of beliefs but a set of traditions or practices that have been shown, through the years, to bring about a measure this edification, feeding, nourishing, enlightening, maturing or whatever. Over time and distance this particular orthopraxy has created a remarkably consistent (although not unique) outcome. Today we express it as simplicity, peace, integrity, community and equality. As I have said before, other lists also skillfully describe these same human qualities.

It is not the beliefs that Friends might use to explain this experience but the experience itself about which we are radically inclusive--as Joel and Hannah Bean were, as George Fox and Margaret Fell were. We will include those who want to live out their spirituality in the manner of Friends--regardless of their beliefs. That is radical for a spiritual community in the sense that it is "extreme," and it's radical in the sense that it relates to the root from which everything else "Quaker" comes.

If someone wants to celebrate mass, pray bowing to Mecca, or chant vows, or sacrifice a chicken during meeting for worship we are not likely to go there. That's because it's not a part of the practice that has been shown to Friends, century in and century out, to give use the water of which we have had a taste, ourselves, and its ability to slake thirst we have seen in others. People who "believe" that which underlies those other practices are welcome, of course, to worship with us in the manner of Friends and we are glad to include them.

And we acknowledge that ours is not the only set of disciplines and practices that edifies, feeds, nourishes, enlightens, matures or whatever. It's one that works for us and, as replicating outcomes from any successful models depends on fidelity to that model, we go with doing it the way it's worked, before. (Not without change, of course. Isaac Penington did not participate in worship sharing, after all. But change must show that it enhances the work from the root: the outcomes sought and the experience that brings them about.)

The fact that many of us in the yearly meeting don't understand that it's the experience that comes out of the process/practice/discipline that keeps us here doesn't mean that it is not so. It just means that in this regard we are much like some people in business who don't know what it is that really makes them successful (until they stop doing it) or like fish who do not get the centrality of water to their existence.

It is certainly not propositional belief that is central to holding our community together. We are not held together by our gregarious charisma, our outgoing and easy-going personalities, our sense of fashion, our lack of annoying eccentricities or our potlucks. (OK, maybe the potlucks have something to do with it).

We are held together by the experience of Quaker practice, and it is not just some ecstatic "other worldly" "bliss out" kind of experience. It's an experience of change and growth we see in ourselves and those around us as time goes on, and it's all about relationships. First, of course, is our relationship with that which we sense moving among us (however we may characterize it), our spirituality. But also crucial are the relationships we have with those who, like us, are trying to live out their lives and spirituality in the manner of Friends.

The Kingdom of Heaven is described in the Gospels as being both "is" and "is becoming," a concept that Quakers have used before to describe what was "going on" with and around them, what was moving among them. In that same way I have described radical inclusiveness.

So, Ashley, I do and I do not agree with your take on radical inclusiveness as being an aspiration and not a reality in North Pacific Yearly Meeting--because it is both.

The "reality" is not to be proved, in my view, at some time in the future when everyone "blesses" and confesses the validity of all the beliefs held by every one in the yearly meeting.

The reality is proved, to me, right here and now by the way people who dearly hold to mutually exclusive and inconsistent beliefs meet together for worship, do business together, abide with one another through the child births and the death watches, the celebrations and the occasions for mourning--doing all of this living out of their spirituality in the manner of Friends.

It doesn't matter to me what anyone believes when we are doing the work of the building maintenance committee, or sitting next to one another in meeting for worship, or when you are on my porch with a hot dish in a time of illness, or when you gather with me to send my daughter off to college, or your son is raising money to go on a service trip, or we are putting together shared transportation to annual session, or figuring out infant care to allow young parents to attend a vigil. What matters is how we do those things together in obedience and humility so that through doing them together, we all grow in the Light.

You point with justification to the lack of perfection.

But notwithstanding all that, I suggest that radical inclusiveness describes both the current condition of North Pacific Yearly Meeting and that which holds us together in it.

Thank you, again, for your comment Ashley. I am sure I'll see you again soon.

Another comment too long to be a comment...

This post was of interest because I dress in simple clothing--but not plain dress.

For work I wear black slacks of the dockers type, black shoes and socks with a tie that's black or gray (sometimes other solid colors) and a white shirt. I rarely wear a jacket, but if I do it's a sport jacket that is a shade of gray or brown. (I'm the only lawyer I know who doesn't own a suit.) Always the same. Makes deciding what to wear (and what to pack for business trips) easy.

I spend far less time deciding what to buy or what to wear on a specific day, than it takes me to get dressed.

It does get noticed, because I work among legal and social work professionals, and I do say, if asked, that it's a personal Quaker scruple. I will also, insofar as anyone is interested, talk about it. In that regard it's a witness.

Witness or not it is a testimony: an outward manifestation of an inward change done in my by Christ.

For casual, it's blue jeans (sometimes shorts) and t-shirts or long-sleeved shirts of solid dark colors (except for my "second string" white shirts--too gray to wear for work and too ragged to donate but too good to discard). I wear those same black shoes or sneakers or sandals (without socks even though I live in the Pacific NW...). Sometimes I go barefoot.

I am probably in a place similar to where the writer of the blog post to which I respond is on dress.

My understanding of plain dress was that it was originally something to which one was led because one had been dealt with concerning superfluity of dress and fashion--that one had stopped squandering one's time and money on things that were not necessary. Friend Woolman had a particular scruple, too, about cleanliness of clothing.

I have worn uniforms in my life--including those of the US Marine Corps, of a law firm, and judge in court. I do believe that clothes make the person and I do believe that is not a good thing, very often. Uniforms--even informal ones worn, say, by bank employees, intentionally instill a conformity and rigidity to limit one's ability to respond to people spontaneously and to dictate to others how they are to act toward the person wearing it. It's not about a witness to equality.

I have heard it said I wear a uniform, now, and I suppose I do, in a sense. But a uniform actually gets its name from uniform dress among a group of people, not one person's habit of dress. It's a uniform, in so far as it is one, of my own making and it's done with a conscious intention, consistent with the testimonies of simplicity and integrity.

It does influence my behavior, so it does "make the man" to some extent although it doesn't transform me so much as it reminds me of the transformation already done in me. It makes me grateful, at times, too, for that and all the rest that has come with it.

It does not, however, influence how others treat or respond to me.

So uniforms draw lines between and among people--conveying stereotypes and often moving us to respond to the uniform and not the person wearing it. The only way I'd wear one again, I think, is if I went back on the bench.

ps on the bench I prompted people to call me "judge" rather than "your honor." I knew, and they knew, that I was in the role, the job, of a judge. I don't think they could know,in the same way, from that robe I had on, whether I was honorable. That I had to earn--or not--day in and day out.

Some Questions

I saw the writing of someone trying to sort out a number of things about "universalism" and it led me to wondering what the importance of such sorting was, what it meant to the writer to be working through it.

I also became curious about the writer's take on the nature and purpose of spirituality.

I wondered if the writer sees spirituality as being about developing/adopting a set of propositional beliefs, the acceptance or rejection of which gets a person something, or shows a person something about themselves or other people.

I wondered whether the writer saw these propositions/axioms about universalism, the nature of the divine/profane--about how the divine/profane works or doesn't work-- as the basis for reasoning about how to act toward others and live one's life.

Is spirituality about developing one's personal condition along some pre-determined path that is in some way inherent in the nature of things, of God?

Does such development, such transformation, turn us into the image of Christ/Buddha/Spirit/Light/the Big Kahuna?

If it is neither about developing a set of propositional beliefs, or developing a spiritual condition, what is it about?

If so, or not, do we think we need to know why or how that takes place or does not?

Is our spirituality a source of understanding about "how things are," what the nature of God (or no god) is, what God/no god's purpose is or is not?

If so, what is the value of that understanding? What do we do with it?

Does it make a difference if Jesus walked out of the tomb and a video camera would have captured his image in the process? If so, why?

Does it make any difference whether or not Mara tempted the Buddha?

Does it make a difference in how we live whether or not there is an afterlife?

What difference does it make in the way we live our lives if, as one universalist "take" has it, everyone is going home to God, in the end, or, as another has it, God gives everyone (regardless of their "religion") the chance to know and accept Christ (although not necessarily by that name), or as another has it, all religions are like a sacred GUI interface sitting on top of a divine DOS--that all religions are really "takes" on a common spirituality, the proverbial paths to the top of the same mountain? If one or the other of these, or none of them, is true, so what?

How do (or do not) (or should) the answers to any of these questions affect who we are, what we do, day to day, in living our lives, in relating to other people?

Can the answers to these questions be known?

If so, so what?

If not, so what?

Too Long For a Comment..

Sometimes I hear Friends talking about nontheism as though it is a species of atheism or agnosticism. And sometimes it is.

But I have also heard it said that nontheism is not necessarily such a negation of a Higher Power (internal or external), rather, it is sometimes an affirmation that this great "whether or not" is so unknowable as to be irrelevant to the human condition and a distraction from its unfolding or being unfolded within and among us.

I cannot know which it is in the sense that knowledge is discussed, in the blog post I have linked, above. I cannot really know many of the things I have read in the very interesting (distracting?) post and the string of following comments. I am in awe at the degree to which some of this writing has mastered the material involved and I certainly have my own sense of how such things go/are.

My failing is that in talking and writing about these things that I can never really know (and about which I can only extend the benefit the doubt in crediting others with this knowledge that eludes me) I end up discounting, dismissing and pushing other people away or stimulating them to push me away. See? I just did that, didn't I?

In a life that has not been short I have been around that barn far too many times.

What I can know is that there is something "going on," here, and that I am dealt with on a daily basis as part of it. Prove it? I can't. But I know that as I am able to submit I am conformed whatever is "going on" and I find my life more pleasant for me and for those around me. This is no small thing.

I know and appreciate (as do those who have known me for years) I am being changed and I recognize the drift of it. This transformation I am experiencing seems similar to the way the Quaker (and other) heroes mentioned in the post and comments to which I have linked, above, describe (and are described by others) as having been changed. Both the five testimonies current in the Liberal domain of the Society of Friends and the Eight Fold Path seem to capture that change, as well. Huxley describes it, too, in "The Perennial Philosophy," as does Rumi's poetry. It's elsewhere--it's everywhere. Everyone has heard it from other people--even if they have not stopped to hear it from the source of it--whatever that is.

For years I tried to get to such places as described in all this (and more) spiritual literature by reading it, parsing it, reasoning from it--I remained largely alienated from others and from myself, seeking "orthodoxy" rather than "orthopraxy." Imagine, what I do is more important than what I think is true. News flash.

Someone who contributed the the comments following the post to which I linked, above, once said it's not so much about "understanding" as it is about "standing under." My take on that is that it's not about figuring it all out and then living according to what I have figured out. It's living as I am led and from that I experience a developing concinnity with whatever it is that is "going on."

So, I don't know if there is a God (whatever someone using the word may mean by it), where S/he may or may not have come from, how S/he works, or why. I don't know about atonement, virgin birth, lakes of fire, unfolding lotus flowers or the brushing wings of butterflies wearing boulders away over incomprehensible periods of time.

And I have to say I don't think my believing in the reality or centrality of such things has ever done me or those around me much good. What matters is how I live out my life and in my experience "belief" about existence of a "God" has been of little help in that. And history seems to indicate to me that belief in a God and reasoning from the concept in which one believes has not been very helpful to a lot of people (or to those around them) in coming to grips with how to live out their lives.

I am part of a religious Society and a world that is badly fractured by contention over things that I can never really know and that I doubt anyone else can, either. So many people are trying to come to some kind of unity about these unknowable things and even trying to force such a unity on others or to police, within the group of which they are a part, a unity that is exclusive them--even though it alienates them from everyone else. Yeah, I know. Don't be yoked to unbelievers. The problem I have found in following that teaching is that I end up too often doing harmful things to those with whom I avoid being yoked--and there are other teachings exhorting me to avoid doing those things.

I don't think that this is all working out for us, as a religious Society or as a global society. Of course, I can't really know if it's supposed to. All I can know, as I say, is the guidance I am getting and that without knowing where it's coming from (God? My psyche? Mars?), or why it's coming, I have come to trust it--based on the outcomes.

As I have put it before--the one celled animal on the forest floor has no concept of the eco-system of which it is a part. It just knows to eat the leaves and, so long as it eats the leaves things work out for it and the system. Maybe there is such a system of which I am a part and maybe there is not. But I know what I am supposed to do and from the moral consensus humanity has developed and ignored across time and space so does everyone else. As the one celled animal is supposed to eat the leaves I am supposed to love and to be connected to others--even those afraid to love me back or who don't understand the interconnectedness. Those are the leaves, bitter and sweet, that I am to eat.

And eat those leaves I do, whether it means anything or not. To the measure of the ability developed and developing in me, I try to clean what's put on my plate each and every day. It's what I keep being told to do. It's all that makes sense, to me. I don't know any better.

It's Just Not Fair

Word gets around fast, although it does not always get around very well.

I have heard a couple of versions of why I am laying down the clerkship of the Committee on the Discipline that are not accurate.

The Committee spent a little more than a year looking for a way forward. A number of things--some of them very much my responsibility, some that cannot be laid anywhere near my feet--had us stalled. Finally, at a meeting this last April, we came together in a unity about that way forward.

The Committee had already come to unity on radical inclusiveness as the touchstone of the yearly meeting. It is the living out of our spirituality together in the manner of Friends, rather than any particular theological formulation, that gathered the members and attenders of North Pacific Yearly Meeting, and that kept them in fellowship despite huge theological diversity among us. The Committee did not see this as aspirational--we saw it as what it was true of us.

The Committee came to that conclusion the hard way. Dissatisfaction was almost immediately manifest upon our initial proposals for revisions of various sections of the Faith and Practice. We faced the fact--sometimes delivered like the handle of a rake stepped on--that Friends cared very much about, for instance, what words were used and not used to describe the Divine. This issue is emblematic that Friends' measure of satisfaction with the drafts was how well these expressed what their personal beliefs. The word "Christ" was central to some--totally un-acceptable to others, for example.

Those who have followed my blog have seen the dawn of my being stunned and perplexed by this "creedal" orientation in the yearly meeting and have watched the sun of my confusion travel across the sky of my consciousness to finally set in the West of radical inclusion. Like any such "day" it was new and not new, others lived it before me. It is the same day lived by Joel and Hannah Bean as they witnessed and then endured the divisions in the Society of Friends during the 19th Century and, eventually, set in motion the chain of events that would lead to the founding of this yearly meeting. The "united" meeting in San Jose was radical inclusiveness in the 1880's--where Hicksite, Orthodox, Conservative and Evangelical were welcome to worship in the manner of Friends.

With the help of a quotation from Catherine Whitmire (also familiar to those who have followed this blog) the Committee on the Discipline, as a whole, came to unity on this radical inclusiveness as the center of gravity from which our work should proceed, because it was the center of unity that gathered and held the yearly meeting together.

From that unity the Committee began to create a new process for developing drafts of sections and new vehicles of communication to increase participation of Friends in a process that, primarily, is a necessary corporate and individual re-centering in light, a conversation about where the Light has brought us since last Friends in this yearly meeting made their condition manifest in writing. The creation of a book of Faith and Practice is actually secondary to this conversation, made possible only by the conversation having taken place.

This process should not have the Committee on the Faith and Practice at its center. It should not be a discussion, a "negotiation," between "this" group of Friends and the Committee and then "that" group of Friends and the Committee with the Committee--in the end--trying to reconcile it all to the satisfaction of all.

The process should be, rather, that "this" and "that" group--and all Friends, as individuals and groups--should be talking about the issues involved and, as they do, coming to a unity that, through listening to the conversations, the Committee can express that unity or discern where unity is lacking.

That's just nutshell. Soon (by the end of August?) a series of documents will appear on the North Pacific Yearly Meeting website that will show all this in depth. Soon (by the end of August?) the new process will begin.

My point is not to describe all that. This post began as an explanation of why I am laying down the clerkship of the Committee. It is not, as has been reported to me, because the Committee is in chaos and I am stomping away in frustration, or because the process of revising the Faith and Practice is hopelessly mired. The opposite of both of those rumors is true.

I left that April meeting in Seattle and drove with two members of the Committee back to Portland. In between our conversations I began to feel a pull. Arriving home, the pull continued and in two weeks or so the message was clear: I was to lay down the clerkship of the Committee as soon as a new clerk emerged and leave the Committee altogether in August 2010, at the end of my current term.

My practice has made me able to clearly recognize the voice of the Shepard, to hear it and to sort out that it is the Shepard's voice and not the enticement of one wolf or another trying to lure me out onto my own so that I can victimize myself (again).

I hear you, God, I thought. It was a thought of resignation--in both senses of the term.

But I didn't want to.

It didn't seem fair.

No, it's not--by my way of seeing things--fair. Not at all.

I was clerk through a long and uncomfortable period. It was painful for the Committee to endure that long period of doubt and discernment, and it was painful to see and hear how Friends were responding to the work--these Friends not offered leadership up to the task by me as clerk of the Committee, not themselves, at times, operating in the manner of Friends.

Now, I thought, we have come through this. We have re-oriented the process and laid a new course for the next year. And we have "road tested" both the concept of radical inclusiveness and the new process at Annual Session.

Radical inclusiveness turns out, to Friends gathered in Missoula, to be the obvious and true description of who we are as a yearly meeting.

The new process appears to be made up of steps in the right direction to even the harshest of the Committee's critics among Friends.

I have been clerk through this hard period. I was blessed (which is to say "matured" and "made [more] perfect" and made "more fit for a particular purpose" or "grown") in getting through by the support of an elder committee to keep my discernment true. The Faith and Practice Committee itself didn't shy away from the hard questions and stayed faithful to the discernment. Both boldly characterized me as full of canal water when I was, and urged me forward when I seemed to have it right.

So, now the way is open into the future and I am so much better prepared to clerk through it.

So, lay it down?

This is fair?

No.

But, as one of my elders told me, at the darkest point in all this for me, it is not just the vision of radical inclusiveness that had to sustain me. He reminded me that what I was up to required a "radical obedience."

Oh, that.

That obedience thing.

So, it doesn't matter why I am led to lay this down. What matters is that I am.

And it matters that I obey.