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.

Bonnie Tinker's Lessons

I didn't used to like the phrase "hold in the Light."

I used to think it was a cop-out, a politically correct way to say "pray for" without upsetting Friends who were resistant to the "Christ Talk" used by some (of us) other Friends.

When someone said "Is there anyone to be held in the Light?" I would say, when I thought there was, that I would like Friends to pray for so-and-so, or for me.

But you learn, you grow.

I came to think of holding someone in the Light as a comforting thing. Quaker theology holds, at least traditional Quaker theology holds, that it is encounters with the Light--Christ--that transform us, that conform us to the image of Christ. This is a scary process, at times, as the Light confronts us with those things about our lives that have to change and also gives us the wherewithal to make those changes. This is where the quaking came in, along with the tears and the moaning. It was as though, it was written by some, that which is described in the book of Revelation was happening in the hearts of Friends.

So, holding in the Light seemed to me like holding on to my dog in the bath, or my daughter's hand as she got a shot or her ears pierced. It was a warm, comforting thing done for the benefit of someone going through some thing difficult.

But Bonnie Tinker taught me a different take on "holding in the Light." Rather than comforting arms it was like "Get your butt into that Light. You and I both know you need to be changed in this regard and I'm going to stand here and make sure you stay there until the dross is burned off."

She was like the sheep dog, in way, getting me into the pen where I needed to be.

"Feed my sheep," indeed.

She never said it quite so bluntly (at least not to me) but when she was on the phone, as I wrote in my other blog, today, it made me apprehensive because I knew she was going to ask for time or money that I did not think that we had, for something I knew that we should support.

It was not a guilt trip she was laying on me. It was holding out a truth I knew and insisting that I look at it and, with integrity, act on it.

"...holds a fistful of rain tempting you to deny it."

I'm thinking that the difference between holding my daughter's hand when she wants to flee the doctor's office and having my heels nipped (in a loving way) to keep me going in the direction she and I both agreed I needed to go, were not so different.

Transformation is scary, it pulls me out of who I am, it calls upon me to lay down comfort and convenience and privilege--to pick up the cross, even the cross that, upon first blush, doesn't seem like it's really mine.

Community, of course, depends on strengthening the relationships with those upon whom my well being relies, whose well being depends on their relationship with me.

Bonnie alienated a lot of true-believing activists who took themselves as being of "like mind" to her because she wasn't about, and she implored against, shouting and politically overpowering those who were persecuting them. She understood that our enemies were not those shouting and spitting in our faces. Those people are captive of the powers--and it is the powers, especially the powers of retributive violence--that need to be overcome.

The only way we can set ourselves free from persecution is to set free those persecuting us. And the way to do that is to get into a place--we need to be transformed to the place--where we cannot do harm others and, no matter what they do to us, they cannot really harm us, either.

(Click on the "one quaker's take" link to read my other blog post about Bonnie, today).