Marginalizing Myself Even More

I have recently been in correspondence with a Friend that was begun with some comments I made to a group that penned a proposed Minute on Overpopulation for the consideration of North Pacific Yearly Meeting.   This is an excerpt of that correspondence:

I did not forget your note, I have been thinking about it and bringing it to my worship, not having, until now, time to respond.   Your note has given me an opportunity to go pretty deep into my own heart about not only this particular issue but the issue of issues, in the first place.  Something has been working in me about all this for a good long time and I am beginning to be able to articulate some of that in a manner that is less reactionary. 

So, this is not an answer to your note, so much, and certainly not a refutation of what you wrote, so much as it is thoughts it has brought to me in its contemplation. 

Perhaps what I mean by all that will be made more clear by what I write below.  Perhaps it will not.  I don't have a conclusion, here, and it may be time for me to be quiet--aside from sharing thoughts (as opposed to conclusions) and listening to others on this deeper question (rather than trying to guide).

I do question dubbing "restoring the earth and establishing just societies" as a "Quaker vision."  I suspect I am even questioning the whole idea of a "Quaker vision," frankly, and what we do with those things we so identify.  All that may be the aquifer to which this particular spring of dissent of mine can be traced. 

I was unaware that this phrase is a quotation from the FCNL mission statement, but knowing it now does not convince me that this imprimatur elevates it to the height it occupies in the minute.  Does such a mission statement, or a confession of faith, or any such thing from any particular Quaker organization or individual define a vision as being "Quaker" for ideological or theological purposes?   After all, in response to what Rachel Maddow calls the "Kill the Gays Bill," the clerk of Uganda Yearly Meeting made a statement about homosexuals deserving death, quoting the book of Romans, but that can hardly be said to be a Quaker vision.  Yes, yes, he back-tracked on that, saying he meant spiritual death, but that doesn't make it better, does it?  Throwing the Quaker blanket over this (or any other) horse and then mounting it to stalk the political landscape has become disquieting to me.  This Ugandan statement--and even similar statements from some American Friends organizations and yearly meetings vis a vis same sex marriage and LGBTQ civil rights--is probably the most stark example of why I am so uncomfortable with political organizing done under the rubric of a Quaker vision or Christian vision or Islamic vision as I get older.

There are lots of "Quaker visions" that are really just visions of things/issues that some Quakers have quite apart from their "Quakerism."  I am an Oregon Duck fan.  A national championship in football:  a Quaker vision?  It's pretty hard sometimes, to keep thinking like that from slapping me around.

It is perhaps why I am so uncomfortable when, promoting current issues with which I am engaged, I am so quick to liken myself to the tiny minority of Friends it appears to me "made our bone" or "established our brand" for me when they tried to protect Native People against the swindling and violent incursions of Europeans, by helping slaves escape and bringing succor to starving Germans after the First World War.  It is humbling to realize that I--and most of us--would not, my own thoughts to the contrary notwithstanding, have gone to these lengths I so admire.   I--we--certainly are not going to those lengths in regard to most of the things about which we write minutes for the edification of Friends and those beyond our sparse hedge.

I think it's fine and wonderful to organize and engage in political activism (I do it frequently and, on the whole, find it edifying) but I am not sure, now, why it's important to play the Quaker Card in doing so.  How different is this than people saying things like Jesus would oppose abortion or gay rights or outlawing plastic grocery bags? 

If we live in a self governing republic, or a democracy for that matter, don't we make our political case on reason rather than appeals to authority, including the ultimate authority?  Do we need to sit on the rhetorical phone book of "Quakerism" to make ourselves taller at the political round table?  Is that consistent with the equality that eschewed titles of nobility and gave more weight to the interests of those of birth and wealth?  How does saying a vision is a Quaker vision add to its legitimacy?

I am also troubled by the (almost?) universal outcome, through history and as I have seen events unfold in my own life, that when people haul their religions and their churches into the political arena the political process ends up having far more influence on those religions and those churches than these have upon the political process.  How about the irony of those American flags in the corner of so many church sanctuaries?  How much apostasy does it take to suggest that the "wall of separation" actually protects the church more than it protects the state?

I realize that I am almost completely turned around here, that my grousing over they years about our minutes looking like they came from the Democrats or the Greens instead of from a "Quaker" perspective seems, now, like a glass door into which, due its transparency, I have just walked--upon which my now bleeding nose has left a big smudge. That may be, or it might not be. 

Perhaps by overstatement I can explain this uneasiness of mine:  when I hear about "peace and social concerns" (especially recalling that once it was called "peace and social order") too often it seems to me that what I am hearing springs from political ideology someone has brought into the meeting house so as to rebrand it as a Quaker testimony and lend it whatever gloss the rebranding confers.  Perhaps it's an uncharitable overstatement to imply that it's a conscious act of deception, calling it rebranding it.  Perhaps I mean to say it's as I described above--the difficulty of separating what God has brought to me and what I am bringing to God for approval and legitimacy out there in the red and blue states.

Could it be that it's not the tone of these minutes, over the years, that has sounded discordant to me, but that the very fact of us writing them, the reasons we do it, makes me uncomfortable because it seems, to me, to be an abuse of our spirituality? 

Friends did not begin by trying to make the world over--they began by trying to make themselves (or be made) over and to convince others to come along and be made over by Christ in the same way.  They did not begin with the notion of ending war in the world but with the reality of keeping themselves out of wars (national and personal).  They did not begin with trying to liberate the slaves, so much, from slavery as to liberate themselves from the corrosion of their own conditions caused by their part in it. 

I pride myself (and I mean that term in the sense of the source of the haughty look that precedes a fall--as one of the 7 deadlies) on not evangelizing but I define that term to mean not exhorting others to copy my theological take.  I do try to remake the world and the lives of others right and left in what I take (again, pridefully) to be my own image and somehow I think I are not evangelizing.  Who says that this minute on over population is not evangelizing?  Of course it is.  By endorsing it I am urging people to come to the "Jesus" of recycling, limiting population growth and all the other things listed as conforming to the testimony of Earth Care.  And this is a Jesus I don't even worship in a worthy way.  This is especially true when I say that environmental activism is sacramental, that by recycling and all the rest I am being conformed to Christ by "restoring" the Earth.  Beams?  Motes?

Does this mean I don't want to pursue these worthy ends?  No.

But when I think about referring to all this as "sacramental" then I cannot escape the conclusion that is this the dreaded evangelism that I feel so smug about eschewing as I pass people on Pioneer Square asking where I will spend eternity.  Samey-same.  Face it, NPYM Friends, we evangelize.

Since the first time I heard the idea of a Testimony of Earth Care I have wondered whether everything it encompasses is not already included in the testimonies we hold up (be they four or five) in North Pacific Yearly Meeting.  My own moss-backed view is that the movement to elevate environmentalism to this level might grow from a misunderstanding--or perhaps a simple redefinition (to be less inflammatory) of what a testimony is, or was.   I know that the tide is running strongly to view testimonies as values toward which we ought to strive as opposed to outcomes that are apparent in our lives due to our transformation in the Light.  I should probably just accept that and shut up (there are so many things I should probably just accept and shut up about) but to transform the meaning of testimonies in this way is one of the most obvious way in which Friends seem to be following the Unitarians into a "spirituality of rationality"--a worship of the human mind and of rationalism, a spirituality without spirit.  (and I am not describing non-theism.)  It's all just so...so...Protestant.

Sigh.  I've done enough annoying rambling on for one morning. Please know I am not trying to hurt or make fun of you or of anyone or belittle anyone's efforts.   Please.  This all just comes from an uneasiness about all of these things that has grown in me over the years and now, for better or worse, seems to be pour out of me, unbidden and, frankly, unwelcome.