tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-249174432024-03-07T18:12:55.937-08:00One Quaker Take"This is the sum or substance of our religion; to wit, to feel and discern the two seeds:...and to feel the judgments of God administered to the one of these, till it be brought into bondage and death; and the other raised up in the love and mercy of the Lord to live in us, and our souls gathered into it, to live to God in it." --Isaac Penington, The Sum or Substance of Our Religion Who Are Called Quakers, Works, Volume II p. 441Tmothy Travishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02788311873771605510noreply@blogger.comBlogger105125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24917443.post-49810448973381325192012-12-11T09:37:00.001-08:002012-12-11T09:37:07.456-08:00A Quaker Bible Study
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<span style="font-family: Cochin; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 120%; mso-bidi-font-family: Cochin; mso-fareast-font-family: Cochin;">I spent
years, on and off, studying the Bible, trying to understand God, reality and my
life--believing it was all there and that I could piece it together. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Cochin; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 120%; mso-bidi-font-family: Cochin; mso-fareast-font-family: Cochin;">Sola scriptura</span></i><span style="font-family: Cochin; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 120%; mso-bidi-font-family: Cochin; mso-fareast-font-family: Cochin;">, as it is written. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Cochin; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 120%; mso-bidi-font-family: Cochin; mso-fareast-font-family: Cochin;">Then I was
dragged into the Inner Light, where my reliance on rationalism was broken, my
condition(ing) spoken to.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Cochin; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 120%; mso-bidi-font-family: Cochin; mso-fareast-font-family: Cochin;">My mind, I
was shown, can make whatever use pleases me of scripture, but no Authority lives
there that can make use of me. It’s
not the Word of God, it’s just words about God, a compilation of notions—speculations,
inferences, reasoning--about It’s nature, character, and plans—things I can
argue about, even believe, but never know or need. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Cochin; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 120%; mso-bidi-font-family: Cochin; mso-fareast-font-family: Cochin;">Still, among
those lurking notions, pregnant with opportunities for my mind to mislead me
(and others), I recognize the Light working on the people depicted in the Bible,
as It works in my life, as It works in our lives in our Bible study group.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Cochin; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 120%; mso-bidi-font-family: Cochin; mso-fareast-font-family: Cochin;">Could anything
offer a dozen or so Friends from two yearly meetings more opportunity to
disagree and contend with one another than reading the Bible(s) together? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Cochin; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 120%; mso-bidi-font-family: Cochin; mso-fareast-font-family: Cochin;">And we do. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Cochin; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 120%; mso-bidi-font-family: Cochin; mso-fareast-font-family: Cochin;">Yet, we remain
Friends, and that peculiar love, compassion and reconciliation—the convincement
to which we aspire—matures in us on Monday mornings, turning those pages
together. Gathered into The Life, we
are brought to know, connect, support and encourage one another. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Cochin; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 120%; mso-bidi-font-family: Cochin; mso-fareast-font-family: Cochin;">The verses
may illustrate our broken conditions, but it is the Light that moves us through
them, together, toward wholeness. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<!--EndFragment-->Tmothy Travishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02788311873771605510noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24917443.post-58286323424681396972012-08-03T10:26:00.003-07:002012-08-03T10:36:11.145-07:00I Can Still Do Something Wrong<br />
<br />
I was told more than 20 years ago that in the Society of Friends, at least the domain in which I have been planted, there are no rules but it is still possible to do things wrong. In the fullness of time it has been opened to me that I should think less in terms of "wrong" and more in terms of "ineptly" or "unskillfully." <br />
<br />
From my own lack of skill in Friends' practice I can testify to two such that seem to be missing, often, in conducting Friends' business.<br />
<br />
First, I have sometimes ineptly rushed a matter to a meeting for business. Anymore, when I first hear about an issue at meeting for business I know I am in the midst of confusion turning quickly toward despair. <br />
<br />
I am especially susceptible to quaking when an item is added to the agenda as the meeting for business begins. Rarely are "emergency issues" actually emergencies and very frequently they don't belong at a meeting for business, at all. Best to leave dealing with these for another post.<br />
<br />
The problem thus created--that few understand what it's about--can be ameliorated, to some extent, with a period limited to clarifying questions (and for the clerk to rigidly keep discussion in that mode until all such questions have been answered), but once that is over substantial amounts of time are still likely to be taken up by people who do not understand but, thinking they do, lead us off into the thickets of their misunderstandings. Then more time is lost trying to bring them back to the actual issue. <br />
<br />
By the way, a skillful clerk, realizing that Friends are heading into such a thicket, must not allow this go on but tenderly intervene to stop them and ask the clerk of the committee whose business is at hand to clarify the nature of the business.<br />
<br />
The second inept thing I have done is to not pay attention to an issue until the last minute. This shows up when a threshing session has been held and notes taken, a committee report has been prepared and both notes and report have been circulated to all. Still, at meeting for business someone tunes-in for the first time, stands up and says "This is the first I have heard of this but..."<br />
<br />
This too oft-heard phrase--also an occasion for me to quake--seems, to those who have been engaged all along, to be accurately (if uncharitably) translatable as "I couldn't be bothered with what the rest of you have been processing for a while but I am going to talk about it off of the top of my head, anyway." <br />
<br />
It has been opened to me that if I am just now emerging from the dark on such an issue it is likely problems occurring to me have already occurred to someone else earlier in the process. <br />
<br />
Committees do need to write reports and notes from their meetings such that they represent their process of coming to a recommendation, including courses of action they considered but set aside and why. When they do not it shows a lack of skill at Quaker practice.<br />
<br />
But I need to read (and even talk over with others) those reports and notes, in advance. It might also help, as I do that, to leave myself open, in individual worship or prayer, to hear from Christ about it--just in case, you know, my busy life and my incisive reasoning are drowning out that still small voice. The true nature of things seen in the Light is more obvious to me than when I think them through in my own power.<br />
<br />
This lack of preparation is deadly to the morale of a meeting for business when a string of questions are asked that boil down to "Did the committee think of this?" or "Why didn't the committee decide to do that?" This is especially true when, caught up in our own power, these represent not a true request for information but a rhetorical prelude to our going on at length, entranced by the sound of our own voices and the occasion to demonstrate our powers of logic, about why the "this" or the "that" would be superior to what the committee is recommending. <br />
<br />
Again, a skillful clerk must intervene to halt such off-topic discourse, and, again, a committee report can prevent it from starting if that report is skillfully written.<br />
<br />
So, the gist of this, to me, is that notwithstanding the widespread notion that there are no rules in a Liberal Quaker meeting there are at least two unskillful things I struggle with, and see others struggling with, in conducting of business. The first is the inability to adequately present Friends opportunities to prepare themselves to process business, and the second is in inability of Friends to take advantage of such opportunities.<br />
<br />
Thinking about how to work with this, though, I have to start with the realization that how most of us got here, and who we were, coming in the door, is where these problems begin. Most of us showed up at a Quaker meeting, hung around for a while and then concluded that we knew all there was to know about what was going on. In fact, I didn't have a clue, for a long time. It was difficult for others to help me understand my condition as a new comer because whether addressed, usually too obliquely, through continuing adult education or individual mentor/elder-ing my attachment to my notions about what "Quakerism" was "to me" (or to who I "was") sometimes led me to respond by playing one of the cards in the suit of "Who made you the Quaker Pope?" Pride.<br />
<br />
My embarrassing experiences with my lack of skill in these matters now tempers my frustration when these two problems hamper and even hamstring a business meeting in which I am taking part. I have to keep in mind that it is important to the meeting and the Society (as it is to my own condition) for me to be patient and gentle as we bring new Friends (and long time Friends clinging to notions) along. <br />
<br />
I, too, came into this totally wrapped in my "self" and in living my life out there in The World. I was reared a Protestant where, for the most part, not much is demanded from members of the congregation. One can be involved, of course, but one can also just show up every Sunday and be done with it, if that's what one is after. This was a barrier to my seeing the faith and practice of Friends for the narrow gate it is. <br />
<br />
I didn't get that Quakers did not so much abolish the "hireling infrastructure" that kept things going for the community, as they elevated the laity and placed the responsibility on the community. <br />
<br />
I also did not get that fulfilling this responsibility transformed the community.<br />
<br />
Finally getting these things, it was still quite an adjustment for me, only gradually made, to give over the time necessary to make the spiritual discipline of participating in the life of the meeting work (both for my own edification and that of the meeting). <br />
<div>
<br /></div>
It took some time for me to realize that this is most important piece: learning to act in the good order is not empty ritual or adherence to forms. Things work better when we are all skillful at the Quaker practice (everyone knows what's coming and how it gets there). Animosity and contention grow when we ignore good order--and that ignoring is often increased when we are in contention. <br />
<br />
Taking the time and effort for good order has changed me, and these changes are part of my convincement and perfection. Orderly participation in the life of the meeting (including doing its business) is an entry into the The Life (the Kingdom of God). It manifests the Sermon and the Fruits of the Spirit in us, it glorifies (magnifies) God on earth. <br />
<br />
This is why it is important for clerks and elders (e.g., Ministry and Oversight Committees) to constantly keep in mind the good order for doing business and bring Friends who have gone off into the weeds (and that will be all of us, from time time) back to the path. This means continual repetition of things like "Please have your committee report completed at least a week before business meeting so we can send it out to all well in advance of the discussion," and "Please be sure to read this in advance of business meeting and contact the clerk of the committee if you have questions or concerns."<br />
<br />
This all requires sacrifice of my "self." It takes time and forbearance. For the Quaker faith and practice to "work"--both for the meeting and for me--I have to accept and talk up good order, including how business is done. <br />
<br />
The larger concern, though, is that faithfully doing business is one more example of how being a Quaker is more than a Sunday morning thing. The Quaker faith and practice requires sacrifice of my "self"-importance through the laying down of doing things that interfere my doing that practice faithfully and giving over to it the time and energy thus gained. <br />
<br />
To abuse an analogy, if it looks like a swan, swims like a swan and flies like a swan then it's a swan. If it doesn't then, as all of us have been (and even continue to be) at times, it's likely just an ugly duckling on its way to manifesting perfect swan-hood. Swans take time.<br />
<br /><br />
<br />
<br />Tmothy Travishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02788311873771605510noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24917443.post-17664550362498913442012-08-01T08:03:00.002-07:002012-08-01T08:31:46.643-07:00Standing AsideNorth Pacific Yearly Meeting Annual Session ended a week ago and it was a rich and edifying experience. <br />
<br />
One of the most edifying things, for me, was asking the question I was moved to ask of a Friend speaking at a plenary on behalf of a committee charged with supporting and encouraging a discernent process over the past year. I asked whether her expressing her own views about the business at hand while charged to foster discernment on the question was good practice. I asked because, during the past year members of this committee, on occasions when they acted as a members of the committee (including during this plenary), freely and openly expressed their personal view on what the outcome of this discernment should eventually be. <br />
<br />
Sometimes, on these occasions, they said things like "Speaking now as an individual and not a member of the committee..." This disclaimer, the committee member answered me at the plenary, prevented her expression of personal opinions from implicating integrity--hers or that of the process it did not influence their conduct of the discernment process or the views of others. (I note as an aside that, traditionally, the very act of advocating, at all, compromises the Friends business process.)<br />
<br />
My settled view is that Friends participating in discernment should never hear the personal views of those charged to support and encourage their process. Friends may have an idea of what those Friends think the color of carpet to be chosen should be, but they should not hear about it as the discernment process is taking place. <br />
<br />
I came to this as clerk of Bridge City Friends when we were a preparative meeting. During those two years there were times, following after clerks I had seen, I "stood aside" from clerking and otherwise freely expressed my views on items of business. Accumulating experience during those two years it was revealed to me that this was not edifying, to me or to the process. Subsequently finding validation of that revelation in the literature of clerking, I stopped doing it. <br />
<br />
I know that there is no settled unity on this, and if Friends disagree with me that's fine. However, I will--as I did at this last annual session--insure that when people who are charged to support and encourage discernment also express their personal views in public they are asked about how they see doing so implicating the integrity of the process (and their own). I will ask this of them first in private (as I did in this situation) and, should they continue, I will ask it in public. It's something all Friends need to consider when someone is, in one moment, speaking for the process and in the next is advocating for the outcome. (As I say, advocating, at all, is a problem.)<br />
<br />
In corporate discernment processes the role of the clerk or facilitator is to be mindful of the process, not the outcome. I have found that, aside from compromising my ability to do that, expressing my own opinions while in that role corrupts the process for others. Preventing, in so far as possible, that corruption requires the sacrifice of self from those supporting the discernment--one cannot serve the master of one's own position on a question and the master of serving the process. ("One's own position," is another obvious problem, here.)<br />
<br />
Clerks and those involved in supporting discernment should not underestimate the influence they have on the process, both because of their selection to "leadership" and because they have far more opportunities to talk than anyone else.<br />
<br />
It might seem ludicrous to <i>us</i>, if we are not looking carefully at ourselves, that such things could possibly corrupt <i>our</i> participation in meetings for worship for business. It might corrupt others, but <i>we </i>know how to keep our our own feelings from influencing how we support an even handed discernment process<i>.</i> <i>We </i>are seasoned Friends. That's why <i>we</i> were selected to be in this position.<br />
<br />
But hearing such rationalizing is why I don't find it ludicrous, at all. Hearing it tells me that there is a problem. When I hear such self exoneration I often see such corruption. Thus it is apparent to those who, as it is written, know what to look for. Often, however, we do not think to look for them in ourselves, forgetting that everyone's measure of maturity is limited and oversight of all of us is necessary, especially when we are in a position of authority and have an interest in a process. Our minds are excellent accomplices to our rationalizing what we want as being right--and how we go about getting it as "Quaker process."<br />
<br />
I have heard that a visitor from another domain of the Society said, after observing one of our Annual Session plenaries for business last year, that it as the least worshipful he had ever seen. This hearsay did not surprise me. That plenary featured Friends making advocacy speeches they had prepared in advance, supporting their own views.<br />
<br />
It has been of concern to me for quite some time that the mores of American democracy and the world of non-profits have drifted into the business process of Friends, at least here in the Liberal domain of the Society where I am planted. This may be because we attract people who, in other aspects of their lives, are used to "doing business" in that way. They easily mistake what's going on in meeting for worship for business for that same process and, too often, they employ these mores here, complicating and even corrupting the process. <br />
<br />
Our business process is not supposed to be a reconciliation our diverse views, a compromising or overcoming of opposition that creates (or forces) something we can all live with (or not). We are supposed to finding the <i>will of God</i> and then reconciling <i>ourselves </i>to that. It's hard enough to stay in that low place while sitting among Friends doing business, subject to the wolves of our own egos, wills and vanities It's even harder to do while trying to tend to the process from the facing bench, where there is ready access to the levers of rationalistic and psychological influence that, whether one is aware of it or not, we can (and do, sometimes) use to subvert the will of God, and substitute our own will--sometimes because we are so caught up in our will-worship that we could not see the will of God if it were written on the wall and labeled as such.<br />
<br />
Those charged with supporting discernment, in my experience, should give their undivided attention to the integrity of the process. As I say, no one has to agree with me about this. It is, however, for all to consider.<br />
<br />Tmothy Travishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02788311873771605510noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24917443.post-88302365046076228222012-07-26T05:58:00.000-07:002012-07-26T05:59:44.813-07:00Christian, Not Christo-CentricBack from Annual Session and I have a lot to think and write about in the coming weeks. I want to start with something of a personal concern. It is a fairly small thing, but it challenges my peace because it is symptomatic of one of the reasons our Society has reached its current, much reduced condition.<br />
<br />
A Friend, a good friend, referred to me as "Christo-centric" at Annual Session. She meant nothing negative by it and surely did not know that to call a Christian Quaker Christo-centric was similar to calling a Sunni Muslim a Shia, although the differences between those two groups is far less than that between Christo-centric and Christian Friends.<br />
<br />
There are many fine explanations of what Christo-centric Christianity is about and the Google machine can give more subtle distinctions than I can in my summary to draw the contrast. Christo-centrism is a Protestant notion that moves the "person" of Christ to the center of religious practice (or makes it the main notion of belief) but only in certain offices. Given the uncertain state of our pre-destined souls, Christ is the only agent who can punch our ticket for the afterlife and so that is where the Christo-centric are led to concentrate, to the diminution if not exclusion of all others of its offices.<br />
<br />
Christo-centric theology goes beyond that, at least among those concerned with nuances, but on the steeet tends to keep Christian minds pre-occupied with "everlasting life" and sends the message that they have been given a pass on righteousness in the here and now. Can't help ourselves, you know, the Powers run the world. Sermon on the Mount is a great set if ideals but, really, the best we can do is "believe" in Christ (that is, affirm one set or another of "orthodox" notional propositions about "his" nature, character and the "work he did" for us while walking around among us). If we accept the validity of those propositions we can be saved. <br />
<br />
A faith and practice quite different was opened to Fox and Friends. Sure, they affirmed an afterlife, but they believed that living in the Kingdom of God, here and now, would take care of whatever lay beyond the grave. Christ, The Light, was to be "believed in," but that meant actually doing what Christ told us to do, what the Light showed us we needed to grow out of, in this life. The Powers were to be confronted and redeemed by living as guided, and their experience was that this guidance pulled them closer and closer to living lives exemplified by the Sermon on the Mount, more and more described by the Fruits of the Spirit. Friends of the Lamb's War generation rejected the institutions and doctrines of Christo-centric Protestantism--explicitly. They set out to confront the Powers (including the church), to redeem them. And it cost them.<br />
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The fact that 300+ years later there are many Christo-centric, Protestant Friends, so many, in fact, that most Friends don't know there is a difference between their faith and practice and that of Fox, can be explained. First, that founding generation was comprised of people brought up as Protestants so that many of those notions came into the Society with them and were never completely eradicated in them. They left marks that could be used later (by Friend Gurney, for example) to legitimize their later amplification. Second, the relentless heat brought on Friends by the hostile Protestant establishment finally, in succeeding generations, caused Friends to at least appear to pull back to the mainstream as they retreated into Quietism behind their hedge. Much of the effort of second and third generations of Friends (Barclay and Penn, for example) was aimed at showing that Quakers were harmless, not so different, and hammering out "compromises" that obscured distinctions and gave the establishment the satisfaction of believing that Friends conformed to their notional norms. "Affirming" rather and "swearing" did not confront the idea that there could be two standards of truth and that one had some latitude to lie if one was not "on record" as telling the truth. <br />
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I am among the Friends who have found themselves brought to that faith and practice, not to "Christo-centric" or "Christ centered" belief. I am not preoccupied with heaven and "believing" but with hearing and obeying, living in the Kingdom of God on earth (although I more often call that "living in the Life"). I do what I can and hope/expect to be able to do better in the future, as what I have done in the past has enabled me to do better, now, than I did then.<br />
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That this confusion exists about the difference, or that there is little awareness that there is a difference, is due to the gradual invasion, growth and legitimization of the Protestant faith and practice among us which, culminating in the 19th Century in the United States, keeps many Friends in the dark today. <br />
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The suffering and hardships endured during the decades of persecution of Friends by the Protestant establishment of its day was not some kind of tragic misunderstanding. That establishment understood with clarity the threat the Quaker faith and practice posed to the Power they called a church and the wages they received by serving that Power. They set out to destroy that faith and practice and, looking around, it's apparent they have almost succeeded. But, as it is written, the darkness cannot comprehend (eclipse) the Light.<br />
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Some interesting Quaker process questions came to the fore during the business plenaries at Annual Session and I'll be addressing that next time.<br />
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<br />Tmothy Travishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02788311873771605510noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24917443.post-43547620016835032712012-07-01T11:51:00.001-07:002012-07-01T11:54:19.781-07:00It's just the <a href="http://theroundearthsimaginedcorners.blogspot.com/2012/06/towards-quaker-theology.html?spref=tw"><span style="color: red;">same old Protestant stuff,</span></a> over and over again.<br />
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My "experience" is as unreliable a source of grounding and authority as the Bible is. Both lead me to draw my own inferences and then be guided by these rationalistic notions--instead of being guided, day by day, by what God is telling me directly.<br />
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I have laid down both the Protestant notion of reasoning my way to righteousness from the Bible, and the "Quaker" notion of reasoning my way to righteousness from my own experience. <br />
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Neither has or can improve my condition because both come down to worshipping and relying on my own reason.<br />
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If I hear God and do as I am told then I am fine. <br />
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It's all the theology I need. In fact, it's all the theology I can handle. Anything else just gets me in trouble.<br />
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<br />Tmothy Travishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02788311873771605510noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24917443.post-6132365983600617752012-02-01T15:58:00.000-08:002012-02-01T16:00:31.310-08:00civil persecution in the name of freedom of religionReligious freedom is precious to Friends so when people begin complaining that theirs is being compromised our ears perk up.<br />
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I think that the Catholics who run hospitals currently complaining about the "unconstitutionality" of requiring them to follow federal law regarding birth control are confused about the concept.<br />
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Catholic hospitals, like all hospitals, are businesses. They are not religious institutions. Religion is incidental to the business. Although people who run these businesses have the right to religious liberty, as do those who work there, the hospital, itself, does not. The fact that a business, even a non-profit, is owned by a church does not mean that business can choose to ignore the laws that apply to all such businesses.<br />
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There are provisions to protect people who claim violation of conscience if they are required to dispense contraception. The hospital, however, does not have a conscience--it has a business license. If no one currently working for that business is willing to do work the law requires the hospital to do then the hospital has an obligation to hire people who are.<br />
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The Catholic church is not prohibited from hiring a priest who refuses to marry same sex couples, and cannot be required to hire one who will, but it cannot run a hospital that hires only doctors who refuse to treat patients simply because they are gay. It's hospital--a business--not a church. <br />
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People most often think of freedom of religion as a way to protect churches from the state. Actually, it's the other way around. Most of the time it works (in so far as it does) to ensure freedom from religion, to keep the government from being corrupted into a tool one religious group can use to force others to conform to its orthodoxies. <br />
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And that's what's going on here. Catholics want to run the businesses they own in such a way that they can refuse to provide services to those who don't live a Catholic life style, those who refuse to be a Catholic in form if not in content.<br />
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It's really a pretty clear cut example of why religion--all religion--needs to be kept out of civil government.Tmothy Travishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02788311873771605510noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24917443.post-2078014355595484922011-07-03T10:25:00.000-07:002011-07-03T10:42:23.926-07:00Protestant First, Quaker Second (a simple desultory screed re "heresy")A Quaker blogger wrote a <a href="http://lambswar.blogspot.com/2011/03/is-universalism-heresy.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+LambsWar+%28The+Lamb%27s+War%29">piece</a> about whether a current theology of Christian universalism is heresy or not.<br />
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Moving in fear of spreading division and strife (as if I had the capacity to do that), I want to clarify that for some Friends the Protestant orthodoxy that is implicitly the reference point in this piece for what "Christianity" is, does not cover the waterfront. This Protestant orthodoxy seems, to some of us, like a heresy, itself.<br />
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As the few who give notice or pay attention to this blog know, Christianity is not, for some, a set of rationalistic, propositional beliefs about the nature, character and plans of God. Christianity is, rather, about finding Christ in one's every day experience, developing a quotidian spiritual practice that sharpens and tests such imminent discernment, and acting in the present on the discerned leadings.<br />
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Christ is the <b>only</b> authority. And that means Christ, the living presence, and not Christ, a set of ideas (approved or not) from which people try to reason what Christ wants done. The problem with Protestantism is that it denies the word <i>of</i> God and substitutes words <i>about</i> God as the supreme authority. Hence the chaos in Christianity--human minds working with human ideas to figure out what God wants us to do. Individuals with the bounded rationality inherent in the human condition, using one version of the Bible or another as a more or less closed data base, parsing its words to "work out their salvation." (the verb is "work" not "think") Protestantism, like any religion based on manipulation of propositional beliefs, is as much a faith in human rationality--and as little a faith in an actual God in any sense of the word--as is the atheism of a Dawkins or Hitchens; Doctor Tweedle-dee Dawkins, meet Doctor Tweedle-dum Dobson.<br />
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No one knows whether or not all will eventually be saved (or even what "saved" means) except in their own reasonings, hopes and imaginations. And, except in such places, no one ever can. One can believe but one cannot know. Notions, notions, notions. A blunt, square blade makes a spade and problems arise in using such a tool as a shovel.<br />
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But we do know how we are supposed to be living our lives--a knowledge that anyone can (and does) come to fairly easily. We're not very good at living that way, but it's been clearly revealed many times in many places (including our own individual hearts) for a good long time. It's a part of all spiritual traditions--it's just stuck in the middle of a lot of theology and, as it is written, in for a dime, in for a dollar. You can't take the word of the living Christ (or even the written one, sometimes) if it's contradicted (in fact or by "reason") by some other part of the theology in which it has become imbedded. What is revealed in our hearts is denied by our brain--and our cultures have created marvelous thought structures to ensure this denial sticks in favor of "common sense."<br />
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That's how we got the "just war" doctrine. Just one more way to reason/rationalize our way away from clearly defined leadings and openings we all have about killing other people.<br />
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So, this is why, by the way, the revelation of early Friends so easily turned away from the teaching of the universal access of all humans to direct guidance from God and the necessity of one to obey that guidance. Given that they were led out of the bondage of Protestant rationalism by reality of an indwelling Christ it was easy for them to return there while claiming to be carrying that Christ back with them. Then came the reconciling of their direct experience of God to all that theology (so familiar to them from their upbringing) that they were led so recently to deny. So, bit by bit, the Judaic books of law and practice and historical "lessons learned" (along with all the theology that has developed to "explain" all that stuff) pushed the living Christ further and further out of Quakerism. There can apparently be no co-existence between the ideas about God and word from God. The Bible may reflect some Christian experience, along with a lot other things antithetical to it--but it does not define it and is certainly not the place to learn about it. All of those doctrines presented and parsed out of the Bible apparently inevitably overwhelm and subsume reliance on discernment and obedience God--perhaps because it's hard to hear that still small voice with all those Bible verses buzzing around in our ears.<br />
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That is why the 19th Century was so turbulent, fractious, backbiting, faction ridden (and so Un-Quakerly in so many ways) for Friends. That was the outcome of Protestantism becoming completely ascendent over the indwelling Christ, the Christ who was completely drown in the rising tide of what some would call Biblical worship. It took that kind of discord and even hatred and violence to turn the Quaker movement just another "denomination" of Protestantism, with a few quaint oddities that did not allow it to retain its peculiarity. And so it was revealed to Bible parsing Friends that Christ was only available to those who were sanctified as described by the Protestant ideology and not, as it appears to say in John something born in the heart of all people entering the world. Yes, the indwelling Christ was declared .... wait for it ... a heresy by Protestant Quakers. <br />
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The problem is that theologies, Protestantism among them, consist largely of a mapping out of strategies of escape from living as we know we are supposed to live (and therefore from the difficulties entailed in living that way). This substitution blunts our urgency to obey God (making it "safe" for us to live in our cultures) and facilitates our living by the book, or, rather, by what we can convince ourselves, or the keepers of our orthodoxy can convince us, the book <i>really</i> says. Our Christ comes to us with a David chaser, so to speak, and David and Jesus don't mix, no matter what is written to the contrary. (Jesus may or may not have descended, as it is written, from the house of David --we will never really know--but can you picture him at the dinner table there?)<br />
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So that makes me a heretic because what I am saying definitely undermines the Protestantism that so many identify as being Christianity. <br />
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If heresy is that which, in the name of Christ leads people from Christ, that puts me the position to ask what really is the heresy, here? <br />
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It's fine with me if one says "I believe that a rationalistic ideology about the nature, character and plans of God is the supreme authority of my life--and should be the supreme authority of everyone's life-- because that rationalistic ideology tells me it is the supreme authority and that stands to reason." I hope it's just as fine with them if I say I believe something else because, notwithstanding it "standing to their/our bounded reason," the outcomes don't indicate that their ideology leads people to those green pastures and still waters described in its brochures.<br />
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And I am convinced that it is those green pastures and still waters--and our transformation into beings fit and able to live there--that is the point of our spirituality. That is, of course, a belief that got Friends in big trouble way back in the founding generation because they spoke out against Protestantism's teachings that there could be no improvement in human spiritual condition "this side of the grave." That notion, that denial of the possibility of human transformation in this life, so integral to Protestantism, allows us to shrug at all evil--in ourselves and in the world--and go upon our merry way as people whose first allegiance is to the world and whose hope for kingdom is reserved for the great by and by.<br />
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And yet, it is written, the kingdom is and is becoming...who's the heretic, here?<br />
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A contemporary prophet wrote, "You can't talk your way out of something you acted your way into. You have to act your way out." He might well have written, for the context of discussing the Protestant heresy, that one cannot "think" or "believe" one's way out--one must hear and act (obey) one's way out.Tmothy Travishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02788311873771605510noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24917443.post-66686311859512627432011-05-06T09:57:00.000-07:002011-05-07T07:20:46.493-07:00What I Can Say...<span style="font-size: large;">I heard confusion among us about the death of Osama Bin Laden, and the confusion echoed in my own mind. The conclusion I came to is a familiar one: if my thinking about something leads me to confusion one of the causes of that might be that I am trying to reason about something not amenable to reason. I'm a lawyers so I can take a lot of different sides and argue them convincingly, but I once had a poster on my wall that said "People who argue better are not necessarily right."</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Thinking about how to react to the killing of Osama Bin Laden is confusing because, like all issues of morality, reason cannot help but fail us. But that's fine because I don't need reason to know how I am supposed to react to this.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">My experience has been that any time I have used coercion (or entertained the possibility)--be it physical force or sarcasm--to protect myself or someone else from something I perceived as threatening or something I feared I have not been made safe and my condition has been compromised in the effort.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Christ/The Light has made it clear to me that, regardless of the harm I do others in this regard, I do harm to myself, to my spiritual (and psychological and even, perhaps, physical) condition. I know because it has been revealed to me (no thinking necessary) that as the powers and thrones and governments (and those acting under their control) struggle and war among themselves around me I am supposed to resist being sucked into it (by thinking errors like the "just war doctrine" or some concept of "justice") and, if the way is opened to me, to do what there is to do to ameliorate the suffering and damage done to all involved.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I can't say if that's what others are suppose to do, but I know it's what I am supposed to do. It's not that this "makes sense" to me or that it "stands to reason"--because often it doesn't. It's just that if I don't go with what I know, as opposed to what I can be persuaded (or persuade myself) to do, I am going to hear about it later and I am going to be sorry.</span>Tmothy Travishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02788311873771605510noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24917443.post-28120029139379934572011-03-18T10:25:00.000-07:002011-03-18T10:43:09.560-07:00As if ...<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This is one more of those comments on <a href="http://lambswar.blogspot.com/">another's blog </a>so long that turned into a whole post of my own. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This iteration of The Lamb's War, Micah Bales' outstanding vehicle, centered as it was around this quotation from C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity, really spoke to me. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;"><i>[People] are told they ought to love God. They cannot find any such feeling in themselves. What are they to do? The answer is the same as before. Act as if you did. Do not sit trying to manufacture feelings. Ask yourself, 'if I were sure that I loved God, what would I do?' When you have found the answer, go and do it.</i> - C.S. Lewis,<i>Mere Christianity</i>, pg. 132</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;">I</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;"> was one time thrown off--way, way off--by this thinking error, which did not take me to green pastures and still waters. It led me through rapids and into the desert. Getting back has been a journey. </span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;"><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;">I saw descriptions of a direct experience with God, much like my own, validated in Protestant scripture and theology, in the Protestant notions that have come to be incorporated into Quaker faith and practice. I therefore came to the conclusion (thinking, thinking) that everything else described in orthodox (mere) Christianity had a validity equal to that of my experience. </span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;">In for a dime, as it is written, in for a dollar. </span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;"><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;">The Quaker cliche that spiritual experience is validated by scripture led me to the thinking error that spiritual experience <i>requires</i> scriptural validation but that scriptures do not require the validation of spiritual experience. </span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;"><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;">In for a dime, it is written, in for a dollar.</span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;">Lewis says fake it, act on what you can reason from theology tells you is true, until you make it, until your experience shows you it's real. If your experience never validates the theology/ideology then keep right on distrusting your experience and keep right on trying to live in the "reality" the keepers of your theology recommends to you. Even though your experience never aligns with notions about the nature, character and plans of God (say the certified smart interpreters of this theology/ideology) do not distrust it, do not lay it down in favor of what you are hearing from God. Who are you, anyway, to be hearing things from God? </span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;">That did not work out for me, at least it didn't move me toward realizing the fruits of the spirit in my own life. In fact, it worked the other way around. I accepted orthodox Protestant notions--inferences humans have made--conclusions to which they have jumped--based on their own experience with God or on second-hand descriptions from others of their experiences with God. These inferences (built on other inferences), came to me in the same package as the description of "that still small voice" that I recognized and raised those notions to a level of validity that was not proved in my experience. </span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;"><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;">These orthodox notions completely subverted the experiential leading of God in my life and left me, and many like me, signing on to notions such as "the teachings of Jesus do not require us to help the 'undeserving' poor." Most notably, to me, was the idea that the church should line up to support the wars waged by the powers against one another. </span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;"><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;">No matter how many times I crucified Christ when It showed up to lead me out of that mess, no matter how many times I buried Christ in the tomb of my heart so as to raise theological notions to lead my life, sooner or I later I heard the rock rolling away and found myself, face to face, with Reality (AKA Truth). Could this, and not all the theology, be Reality? </span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;"><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;">From the time of that opening I began to "deconstruct" my "Christian" "beliefs," winnowing them down to what I could say from my own own experience. I can say that God deals with me as scripture describes David (and many others, including Jesus) being dealt with, at times. I can say that by going with that, and not resisting it, I more closely resemble </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;">the image of Galatians 5:22-26 and Matthew 5-7. That's what I can say.</span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;">When C.S. Lewis talks up what comes down to "What Would Jesus Do?" he loses me completely. It' a trap that lured me into relying on drawing rational/rationalizing conclusions about my moral choices based on second hand, hearsay notions (reasonings) about the nature, purpose and plans of God. Did Augustine really not hear God's voice when he thought out the theology of "just war?" Or was he relying on his own reasoning, compromised by the values and power he and the church had, anointed as they were by the powers Christ, it is written, came to destroy? When Augustine spoke was he seeing himself and the church as the power behind the thrones? Was he clueless that the thrones were the power behind him and his church?</span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;">Am I the only person who ever noticed how many times "interpretation of scripture" actually rationalizes evil, allowing us to continue in the states of mind from which that evil springs in our lives? </span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;">This I can say: I have lived in and been delivered from this trap.</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;"><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;">The other thinking error from which I have been delivered that came to mind in reading Micah's blog was the necessity to work my own way through the "dry periods"--the times that God seems so far away that I could not find God.</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;"><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;">I remember a line from a play (Inherit The Wind) in which it was said of someone that he was a good man who got lost looking for God too high up and too far away. It was both liberating and edifying to realize that the absence of burning bushes is not a sign of the absence of God. It's a still small voice. It caused an earthquake in my soul, but it didn't sound like a freight train, all the time. And it certainly didn't, and still doesn't, leave me feeling all warm and loved all the time.</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;"><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;">In line with that, I remember telling a Presbyterian pastor, after a Bible study, that sometimes it's hard to hear God for all the scripture ringing on my ears, for all the interpretations of scripture available to occupy and distract me when I should be listening to God. I can always find a way to avoid the hard and beautiful stuff by throwing a couple of Bible verses together and going out for a spiritual cheeseburger. </span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;">My experience of God's presence is not about being blissed-out. My experience of God's presence and guidance is as mundane and quotidian as remembering to feed the dogs, not letting the dirty dishes (actual and metaphorical) stack up in the sink, yielding the right of way and deciding to pick my daughter up from school when it's raining before she calls. Those are the kinds of things God seems to care about most, in my life.</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;"><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;">God is always about what I am doing, or not doing. God never tells me about God, other people tell me about God, boy oh boy do other people tell me about God.</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;"> I hear God telling me to love others, I never hear God telling me that God is love. That's an inference I could draw from my constant instructions to be loving, but God is not proved to be loving by telling me to love--and it isn't necessary for me to believe that God is loving, anyway. What's necessary is for me to love.</span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;">People tell me to love God. God doesn't. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;">I don't even know what it means to love God. Maybe, because it's what I constantly hear about, I am loving God by loving other people--but that's just a notion. Maybe I am loving God when I accept the Grace of God's guidance and act on it. I don't know if any of that is true but what I know is I need to love people and accept God's guidance.</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;"><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;">And God never tells me about other people. I have learned (the hard way--how else?) that when I think God is telling me about someone else it's really my compromised, judgmental little reasoning skills inferring things about other people's lives based on my experience. And when I am deluded enough to act on those kinds of inferences I discover, very soon, the immanent presence of God--insisting that I meditate on the conflict and strife I had stirred up and how much good I have done anyone involved. </span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;"><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;">Although I struggle with anthropomorphizing about God, I have very commonly envisioned God as standing with folded arms, tapping a foot with an expression that says "how many times, man, how many times, do I have to tell you to stop thinking about what I am and what I want and just do what I tell you?"</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;"><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;">My experience is that God does not take vacations and that those times I used to think God was not present were times I didn't want God present to me (in the tomb you go!) or times that, trying to wade through all the theology to find God, my ears were full of second hand notions--religious ideology--about things that it did my condition no good to think about--thinking about things that ended up compromising my condition. </span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;">Odysseus, it is written, filled his sailors' ears with wax so they could not be led astray. Filling my own ears with theological wax actually worked the other way around--it made it possible for me to be misled, cut off from my guidance, into relying on what I thought that guidance would say if it could get through.</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;"><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;">Micah has an idea about what God not seeming present might be about: He writes:</span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i style="background-color: black;">"It seems from my experience of this process that God periodically removes our training wheels. God gives us the freedom to experience the full possibilities of life in Christ.</i></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i style="background-color: black;">This makes sense, doesn't it? As Christians, we believe that God desires us to freely choose relationship with God."</i></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;">I honestly don't know if that's true, and no one else does, either. It might make sense, if the notional mainstay of Protestantism he describes as something we believe "as Christians" is, indeed, true. But I don't know if that is true. (That's part of the "free will" doctrine that seems as useful to me, spiritually, as the notion of a "free market" seems useful in understanding the real world of economics.) My experience actually cuts the other way, insofar as I can draw conclusions about it from how God treats me. God does not wait around for me to make the choice about being in relationship with God. I am and when I have tried to leave that relationship the "hounds of heaven" pulled me right back home. I cannot speak to the experience of others in this regard--I can only say what I can say.</span></span><br />
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<div style="font-family: Times; font-size: medium; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;">People I have loved have died. It doesn't do me much good to think about why "God lets that happen." It just does. I can't say why.</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;"> I can say, though, that that my knowing why (or thinking I do) is way less important than my knowing how to respond to them. As I say, my experience is that God is long on the "how to deal with it" and very short on the "why it's coming down." What I get is really what I need. "Why me, Lord?" is totally beside the question. The question is "What do I do with this, Lord?"</span></span></span></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white;"><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;"><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;">I recall "dry spells" from my younger days. There were times I felt separated from God, but what I feel like is not necessarily what I really am. How many of us have felt fine while a terrible sickness developed in our bodies or while alienation from someone we loved eroded a relationship upon which we relied? And how many times have we known, although we still felt lousy, that we were on the mend, or that although it was still awkward and sometimes difficult a relationship was heading in the right direction? Feeling alienated from God is a feeling--it's not a description of my actual condition.</span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;">Those "dark nights of the soul" were times I was hung up trying to reconcile all the orthodox propositions about God so as to "understand" God and figure out what to do. Those were times I thought it was only if I understood the nature, character and plans of God that I could hope to live my life according to God's will. </span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;">But that's a thinking error. It's not for me to figure God out. It's for me to hear and obey--even if, perhaps especially if, what I hear doesn't "make sense" in light of all I have been told has been "figured out" about God. </span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;">Sometimes I really wish there was a book in the Bible that tried to get this across to me. I could have saved myself a lot of time and trouble.</span></span><br />
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</span></span>Tmothy Travishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02788311873771605510noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24917443.post-72776459824144509092011-02-21T06:53:00.000-08:002011-02-21T07:10:46.464-08:00The Third Question<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white;">This is the last "installment" of my own attempt to answer the three questions posed by <a href="http://questforadequacy.blogspot.com/2011/02/jesus-and-me.html">Ashley </a>in her blog, A Passionate and Determined Quest for Adequacy.</span><br />
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<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white;">3. What one thing would you say to people to describe your relationship with Jesus?</span></b><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white;">The way I relate to Jesus is as a master, like a chess master.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white;">The gospels are about Jesus, placing him at the center of "the good news." I cannot get my mind around the life of Jesus as good news for me if he was "the pre-existing God" or "born God." To say that Jesus "lived a perfect life" doesn't speak to my condition because I am not God. To say that he lived a "perfected life," however, aligns our lives.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white;">This is a notion, of course. It's as speculative to say Jesus was human as it is to say he was God (no matter what the probabilities) because there is no way to know, one way or the other. One can believe, one way or the other. As I have said many times believing things in the realm of spirituality and morality that we can't know is dangerous due to the limitations--lack of data and presence of thinking errors--of rationality. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white;">Where such notions have value to me--and then only when I don't invest in them to the point that I care if anyone else invests in them or not--is when they seem consistent with my own experience. It is notional, speculative, for me to think that such things as God talking to young Samuel in the temple could happen but the story "rings true" with me. That's not because I hold up theological and/or scientific propositions about how a universe would have to work for such a thing to happen. It's because I have had that experience, myself. That makes it seem plausible to me.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white;">The story of Jesus is "the good news" to me because it is the story of a man who, with diligent attention to the leadings and openings of God to him, attained a degree of perfection that demonstrated life that transcended the world we all inhabit, a life he is written to have said "was" and "was coming." </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white;">I see that. Not in my head, I don't "understand" it, it doesn't "make sense," or "stand to reason." I mean I see it, around me.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white;">I don't (and can't) know that there is an afterlife. But I know that there is a here and now. And I know, from my experience in it, that if I pay attention to what God is telling me from moment to moment, I am going to be a lot better off--as will those around me. The faith and practice of Jesus, insofar as it is portrayed in the scriptures, is one of a person who spends a lot of time with God, in different ways, and who is always seeking--and following--divine guidance.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white;">Having been dragged to it enough times to have finally figured out that it's easier all around to just walk where I am told to go, I cannot say that I live in that transcendent space that Jesus seems to have occupied. I can say, though, that when I am able to be faithful I catch glimpses of it all around me. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white;">I think about the scene at the river when, it is written, John puts Jesus under. The spirit descended on Jesus (like the form of a dove). I don't know what that means, any more than anyone else does. But I can see it meaning that it marks the perfection of a human being, the attainment of maturity, wholeness and fitness for a particular purpose. From all accounts, accounts being what they are, this was the Perfection of all Perfections, and maybe it was. What it was for Jesus, though, is not as important to me as what it is to me.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white;">For me <i>that</i> is the good news. I am not, nor is anyone else, doomed to a life of depravity, hopeless under the power of sinful states of mind, creating an endless stream of evil that will dog me and everyone around me for the rest of my life, finding relief, perhaps, only after I die. The Protestants are wrong. Fox was right. There is perfection, maturity, wholeness and fitness on <i>this</i> side of the grave. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white;">Or maybe they were both right. God's grace, orthodox Protestantism teaches us, "saves us." I have been taught that God's grace is some kind of a "get out of jail free card" issued for whatever reasons it might please God to issue it--eiher in this life or the next. It certainly has nothing to do with anything I can do.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white;">However, God's grace as I have come to know it is the willingness of God to talk directly to me, to show me the way and to change me. If I will take the hints and submit to the process I will be by some measure saved. Can I make that happen, myself? No, but accepting the grace of God--doing what I am told to do--I can make sure it does.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white;"> I will not get to where Jesus got, but I have come nearer than where I started, and I can keep putting that starting place farther behind me. In the dynamic of the faith of Jesus I recognize the outlines of that which has been trying--with uneven success--to bring me along for years.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white;">There is a similar view of Jesus, I have discovered, in the work of Elias Hicks. That doesn't give my notion any more (or less) weight. Mine or his, it's still just speculation. I don't really care if anyone else validates it or not. What matters to me, as I have stressed through answering these three questions is that what matters is my doing what I am told to do, going where I am told to go, and following to where I am led. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white;">But for being moved to answer the first question I might not have ever addressed the other two--and especially not this last.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white;">But, hey--you asked. ;-]</span>Tmothy Travishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02788311873771605510noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24917443.post-64326202979587687022011-02-16T09:54:00.000-08:002011-02-16T10:10:47.118-08:00Question Two<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I answered the first of the "three questions" addressed by Ashley in her blog post, <a href="http://questforadequacy.blogspot.com/2011/02/jesus-and-me.html">Jesus and Me</a>. The questions grew from a "homework assignment" that a friend of hers was working on in the course of her participation in the School of the Spirit.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Here is my answer to the second question.</span><br />
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<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">2. Who is Jesus in my life?</span></b><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This is where things get hard for me to talk about because I don't know whether Jesus is "the same" as Christ. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I hear a lot of people talk about Jesus in the same way I talk about what I have explained I mean by Christ and it's fine with me if people want to do that. As I have said many times, I don't care if people call the intervening agent of authority in their lives The Light, The Spirit, God/Goddess, Christ, Jesus, the Messiah or The Big Kahuna. I don't really care if they see it as an intervening agent--whether "that of God in everyone" is conceptualized as a little piece of God that is some kind of aspect of us that grows on our inside and shapes us or as something in our make-up that "put there" and belonging and responding to God and thereby shaping us.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Don't care. Inney shaping agent or outtey shaping agent--no matter to me.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I care about the shaping. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I have conceived of God (and no God) in a lot of different ways in my life, and have struggled earnestly with myself and others who have conceived of It is the same and different ways from what I was believing, the conceptualization I was holding on to, at that moment. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">None of those beliefs and notions has a been of real help in the "conversion of my manners" or "conforming me to Christ"--although some of them have been a real hinderance. Looking back, I can see that "The Work" has proceeded in me, over the years, as I described it in my Answer to Question One, no matter what I believed or didn't believe, although sometimes an episode in my shaping ended with my laying down what I believed before the episode began.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I have reached a point that I prefer to lay down (or, perhaps, lay aside) all "belief," at least all belief about things I have not experienced: all "belief" about where my experience "comes from"--all speculation about the nature and character of God--and all "belief" about where it's taking me (except that which I can see)--all speculation about the purposes of God.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I don't know what to believe about that experience and what's behind it. I do know, though, to have faith in it, to trust it and act on it.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I have never "met" Jesus unless, as I say, Jesus and Christ are the same thing. I can't know that (although I could believe that and have). </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">For a long time the writings of Lloyd Lee Wilson have been influential on my "beliefs" and I am more comfortable with some of the theology he writes than I am with the works of others, especially the works of theologians long on the more "orthodox" Protestant notions. HIs Pendle HIll Pamphlet (409), "Who Do You Say I Am?" sits easy with me, and I encourage all to read it. This theology "makes sense" to me in light of my experience--his Jesus "explains" my experience, is consistent with it. It accounts for the "known data." </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But, again, in the most loving and respectful way, I have to say say that like all belief about the nature, character and plans of the Divine, it can't be shown to be "true"--to the exclusion of other explanations. Is the "known data" all the data about the ineffable? And, most important, my acknowledging it's "truth" has not a condition precedent to the work that has been done and remains to be done in me. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "Who Am I, as a Disciple of Jesus?" is the title for the last section of Friend Wilson's pamphlet. In it he writes: "My faith commitment is to God on the path illuminated for me by Jesus the Messiah." I would not say that (although his choice to use of the word "faith" instead of "belief" is certainly one I would make). I know, though, that he means the same thing by "Jesus the Messiah" as I mean when I say "Christ."</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Why is this distinction so important to me? </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Equipped with an experiential/experimental Christ, as opposed to a notional Christ/Jesus, it's the difference between listening and thinking--and that is all the difference in the world, all the difference between the world and the kingdom.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I remember the "What Would Jesus Do" query. It invited us, in making moral choices, to consider--to reason from--what we thought Jesus would have done. One cannot do that unless one has some kind of notion--and speculation it cannot help but be--about who Jesus was and what made him tick. That kind of reasoning from theology/speculation has led me into some pretty painful places.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There is no necessity, in my experience, to reason from any set of notions, even from my notions (or anyone's notions) about what Jesus would do, if faced with and particular moral situation. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I have plenty of my own notions about Jesus, though, and I will share at least one of those in my upcoming answer to the Third Question.</span><br />
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</span>Tmothy Travishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02788311873771605510noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24917443.post-40516036074349059392011-02-13T08:56:00.000-08:002011-02-13T09:01:36.308-08:00Addressing a comment to my last post ...<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 16px;">J</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 16px;">ay asked, in a comment to my last post:</span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;">"Please tell me how you discern Christ's voice from that of your conscience. How does it sound different to you?"</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;">Way too long an answer for that little comment box, so I will address here it before moving on to questions 2 and 3.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;">I am not so certain about what conscience is. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 16px;"></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 16px;">I look at it as a part of my cultural conditioning that governs morals and ethics, as an orientation within the social, political and religious consensus in which I live. The abstraction I call "conscience" seems to work to keep me within that consensus when I am tempted or urged to act outside of it. </span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;">The culture that conditions conscience is the collection of norms a group has adopted to accomplish the universal activities that fulfill human needs. Eating, staying warm, reproducing and re</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;">solving disputes are examples of these universal activities. Everyone, everywhere, at all times, has done these things in an amazing array of ways. Conscience is the part of those norms, in a given time and place, that focuses on moral and ethical behavior.</span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;">Such consensus, and therefore conscience, always contains exceptions to its rules and, along with flexibility necessary to meet complex situations, these exceptions create the possibility for rationalizing in the matter of morality. That makes conscience vulnerable to sinful states of mind (greed, anger, pride, lust and so on) and an actual accomplice in breaking through its own moral limitations. After all, for every cliche--or love song--that we can hang our hat on as we make a decision, there is another that counsels us to do exactly the opposite. In other words, we can corrupt conscience, or allow others, especially authority figures, to corrupt it for us.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;">Conscience is also vulnerable to the limitations of the group's knowledge. Even in the most loving states of mind our moral and ethical direction from our conscience can bring us to a bad end for lack of data or information that, if we had the benefit of its possession, we might have been able to choose better. Notions about race and sex and sexual orientation are examples of how conscience is misled, even sometimes without malice, by the definition of "reality" that exists--or is accepted--by a group.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;">It seems helpful, to me, to think of conscience a belonging to to realm of "the powers"--those institutions--including religion--that are said in some theologies to hold the world together in its fallen condition. (I realize that sentence is packed with notions--all theologies are--but it may (or may not) help communicate how I think about conscience. I certainly do not lean on that--or any other--theology to add validity to what I am saying, just to illustrate it).</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;">My discernment allows Christ to push conscience aside (Christ has defeated the powers, it is written) and leads me to act outside of the consensus of my cultural conditioning (there is one, in effect, that can speak to my conditioning), or to do things included within that consensus but not taken seriously by most of its members.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;">So, with that said, discerning Christ's "voice" from that of my conscience seems to be a function of three things: the amount of pressure brought to bear on me by the visitation, persistance of that pressure and my experience with Christ and the various other "voices" out there, in the past.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;">When confronted by a choice, or when I start hearing myself taken to task about something, I know it's Christ when the amount of discomfort or suffering associated with the confrontation causes me is great and becomes greater over time. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;">The second hall mark of a "visitation" is its persistence. If one of my normal rationalizations or a countervailing cliche does not cause the pressure to dissipate then it's probably Christ. (Sometimes my powers of rationalization have been able to dismiss Christ, but only temporarily. I can crucify Christ, sometimes, and lock It in the tomb of my heart, but when it's Christ I am dealing with I soon hear the rock rolling aside and know that It's back.)</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;">The third discerning factor is my experience. As scary, and humbling, as it has been, at times, following high pressure, persistent urgings has led to good outcomes for me, not only in regard to the situation at hand but also improving my overall condition and ability to function in the future. Like others, I have seen my condition portrayed in the Bible, and elsewhere. For me seeing the Fruits of the Spirit, described in Galatians 5, is validation of good discernment. The five testimonies, a restatement of those Fruits, is another set of benchmarks--as is being led to those green pastures and still waters, notwithstanding what I had to go through to get there.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;">If I am being visited about something that sounds familiar--something about which I have been visited in the past (shocking that there should be backsliding, I know) or something similar to the subject of a previous visitation then it's easy for me to discern who it is knocking on my spiritual chamber door.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;">This thing about conscience, though, becomes difficult for me, at this point. I begin to suspect that "mere conscience"--as a pure manifestation of cultural conditioning and a product of secular or religious (second hand) reasoning--is changed, or shaped or conformed or made peculiar when I respond to Christ's visitation. Perhaps it's just that conscience is an abstraction, but the accumulation of wisdom from Christ's leadings and that from conscience seem to have less a bright line boundary than once they did. Again, that may be because in reality there is no such "thing" as a conscience, it's just a notion. It may also be helpful, though, to conceptualize the "conscience" as changed by visitation and so no longer representing just the conditioning by one's culture but, rather, a conditioning--a transformation--by God or Christ or the Holy Spirit. The conscience may, then, become a vehicle for transmission of Christ's wisdom rather than just the wisdom of this group of people, at this time, in this place. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;">I seem to recall that in the literature of early Quakers the clear communication that The Light was not conscience (which seemed to be cast as a function of reason in Enlightenment thinking). But I think that alongside that clear distinction between the Light and conscience was that idea, in some writings, that The Light could inform conscience as I speculate, here, that it might.</span><br />
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;">I dunno about that, though. And I don't think it's all that important, one way or another. What is important is that I behave myself. As the masthead of this blog indicates, the purpose of religion/spirituality--its sum and substance--for me is improvement of the moral condition (specifically, my own), and therefore the moral behavior, of human beings. </span></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;"><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;">The short answer to your question is that if what I hear makes me uncomfortable enough, and lasts long enough, then I discern it to be Christ and follow it. I can't recall a time when, dragged around like that, it turned out not to be.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;">In addition, I strongly suspect it's Christ when I am hearing, again, about something I've been called on, before, and, in dealing with it, previously, my condition was improved.</span><br />
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</span></span>Tmothy Travishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02788311873771605510noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24917443.post-77043032166775692032011-02-09T13:00:00.000-08:002011-02-09T13:02:24.085-08:00Question One<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">After my post on equality it makes sense that I am interested in a blog called "A Passionate and Determined Quest for Adequacy." In a <a href="http://questforadequacy.blogspot.com/2011/02/jesus-and-me.html">recent post </a>there Ashley W. (also a Quaker lawyer, who lives in Oregon) answered three questions posed in a paper a friend of hers is writing for an assignment in The School of the Spirit.</span><br />
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<ul style="line-height: 1.4; list-style-image: initial; list-style-position: initial; list-style-type: disc; margin-bottom: 0.5em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 2.5em; padding-right: 2.5em; padding-top: 0px;"><li style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-color: initial; border-top-style: none; border-top-width: initial; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-indent: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Who is Jesus in your life?</span></li>
<li style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-color: rgba(128, 128, 128, 0.496094); border-top-style: none; border-top-width: 1px; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-indent: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What does it mean to you to live a Christian life?</span></li>
<li style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-color: rgba(128, 128, 128, 0.496094); border-top-style: none; border-top-width: 1px; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-indent: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What one thing would you say to people to describe your relationship with Jesus?</span></li>
</ul><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As I set out to answer these for myself I realized I would have to change the order in which I would answer them. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Also, as I thought about these I realized it was too much to cover in one blog post. This, then, is the first of three posts, one for each question.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">1. What does it mean to you to live a Christian life?</span></b></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></b></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A Christian life is one given over to living under the guidance of Christ. My experience is that reported by many Quakers since the founding of the movement, and by many people before and since, in and outside the Society: God communicates with everyone--the Light shines into the hearts of all and illuminates the way.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I think, by the way, that the fact God does communicate with us is the functional definition of grace. Grace to me is not being spared in the plane wreck, or recovering miraculously from cancer, or given lots of money and resources, or even being saved despite our inevitable failures. Grace in my sense of things is that God is there to lead us in our lives.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And, for clarity sake, I don't mean that God communicates with me through the Bible, or theological writings. I am talking about direct communication, revelation, openings--whatever. This is first hand, not second hand communication.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">My experience with this is of being confronted when my behavior does not conform to that which is required of me and, if I acknowledge that it does not, and submit to that conviction, I am led to be changed, improved, perfected--whatever--by that submission and my repentance.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If I don't acknowledge and don't submit then I can render myself less likely to do so next time although as I have become older I have found it well nigh impossible to shut Christ up for long, at least on some things, with whatever rationalizations I have for my behavior. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This experience, over the years, and bumpy years they have been, has changed my condition. I am being constantly shaped to conform--in my own inadequate way--to what is described in the liberal domain of the Society as the testimonies of simplicity, peace/harmony, integrity, community and equality (or to the fruits of spirit in Galatians 5). Successive trips to the spiritual wood shed, and the lessons learned there, have improved my experience of living and certainly improved the experience of those who live with and anywhere near me. If you think I am a mess today, which I cannot deny I am in some ways, you should have seen how it used to be with me.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This communication "breaks into" my world in the sense that it often overrides the "best advice" available from the people in our culture who are "certified smart" in matters of ethics, law, culture and religion. I have learned that if I follow these rather than Christ I will get no manner of peace--and cause problems for others--until I come around.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">That's my experience. I identify with Fox about there being one who can speak to my condition. </span></div><div></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">That's my faith and practice, to me that's a Christian life. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I call it Christian even though, as is clear to anyone who has read to this point, and will made even more obvious, below, much of what our religious culture calls "Christian" is of no value to me in this process described in Quaker literature as "perfection" (maturity, wholeness, fitness for a particular/peculiar purpose). </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Theology--thought structures built on inferences drawn from spiritual experience (and from other sources, not the least of which are the creations of our "reason")--has proven to be of no real help, and sometimes has been a real hinderance, to the work that is being done in me. Sometimes the sound of scripture ringing in my ears has temporarily drown out the voice of Christ.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What I hear from Christ, by the way, never has anything to do with how other people behave. Christ talks to me to improve me, not so I can improve others. The only time I hear about others is when it is pointed out how I have hurt them in some way, or could help them in some way, and that a different approach is called for on my part. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When I think I hear Christ talking to me about others the outcome--if I give those others the benefit of what I heard--is never good. It does serve to remind me that there are a lot of spirits out there in the world and their babbling on and on about the shortcomings of others only serves as a signal that I am hearing from one of these, not from Christ .</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I may well see someone behaving in a certain way and conclude that he is headed for a bad end because when I behaved that way, once upon a back in the day, I came to a bad end. But I no longer confuse the conclusions I am drawing, the judgments I am making, about this person with Christ telling me to do something to straighten him out. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This is the end of part one of this three part blog post.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
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</span></div>Tmothy Travishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02788311873771605510noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24917443.post-3132487725654808152011-01-28T11:15:00.000-08:002011-01-28T11:25:05.505-08:00equalityI have long felt contended with over times I have felt and acted better than someone else. Judging others has caused me a lot of well deserved grief and Christ has not been slow to make sure I get it.<br />
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More recently, though, I am taken to task on the other horn of equality--about the times I have allowed myself to be compromised by the judgments of others I was convinced were better than I.<br />
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Sure, there are people who are more intelligent, more studied, more accomplished than I. And sure I can be edified by being with them and being influenced by their ideas and their example, even their eldering. <br />
<br />
I have been led to more appreciation, though, of where concerns about equality among Quakers came from, originally. The testimonies were about titles of honor and showing deference to people of wealth and power, the acceptance of theological notions from people who were "certified smart" by the church establishment. These were of prime importance to many who gathered around that founding generation. They were largely of simple status.<br />
<br />
Theirs was a struggle to get out from under the control of their "betters," not to raise up the less fortunate as, for so many of them, there were few less fortunate than they (except, perhaps, spiritually). They saw that the privileged around them were actually living in a spiritual trap--and that their condition was degraded by the delusion of the image they had of themselves and the energy needed to force others to accept that inflated image.<br />
<br />
As damaging as it is to be the object of privilege, being its subject is corrosive, as well. <br />
<br />
Someone very close to me once said, hearing me talking about how impressed (and intimidated) I was by someone I had met, "That's just your inside looking at her outside."<br />
<br />
We all feel inadequate, at times, and we are all made to feel inadequate, at times, by people who want to use our feelings of inadequacy to exploit us, to use our lack of confidence to lead us into temptation and beyond. We can all come up with long lists of things from our past to convince ourselves of our inadequacy, if we are inclined to do that. Each item on such a list can be a handle someone--including ourselves--can grab to spin us off in all kinds of directions.<br />
<br />
And how many times have I, upon encountering a celebrity of some sort, become tongue tied and even sought that person's approval in some way? How many times have I spoken to others about such contacts in such a way as to associate myself with these elevated persons, as a means of improving my own sense of adequacy (in my own mind, in the minds of those who hear me, or in both)?<br />
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How have I damaged myself in the past by thinking that someone deserved more deference from me than the respect and compassion I normally have for others? <br />
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As I say, I have been contended with many times in the Light when I judged someone else, and such contention has begun to arise now when I am too quick to accept judgments about me that I hear/fear from others.<br />
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We are all equal in the Light. We all have access to the transforming power of Christ and to the ability to discern the guidance we get from standing in that power. While others may have a perspective on what we do and how we do it, the second-hand religion of others is of no more value to me than is my own second hand religion of value to others. I have developed a trust that Christ will make me feel convicted when I am deserving. The only time I am confused about what is expected of me is when I think about it. When I listen it's clear.<br />
<br />
Christ, then, is working on my inside and leading me to spend less of my spiritual energy engaging with/ensnared in the facades of competence, authenticity and authority that get thrown up around me to create deceptive impressions of my worth and adequacy relative to that of other people and institutions. <br />
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I remain standing in the need to be liberated from the spiritual compromises that flow from believing myself to be better than others. More appreciation has been developed in me, now, for the need to be delivered from the notion that some other people are better than I.Tmothy Travishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02788311873771605510noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24917443.post-26412594413124227342010-12-19T14:48:00.000-08:002010-12-19T14:48:36.728-08:00North Pacific Yearly Meeting Contemplates Affiliation with Friends General Conference: Big or No Big Deal?Friends in North Pacific Yearly Meeting are considering affiliation with Friends General Conference. To do so it would be the first time that this yearly meeting has identified itself with one or another of the existing domains into which the Society is divided. <br />
<br />
The fascinating history of how it came to be a defining characteristic of this yearly meeting to be non-affiliated is too complicated to go into, here. It is enough here to say that this came to be and that there was a reason for this that should be considered in this process. <br />
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The forerunner of North Pacific Yearly Meeting, the College Park Association of San Jose, California, was intentionally organized not as a meeting but as a California corporation. Setting themselves aside from the recently created divisions and domains within in the Society, and describing themselves as an independent and unified body, Joel and Hanna Bean, and those gathered with them, intentionally refused to recognize the legitimacy of these divisions. They lived in the hope (in the sense of that word that is a synonym with "expectation") that these divisions, bitterly pried open among Friends over less than 100 years by remarkably "un-Quakerly" behavior one to the other, would be closed and Friends would again be united in a single Society. Open to correspondence with all domains, they identified themselves with none of these above any of the others.<br />
<br />
At least at first, College Park had no members, as I understand it, but was a gathering of those whose membership in the Society was grounded in monthly (or quarterly) meetings in those other domains. Those who attended, whether by conviction or by the necessity occasioned by the spiritual isolation consequential to their westward migration, did not jeopardize their standing in their Orthodox, Conservative, Hicksite or Evangelical Friends meetings by worshiping at College Park--all were welcome in a gathering that was not a part of any of these domains.<br />
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Eschewing organizational affiliation (while maintaining individual affiliations) was part of the re-unifying vision of those who founded College Park Association of Friends and it remains a part of that same vision to some in North Pacific Yearly Meeting, today. Any single domain pursuing re-unification is seen as trying to displace the others and absorb them, trying to "win" the doctrinal struggle rather than overcome it, entirely.<br />
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That complicates the question of affiliation, today, for some in North Pacific Yearly Meeting.<br />
<br />
Some believe that the connections that have forged, gradually, patiently, with some Friends in other domains of the Society, who were similarly led to reach beyond their own hedges, will be strained if, by affiliation, our yearly meeting lays down it's "neutrality" and appears to settle, officially, into one domain or another. It is that stated independence, these Friends believe, that makes it possible to straddle the divides, so to speak, until they close beneath our feet. <br />
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Perhaps these Friends are mistaken. Perhaps affiliation will not change the actually identity of this yearly meeting, in its own eyes or those of the Society, at large. <br />
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After all, it my impression that, charitably, fewer that 1 in 10 among us has any idea of why North Pacific Yearly Meeting is unaffiliated today and how this lack of affiliation is (or was) an intentional "peculiarity" (in the sense of "being set aside for a particular purpose") of this gathering. It cannot be said that standing aside from identification and the vision of a re-unified Society is uppermost (or anywhere, for that matter) in the minds of Friends today.<br />
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Those among us anxious to affiliate believe, insofar as they are even aware of this historical peculiarity, that North Pacific Yearly Meeting has already settled firmly into what is called the "Liberal" domain and that the vision of a reunified Society is as unimportant as it is un-understood among us. Frankly, many in this yearly meeting are not at all inclined to find unity with Friends in (at least some) of the other domains of which they have a rather dim understanding, one at least as dim as that of those in those other domains have of us. Many of us are as self satisfied in our divided condition as most other Quakers seem to be. <br />
<br />
Then, too, development of College Park Association of Friends, and of the congregations that grew up in the West and associated with it, into Pacific Yearly Meeting and then into North Pacific and Inter Mountain Yearly Meetings may well have gradually amounted to the establishing of a whole new domain within the Society. Holding to waiting worship--as opposed to the programmed worship that predominated on this side of the Continental Divide at the close of the 19th Century--those of us who came after Joel and Hanna Bean have definitely morphed into gatherings made up of Friends difficult to distinguish from some of those in the East identified as Liberal. I attend meetings in the East frequently enough to know how similar we are and many among us, here, are surprised to learn, if ever they do, that those at the roots of our yearly meeting actually held an Orthodox, not a Hicksite, faith and practice.<br />
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If all that is so, is the "independent" and "unified" nature of our yearly meeting little more than a largely un understood fiction?<br />
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Did the very act of becoming a yearly meeting (something those we claim as our "founders" intentionally did not do) actually amount to stepping off of the "neutral" ground upon which they stood?<br />
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Does North Pacific Yearly Meeting still carry the Beanite leading to welcome all Friends, regardless of their doctrinal beliefs, and in so doing keep alive the expectation of a re-unified Society? Or are we open to only Liberals, now--whatever the many things that label appears to mean among us. Are we uninterested in the challenges involved in coming to terms with our history of bitter division and are we satisfied with our prospects within an exclusivistic future? It does appear that for us, like so many Friends today, the direct transforming experience of Christ/Spirit/Light is not a strong enough commonality to hold us together in the face of differing rationalistic, propositional beliefs and doctrines.<br />
<br />
So, are we easy that our character and orientation in North Pacific Yearly Meeting, as individuals and a gathering, is today fundamentally different from those of our dimly understood "founders" in that it does not hold up unity among Friends as a vision? Are we confident going forward with our sense that the Beans were heroes of "toleration" (which many tend to translate as "anything goes" so long as it comes in the guise of our own image) and that the fractured condition of the Society presents no problem for us?<br />
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By affiliating with Friends General Conference (or any of the "umbrella groups" or "gospel orders" that exist in the Society) are we endorsing and validating the divisions among Friends and settling into a home in one of those domains, or have we already done that such that affiliation would be little more than a recognition of the reality of our condition? <br />
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This is, as we discuss and seek the leading of the Light about the benefits and costs of affiliation, something we should at least listen for in our seeking. Notwithstanding the possibility that the vision of independence and unity that we inherited, and the policy based on it, might seem "obsolete," it is also possible that this vision is actually just stuck away in the attic of our Quaker consciousness where few of us have ever come across it, let alone been contended with as to its implications for our integrity, our community, or sense of equality and harmony--as well as the future of the Society. <br />
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There was a reason, then, that those who came before us recognized in this independence a leading the Light had for them. Rachel Hicks--although not among them--expressed their mourning and their motivation. She eloquently lamented the way Friends had rendered themselves largely impotent to affect the condition of the world because of the outcomes of the bickering over belief that would take, from the time of her writing, two decades run itself out and leave Friends divided and alienated from one another. <br />
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"And now, as I write this, after years of reflection and observation of the effect of promulgating opinions and doctrines not essential in themselves, especially on the mission of Christ in that prepared body, I am confirmed in the belief that it tends to unprofitable discussion and controversy, and often to alienation of love for one another...and [that] we should have remained a united people of great influence in the gathering of nations to the peaceable kingdom of Him who was ushered into the world with the anthem, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will to men!<br />
<br />
Rachel Hicks<br />
"Memoir"<br />
(New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1880) p. 39<br />
<br />
How long will the Society of Friends last in this divided condition? Can any claim that, except where it exists as a certain strain of Protestantism (and lives by the credo on the mast head of a 19th Century newspaper, "Christian First, Quaker Second"), the Society has a dynamic a presence in the world? (Actually, of course, that masthead meant "Protestant First, Quaker Second.")<br />
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Are we comfortably living out, in our self satisfied way, the legacy of, as it is written, those who divided a house and maintain it in such a condition? <br />
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Perhaps our general ignorance of what "independence" and "unified" was about is an indication that the Light is not showing Friends that leading toward unity, any more--new light and all that. <br />
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Perhaps, on the other hand, the endurance of that leading toward unity in the hearts of some (in and outside our yearly meeting) is an indication that darkness, as it is also written, may temporarily blot out much of the Light, but never completely displaces it.<br />
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It seems unlikely to me that Friends in North Pacific Yearly Meeting share the vision of unity that independence was intended to foster. I would just ask whether, in laying that vision down, we might at least mention it in passing, understanding it and intentionally leave it behind. <br />
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It is sometimes difficult for me to understand how the process of spiritual transformation that almost every Quaker I meet says is at the heart of our faith and practice could really lead a gathered people into such a fractured and inconsequential condition. Tmothy Travishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02788311873771605510noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24917443.post-33423919508297493962010-12-09T10:27:00.000-08:002010-12-09T10:27:53.290-08:00Marginalizing Myself Even MoreI 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: <br />
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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. <br />
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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. <br />
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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).<br />
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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. <br />
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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. <br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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? <br />
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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?<br />
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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?<br />
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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. <br />
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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.<br />
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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? <br />
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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. <br />
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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?<br />
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Does this mean I don't want to pursue these worthy ends? No. <br />
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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.<br />
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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 <b>values</b> toward which we ought to strive as opposed to <b>outcomes</b> 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.<br />
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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.Tmothy Travishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02788311873771605510noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24917443.post-24428388071523115072010-11-26T10:26:00.000-08:002010-11-26T10:31:37.193-08:00Reflections of a Recovering TheologianI wonder, anymore, when I hear the stuff about people being made in the image of God. <br />
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That was, it is written, the condition of the Happy Couple before they made the decision to "know."<br />
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A lot of change grew out of that decision, though, and it is unclear to me what aspects of their pre-knowledge condition were changed and which they carried over into their new life.<br />
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The consequences listed, of course, were profound--but I can't tell whether that list we are provided was comprehensive. it is certainly not written that, upon lighting the sword, God said "Oh, and I am leaving you in my image, for all the good it will do you." To be fair and balanced, of course, God did not stand at the palisade to ensure that they left this image at the gate.<br />
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The historical record, from both the Bible and other sources, indicates that our image is really not very consistent with the image of God, at least not as anyone has defined it for a few thousand years.<br />
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Perhaps this evidence indicates that our image and God's image now vary--that the degree to which our image reflects that of the divine--like the necessity for us to toil in the earth and suffer in child birth--is an after market adaptation for our changed circumstances.<br />
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Perhaps we are now a pale image, or even an image beyond the pale.<br />
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There is not much at stake, of course, in this fringe theological question.<br />
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I am thankful, this Thanksgiving, for that.<br />
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PS In the play <b>Inherit the Wind</b>, which was about the Scopes trial, a part of what Mr. Scopes did to alienate his community was tell a joke: "God made man in His image and man, being a gentleman, returned the favor."Tmothy Travishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02788311873771605510noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24917443.post-90502188884134016692010-10-18T06:05:00.000-07:002010-10-18T06:08:52.384-07:00here and nowIf I cannot be free where I am then I cannot be free anywhere.<br />
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My states of mind create my behavior. Sinful states of mind cause evil behavior that causes problems for me and for those around me. Fear pushes me around as though I am a grocery cart.<br />
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The work of Christ is to bring sin and evil down to earth, down to size, down home, down to me. Sin and its resulting evil are not huge and not far away. Both are small, quiet and quite common. They are ordinary residents in my being, manifested as the anger, greed, lust, gluttony, sloth, envy and pride (as they are denominated in one iteration--see also Galatians 5:19-21) that flow from my quotidian fear of what life might hold. Ubiquitous, they are, but not invincible. Grace that shows me how this all works and how to avoid it, the Light, outlasts them.<br />
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If I cannot acknowledge the truth of what Truth shows me and obey it, if I cannot be moved out of the control of these states of mind, of the fear that spawns them, and thus saved from doing evil right here and right now then I will not be able to at any time or in any place--on this or that side of the grave, In my halting <b>practice</b> and in the ultimate maturity of such freedom--salvation from doing evil to others and to myself--may be demonstrated the possibility, may be created the hope, even, that others can, too.<br />
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This is not, though, about others, and it's not about the result in the world. It's about me, and the results in my own life. <br />
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Hearsay, second hand, assurances that I will forgiven for my trespasses in bartered exchanged for the forgiveness I bestow on others who trespass against me is no longer satisfactory to me. It is not the freedom I have been shown, it is not the Kingdom into which I have been led, at times. I need to continue to develop my ability to trespass far less, to move out farther and more often from under all the evil behavior that seems to make so much sense when I wander in the fog of those sinful states of mind, when I live under fear that gives rise to them.Tmothy Travishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02788311873771605510noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24917443.post-45727280257472423492010-08-29T22:14:00.000-07:002010-08-29T22:19:47.124-07:00ministry from this morningI can only get what I need from Christ--the Spirit, the Divine.<br />
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No manifestation of Christ--no person, no set of ideas, no story, no testimony, nothing on this earth-- no matter how perfectly it may (or may seem to) embody the Divine (or what I wish the Divine to be), can spark the transforming fire in me and bank it such that the heat burns away the sinful states of mind that disgrace, distract and bother me. Only the Spirit who did that work in others, and not those others, can do that to and for me. <br />
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No one can go up the mountain for me, no one can bring down that lightening in a bottle--safe and smooth, warm and comfortable--that can change me and save me.<br />
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I have to go up there, myself. I need to feel the shaking, smell the smoke, endure the heat, and get what I need for myself (which is freely given to all who seek it), directly from the Source. Because when I do, and when I come back down, my skill at living my life is improved--as are the lives of the people who must deal with me day to day.<br />
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Often I think about the number of times I have made that trip, and how I sometimes have to go, again, about things I thought long since settled.<br />
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But experience has taught me that the more open I am to going, notwithstanding the fear of making the journey, notwithstanding the dread of the humbling I will endure at the top, that the more faithful I am about going when called, the easier it will be to face what needs to be faced and to be brought out on the other side of it.<br />
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The clarity, and the certainty, also grow that all this relentless drive to perfect me, to make me mature, to put me back into good order, Gospel Order, to fit me for some particular purpose is not for my own benefit, at all. It is for all those people I encounter every day who--in big and in small ways--need me, need all of us, to be the best people we all can possibly be, <br />
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Sigh. My salvation is not about me, at all. I am not the crown of creation--I am a means to an end that is not my own, not of my own choosing, nor even of my own understanding. I cannot know what that end is, what it is of which I am a part. I have learned, though, to do as I am told to do and to trust that in doing that--no matter how much difficulty and fear it pulls into my life, I am, in some way, contributing to its unfolding.<br />
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There is no way that I can prove that, which is not to say that there is no way I can know it. In knowing it I have come to trust in it, and to be faithful to it. From the trusting, and the faith, comes the proof--in the outcomes.<br />
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By our fruits, it is written, we shall be known. We shall be tested--proved. But it is not, actually, us that is known, tested and proved. It is that which we worship--glorify, magnify in ourselves and on this earth--that is so revealed.Tmothy Travishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02788311873771605510noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24917443.post-39034570641887070782010-07-12T07:59:00.000-07:002010-07-12T19:41:41.707-07:00Responding to a CommentA Friend posted a comment to my last blog post and, in responding to it, (here’s a shock) I wrote much more than fits into the comment box. I am putting it up as a new post. For context see the comment.<br />
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Dear Friend<br />
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Thanks for taking the time to leave your comment. I need all the help I can get looking at all sides of this thing going on with me.<br />
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First, let me say again that the primary thing to me is moral outcomes--being transformed so as to re-produce in me the characteristics that have been identified with Quakers (and some others) for centuries. These are the result of actions I take, not things I believe or think. I need guidance about what to do, not about what to think. Christ gives me plenty of the former, directly, but not about the latter. "Faith" and "belief," to me, mean having the confidence to do what I am told, as hard or frightening as that might be. It doesn't mean accepting unknowable intellectual propositions about the nature, character and plans of God.<br />
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Second, let me say again that I don’t claim that people who find theology an edifying spiritual discipline, something that improves their condition and contributes to their conversion of manners, are deficient in anything. I know what being considered “deficient” feels like. I have heard it said about me plenty of times by people who cite chapter and verse about such things as war, sexual orientation, the state and the place of my daughters in the church (and in the world). Ouch.<br />
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You have struck the nail’s head true: my view of spiritual authority is anti-intellectual, which is just another way of saying that it is not based on reason. To say it is not based on reason, however, is not to say it’s not empirical (because it is). It is also not another way to say that this experience and its outcomes are not predictably reproduce-able (because it has been in both method and consistent outcomes, within the Society and outside it, for centuries). It is also not to say it’s irrational. It’s non-rational. I am sure you understand the distinction.<br />
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It is true that the “rational” Protestant establishment—which has gained far more than a toe-hold in the Society of Friends since the “great walking back” that saved the second generation of Quakers from being persecuted out of existence--has certainly used that term as an effective epithet to refute—to the satisfaction, at least, of children of the Enlightenment—any spirituality that doesn’t fit in with the notions that form the ideological base of its orthodoxy. This orthodoxy is the set of speculations about the character, nature and plans of God from which it reasons its theologies. At its least common, but most “pure,” such rationalistic religion is what people today—mistakenly—are most apt to call “fundamentalist,” where scripture is a closed data base and only arguments that come from and are consistent with it are “valid.” <br />
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I can say that the intellect, reasoning, has proven at best, for me, to be beside the point in matters spiritual. At worst it has been a hindrance to me in re-producing the kinds of outcomes that make my life better for both me and for those who have to live with and around me. It has also proven the quickest way for me to get on the wrong side of Christ in regard to basic morality and ethics. <br />
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You are correct that reading Barclay is “experience” and I have a hard time, from my life’s outcomes, with the idea that an intellectual or an emotional experience—such as reading a book or hearing music—is a spiritual experience. First, because one is engaged with a work of art (or letters) and not with Christ (however one conceives of the Transcendent Reality that moves in our lives). In the second place, and most telling, these are intellectual experiences, or emotional experiences, that have not proven, for me, capable of creating the lasting transformation of my character, the set of outcomes we call Quaker testimonies (old or new).<br />
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As I have often said, if the transformation that is at the root of the Quaker experience were reproduced in me as the fruit of intellectual or emotional experiences that’s what I would be doing. It hasn’t, for me. I have written at length about how that has worked in my life. <br />
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For example, I can’t figure how I could possibly say that “God is love,” with intellectual integrity. It’s beyond my knowing. There are things I can know and those I can’t know. I can very clearly know that God is forever on my case to <i>be loving </i>toward other people. If I don’t do that, in some actual situation in my life, I hear about it and hear about it until I shape up. <br />
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But to get from “God tells me to be loving” to “God is love” is a leap. If I wrote that on a paper in a class on logic I’d get a big red check mark. My Dad used to tell me to be all kinds of ways that he wasn’t, and I recognize a little of the Elmer Gantry in a lot of people who go on and on about love in regard to things spiritual. If telling me to be loving makes one "love" or even "loving" then why aren’t my Dad and Elmer Gantry “love?” These are the kinds of problems I see the intellect giving me in such matters of theology.<br />
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Leaping to belief that “God is love,” and proclaiming that to the world—which is completely unnecessary to get done what I am told to do—creates problems because almost always someone says something like “what about childhood cancer?” Consider the mental gymnastics I have to go through to square a loving God with that. No one has ever come up with a satisfactory answer for the question of how an omnipotent and loving God can allow evil to exist in the world—and they never will. <br />
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How many people remain "turned off" to Christ because they cannot buy the speculative notions about the nature, character and plans of God that are totally beside the point in living in, as it is written, the Kingdom? People need not "believe in" atonement, the trinity or a lake of fire to have Christ transform them such that their lives reproduce the fruits of the spirit. That not only squares with our observations about people through history but it also lived in Quaker "theology" at least through Penn's writings.<br />
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I don’t know if God is omnipotent or loving—none of us does, notwithstanding the fierce belief among us that “He” is—because I can’t know those things. Those are notions—speculations. Those things don’t square with the evidence at hand--although that does not disprove them. It is a good thing I don’t need them to know what I am supposed to do and to get those things done—and in that process becoming the kind of person doing them is turning me into, in that process have the outcomes associated with Quakerism reproduced in me.<br />
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What matters is that I am loving. I know that because I've been told by Christ who keeps the heat on me if I get out of line on that score. I don’t “know” it in the sense that I figured it out or it “made sense” to me. I have relied, in my life, on a lot of things that “made sense” or that I figured out but that, it turned out, were not true. Bad berries for me and, too often, for other people. <br />
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I trust my capability to reason for a lot of purposes. I am not anti-intellectual, in general. The first thing I do when facing a novel problem is to find a book (or, anymore, something Google finds for me) for guidance.<br />
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Back to Barclay, I would never say that reading The Apology was of no use or value to me. I read from it frequently, although not as frequently as I do from the Bible. It’s about discernment, though, and that doesn’t mean, to me, “thinking things through” (except, perhaps for comparing things to my own outcomes). <br />
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My experience, for example, with Christ made me wonder what Barclay meant when he talked about “the day of visitation.” It is a time limited offer for salvation, as he explained it. That did not fit with my experience of Christ who, over a lot of years put up with a lot of being ignored by me and never went away, was always trying to get my attention and develop my condition—even when I loudly trumpeted that I was an “atheist.” <br />
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At one time I wrote down all the scripture that Barclay quoted to “prove” that the day of visitation was not an open-ended offer of salvation and, after studying them I concluded that they did not actually “prove” his point, not in the sense that I once was required to decide if some lawyer proved that his client was entitled to prevail in a legal case. That is, all the verses Barclay strung together did not add up to his notion of the day of visitation, logically. I shared that with Friends, by the way, and none thought Barclay “carried the day,” either, when they read his “proof,” rather than accepting it on the basis of his reputation.<br />
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Does that mean he was wrong? I don’t really know because I can’t know that, one way or the other (and neither could he—or you—or anyone). But I do know that, intellectually, rationally, Friend Barclay did not, as he set out to do and as he claimed he had done, prove that one should take up the offer of salvation now because it would be too late, later.<br />
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Maybe Christ told Barclay that it was time-limited but Christ never tells me stuff like that. If Christ told that to Barclay that's fine with me. I'm thinking, however, that he parsed it out of scripture as a means to bolster Quaker evangelism. Doesn't matter, though. <br />
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To be fair, Barclay finishes his argument much as the public health people do, today, about the dangers of smoking. As it is possible that the effects of smoking won’t catch up to you before you die, it is also possible, Barclay says, that your “day” of visitation may last until you die. To also be fair, however, that does not “save” Barclay’s argument rationally, intellectually. It only saves mine; whether there is a day of visitation is a question we can never really answer, for sure. Either way we answer it is speculative: it’s a notion <i>and it’s not important. Reproducing the Quaker transformation in our lives is what is important.</i><br />
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Thank you for providing me the occasion to, first, restate that I am not advocating that all throw theology over the side like so much ballast in a storm. If it is a spiritual discipline that contributes to reproducing the set of outcomes called "Quakerism" it’s fine with me. <br />
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If people, however, are “into” theology but are arrogant, prideful, argumentative people seeking to dominate others with an orthodoxy and divides their meeting, creating factions and strife, then they might consider whether intellectual theology is doing their condition—or the condition of the Society--any good. I have been there, myself, and found it very uncomfortable. I see it in the history of the Society and I mourn its outcomes, here. Righteousness, not "right thinking," makes a person a Quaker--a Christian--saved from being bonded to the world.<br />
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Thanks, again.<br />
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Off to Annual Session!Tmothy Travishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02788311873771605510noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24917443.post-31909734442072345372010-07-04T16:14:00.000-07:002010-07-04T16:22:30.429-07:00sharpening the definition of "theology"A correspondent asked me, in an email, whether my my chosen definition of theology might use some careful examination. I think that I can distinguish the kind of writing and discussion of spiritual and religious "doctrine" with which I have become so dissatisfied.<br />
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In contrast to the act of talking up and elaborating on that kind of doctrine, there is something that Marge Abbot writes about (<b>To Be Broken and Tender</b>, p. 58--get this book, by the way, for yourself and your meeting's library) called “narrative theology,” which does not appear to me to be exactly the same as the Narrative Theology “movement” that is said to have begun with Niebuhr.<br />
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What she has in mind, she writes, is the kind of writing found in traditional Quaker journals. Friends wrote (and write) about their encounters with God. This kind of narrative amounts to telling our stories and by so doing we help point others to that essential connection to the Light and with their own developing sense of discernment.<br />
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This speaks to me because my experience is that the faculty of discernment is basic to living in the Spirit, to recognizing which “spirit” is speaking to me at a particular time or what it means when more than one such spirit is. This faculty of discernment is different from the faculty of reason, which is what we use to figure out choices we should make based on an ideology or a theology pieced together out of second hand sources like the Bible or some other "received tradition." (This paragraph is my own, not part of Marge’s, take.)<br />
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This kind of narrative opens the heart, Marge writes and, to me, it models the process of convincement of which George Fox wrote, this kind of narrative takes people to Christ and leaves them there; it takes people to the base of the mountain so that they may climb, themselves, to experience the transformational thunder, lightening and shaking of the earth/soul that is where the spiritual perfection and maturation Quakers seek, and others have undergone before us, takes place.<br />
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This kind of narrative speaks from one’s own experience (and not from, as I say, “second hand” or “hearsay” religion) and, if one does not run ahead of one’s measure of light, this narrative will not incude unwarranted, speculative and divisive conclusions about the nature, character or purposes of God that are not part of and do not come from the experience, itself (even though we might be led to defend such speculation because it fits in with, or we can rationalize it into, some pre-existing ideo-theological framework or a notional part thereof). <br />
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I also appreciate this "kind" of theology because it supports the appropriate relationship between the Spirit and the letter: the former should validate the latter, not the other way around. I continue to be amazed the people believe the notion that the Bible provides some kind of constant meaning that curbs the danger of "unanchored" revelations claimed to be "from the Spirit." Human rationalizing capacity has led to many completely delusional "leadings" straight out of the book. Whether one is listening to the Spirit or using the Bible like an oracle, seasoned discernment is essential to keep from being overcome by the power (or the powers) of one's own ideas and agendas. "Moral relativism" is about reasoning/rationalizing, whether one reasons from a propositional data base that is secular or religious.<br />
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Finally, it seems to me that the kind narrative theology of which Marge writes tends to support orthopraxy/spiritual practice rather than orthodoxy/religious belief, focusing on what is functional, on what reproduces the transformational outcomes that Friends (and others) have experienced in the past. These common, consistently reproduced, unifying outcomes are a stronger basis for community than is intellectual assent to a set of propositions about who and what God might be. It was this shared transformational experience, rather than a set of intellectual beliefs about God, that initially gathered Friends, at least according to Barclay in <b>Universal Love</b>.<br />
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With my take on "narrative theology" I contrast, then, theological works such as Barclay’s <b>Apology</b> (published a year later than <b>Universal Love</b>) which does not open the heart to God but floods the mind with human wisdom, that moves the reader toward an orthodoxy that is rational, abstract (and often speculative), incorporating Protestant notions (chief among them the subordination of the Spirit to scripture—reversing the proper relationship between the two). (I know that Fox said that, after his experience with Christ, everything he was taught he found in scripture did he also say that he found in that experience everything that is in scripture? I can't say that--there are a lot of things in the Bible that are not confirmed and, instead, are contradicted by my experience.)<br />
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That rational religion (or religion of rationality) is one of the main "gifts" that the Enlightenment, with its deification/idolization of human reason, gave to us: a rational "spirituality" (or a spiritual rationality) that literally tries to talk me out of the trusting the experience of God and instead into trusting my ability to figure things out (or the ability of "certified smart" theology types who know more about such things than I do) based on what I know or have been told and my ability to reason. Dr. Dobson, just like Dr. Dawkins, looks to reason as the ultimate authority. Both point me away from the work Christ is trying to do in me toward their own notions about what God or reason "wants." (If I am unsure what God wants me to do I listen to what God is telling me to do. No "figuring" necessary.)<br />
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It was this kind of rationalistic theology that, on legs provided by revivalism, ran the Society to distraction, division and disintegration in the 19th Century. That outcome should not have come as a surprise given that, whatever else <b>The Apology</b> may have set out to accomplish, it was a part of a conscious "walking back" of radical (from the root) Quakerism that was necessary to purchase toleration from the Protestant establishment.<br />
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It is the value of this rationalistic theology—which I think is most of what I hear people talking about--that I have of late been questioning. It is actually the outcomes of this rationalistic theology, and the human reason that animates it, that has me turning my back on it.<br />
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I quickly add that if reading and studying the Bible, and reasoning from it, has the outcome for some people that they are drawn into the spiritual unity (or humanistic consensus) that is summed up in the Fruits of the Spirit, the Quaker Testimonies of the so-called Liberal domain of the Society or the Golden Rule, then it's fine with me for them to reason away. My personal experience is that trying to live that way led me to be characterized by completely different lists. I don't care if people paint themselves blue and wear mismatched socks--if it leads to spiritual transformation, maturity and completeness, as Friends (and others) have experienced it for centuries then I am heard to have no complaints. I am more concerned, in myself, with righteousness than I am with orthodoxy. Harvesting to feed the hungry, and healing the infirm, are fine with me anytime--even on the Sabbath.Tmothy Travishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02788311873771605510noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24917443.post-84750663330218140962010-06-25T09:55:00.000-07:002010-06-25T09:55:46.479-07:00Epistle from Quaker Women's Theology Conferencerepublication of a comment left on on a blogpost that published <a href="http://northmidwest.blogspot.com/2010/06/pacific-northwest-quaker-womens.html">the epistle</a>.<br />
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Reading the epistle from this year’s Quaker Women’s Theology Conference I shared the sadness expressed at the lack of support for women’s ministries in the Society and at the continuing sexism that divides us.<br />
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It may well turn out, when we reach a situation in which it is possible to have some hindsight on this struggle, that overcoming the self-comforting illusions to which we cling about ourselves will turn out to have been as important to success as the Other overcoming the illusions they use to limit and control us.<br />
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I know of no Quaker who does not share the unity that our Society must work through the issues of sexism and come free of them. It is not, however, the devil that is in the details of getting that done. It is, rather, walking in God’s ways that will lead us to this as to all other iterations of salvation. This transformation will be a fruit of the Spirit, not a fruit of the flesh.<br />
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When that happens we (or perhaps our grandchildren) all will have been transformed into different people than we are now, having laid down, among other things, the stereotypes we held that limited the Other. We will also have laid down those stereotypes with which, although we cherished them, we came to see that we were limiting ourselves.Tmothy Travishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02788311873771605510noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24917443.post-62428061929507100042010-06-20T07:36:00.000-07:002010-06-20T07:36:13.759-07:00Of What Value Is Theology?I ask Friends to help me with that which I am trying to deal at the moment. <br />
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<i>If</i> you share the traditional Quaker experiential knowledge of direct and transforming guidance from Christ/Light/Spirit, what good is theology? (<b>the study of God and God's relation to the world</b>--last phrase of the first <a href="http://mw2.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/theology">definition</a> in Merriam Webster's on-line). What is the value of thinking about such things as the nature, character and purposes of God?<br />
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If you will write here, if you confess experience of the direct access to guidance from The Source, how it is that study and discussion of theology edifies you and makes a positive contribution to improving your individual condition and that of the corporate body of which you are a part, I promise I will not engage with you to argue with or attempt to refute what you write. <br />
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If I make any response it will be to ask clarifying questions and you will be the only judge of whether any question I ask is not actually an attempt to argue or refute, in disguise. I can ask any such questions I might have "off line" if you would prefer (please indicate such a preference--or one that I keep any questions I may have to myself).<br />
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I just want the benefit of reading about the role of theology in your life and your spiritual community. <br />
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Thank you.Tmothy Travishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02788311873771605510noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24917443.post-74147941645872784342010-06-19T11:14:00.000-07:002010-06-19T11:14:50.479-07:00In response to my ramblings on about the place (or lack thereof) of theology in my discernment process, in the working out of my salvation, George referred me to a <a href="http://postmodernquaker.wordpress.com/2010/06/17/light-right-and-unity/">post on his blog</a><br />
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It was probably not what he hoped I would take from it but I was struck as he wrote of a Friend who rose to ministry in his meeting and said, in effect, that one who follows the Light will oppose abortion.<br />
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That made me realize that the times I am pulled into the Light (and held there if I squirm to leave) don't have to do with such things as my abstract beliefs about "issues" like abortion or war. I am dealt with by Christ about specific things that have actually happened or are happening in my life or the lives of people who are in my life, immediately or remotely. It's about the choices I have or am making about dealing with real circumstances and situations, choices about how I am or am not treating someone, impacts--direct and indirect--of my behavior on others. It's very non-abstract, and has nothing to do with "issues" (things about which people disagree).<br />
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God is in the choices I live out--not in the lame ideas I come up with, or adopt from others, about how the world (or God) works and how that should inform my choices. My thoughts about abortion or war or global warming are just that: thoughts. Throughout my life I have "thought through" a lot of issues (from an array of points of view) and come to have "firm convictions" about such things that I could quack about with others around a table or in the course of whiling away a long trip. But my experience is that such convictions have often led me to regrettable outcomes in some real situation in which I turned to them and expected to have been able to rely on them for guidance. <br />
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I now know that's because these "convictions" are the product of abstract ideologies and theologies (and there is no other kind) from whose speculative premises and assumptions I have reasoned, with whatever data I have had on hand, doing as best I could in overcoming the shortcomings of my reasoning abilities (the extent of which many can provide eloquent testimony), including the skewing effect of the beams in my eye (called "thinking errors" these days) and the threats involved, sometimes, in doing what I know (even when I need reminding) I should do without going through any "thinking through," at all. <br />
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I have also seen people sink--and pull others under with them--wearing the iron life vest of one or another firmly held conviction about the way to stay afloat in stormy seas (especially firmly held convictions, convictions that made perfect sense, about how to deal with interpersonal conflict). <br />
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I think of the accusers of the adulterous woman--they knew what their ideo-theology told them to do in that situation. But the Light of Christ shining through Jesus, it is written, led them out of the evil into which their reasoning was drawing them, and to an edifying outcome (for all) of compassion and righteousness. Beyond its immediate impact, some of those men, at least, grew and were changed by the experience that superseded their "common/cultural sense" as a guide.<br />
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My experience is that Christ is not involved in my lame figuring and my reckoning about abstractions and hypothetical situations. The longer I have "agonized" over a moral decision the more room there was for rationalization to lead me where it was easiest, and in my short term interest, to go: to some kind of disaster for me or for someone else. Tmothy Travishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02788311873771605510noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24917443.post-31599131964640992282010-06-05T13:14:00.000-07:002010-06-05T13:14:40.365-07:00Response to a Facebook FriendYou sent me a message on Face Book that was relevant to my last few posts. My attempt to respond there generated a missive beyond the space limits imposed by that vehicle. Therefore, I am posting it here.<br />
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Friend <br />
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We are in the "agree to abide and disagree place." I'll explain where I am coming from about ideo/theological discussions and spiritual authority but please do not consider this an attempt to convince you of anything. <br />
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I do not agree with you that we should continue to discuss the issues that divide us, as Friends. I do not think, as you suggest, that continuing to do this will lead us to unity. <br />
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Most of the the issues that divided our Society are questions that could be discussed for years, even in the best of faith, and the facts at issue would never amount to truth. The nature of those issues, however, seems to me to rule out such "best of faith" discussion. At least, the history of talking about such issues has shown the fruit to be bitter and divisive. <br />
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The saddest part of it is that even if we could "know" the right answers, someday, through hashing it all out, those answers would be no more essential or even material to our salvation than they are as they elude us, today. <br />
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Re-consider the questions Iowa Yearly sent to Friends in San Jose, and the spirit/power at work in the sending. Consider, too, the outcome of that exercise.<br />
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All of those questions were notional (in the sense that they were/are abstract ideas about the origin, nature, character and plan of God--things we can believe about but not know) and all completely unnecessary to being in that transformational relationship with Christ that has been Quakerism from the beginning. One must go beyond charity into lack of integrity to deny that the lives of many--very many--who know all kinds of answers to all kinds of such ideo/theological questions show a meager measure of the fruits of the spirit. Coming back into the realm of integrity, one must mourn the number of such people whose lives testify far more to the works of the flesh.<br />
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I don't know what you mean by "summaries of the Bible's message" about the doctrine of atonement, but I do agree--with great sadness for the irony of it--that something so unimportant as what atonement "means" was pivotal in the rift between Hicks and the Orthodox--getting it "right"--it being something no one can really know--was more important than the unity of f/Friends and families. All the deep wounds inflicted on each other--the degraded condition of the Society, itself--was "worth it" to make sure that no one who wasn't "sound" was allowed on the "sound" side(s) of the hedge. <br />
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I don't know what you mean, either, by saying that this summary was "given" by the Holy Spirit. Do you mean that the Spirit took some Friends aside in worship and prayer (as the Christ communicates to me about my behavior toward others that is in need of change) "Such-and-such is the way that atonement works?" Or do you mean, along with my mother-in-law the Presbyterian, that the office of the Holy Spirit being to help us read and interpret the Bible "correctly" that many Friends in one part of the Society got it right and many in another part didn't? (And that the Holy Spirit was far more successful among Friends in one geographical part of the country than the other?) Does this mean that when we do "get it right" the conclusions we reach are "revelation" on par with God, as it is written, calling out to young Samuel (as we have both experienced such direct callings frequently, in our time)? Is this reading and reasoning through which we are led by the Holy Spirit "revelation" in the sense that some consider the conclusions they draw about the character of God from meditating on (or in) and oak tree to be revelations from God?<br />
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Sadly, I once said to my mother in law, in jest (and I got firmly "held in the Light" for doing so), the Holy Spirit is not able to get us in the place where we can all read the Bible "correctly," and the only thing that is working for re-unification of divided Protestants is that the doctrines over which they were willing to cause suffering for one another are less important to people than once they were. My own mother, I am sure you have seen me write, moved us from a Congregational to a Presbyterian church in my youth because she didn't like the new pastor and didn't want to build a new church. Imagine what it would have been for a member of a Congregational church to slip into the Presbyterian church back in the day over such issues.<br />
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Do we really suppose that God told the Presbyterians that "top down and back up" is the gospel order that is correct and that the Congregationalists just didn't get the memo? Or vice versa? Or do we suppose that the founders of both movements figured out what they thought was best, and (quite sincerely) believed that in all this figuring was revelation from God? Or do we suppose God told each group something different for some reason?<br />
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God has never spoken to me about doctrine, although I used to spend a lot of time thinking about it and trying to figure it out. God has never let me know in any way that any doctrine is "correct" or "incorrect." (The only thing I know about doctrine from my personal experience with God that is that, if leads me wrong, that's no defense.) God only deals with me about my behavior and how I should treat others. God has never revealed to me anything about God's origin, nature, character or plans. I may speculate about such things (and I have, at great cost to me and those around me), based on what the Light shows me I must do, how I am led to live (on the pain of having no peace, whatsoever), but anything I "believe" about atonement or the trinity is my speculation--my notion--not "revelation." <br />
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Just because the consistent message I get from God is to treat people with love and charity doesn't even justify the conclusion on my part that God is loving and charitable. That's just speculation--"common sense"--stands to reason.,,Helpful? No. Harmless? Hardly. As soon as I say God is a loving God someone brings up childhood cancer and then off I go into the high weeds of notions to try to square that with a loving God. Yeah, I know, "mysterious ways" and something about not being around when the alligators were made. Really, though, why do we do that? Does "believing" God to be a loving God--or not--make any difference in how I live? Isn't what matters that I live as I am guided to live?<br />
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I hear people say that theology improves people I have to shake my head and wonder upon what they base that. Theology has supported every great crime of history, and has led many to...well, bad ends. <br />
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And as you may have read in my blog, it's not true that the Bible is the more "stable" guide. One can go as far off the rails with Biblical support as one can with the Light--if one is deluded or guileful in the way one uses either. One can lie using either as authority. Only the outcome will reveal the falsehood (intentional or delusional).<br />
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As, it is written, it was revealed of those who cried "Lord, Lord," only to discover they never knew him.<br />
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Notwithstanding "the Bible's summary" of atonement (and truly, I don't know what that is) there are many atonement doctrines, and they are all notions. They are unprovable intellectual constructs, abstractions, "rational" conclusions that people have come to in attempts to account for what it says about atonement (or seems to say) in the Bible. <br />
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The summary of which you speak as "the Bible's" may have been "given" by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit may have taken someone aside at some point and explained how it works and told him or her to pass it along to the rest of us. If that happened the message was garbled in the retelling and it still amounts to "hearsay" and "second hand" religion as far as I am concerned and--thank goodness--whether I believe it or not (or heard the right version or not, or having heard more than one chose the right one) is not important to the project upon which all of Christ's work with me is centered--my spiritual and moral maturity.<br />
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None of the many "takes" on atonement has ever "prevailed" over the others (although religious establishments have certainly enforced conformity of belief to the limits of their power to do so) because. like all such ideas, they naturally give rise to counter ideas. Unlike the scientific process, where there is a means of establishing which of two or more ideas accounts for the data and which does not, arguments over such things as atonement are attempts only to determine which point of view best accounts for the limited "data" that's in the Bible--and that data is of a nature and an amount will never be settled.<br />
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Religious "doctrine" is a collection of theories within a limited and closed universe of data, at least in rational, enlightenment (as opposed to Light based) religion.<br />
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Yes, one can hold both rational and spiritual--but the rational theology has, thus far, managed to subsume the living Word and relegate it to the back benches. After all, if the leading of the Spirit takes you somewhere that the orthodox reading of the Bible won't then you can't go there--because the Spirit will never contradict scripture.<br />
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We hold all our doctrinal notions dear because, after all, we rely on our ideas about things we can never know, for sure, to fix our place in the universe, and we even reason from those notions for guidance about how to live our lives. To defend these speculations and abstract constructs when they are challenged, we can only speak more and more loudly in our attempts to "prove" them, go to further extremes in our attempts to prevail...and we go so far that we work ourselves into conditions in which it is impossible to say that we abiding with one another in entreaty. We are undeniably, rather, pushing one another around through contention.<br />
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And for what? <br />
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Do any Friends "believe" that one cannot work out one's salvation through the presence of the Light/Christ in our lives, through grace, if one does not believe in one or the other of these notions about what the death of Jesus "meant?"<br />
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I also agree that you have a point when you say that Hicks did not take "the Bible's word" for things that were not otherwise revealed to him. Two points about that:<br />
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First, much of what people say "the Bible says" actually comes down to doctrines that, as I say above, are actually ideo/theological constructs they have created from what is in the Bible. Rejecting those constructs is not rejecting what the Bible says, in such cases. It is, rather, rejecting what the some people say the Bible says. Atonement is an example, as I explained. <br />
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(Who can help but be simultaneously sad and amused at Barclay's denunciation of human reason as a governor as he merrily uses human reason--from the Biblical data base--to establish his propositions in the Apology. You may recall an analysis I posted to a newsgroup a few years ago about his doctrine of the day of visitation in which I showed that the verses he cited as authority for that notion did not, in fact, logically prove his case. Reason failed him as if fails us all--for a lot of reasons. For many purposes reason is a wonderful guide. For moral guidance or trying to figure out the nature, character and purposes of God...not so much.) <br />
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Second, I don't think that the one quote you provided from Fox re the Spirit not contradicting scripture "settles the argument." For one thing, it does not account for the way that Fox sometimes used the word "scripture" as being something we could "have," by the grace of the Light, rather than something we could hold in our hands and read. Also, you know, as do I, that there are times when he says things that don't equate the two, as the quote you provided does, and you are also aware, as am I, of the editing that went on during the beginning of the period of Quaker appeasement of (the "Great Walking Back" as I have called it) and coming to a <i>modus vivendi </i>with the Protestant/Anglican establishment.<br />
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Fox, of course, participated willing in this effort, consenting that his earlier writings (dangerous stuff!) be edited and "toned down." Barclay's position that the Light would never, legitimately, contradict scripture was one of the first steps in this Great Walking Back, and it amounted to a conflation of one of Fox's earlier statements. Fox said and wrote that many things were opened to him during his "re-education" in the Light and that afterward he found those things in scripture and although he had seen them before he had not understood them, as he did, afterward. <br />
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I don't think that saying that he found everything learned in the Light validated by scripture means that the Light will, in turn, validate everything that is in scripture--although that is where the idea was taken. My experience is that many things I have learned from this constant "hectoring" I experience in the Light are found in scripture. But there are a whole lot of things in scripture that are not confirmed by my experience in the Light. If I treated people (I should say, when I have treated people) in some of the ways scripture exhorts the reader to treat them I would be constantly in the Holy wood shed.<br />
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I don't really think that the Bible is clear on things and I don't think it is perfect, written by human hands guided into infallibility by God or the Holy Spirit or one or another angel standing there to make sure there were no errors. <br />
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My experience matches that expressed in some Friends literature that one can be saved, in the Light, by obedience to Christ, without ever seeing a Bible, let alone without "believing" whatever meanings someone can parse out of it. One need even know who or what it is that is guiding them. The point is to obey and be changed.<br />
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(see Sum and Substance quote, above, in the masthead of this blog)<br />
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You know, already, that it is my view that once Friends realized that they were living in the "mean time," rather than the "end time," they began to accommodate themselves to the world as dominated by "orthodox" Christianity. Seeing that the world was not passing away in the sense they thought it would they had to come to terms with it. <br />
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It's been a long pull into conformity with the rational, enlightenment form of Protestantism that prevailed and prevails--and it was (and remains) complicated among us by the fact that we do, to some degree, still look to the Light for guidance. It confuses us at times, looking to these two masters, and the rational authority doesn't always prevail over the Spirit. The Light will never be completely "comprehended" even among those who, unlike us, may not have a spiritual tradition whose experience has shown that.<br />
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It is true, of course, that many in the Quaker movement came by their Protestantism honestly in the sense that it was where they came from and what they brought with them. Much as those gathered to Iowa Yearly and drove out the Beans (and many others) brought in their concept of what religion looked like--the Protestantism that (even if they were not raised in it) they grew up with--so many "first Friends" brought their notion how religion worked into "Quakerism" when they came, notwithstanding Barclay's earlier (than the Apology) statement that it was not a theology that gathered Quakers together but an experience of transformation. <br />
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Gradually, in my view, that "built in" Protestantism (epitomized, perhaps by George Keith) and the exterior pressure to conform to Protestant norms--both official and unofficial) took Quakers--us--far too far into "rational religion," and, as I said, although it seems to me far too dominant, it has not totally eclipsed the Light.<br />
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I'll stop there, I've written about this in my blog over the past few days.<br />
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I do not intend or hope to persuade you that I am correct in all of this. I am just explaining where I am coming from in saying that the ideo/theological notions that separate us are not essential to Quakerism--that what is essential is the experience of transformation and that the validity of that experience is not "proved" by doctrinal soundness but by changes done in us, manifest by our moral and ethical behavior--summed up in the Fruit of the Spirit and the Quaker testimonies. Not only are these notions/doctrines not essential to this process of transformation, the issues they interpose among us are destructive of that process in and among us.<br />
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No, you know I don't think the Bible is useless. I read from it every day and it is of great value. But a very common way the Bible is used, in this age of rational religion, is as a "data" base from which one can draw to justify just about anything one wants to. It's a lot like that pouch David carried, it is written, into battle with Goliath. As he could reach in for the right stone to kill an enemy so the Bible can be used as a magazine where, among those who believe "it's all in there"-- the right "proof" can be found to win an argument. <br />
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That orthodox rational/notional, Protestant establishment that could take the property and even the lives of those who would not bend to its will no longer has the power to bind us in the chains of its theologies and doctrines and orthodoxies. The door is open, and we are free to walk out of the prison of our ideo/theologies and into the liberty of being guided to the green pastures, the still waters. We can trust living by grace, by the guidance we receive from Christ, what, it is written, is written in our hearts, rather than that we can divine in our own spirit and our own strength and our own understanding from second hand, hearsay religion. The proof of our guidance is not in our orthodoxy--it is in our outcomes. (See Matthew 5-7, et seq, not for authority but for illustration.)<br />
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If it is outcomes that count (the way we live), outcomes that we demand from ourselves, then we can all be together, working out our salvation in support of one another. If we continue to talk to one another about our own takes on orthodoxy and make agreement there the bar we must clear for fellowship, then, well, we can see the future by what is, today, in our hands. <br />
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In Love<br />
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Timothy Tmothy Travishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02788311873771605510noreply@blogger.com3