One Quaker Take

civil persecution in the name of freedom of religion

2012-02-01T15:58:00.000-08:00

Religious freedom is precious to Friends so when people begin complaining that theirs is being compromised our ears perk up.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It's really a pretty clear cut example of why religion--all religion--needs to be kept out of civil government.

Protestant First, Quaker Second (a simple desultory screed re "heresy")

2011-07-03T10:25:00.000-07:00

A Quaker blogger wrote a piece about whether a current theology of Christian universalism is heresy or not.

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.

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.

Christ is the only 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 of God and substitutes words about 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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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 really 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?)

So that makes me a heretic because what I am saying definitely undermines the Protestantism that so many identify as being Christianity.

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?

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.

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.

And yet, it is written, the kingdom is and is becoming...who's the heretic, here?

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.

What I Can Say...

2011-05-06T09:57:00.000-07:00

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

As if ...

2011-03-18T10:25:00.000-07:00

This is one more of those comments on another's blog so long that turned into a whole post of my own.

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.

[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. - C.S. Lewis,Mere Christianity, pg. 132

I 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.

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.

In for a dime, as it is written, in for a dollar.

The Quaker cliche that spiritual experience is validated by scripture led me to the thinking error that spiritual experience requires scriptural validation but that scriptures do not require the validation of spiritual experience.

In for a dime, it is written, in for a dollar.

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?

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.

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.

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?

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 the image of Galatians 5:22-26 and Matthew 5-7. That's what I can say.

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?

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?

This I can say: I have lived in and been delivered from this trap.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.  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.

People tell me to love God. God doesn't. 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.

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.

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?"

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.

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.

Micah has an idea about what God not seeming present might be about: He writes:

"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.
This makes sense, doesn't it? As Christians, we believe that God desires us to freely choose relationship with God."

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.

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. 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?"

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Third Question

2011-02-21T06:53:00.000-08:00

This is the last "installment" of my own attempt to answer the three questions posed by Ashley in her blog, A Passionate and Determined Quest for Adequacy.

3. What one thing would you say to people to describe your relationship with Jesus?

The way I relate to Jesus is as a master, like a chess master.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

For me that 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 this side of the grave.

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.

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.

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.

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.

But for being moved to answer the first question I might not have ever addressed the other two--and especially not this last.

But, hey--you asked. ;-]

Question Two

2011-02-16T09:54:00.000-08:00

I answered the first of the "three questions" addressed by Ashley in her blog post, Jesus and Me. 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.

Here is my answer to the second question.

2. Who is Jesus in my life?

This is where things get hard for me to talk about because I don't know whether Jesus is "the same" as Christ.

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.

Don't care. Inney shaping agent or outtey shaping agent--no matter to me.

I care about the shaping.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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."

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.

"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."

Why is this distinction so important to me?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Addressing a comment to my last post ...

2011-02-13T08:56:00.000-08:00

Jay asked, in a comment to my last post:

"Please tell me how you discern Christ's voice from that of your conscience. How does it sound different to you?"

Way too long an answer for that little comment box, so I will address here it before moving on to questions 2 and 3.

I am not so certain about what conscience is.

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.

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 resolving 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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Question One

2011-02-09T13:00:00.000-08:00

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 recent post 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.

Who is Jesus in your life?
What does it mean to you to live a Christian life?
What one thing would you say to people to describe your relationship with Jesus?

As I set out to answer these for myself I realized I would have to change the order in which I would answer them.

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.

1. What does it mean to you to live a Christian life?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

That's my experience. I identify with Fox about there being one who can speak to my condition.

That's my faith and practice, to me that's a Christian life.

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).

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.

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.

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 .

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.

This is the end of part one of this three part blog post.

equality

2011-01-28T11:15:00.000-08:00

I 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

As damaging as it is to be the object of privilege, being its subject is corrosive, as well.

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."

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.

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)?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

North Pacific Yearly Meeting Contemplates Affiliation with Friends General Conference: Big or No Big Deal?

2010-12-19T14:48:00.000-08:00

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

That complicates the question of affiliation, today, for some in North Pacific Yearly Meeting.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If all that is so, is the "independent" and "unified" nature of our yearly meeting little more than a largely un understood fiction?

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?

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

"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!

   Rachel Hicks
   "Memoir"
   (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1880) p. 39

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.")

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Marginalizing Myself Even More

2010-12-09T10:27:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reflections of a Recovering Theologian

2010-11-26T10:26:00.000-08:00

I wonder, anymore, when I hear the stuff about people being made in the image of God.

That was, it is written, the condition of the Happy Couple before they made the decision to "know."

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.

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.

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.

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.

Perhaps we are now a pale image, or even an image beyond the pale.

There is not much at stake, of course, in this fringe theological question.

I am thankful, this Thanksgiving, for that.

PS In the play Inherit the Wind, 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."

here and now

2010-10-18T06:05:00.000-07:00

If I cannot be free where I am then I cannot be free anywhere.

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.

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.

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 practice 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.

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.

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.

ministry from this morning

2010-08-29T22:14:00.000-07:00

I can only get what I need from Christ--the Spirit, the Divine.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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,

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.

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.

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.

Responding to a Comment

2010-07-12T07:59:00.000-07:00

A 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.

Dear Friend

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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).

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.

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 be loving 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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 and it’s not important. Reproducing the Quaker transformation in our lives is what is important.

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.

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.

Thanks, again.

Off to Annual Session!

sharpening the definition of "theology"

2010-07-04T16:14:00.000-07:00

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.

In contrast to the act of talking up and elaborating on that kind of doctrine, there is something that Marge Abbot writes about (To Be Broken and Tender, 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.

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.

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.)

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.

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).

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.

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 Universal Love.

With my take on "narrative theology" I contrast, then, theological works such as Barclay’s Apology (published a year later than Universal Love) 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.)

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.)

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 The Apology 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.

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.

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.

Epistle from Quaker Women's Theology Conference

2010-06-25T09:55:00.000-07:00

republication of a comment left on on a blogpost that published the epistle.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Of What Value Is Theology?

2010-06-20T07:36:00.000-07:00

I ask Friends to help me with that which I am trying to deal at the moment.

If you share the traditional Quaker experiential knowledge of direct and transforming guidance from Christ/Light/Spirit, what good is theology? (the study of God and God's relation to the world--last phrase of the first definition in Merriam Webster's on-line). What is the value of thinking about such things as the nature, character and purposes of God?

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.

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).

I just want the benefit of reading about the role of theology in your life and your spiritual community.

Thank you.

2010-06-19T11:14:00.000-07:00

In 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 post on his blog

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.

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).

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

Response to a Facebook Friend

2010-06-05T13:14:00.000-07:00

You 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.

Friend

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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."

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?

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.

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).

As, it is written, it was revealed of those who cried "Lord, Lord," only to discover they never knew him.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

And for what?

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?"

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:

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.

(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.)

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 modus vivendi with the Protestant/Anglican establishment.

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.

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.

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.

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.

(see Sum and Substance quote, above, in the masthead of this blog)

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'll stop there, I've written about this in my blog over the past few days.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

In Love

Timothy

The Light and the Enlightenment

2010-06-03T06:43:00.000-07:00

Maybe my problem is that I'm not really a Liberal Quaker. The Paine/Burke thing doesn't sit easy with me. But it's not because it doesn't apply. It's because I mourn how Quakerism got to where it does apply.

Both Paine and Burke were (and are) talking about how self governing people should deal with change.   They were products of the Enlightenment--worshipers of reason--riding the early waves of the industrial revolution and coping with what it was doing to society. They were talking about the "best" way to manage cultural change.

But the Society of Friends isn't governed by that model of self government.

Is it?

OK, it is.

Should it be?

I think Doug Gwyn depicted the Lamb's War as a losing effort, with Quakers failing to establish a counter-narrative to that of the Anglo-Protestant capitalist class system that eventually emerged from the English Civil War.

That winning narrative was all about the Enlightenment, with its "rational Christianity," the handmaiden of both the capitalist industrial revolution and the modern imperial nation state.

Moral guidance, here, is not a function of spirituality--direct engagement with God. It is, rather, a function of engagement with ideas about God, from scripture and the authority of the church. The transforming experience with God is replaced by manipulation of second hand, hearsay ideas about God that, far from changing us, tends to validate us in our worldly condition.

Quakerism was subversive to this theo/ideology and the establishment upon which it was based and, as fractured as it might have been from time to time, that establishment was united in persecution and suppression of them. In time, though, it was not necessary to persecute or suppress Quakers. They did that to themselves.

Accommodating themselves to "the world" sufficiently to be allowed to live with whatever peculiarity remained among them, over the centuries Quakerism has pretty much gone over to this theo/ideology, accommodating itself gradually to the "reality" of the world of rational Christianity and, beyond that, rational religion and/or philosophy.

This began early when "certain writings" of Fox (with his permission) were revised and "toned down." Friend Barclay stated the first necessary proposition upon which this movement to the mainstream was predicated--the idea that nothing revealed by the Light could contradict scripture (which is a conflation of Fox's statement that everything he learned in the Light was confirmed in scripture--nice rational sleight of hand).

By the 19th Century, in America, there were domains in the Society where the "doctrine" of the Light was deemed an un-Biblical blasphemy. Short of that extreme, the Light gradually became subordinate to Biblical and other kinds of theological reasoning--whether that was "owned" or not, it was true:   the divided condition of the Society testified to this reality.

With scripture set up as the ultimate authority, the only legitimate "data" upon which one could draw to rationally create and un-create notional theology that suited the institutional needs of the moment (both within the Society and American society at large), the road was paved for Paine and Burke. Re-interpreted scripture was "continuing revelation," as reasoning religion had created an obsession not with abiding in and with God for guidance but an obsession with enforcing "belief" in propositions about God and insuring a uniformity in that belief, trending ever toward rational Christian orthodoxy. If one wants to rule by reason one must control what data is legitimately used in the "rational" process of establishing and maintaining power over others.

With some saying that God was revealing "new light" more fit for a new age, and others maintaining that "old light" meant something different in new situations than it meant in situations it originally shined, Friends used the doctrine of continuing revelation to move farther and farther into the rational Protestant Christian consensus and the world it created and maintained. Coming around to living out the capitalist narrative, Quakerism, once the spirituality of people known as Children of the Light, became largely another "choice" among available churches in which could be found Children of the Enlightenment.

Eventually "truth" from the scriptures of other religious (and non religious) traditions became fruit of "continuing revelation" for some Friends, providing rational Quakerism with new "legitimate" data (at least to some) to be used in "figuring out" (as opposed to "working out") our salvation.

And so Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke walk among us, as Quakers everywhere use whatever data they consider legitimate in this grand reasoning process known to us as Quakerism. Should we hurry forward as we adapt to the world of reasoning religion, or should we go slowly, carefully, so as to not throw the baby out with the bathwater? Opinions come and go, depending on what we are aware of and where our human nature (pushing us toward what is most convenient and in our short term interest) guides us at one moment or the other.   It's not to be wondered, then, that the "revelations" of our "reason" should keep us divided. Moment to moment, after all, any scripture can be used to piece together an argument to support pretty much anything after which one might lust, anything one might covet, anything one might want to do to placate one's anger, anything in which one might want to take pride...

This is a hard realization for me. It causes me a dissonance in that I have always thought that we were led by the Spirit, not by our own notions and reasoning. But what, if not notions, abstract reasonings about things we can never know, could have separated Friends one from the other and kept us separated, now?   If we were abiding in that transformational experience, led by the Light, would we be in this condition?

What is the spirit in which we abide?   Is it Paine? Is it Burke? Is it a spirit of self government, instead of being governed by the Light? Is this not the same struggle of which Friend Penington wrote (see masthead)/

See?   There I go: "reasoning" and speculating about the nature, character and purpose of God instead of staying low, listening to the guidance about how I am supposed to be living and obeying.

Notwithstanding all of our reasoning, direct encounters with the Spirit, with Christ, go on daily. The Light is never totally eclipsed, in the world or in our hearts. All of us continue to be confronted about how we live, everyone hears the pleadings to change and to endure the difficulties of learning to lie down beside that still water, in those green pastures.   This is the struggle within.

Who can look around and say that this reason based world of the Enlightenment, and our notional, rational Quakerism as part of it, is filling or creating holes in our hearts? Isn't it really in so far as we lay down our rationality about morality and go with what we have learned in our hearts that we are matured?

Most of us live with an alloy of spiritual and rational religion, struggling with the confusions that arise where the two compete for our attention, our allegiance.

Confused.

Separated.

Gossiping about the neighbors--gossiping about ourselves.

Neither Paine nor Burke is a guide to living in that peaceable kingdom, to being "in world but not of the world."

Paine and Burke, and the rational notion/delusion of self governance they represent, put us in the position that the world changes us, we do not change the world.

Whether we hold hands with Paine or with Burke, go at one pace or the other, our rationality will take us to the same place: deeper and deeper into the quicksand of our own imaginings and notions, further and further under the sway of the powers, more and more confused about why it is that each time we hit ourselves in the thumb with the hammer of our thinking it doesn't stop hurting.

Gossip 'bout the neighbors--right out where they can hear

2010-05-27T06:59:00.000-07:00

When I read people's thoughts about their own experiences, their descriptions of their faith and practice and what it's like behind the hedges they maintain between themselves and other Friends I usually learn something and almost always feel some kind of connection between them and me.

It almost seems, sometimes, like holes are appearing in those hedges and that they may, some way in the future time, be coming down.

I mourn when I read some of the stuff in this post and most of the comments attached to it--in which Friends talk about "my" experiences, "my" faith and practice and "my" domain of the Society. Can they really believe this twisted caricature of me? It's stunning in its chauvinistic and patronizing historical inaccuracy. In this caricature, hurtful and sure to firmly seat wedges driven long ago, is the story, in epitome, of how our Society became the small and insignificant sect it is.

Our religious "parents" forfeited Quaker peculiarity, making themselves completely comfortable in a self-righteous, notionally divided house they built for us to inherit.

We sometimes look quite like we share that comfort in the same kind of "meantime" world of strife, sniping and factions that our religious "grandparents" were called to reconcile by allowing themselves to be made perfected, matured and fit for that particular purpose.

If we can't talk about others in edifying and constructive ways, saying things that will build them up and that will help connect them to us and us to them as we work out our salvation together, then maybe we should just talk about ourselves--or perhaps wait, and listen.

"Question: But if I do not presently see that service in a thing that the rest of my brethren [sic] agree in? In this case what is my duty, and theirs?

"Answer. It is thy duty to wait upon God in silence and in patience, and as thou abide in the simplicity of Truth thou wilt receive an understanding with the rest of thy brethren [sic] about the thing doubted. And it is their duty, whilst thou behavest thyself in meekness, to bear with thee, and carry themselves tenderly and lovingly towards thee."

"True Spiritual Liberty," William Penn, 1681

(condensed by Lewis Benson), Tract Association of Friends

Authority

2010-05-19T09:51:00.000-07:00

I found this interesting example of "speck" and "beam" blindspot:

Some people, particularly Quakers, Pentecostals and some other sects that claim to hear direct revelation from God on a daily basis, would list experience as a means by which to know doctrine, but I would disagree, and so would a lot of Protestants. There's just no way to judge another person's subjective experience and I think that the credibility of that method falls apart by the demonstrable fact that different individuals, even in the same denomination and the same church, often hear wildly contradictory things from "God".

On the other the hand, dismissing direct revelation because different people come forward with different "truths" and claim such revelation as source and authority for them does not reveal a weakness of this authority that is not also a weakness of Biblical authority.

Those who have looked to the Bible as the primary authority have come forward with all kinds of very subjective "readings" and "parsings" about the will, character, nature and plans of God from scripture. The denominational landscape was, in fact, created by equally wild "contradictory things from 'God.'" The inability to develop a unified, consistent Protestantism is due to the Bible being an often opaque, vague and even contradictory source of guidance.

Furthermore, in practical terms of living a Christian life, attempts to resolve the wildly contradictory things about God resulting from parsing the supreme Biblical authority have involved a good deal of innocent blood soaking into the ground and a good deal of further far fetched parsing to justify the killing.

In terms of the righteous Christian (and Jewish) living to which we are all, it is written, exhorted by Jesus and others depicted in the Bible, and by those to whom authorship of its books are attributed, it is hard to say that those who hold this Book as the supreme authority have had better outcomes than those who place that authority in direct revelation from God. Quakers, for one example, never made a martyr of anyone who disagreed with what they claimed to have heard from God. Biblical authority was, however, that upon which Protestant Boston hanged Quakers. Which best exemplified loving one's enemies?

Placing the outcomes of sola scriptura, and those of direct revelation, on the continuum between the "fruits of the spirit" and the "works of the flesh" (Galatians 5) may be a useful exercise in further considering these rival claims to authority over us.

laying down one's life...

2010-03-02T06:44:00.000-08:00

It always seemed heroic, this idea that "John" gives us (1 John 3:16) that (NRSV) "...we ought to lay down our lives for one another."

Jumping on a hand grenade or giving up one's seat in the lifeboat are the kinds of things I used to think about in this context. It's stuff we are not often in a postion to do and I am thankful for that.

But it has been opened to me that there are two other levels on which one can lay down one's life for others and those are things that are more likely to happen.

Still in the realm of heroic, there are those who, in hard times, lay down university education to go home to support and care for ailing parents and those who give up on "risky" career dreams to take more mundane occupations for the benefit of their families. They are not laying down their physical lives, of course, but they are laying down lives they aspired to live for the benefit of those they love.

That kind of laying down of life has never been asked of me, either, and I am thankful for that,

There is a third level of this, though. I am presented opportunities and calls almost every day. I can lay down my life as I would lay down my quilting, or lay down a project, or lay down the remote, or lay down a book. I can be called to lay down what I would rather be doing to lend a hand in the yard, to take a child to choir or volleyball practice, to help with homework, to sit with an ill friend, to attend a business meeting.

Breakthrough: Doing this (sometimes very grudgingly) I was shown that in those cases I am laying down my life, in the long run, for my own benefit as well as that of the someone else involved. I am strengthening the relationships (community) upon which my own well being depends and--as it is written--losing my life in order to gain it.

This passage in John is in the middle of a lot of talk about love and context is important in how I read scripture and in this case helps with the other sense that I can lay down my life. I can be called to lay down my life, in this same sense, for frivolous things that are not at all edifying. I can be pulled off of the ground from which I should be living to stand in a place of darkness and self destruction.

"My life," then, can mean my "self" and that can mean both the selfishness to which I am prone and it can mean the integrity to which I aspire, It can mean the structure of the compartments in which my various selves live by quite different rules from one another, or it can mean the condition in which all those walls are removed and Quaker Timothy and lawyer Timothy take a common approach to the problems (among these the people) encountered along the way.

But all this laying down one's life, one's self, is in the context of love of others and so, on this third, "mundane," level laying down my life is not a remote, hypothetical possibility. These choices are presented to me every day and I have made them, one way or the other, all my life. I am becoming grateful for understanding the opportunities and the threats they present to me. I am seeing that key to this may be whether I am doing the laying down for (love of/service to) others or for (love of/service to) some self of mine that should be diminished rather than magnified, some self of mine that needs to come out from behind the wall and work it out with the rest of the Timothies involved in this process ("perfection," "maturity,") of becoming integrated into a unity.

Underlying these choices all along, then, has been the definition of what I thought my "life" really was. Over time that has become less about a definition I have "thought out" and more one to which I am being led through my experience.

My current understanding of the definition of what it is--"my life"-- that I am laying down was not created and then my choices flowed from it. It's not that "logical." That definition has been (and still is being) shaped as I go.

Most important in this discernment are the outcomes of what I choose for others and the outcomes in me. All my life I have "heard" all kinds of voices and I have been led, now, to a much better ability to tell one from another and to choose which to heed not on what is most appealing or even what "makes sense" or "stands to reason" but, rather, according to the conditions of the pastures into which each of them has previously taken me and the condition in which my obedience to each has left me.

The signal experience is this: I have laid down enjoyable activities to do things for others, activities that seemed less appealing, and then found that--contrary to reason and to my expectation--I was not laying my life down I was actually picking it up.

a "neglected" Quaker concern...

2010-02-11T06:52:00.000-08:00

You may not have heard of what severe weather is doing to the lives of Native Americans currently living on reservations on the plains. You may well right now be living with a lot of snow, too, but your plight is likely not as dire.

Read it and mourn.

As you mourn, click and join in helping both the short and the long term infrastructure development. In the short term people are in life-threatening physical peril, in the long term infrastructure development will create jobs for those living in the some of the highest unemployment in the world.

There are still Friends engaged with Native American issues, but for most of us the historical Quaker concern over the plight of those the European (ancestors of so many of us) "settlers" displaced is a vague piece of history that, when we are reminded, we are proud to claim as part of "our" spiritual heritage.

This was once a very big deal for our religious Society although, much like the moral high ground upon which we like to place ourselves in regard to racial and sexual equality, it's a complicated historical picture. Some of what Quakers did was very good and some things were misguided and put weight on the other side of the scale.

This opportunity, though, is always there for us to put more weight on the very good side of the scale and now is a time more of that very good is critically, urgently needed.

You are not going to be donating to merely maintaining people in a bad situation. American Indian tribes are making strides forward notwithstanding the lack of resources at their disposal. Supporting this effort is always timely and prevents set backs to progress.

Do not be fooled, by the way: gambling--the "white buffalo"--has not and will not reverse the poverty into which so many Indians have been locked by our culture's historical genocide. In so far as it has bestowed "prosperity" on Indian tribes it has not spread that to all tribes, only a few.

Those in the Society of Friends who are still actively engaged with Native issues deserve the long run support of our churches and meetings as American Indians begin to emerge from the dark night through which they have lived the last few hundred years.

Thank you.

Where are you taking me, Little One, Little One?

2010-02-09T06:43:00.001-08:00

Shortly after my first daughter was born I realized that she was not something new that was added to my life, on top of what was there, in addition to the rest.

Becoming a parent was not like becoming a stamp collector. It did not indicate a new interest but a new center.

Parenting was now the center of my life and, actually, I also came to know, it was the center in a way my life never had a center, before.

My life was taken apart for me and around this child I had to re-collect and re-structure all those scattered pieces--at least the ones that could be adapted to fit--around this new center. If it didn't fit then out it went. Lucky I was not alone in this.

It was, in the words of a contemporary prophet, about "...what to leave in, what to leave out."

Some of what got "left out" was hard to turn loose of, but that baby was easy to hold on to, necessary to hold on to--for all of the struggle and the difficulty. Putting the baby aside was just not an option.

My father said a time or two that he thought being in the Marine Corps made a man of me but he lived to hear me say that it was really the babies. Whatever I might have looked like before, I become a grown up (insofar as I really have) when the babies showed up.

This is no recent opening to me.

What is new, though, is how this perspective is broadened now that I realize that in a less dramatic and more gradual way the center of my life has become that daily, abiding grace called, by some, Christ. As my children grew so, too, did the "intrusion" of the Spirit into my consciousness, so too did my engagement with and submission to the Inner Light--showing me what needed to be changed in my life, giving me strength to do it and gentle but unremitting grief when I fell (and fall) short.

Just like the babies did.

Slowly, gradually but relentlessly and with a momentum not dictated by me, things that are not consistent with this divine principle that is transforming me are being eliminated--some of them going kicking and screaming and tearfully and painfully. These things just become harder to hold on to than the guide who is at the center of things for me, now, just as turning over and going back to sleep became harder for me to do--less appealing, even--than getting up to tend to a vomiting child.

The work in me is not over, by far. But the list of that which must go is clear to me and the sound of the chipping away is constant. And in joy I can look back at what once I was and forward to that which I can expect to become once God is "done" with me, when there is no "me," at all.

I once heard someone say that it's not about making God part of one's life--it's about making oneself part of God's life.

Little children will show the way, indeed.

The Quaker Draft

2009-12-28T17:51:00.001-08:00

I am the only Quaker I know who talks about a return of the military draft in a positive way. In the same way that I am considered a heretical Christian for not accepting (or necessarily rejecting) the idea that Jesus was "born God," I am a heretical Quaker because I don't think the volunteer army was a victory that improved the condition of us or our country. I think it was, rather, a diabolical victory that serves the powers, not the kingdom.

The draft once provided an impetus for resistance to war. Facing the draft once developed the peace testimony among Friends as individuals and as a religious society--and showed that testimony to the world as an alternative response to a call for war. I don't often talk about this among Friends but when I do, by this point, I usually have to ask to be heard out.

Please, hear me out.

The all-voluntary military was not the product of enlightenment or the movement of Christ, it was not in any way "spiritual progress" for national policy. When the all-volunteer army was created the military was in disarray because of the unpopular war in Vietnam. Richard Nixon, as president, was brought to understand that the mutinies, the killing of officers by the troops in the field ("fragging"), desertions and even the peace movement within the military itself were a threat to the "reliability" of the armed forces, an especially ominous development in light of the political rebellion at home against the American policy in South East Asia.

After the spectacle of the National Guard shooting down students at Kent State University many wondered, right or wrong, whether, called upon to put down a rebellion at home driven by opposition to that war, the "real" military, with a core of draftees at its heart, would uphold "law and order" if it was called upon to do so.

This military, with a core of draftees at its heart, was certainly not "optimally" reliable in Southeast Asia.

Faced with being forced into harm's way in a war they didn't support, and watching flag draped coffins on television, a generation (or maybe even two) of young men, along with their parents, their wives and their girl friends became a formidable opposition to that war--an opposition that went into the streets and, increasingly, into the voting booth. Over time a consciousness began to develop among those involved in and sympathetic to the anti-war movement about the infrastructure of US policy, in general, and the interests that it served. Not just Vietnam, the whole political/economic system was under attack.

If you weren't there you might underestimate the flash point potential that was rolling around the campus and the ghetto between 1967 and 1972. If you were there you might over estimate it, too. But, as I say, people were afraid, regardless of how real the danger was of everything coming apart.

This opposition was effectively co-opted, and America made safe for "the party" in the midst of which we still live, by two measures. The first was the 18 year old vote, that laid to rest the "old enough to die but not old enough to vote" slogan that had great traction, at the time. ("you're old enough to kill, but not for votin'..." in the words of a prophet of the day).

The second was the all-volunteer army (which sapped the strength of another line, from the same song cited above, "...you don't believe in war, but what's that gun you're totin'?").

These two, but especially the latter, put an end to the anti-war movement, at least as a mass movement, almost overnight. Safe from the possibility of going to war, most young men, their parents, wives and girl friends were no longer interested in marching, protesting or voting for people who ran on anti-war platforms.

No longer able to visualize themselves, or someone they loved, in one of those flag draped coffins the war in Vietnam just didn't seem to pressing an issue, anymore.

The now defunct "citizen army," was designed by the founders of this country as a check on the ability of the government to fight wars and to oppress its own citizens with military force. Their scruple against standing armies was based on experience and they held to the idea that a country could not engage in wars that the citizenry did not support--at least grudgingly--if the ranks were filled (as volunteers or conscripts) with people who had to lay down their lives, in both senses of that phrase, to fight them.

This was not entirely effective, but the difficulty of raising an army was a restraint on imperial ambitions. No, the draft did not prevent the Vietnam War, but it sure was without doubt, on its way to putting an end to it--until those who wanted to prolong that war (and the American imperialist party to which we are all invited, at birth) put an end to the draft.

You can look all this up, by the way. The Vietnam revisionists have been at work but mainstream history still tells the tale accurately enough.

Would we have gone to war in Iraq (either time) if, when Congress pondered the question, Senators and House Members knew they would have to go home and tell their constituents that they (or their children) had to suit up and go kill and be killed?

Would we still be at war in Iraq if, over the past eight years, high school class after high school class graduated substantial numbers of its members into camo--while parents of younger children saw their growing up as creeping ever closer to the age of conscription?

(Did you graduate from high school between 1964 and 1973 or so? Been a class reunion? That table off to the side that has pictures of classmates who have died...examine it carefully, next time.)

I wonder how many bright young conservative men who support(ed) war in the Middle East would do so if there was a chance they would have to go fight it? Would that at least slow down their enthusiasm, cause them the kind of soul searching it did in young men prior to the all volunteer army?

I wonder.

This is at bottom a question of integrity. Joe Biden and Sarah Palin have children who have gone to war. But how many people who support (even passively) the war(s) would do so if their children were part of the pool? And if they would--then fine. They would be living their faith--instead of letting others live it for them, without paying the price of that faith, themselves.

Yes, the draft was corrupt in those days--the poor and people of color were drafted more often than the white and the affluent--and women never were. One thinks of George Bush and Dick Cheney who found comfortable, legal evasions that one cannot help but think were set up to benefit people of their race and class. But enough white, middle class kids found themselves unwillingly in uniform (and their friends and parents could find their names, later, inscribed on a wall with many friends of mine in Washington DC) to cause substantial opposition--opposition that (it seems hard to imagine this today) had the stability of this country teetering on a precipice.

What about Quakers and Mennonites and others who have a scruple against war?

How did we fare under the draft, and how have we fared since?

Sometimes when I talk to younger Friends about it there seems to be a superficiality to what they say, and I have seen some "cracks in the wall" in regard to the Middle Eastern wars among them, too. Not outright support but an uncertainty, an inability to articulate the basis of their faith in the face of pro-war ideology. It is not the durable conviction that is heard in Friends (and others) who spent World War II in the work camps, who had to do some thinking and soul searching to receive their CO status in the Sixties and the Seventies.

This is not their fault. They grew up in a situation in which they have not been required to contend seriously with this, in which their faith has not been tested (or even explored) by swimming against the cultural tide. They have not grown up required to prove/test themselves.

And such proving/testing was not only edifying to them.

Other young people looking at military service today are deprived of the example and the model of young Friends (and others) testifying to their faith through conscientious objection. Who is actively, seriously, obviously presenting the alternative of peace to main stream young people these days in the same graphic way that Friends, Mennonites and others did in the past?

Yes, we do work with our young people, and we do reach out to young people beyond our hedges whose conditioning has gone unchallenged all their lives, but not with the energy or the organization that we used to. And our young people are not as engaged or focused--they don't have to be--on their spiritual development around war (and how the tendrils of war branch out into our every day lives and all of our relationships).

Who can doubt that we have an out-of-control military, today, that is dictating policy to the President in a way that, in the days of McArthur, got Generals cashiered?

Who can doubt that it's easier to prolong wars when the people who make the decisions (even passively) do not have any chips of their own on the table?

Who can doubt that it's easier for us to all settle back into our own daily lives if the cost of the wars that keep our own personal consumption oriented oil guzzling party going don't touch us in obvious and direct ways?

Have we been "bought off," here? Can we--safe with our children from the storm--just "sit it out" and "mail it in" in regard to opposing the wars fought in our name (fought with our money? By the way, where is the Hyde Amendment for spending money on war against the moral conviction of ... I digress)?

Do we look to Friends like Chuck Fager and the others who work with young people caught up in the military to do that for us, instead of taking our turn to do it when it is our turn, or the turns of our children to face the possibility of fighting? Have we forgotten that when we did that kind of standing up for ourselves and our children we were also standing up for others who are not heard as clearly as we might be?

Because there was a time we were heard clearly on this. CO status was a hard-won recognition by the world that a scruple against war was legitimate and respectable and that recognition made it powerful in the eyes of people who, before, completely discounted pacifism as a means of engaging evil.

Do we think that it's no longer necessary to "hard win" that status is some kind of benchmark or the improved spiritual condition of us, our children or the world? Or do we face the truth that no longer needing to go through that just means we have bought off the system, accepting our own safety in return for letting the evil or war go on without much resistance from us?

Now a significant portion of Americans can outsource paying the price for the "American Way of Life" and no longer need to contend within their own heart about whether it's worth our own lives and the lives of our own children.

Have we outsourced our calling to testify and witness against war, deprived of the most urgent goading we could have to do so? Has our peculiarity (our fitness for a particular purpose) as a voice against war been neutralized?

If so, has this edified us or has it caused our condition to deteriorate when the world needs us (and others like us) as much as it ever has?

If someone thinks war is worth whatever "it" is (this time)? Then they should go fight it or send their children or their grandchildren.

Don't want to fight for it but think it the "purpose' of the war should be accomplished? Then they need to find and pursue a different way to accomplish it.

Don't want to fight for it and don't want to do anything else for it--then they should shut up. They don't have enough integrity to cover their nakedness. they are hypocrites. They should live with that or change it. Just have some integrity.

Nobody should die for what I enjoy (whether I say I want it or not) but that I won't die or sacrifice for.

Thank you, Friends, for hearing me out, on this.

Teach Your Children Well

2009-12-23T15:12:00.000-08:00

Riffing off a post on another blog, again!

Chuck Fager (always a source of inspiration) got me wound up over what we tell our young people about the faith and practice of Friends.

(That's OK, I am trying to get around to a blog post that I know will wind him up.)

This was a hot topic around this old house last year when RR went to Guilford, enrolled in The Quaker Leadership Scholars Program and found herself face to face with all of which Chuck wrote, and more. That meant, of course I came face to face with it, too., because she was able to say that she was a Beanite Friend (she'd heard me and others in our yearly meeting call ourselves that) but she was kind of short on what could be said about that. I never tried to "teach" her much about it, before, because she didn't really want to know, before. And I couldn't have "taught" her, anyway. As Fox said, one can only lead others to Christ and leave them there--to be "taught" by the source.

Christ has come, George Fox said, to teach his people, himself. Christ did not leave a representative (or representatives) on earth to do that. Christ did not leave a book on earth to do that: everyone would be taught by the source--even if led to it by secondary authorities.

It's hard to run empires that way, of course, but Jesus wasn't about running empires. Some years later others would see the value--and they continue to see the value--in using a movement based, at least originally, on following Jesus as a pillar of supporting and running empires.

Quakers, originally, wanted to go back to that pre-Constantinian religion.

The core of the faith and practice of Friends--even since before they were called that--has always been the experience of transformation we undergo through our obedience to Christ/(The) (Holy) S/pirit, the transcendent reality, Goddess, the Great Kahuna or whatever. We are transformed--conformed--to a certain predictable condition.

The core didn't used to be so much, as it is in many Quaker corners, now, about where this transformation came from, why it happened or what it was about in the long run. Unknowable such things are and thus these are the source of great contention if emphasized.

The Light shows us what needs to change and we change--or we don't.

We all attach meanings about where that transformation comes from, how it happens and what it means for us and the world in the long run--but those are our own insignificant meanings and, it should come as no surprise, others have different meanings they have attached to this process. What with the fact that no one really knows (or can know) what it means, contention springing from such disagreements can interfere with the process, itself.

Much better to leave all with their own notions about that and live with them in the transformation--supporting and encouraging (edifying) one another as we live out our spirituality (our relationship with the divine).

That Light is available to every person, everywhere.

Don't look for it too high up or too far away. It's right here, right now: always.

Theology (unprovable notions about the source, nature and purpose of God--useful notions for getting tithes and taxes paid) is not an essential part of the faith and practice of most Friends in the my liberal neck of the woods, as it was of secondary importance originally (which is why George Keith became an Episcopalian). Such notions moved to the center of the Quaker mind later and, as the result we have been left with a torn up and divided fellowship in which to worship.

Even the demons knew who Jesus was, and believed he was just that (so it is written) and yet their sincere belief in those propositions about him could not save them.

Have our (myriad) cherished notions about creedal theology "saved" our Society? That's what worrying about "belief" gets you. Beliefs don't lead to change: obedience does.

Quakers became so concerned and so certain about who Jesus was (where he came from and what he was up to) in the 19th Century that they divided and diminished the Society disagreeing over the possibilities. Friend Hamm's book, "The Transformation of American Quakerism," explains it succinctly--from peculiar to pretty much identical to evangelical protestantism in about 100 years.

Whatever place there may have been for Quakers in the religious world, then, almost all decided to go somewhere else.

"Christian First, Quaker Second"--a sign of those (and our) times.

I believe all kinds of notional things but I try to keep my hand on the plow. I don't make decisions based on my notions. My morality is guided by God, not by my notions--or anyone else's notions-- about God.

So I let people believe whatever they want and support them in keeping their hand on the plow, too.

No one knows what being "saved" is, or whether "atonement" is any one of the many things we parse it to be in our imaginings, in our speculations. Lake of fire? Maybe, I dunno. And neither does anyone else.

All we can really know is our experience of The Light and the transformation it brings about in our lives.

None of us knows whether it's really going to be pre or post or any other kind of millenium and even if we did know/believe it wouldn't do us any good. All that will do us any good--in either or none of those cases--is that which we are becoming, not which we believe(d).

All we can really know is what we used to be and what we are being transformed into. All we can really know is Christ--by whatever name we know him/her/it.

The Sermon on the Mount is not about what I should believe--it's about what I should do or not do with my life.

Our protestant brothers and sisters have made one or another of the Bible(s) handed down to us by this or that editorial committee the ultimate source of truth for themselves and have placed a very high premium on conforming to "right belief" as they define it.

Our Catholic friends put such authority in a person who is the contemporary holder of place in a long line of a different kind of political succession/process and have placed a very high premium on "right action" as the current human being in control of that succession/process defines it.

Friends used to get in a lot of trouble for eschewing both of those points of view (along with the thrones and aspiring thrones they are so apt to support)--orienting themselves, instead, to the source of whatever artifacts of inspiration may be passed along by either of those "authorities," in such condition as they are passed along, with the spin of today put on the spin that was put on those same artifacts yesterday.

Now people wonder whether there wasn't just some kind of big misunderstanding 350 some years ago that got Mary Dyer hanged--because Quakers today are not so different from protestants and even Catholics, anymore. The peace testimony is optional in some domains of the Society, I hear. Even "Quakerism" can apparently support empire (powers, thrones...).

Go with what you know (and not with hearsay religion no matter how "sincerely" or "certainly" someone else knows it). That is, I believe, the essence of the faith and practice of Friends (you can look that up--it's back there with wearing it for as long as you can). So I'll go with my experience in The Light and the transformation toward the fruits of the spirit (which the testimonies paraphrase) that it has brought about in me. It's not been easy, or gentle, or comfortable at times but I hurt myself and others a whole lot less, now, than I did when I was sure about what the Bible said God was and what He (and it was a He) wanted.

Is it still enough for people to follow Christ even if they have never heard that word, or are not so concerned about the historical accuracy of this or that account of the recurring truths of human existence that are described in the Bible?

Is there still a place for this kind of faith and practice in the world, today?

Is there a place for this focusing on improving one's moral condition as part of a similarly inclined corporate body under the direct guidance of an empirically benevolent transcendent guide (albeit not one we can say a lot about except to express our wonder and gratitude) who has been changing people (who let themselves be changed) in the very same way for (probably) ever?

There is room for this kind of religion.

There has to be room for this kind of religion in a world dominated by religion that too often comes out of the the pit of human fear, out of our insecurity at being in fellowship with those against whom we cannot prevail in arguments about things none of us can ever know. There has to be room for this instead of "believing" in "religions" that we must lay down so we can fall back on our true faith in redemptive violence and in the necessity to coerce others into giving us what we imagine will meet our needs.

That's more or less what I told my 18 year old daughter a year or so, ago. It's what I could say.

I can see, once in while, that it's still rolling around inside her head and that, along with other things, appears to be leading her to Christ. I don't have much else, at least on this subject, to say to her.

more on Obama's speech...sort of

2009-12-20T07:37:00.000-08:00

My post on the President's speech in Oslo was one insignificant comment among millions that were made and I found one other that interested me.

The part of this that jumped out reminded me of something that may seem peripheral, but something that is at best a "lesser included" ramification of the major point. Mr. Obama said:

"… America cannot insist that others follow the rules of the road if we refuse to follow them ourselves. For when we don’t, our action can appear arbitrary, and undercut the legitimacy of future intervention — no matter how justified."

This is about integrity, now, not an American strong point. But we are Friends and walking one's walk, living out one's spirituality regardless of consequences is pretty big onions (at least aspirationally) in my Quaker neck of woods. We should talk about this when we see it--or don't see it--working out in the world.

Because the United States turned its back decades ago on integrity where nuclear weapons are concerned our President now faces an unsolvable problem in the Middle East. We are apparently worried about the collapse of our geo-political control (such as it remains) in the Middle East because of the danger that Pakistan's nuclear weapons might fall into the hands of the Al Qaeda. How can we leave if that possibility looms?

So, we are stuck in sin because we are afraid of the outcomes of righteousness in light of our previous sins?

Well, whose fault is that?

For 60 years we have sanctimoniously held on to nuclear weapons and conspired with those who also have them to guarantee the exceptional-ism of our possession.

(There are several layers of hypocrisy, here--including slogans like that of the Strategic Air Command--"Peace is our profession.")

This means that we created a premium on developing such weapons. North Korea, for example, didn't suffer invasion as Iraq did because that member of the "axis of evil" could give us a radioactive bloody nose that Saddam could not. In fact, Saddam getting the nuclear weapons was on of the most harped upon distractions from the reality of the blood for oil policy of the United States. The word is out--get nukes and no one, not even the United States, will mess with you. What a surprise that Iran got the message.

If the United States had worked for abolition of all nuclear weapons--including our own--and to implement President Eisenhower's "open skies" inspection system to guarantee a practical way to assure everyone that no one else had nukes would we be where we are now? Forget unilateral disarmament--what if we had been tireless champions of verifiable abolition of nuclear weapons for the past fifty years? What if that had been the policy of every US president since?

(Yes, I know, that would have conflicted with other US policies--but those are the very policies that have us in trouble, now, on so many fronts. And I use the word "fronts" consciously.)

If we had the courage to allow integrity to shape our policy would we be where we are now?

Perhaps nuclear weapons would still be sought by small countries fearing larger habitual enemies. Perhaps, however, not.

If every powerful nation had destroyed its nuclear weapons in concert with all others, in the context of an openness that would guarantee no secret program would make re-arming possible, would Pakistan have developed nuclear weapons that might, now, fall into the hands of terrorists?

We not only look stupid saying that we can handle nuclear weapons but other countries cannot, we have sown the seeds of what could prove, yet, to be our own destruction.

If Quakers don't have something to say about this who could?

And, next, should we talk about integrity and the military draft?

;-]

another comment too long to be a comment...

2009-12-16T07:16:00.000-08:00

My thanks to Bill Mounce for his edifying post on his blog. I encourage all to read it (and not just because what I have written below will make more sense if you do).

I actually agree with you, Bill. That which is called "blessed" is the product of obedience to God and to nothing else. A "salvation experience" is not enough. One must live out the sermon on the mount, as best one can, one's ability to do so improving over time with each small success in the way we treat others.

I am a Quaker. What any text says is the test of nothing beyond what it says. The Bible is not the highest authority--God is. The Bible is not the "word of God" it's words about God. The word of God came and comes to all of us--heeded or not, understood or not--directly from the source every day. So it says in John's gospel and so it proves to be, empirically, every day.

The question is not so much about one's theology, it's about one's transformation--spiritual (and therefore moral). It's about, as I say (and as you say), living it out. Theology has nothing to do with it and may even be a cumber to it getting done.

We are to be proved by the fruit, it is also written, represented in our lives and our moral transformation. That is not only "written" it's been tested in my own life and the lives of Friends for more than three centuries (and in the lives of others for much longer).

Evidence of being "saved"--transformed--will be apparent in the way we act--the fruits of the spirit manifest in our lives. You are correct that the fruit is pleasing to God when it is that fruit which results from obedience to God--not from affirmation of propositional "beliefs" based on interpretation or parsing of texts and the rationalizations on the "nuances" of those interpretations and parsings. If it's fruit from obedience to God then we know what it will look like. We also know what it looks like if it's fruit from deductive reasoning based on scriptural interpretation.

The Truth you point out, here (and it is true), would be just as true--and no less true--if there were no Greek Bible or even if that Greek Bible said the opposite. We know that because that Truth is sent to us constantly from it's source: the one who must be obeyed.

Queries:

Can we support and encourage others to aspire with their behavior to transformed lives in ways that do not accuse them, divide them from us (or others) and cause them to resist?

Does the form of our exhortation to others testify to our own meekness, mournfulness, poverty of spirit and to the purity of our own hearts in making those exhortations?

Do our actions show us to be (or are they contributing to our becoming) peacemakers?

Three Comments About Oslo Speech

2009-12-13T07:24:00.000-08:00

President Obama made a speech in accepting the Nobel Peace Prize and I have three things to say about what he said.

First, he said that no non-violent force could have stopped Hitler's army. Perhaps, not, once that army existed and was on the move. But an American policy of collaborative engagement with Europe after the First World War--rather than retreating behind our ocean frontier and leaving the League of Nations at the altar--might well have prevented that army from being created.

One of the problems with redemptive violence as a world view and a national policy is that one does things that cause the impetus to violence to build and build until--shock!--violence is inevitable. Pacifism is a long range strategy for security and must be pursued over the long haul.

Second, Mr. Obama called Al Qaeda evil. Mr. Obama's Bible, like mine, draws a distinction between people and the "power" called evil--our enemies are not flesh and blood but the powers that hold and control other human beings just as they sometimes hold and control us. When we drop death out of the sky on innocents with drones and such we are as much in the thrall of evil from the point of view of Al Qaeda (and in reality) as they were, our eyes (and in reality), when they flew airplanes into buildings. When we stop calling people evil, and affirm that evil is something they--we all--serve, at times, we change the paradigm into one that is more useful to building peace and a world community that is secure.

My third comment is about this "just war" thing. Not the first to serve this up, the President put at least as much irony as anyone else ever has into that sugar cone, and has created at least as big, and tasty, a brain freeze. Like the equally destructive human doctrine/notion of original sin, "just war" was invented by St Augustine. It is not a part of the Gospel or even the Bible, itself. The religious hand-maidens of imperial power had to contort scripture (and common sense) to put those "doctrines" of political control into the "constantinian" hands of their idolatrous masters. All wars ever fought were "just wars"--just ask anyone on either side of any one of them. The undeniable truth is that "just wars" are just war--period. Linking the concept of "justice" to any one of them, or either side in any one of them, is missing the mark.

Like traffic tickets, no one is ever to blame for a war or wrong for having been part of one--just ask them.

I know that the Obama administration is sliding along greased rails, here, and sees no other way out. So many opportunities for constructive engagement around community building with the people of the Middle East have been lost and wasted in the past while this country opted for manipulation and force as a means of "pursing our interests."

But if our interests are really security and peace (rather than something else) than we must--at least with one hand--start to do some of that kind of constructive engagement that will improve life for people in that part of the world, and we should gradually cut down on the manipulation and force while we increase the constructive collaboration.

Al Qaeda is a threat because the soil they work has been composted for decades by the poverty and injustice we have helped heaped upon it, poverty and injustice that has been in our "national interest." Until we start offering something better, or at least stop spreading more of the same, no one apt to being successfully courted by Al Qaeda is going to pay any attention to anything we have to say.

Blaspheming non-violence, identifying human beings as hapless as ourselves as being, rather than serving, one of the corrupt powers of this world and throwing the concept of "just war" around only makes it possible for the other side to rationalize their allegiance to evil, as we rationalize our own.

Thank you for conjuring the mirror, Mister President. Pray look into it.

Radically Inclusive Does Not Mean Totally Inclusive

2009-11-20T16:47:00.000-08:00

I hear people saying that the cumber of including non-theist Friends is that they say they aren't seeking the will of God. Since seeking the will of God is the center of "Quakerism," so this goes, people who do not acknowledge God cannot share in the center of our faith and practice (and, in a small and adroit further step, say that such people will ruin our ability to be in that center, as well).

(As I write that it strikes me as the logic of the Defense of Marriage Act and shows us the shortcoming of reasoning done badly. I digress...)

(And why didn't this arise earlier--at least to the extent it does now--re Buddhist Friends? Buddhism is a non-theist "religion." Trust me. I know this.)

(Also, I think, personally, that doing the will of God is the center of living out one's spirituality. It is not seeking the will of God or seeking an understanding of the will, character or purpose of God or any such other thing. I digress...again.)

How is it, I wonder, that people who say that they are not seeking the will of God in a meeting for worship for business can be sure that they aren't? Because their reason tells them they couldn't be doing that? Well, clear the decks and think that over for a moment in the context of people who say they are (or are not) "doing things" they are obviously doing.

"I am not angry, but..."

"I am not a judgmental person, but..."

"I don't hold a grudge, but..."

How do they know they aren't seeking the will of God?

How would they know if they were?

Are they making/jumping to conclusions based on "definitions" of God that very few of us would own? With all due respect, Dr. Dawkins does not get to define God and then dismiss us all as nut cases regardless of our spiritual experience. What makes him think that experiences he has had in his life were not the same ones that some of us characterize as spiritual or even "supernatural?"

When someone says "I don't believe in God" why do those of us who do take their word for it, or even care that they say this?

Have we taken so many steps (as a Society or as individuals) back toward propositional beliefs based on this or that reasoning from stories in the Bible that we have forgotten that it is how we live, and not what we believe, that saves us?

Have we given up on discerning and following the daily promptings we receive directly (from whatever we call the "source") that nudge us toward the love and charity that some of us express in the five (here today but called something else tomorrow) testimonies in the Liberal domain of the Society?

Does some propositional belief (like God doesn't want us to have same sex life partners or God demands that we all confess "Jesus Christ" by that name) cause us to ignore the promptings to love and live out our spirituality with those around us?

Not withstanding what they say they are up to, non-theist Friends seem to take part in doing business and other meeting process in a range of behavior not discern-ably different from the range of behavior as us "believers" in our meetings. And we are not sure whether we can include them just because they refuse to characterize as we do what we are all (more or less) doing in the same way?

I once heard a dharma talk on the radio during which the teacher said "...and then a thought bubbled out of my psyche..."

I snorted and said aloud "Huh! Nothing bubbled out of anywhere! You heard God talking to you."

And then I heard God talking to me: "Shut up and listen."

It was an edifying, helpful and skillful thing that was said and I might have rejected it or missed it altogether if I was hung up on "where" it came from.

Sure, I am a bit annoyed at times when people who never ask me what I mean by God (or people who classify me as "Christo-centric ") say that I believe in God because of some flaw in my character--some need to have a "God" to make up for some unwholesome hole in my humanity. But it's just as likely, you know, that a lack of a "belief" in God is based on the same human shortcomings in them that they decry in me.

If one can be kind to others, and respectful of them, and allow for all the same opportunity to go through the potluck (or any other) line or serve on a committee in a role consistent with their gifts then one can and should be included in my spiritual community (even if they say it isn't "spiritual" at all).

If one needs some work to be able to do those things then I say work with them--and abide with them. (It amounts to working and abiding with oneself, you know.)

But if they cannot do those things--and do not own that these are the things to which they aspire, to which they are being led (by whom or whatever)--then I don't care if they say they are seeking the will of God or not, whether they "believe" in God or not.

Call it what you will, it--just like all of us-- "is" and it "is becoming."

A question from a Friend...

2009-10-22T09:14:00.000-07:00

A Friend sent me a link and a question.

The link takes us here.

the question:

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

I wrote back to him:

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

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

Authentic.

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

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

I? Myself? Two different things?

Maybe they are.

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

Strong stuff.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Progress and the Journey

2009-09-22T09:16:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2009-09-06T09:18:00.000-07:00

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

Hello, Ashley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You point with justification to the lack of perfection.

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

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

Another comment too long to be a comment...

2009-09-04T16:09:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some Questions

2009-09-01T13:50:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can the answers to these questions be known?

If so, so what?

If not, so what?

Too Long For a Comment..

2009-08-23T09:44:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's Just Not Fair

2009-07-28T07:26:00.001-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I didn't want to.

It didn't seem fair.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, lay it down?

This is fair?

No.

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

Oh, that.

That obedience thing.

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

And it matters that I obey.

Bonnie Tinker's Lessons

2009-07-03T17:06:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

But you learn, you grow.

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

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

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

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

"Feed my sheep," indeed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Being Alone...or not.

2009-06-01T07:25:00.000-07:00

I spent some time this week with a young man who told me that he didn’t like to be alone. He said that when he’s alone his head gets filled with unpleasant memories; things he did that he should not have done, mistakes he made, things he wished never happened. It was uncomfortable for him, he said, and so he did everything he could to keep from being by himself.

I didn’t say anything to him then but the next day I had the occasion to be with him, again. I told him that everyone is like that, to some extent, which is why all of us have so many radios and televisions and computers, why we spend so much time with hobbies and working, why some people drink and use other drugs, why gossip and sports are such popular past times.

Quakers have addressed this phenomenon. Fox, Penington and others in the first generation saw this as Christ, or the Light, or the Spirit working in us—showing us the parts of our lives, as manifested in these uncomfortable thoughts, that need to be addressed.

If we paid attention to these, fearlessly and humbly holding these things so as to deal with them, repenting of them (such repentance going beyond mere remorse but also including a resolution to not repeat them and even to acknowledging the wrong doing to others and seeking reconciliation with them) then we would be changed, transformed spiritually, and moved along toward the maturity, the wholeness, the fitness for God’s purposes called “perfection" in the Quaker patois.

If we dismissed this discomfort—either by fleeing from the opportunity to experience it or by rationalizing our behavior ("He had it coming," or "Sure, it was wrong, but under the circumstances, what else could I do?")—then our hearts, as those of Pharaoh and those addressed by Isaiah and Jeremiah, would be hardened and it would be even more difficult for us to hear and heed the voice that was calling us.

Buddhist spiritual literature, and that of other traditions, contains similar writing. Things with which we are uncomfortable about our past should be “held” and “felt” and we can, in contemporary American Buddhist terms, become “softened” to them. This is part of the spiritual transformation sought and sometimes named “enlightenment.”

I don’t know that any of this sank in with this young man, who is not apparently spiritual in any way. Perhaps what I had to say will never be useful to him, perhaps someday, in the context of some other experience, it will come to mind. I cannot say that it will, or even that it was my intention that it should. It was just the right response to what he revealed to me about himself.

This was not a moment of intentional evangelism, although it has been interpreted as such by a Friend with whom I shared it. Perhaps it was, notwithstanding my lack of intention. I am reminded something George Fox wrote in his Journal. It is something to the effect that he never converted anyone to Christ. All he did was lead them to it and leave them there. Christ, he often is quoted to have said, has come to teach his people, himself.

So I don’t know what any of this will mean to him. What I hope, though, is that he will come to know that all of us share his discomfort at being alone to some degree or another, that when he is alone he is not really alone, at all, and that when he feels uncomfortable with things he has done he is not being punished—he is being changed.

Diverse Questions from Daniel Wilcox

2009-03-09T05:08:00.000-07:00

Note: this is a reply to a comment posted by Daniel Wilcox to my post of February 23, 2009 entitled "Why Do Some Quakers Hate to Talk About Sin?"

#1 I see you identify as a Beanite. Do you know where I can find a good biographical study of the Beans?

I do not not. I have found scraps here and there on the internet and in books such as that you mention, but in a phrase I read somewhere "The Beans await their biographer." (and I am not that person upon whom they wait)

Aside from such as I have gathered from these sources, I spent a week or so in the Swarthmore library with the Bean papers a couple of years ago and made a great many notes. I also spent a day in the Guilford College library with the collected minutes of the College Park Association. Much of what I have inferred from this stuff is probably wrong. There are sources I would like to look at--including the papers of Rufus Jones which I think probably contain many letters from Joel.

But, no, I cannot direct you to a biography. If someone else can I hope they will direct me to it, as well.

If you have read back through my postings over the years you know that central to my affinity with the Beans is their conviction that the divisions within the Society are to be lamented and removed. Our differences are gifts to one another, and in abiding together we learn from and are shaped by one another.

It is notions--propositional beliefs--that divide us one from the other and sap our strength as a people. It is the transformative experience and power that we share and, although that may seem lacking in the "other domains" of the Society, it is equally lacking in all. That lack, I think, is ameliorated when Friends worship and live in relationship with one another, rather than living and worshiping only with "like minded" Friends.

#2 Do you have a blog where you share your transformation from a Marine to one who opposes war?

I do not. It had to do with spending three years learning that everything I was taught growing up about such things was wrong because it didn't work and then a lot more years figuring out what was right. Years later, after sitting in meeting for worship for a year or so a lot of things became very clear to me.

When I was near the end of my time in the Marine Corps, and thinking of deserting in despair at being a part of all that, I met some Friends who--like Chuck Fager--were called to reach out in love, support and encouragment to those in the military. Big help to me even if I was not ready for the spiritual message that was behind (and very much not pushed at me) that which they provided me.

#3 Does it conflict with your faith in Jesus that most versions of Buddhism are atheistic?

Not at all.

Christianity and Buddhism are both imprecise labels and each of us applies our own "take" on them when someone uses the term--leading to a great deal of misunderstanding.

I am an empiricist in that I use that which changes me and don't pay much attention to things that do not. I am into the "what" rather than the "how" or the "why." I don't care about theological notions (lakes of fire, life after death, virgin births and such) that are not about how I am supposed to live (see the Sermon on the Mount) (see the Eightfold Path, for that matter).

I get direct guidance every day on how to live my life and I try (at least anymore) not to worry too much about where it comes from, the nature of the source of that guidance, or what that source is up to in providing me that guidance. It is hard enough to follow the guidance, let alone figure out what no person can ever really know. I can know what it tells me to do and do it. That changes my life (improves my condition and the condition of those around me). The other, I have observed in myself, turns into trying to change other people's lives--at least their propositional beliefs. Why try to change things about other people that don't matter? I am not big on propositional beliefs.

I do conceptualize in Christian terms and specifically the terms I find in Quaker writing because they seem to fit with my experience of this guidance. I think it's Christ, Light, Spirit and it appears to be doing that which early Friends said it does--shows us the problem areas in our lives and gives us the power to do something about them.

Atonement? Trinity? I don't know. And neither does anyone else. These are "rational" deductions (at least given the assumptions from which they proceed) pulled out of the air by people who are into the "hows" and the "whys" and too often led by these away from the "whats."

(Resurrection is different. I know from experience that if I ignore the guidance I am given because it seems too hard or no fun that I am "crucifying Christ," and locking it in the tomb of my heart from which it will emerge in no more than three days time to put it all in front of me again. As Marcus Borg asks, would a video camera in the garden have captured Jesus emerging from the tomb? I don't know. In light of my own walk, however, does that really matter? My experience with ignoring the Light, myself, in my own life, gets the point across to me.)

"My" Buddhism is practice, not belief. It is meditation that is modeled on Soto Zen and what Americans have developed as "mindfulness" practice. It means, more or less, just sitting and trying to stay in the moment for a period of time on as many days as I can muster the discipline to do it. I do listen to dharma talks (Zencast, etc.) and read various writings (from a lot of traditions), but I am not into the theology (even the non theology theology) of Buddhism.

Reincarnation, for example, is one of those "notions" of which I can never really know the truth (like life after death in heaven) and that doesn't really matter, anyway, if I am on the Eightfold Path, if you know what I mean (or conforming to the Beatitudes).

Karma is more complicated than I used to understand and, although I don't obviously care about how it plays into reincarnation, my experience is that our actions have far reaching affect on our own lives and those of others so we should be careful about the actions we take.

A Buddhist practice can sit on top of any spiritual conceptualization without "interfering" with it.

#3 If it is true that we as humans first need inner transformation, why is it that the Quakers who put the most focus on sin and repentance (such as California Yearly Meeting, as it used to be termed), show a contrary spirit when it comes to actions? When I was a member there, many members actually supported nuclear weapons, etc. I still don't understand that.

I don't either, but I don't think that approving of war necessarily invalidates a focus on sin and repentance. I think it just goes to the point of my original posting about the two takes on sin. If one thinks that sin is a body of actions we cannot help but accumulate because of our nature, and that the office of Christ is to get those "taken care of" for us, then it makes sense that we can, albeit with great regret and even sincere angst, do that which we are specifically told not to do because we cannot help it.

If one experiences sin as states of mind, from which the office of Christ is to help us withdraw or escape, then one is led to try to lay down those states of mind that come together to create nuclear weapons/war in general (including the wars in which we engage every day with ourselves and others in our lives) and to testify against them.

Unfortunately, Friends' testimony in regard to such things doesn't always get presented in those spiritual terms. Too often public testimony is expressed in worldly terms.

A petition to the Portland City Council in support of a condemnation of the war in Iraq, for example, is based on the fact that we were led into it by lies and deception and that the money spent there is better spent on classrooms and medical care at home. Yes, but Quakers would be opposed to that war even if there had been WMD's and even if there was plenty of money at home for education and health care.

We are opposed to war because we come from a place in which the occasion for it does not arise--we are committed to laying down the states of mind (greed, fear, pride, lust) that take people to war (and laying them down long before a situation is so far out of hand that someone can smugly turn around and sneer "What now, Mr. Pacifist?")

And I don't necessarily think the transformation comes "first" in the sense that we wait til God is finished with us before trying to get anything different done in the world, although I don't think real change can happen in the world without real change in people.

I do think that, like two children who start digging on opposite sides of a dirt pile, intent on meeting in the middle to create a tunnel, our outward conforming to the guidance of Christ and the inward working of Christ in us go together--magnify, build on, one another. I do not think that either, alone, gets through.

#Why do you think Quakers who talk about sin so often strongly support sinful actions, but Quakers who seldom talk about it, often are the most proactive in countering sin?

I don't think they necessarily are, although I do think they think they are. Joyce Meyer once said that the sins that have others stuck look easy to overcome while our own seems impossible. I know a number of Friends with that outlook who are still engaged in re-building the Gulf Coast, and who are as anti-war and who are mourning climate change.

My frustration is with Liberal Friends who often display a conceit about our own righteousness that is at least equal to that of those with bumper stickers that say "Christians aren't perfect, just saved."

Motes and beams.

I think that Friends who never utter the word "sin" or "repentance" are often as afraid, greedy, cruel, covetous, proud, angry and dismissive of the suffering of others as those whose conversation (and conceptualization) is riddled with those words. I think that such Friends can be as manipulative and coercive (albeit in a more passive aggressive way, perhaps) as those who go to war or approve of others going to war.

Thank you, Daniel, for the opportunity to answer your questions. It is the gift of an occasion to grow to be put to explanation.

For Richard M.

2009-03-04T04:15:00.000-08:00

note: this is an answer to a comment posted to a previous post. As I explained in a comment of my own to that post, so much was raised by Friends' comments there that I wanted to address all in an orderly fashion, so as to lose none and keep any strands of conversation that might arise separate from one another. I'm answering Richard M, here, and ask for patience in regard to the rest. I will get to you.

Richard commented:

"The biggest problem I have with this post is your equation of Protestantism with Calvinism. It is true that Calvinism is one major form of Protestantism but it is far from being identical with it. Protestantism represents all the groups that broke away from Catholicism and they broke away for many reasons. The Calvinists broke away because they adopted a more pessimistic view of the human condition than did the Catholics but others, among which were the Quakers, adopted a more optimistic view of the possibilities for human transformation than did the Catholics. And, in my own reading of Quaker history, there hasn't been any tendency for Quakers to become Calvinists. Quakers of all persuasions remain more theologically liberal than Catholics not, like the Calvinists, more conservative."

Richard, I can see the distinction you make between Protestants and Calvinists and will not quibble with you about that although I disagree with you. I think that Protestantism is Calvinism--that the notions that Calvin refined certainly existed before he came along but he put them into a "coherent" body that forms the ground upon which this strain of spirituality stands (and from which, at times, it deviates).

I don't think that the faith and practice of Friends, originally, was anything but a repudiation of--and not a mere deviation from-- that body of notions and forms.

I do, however, think I see a whole lot of "drift" among Friends over the years toward Calvinism/Protestantism.

I think, in fact, that all of the major schisms in the Society of Friends have, at bottom, notwithstanding any social or economic or spiritual reasons some in the Society at a particular place at a particular time wanted to establish Protestant/Calvinist notions as the Faith and Practice of Friends.

This is perhaps most obvious in the course of events in Iowa Yearly in the last half of the 19th Century that ended in some of its members "going over" to Iowa Conservative and a few others ending up in California--stripped of their certificates of ministry and disowned (although later re-instated so that their membership could be orderly transferred) for not "believing," among other things, that the Holy Spirit descends upon a person not at birth (as the book of John was commonly been held among Friends to say) but when they are "saved" as is pretty standard Protestant/Calvinist theology.

Of course these notions were part of the movement from the beginning--the people gathered to it had been steeped in them. George Keith tried and failed to establish them as the norm. It was said by some, though, that his manner, more than his ideas, limited his success. Barclay had a more subtle and long term success. My understanding is that as Friends moved from an "end times" to a "mean time" point of view, toward the end of Fox's life, there was quite a bit of editing of early writings that attempted to pull Quakers into the "mainstream."

The first Friends, however, notwithstanding that they carried Protestant/Calvinist notions as part of their spiritual DNA (did I just write that?) were dissatisfied with the result of the Protestant/Calvinist forms, which is why so many had laid down them down and sat in waiting worship until Fox came along and set them in motion (or Christ did so through Fox). These notions and forms were still there, of course, ready to re-appear and re-appear they did.

Again, as I originally wrote, I am not saying that's a bad thing and they shouldn't.

I am saying that some Friends, especially liberals, have trouble with the concept of "sin" because they see it in terms of Calvin/Protestantism; in its propositions and the deductions that proceed from them. Not believing (or perhaps experiencing) humans as born hopelessly wretched this is not helpful to them.

I am saying that the other view of sin--as states of mind (as opposed to a body of bad acts) upon which Christ (the Spirit, the Light) can "work with us" or "work on us"--revealing the need to change and providing the power in which we can stand to accomplish that--may be helpful to these Friends.

We can change (or be changed) this side of the grave; there is hope for our maturity and developing (or having developed) our fitness for a particular purpose. At least, there is solid evidence in the literature of Friends through the years to show that. The phrase "talking up sin" appears there as characterizing that which Friends rejected.

But there is also a "creep" in that same literature of the notion that we cannot change or be changed, along with other notions and forms that were talked up by Protestants and Calvinists--forms and notions away from which those in the movement that would become the Society of Friends walked purposefully. Steeple house, professors...

I have frequent contact and fellowship with Evangelical Friends and know for myself how much Calvinist/Protestant notions have been absorbed into the faith and practice of many Friends. This didn't happen over night. And again, I think it's fine. Not helpful to me but fine if it's helpful in the spiritual transformation (see the Sermon on the Mount) of those who hold to them.

As a Beanite I hope and expect the Society will again be the whole it was once, with such a diversity of belief as exists among us held, as similar diversity was held 300+ years ago, in a tension that was mutually edifying. I cannot deny, however, my own view that the "Protestantization" of the Society of Friends is a condition that complicates this Beanite vision.

As a Beanite I affiliate formally with no particular formal domain of the Society so as to be open to "correspondence" with those who are a part of any and all--even those not currently in correspondence with me. Although many even here do not know this, it's why North Pacific Yearly Meeting is not affiliated with any of the separate domains of the Society--at least for now.

We must all get home. None of us must be left behind.

Our differences are not be glossed over or ignored--but they are also not reason for us to be divided. Each of us has something for the Society, and the Society has something for each of us.

If seeing sins as a body of bad acts is helpful in developing that pure heart, that mourning condition, that peacemaking practice that's fine.

"Quakerism" is an empirical faith. It's what works that cooks.

Why do some Quakers hate to talk about sin?

2009-02-23T06:11:00.001-08:00

I cannot remember the last time I heard a Friend in my Yearly Meeting talk about sin except to say we don't talk about it or should not talk about it.

I have been thinking through a lot of things in light of a recent opening that the thrust of the Quaker movement was originally pretty much a rejection of Protestantism, and that the fragmenting of the movement--which began almost at the beginning and eventually undermined the Society of Friends by dividing it into separate domains --amounts to a re-introduction and acceptance the Protestant norms among Friends.

Quickly added, Friends (and everyone else) can certainly hold to Protestant thinking if they so choose--Protestantism and those who organize and conform their spiritual lives around its ideas are certainly within the ambit of the radical inclusiveness I am wont to talk up. I just find that confused thinking and action results, at times, when people are not clear about what that means.

If one says that someone's sins are forgiven that usually means that past wrong doings are laid to one side and no longer count against one. There may be outcomes from these which cannot be changed but when Jesus as advocate argues our case for everlasting life he will not have to address those charges. This comes from a Protestant belief in the nature of people--we are flawed by The Fall and we are pretty much doomed to fall short on things and, even though grace will, once in a while, allow us to come through in a good way, that's how it's going to be. Atonement and a lot of other bed-rock "fundamentals" of Protestant Christianity are based on this notion of people as hopeless wretches--only an undeserving elect of whom are going to do well in the end.

Our sins, then, are a body of deeds and we have no hope that we can stop amassing them.

George Fox--at least the early George Fox--and the likes of Penington and Naylor did not talk about sin in this way, at least not exclusively. They saw sin, rather, as the states of mind (conditions) (conditioning?) that give rise to the acts (of evil) that most people call, today, "sins."

One cannot do anything about past acts, but one can certainly do something about the continuing states of mind where those acts orginate. See, for example, Fox's Epistle #10. It's about escaping sin--not giving into "addicitions." Also, see the quotation from Penington at the top of this blog. They talked up that we can overcome sin in a way that would make Calvin spin (and did make English magistrates confiscate property).

Quakers were very much about a process of transformation that put an end to the evil deeds through a spiritual transformation that took, for example, away the occasion for all wars. This meant that people's states of mind would not include, any longer, that which moved them to war.

This drove the Protestant authorities nuts just to hear. People are too depraved for this kind of "progress," in the Protestant ideology.

And I think that's why it drives Liberal Friends nuts, today, to talk about sin: we tend to see it in the Protestant way instead of the Quaker way--the classical Quaker way. Not enough of us understand the difference to use that difference in a constructive and liberating way.

Liberal Friends, me among them, don't like the idea that we are are all worthless, helpless, hopeless spiritual worms condemned to doing evil with no hope of doing better this side of the grave. And we don't think it's helpful to constantly put ourselves down or to turn ourselves over to those authorities who cannot help but try to manipulate us into doing what they want us to do even though we know it's wrong and contrary to the openings Christ gives us and every other person on earth. Some of us seem to think that's vision of people as bumbling evil-doers is "Christian" but actually it's "Protestant."

Of course, Liberal Friends I know are not so big as Penington (see, again, above) was on "Quakerism" as a pursuit of transformation. Far too many of us are pretty darned self-satisfied and believe that the only transformation that needs to happen is that others need to vote for liberal Democrats, recycle more and listen to NPR. Oh, and lately, drive a Toyota Pious cheerfully across the earth in a socially responsible way that looks out for that of God in everyone.

Liberal Friends, I think, could benefit by thinking about the idea of sin as states of mind, rather than actions, because I think that leads to the conclusion that the eradication of these states of mind is not complete in us and we are supposed to be doing something about that.

I feel great sorrow, sometimes, when I hear Friends--myself included--speaking from greed or anger or lust or sloth or covetedness or pride (which did I leave out? It's a quiz! Can we even name--let along confront--the Seven Deadlies?) with no apparent sense that something is going on that needs to be changed.

Sometimes we look back at the 17th Century and are tempted to think that there was just some big misunderstanding and that's why Mary Dyer was hanged by the Protestants in Boston. But that's not true. Quaker ideas and practices threatened the foundation of the Protestant society from which it sprang. Only when Barclay and others gave the movement a firm shove back toward Protestantism did they allow us to affirm--rather than swear--in our quaint little way. Barclay assured people, for example that the Spirit would never contradict the Bible (and the Protestants heard him say the Spirit would never contradict their notion of what the Bible said or that it was truly the "word of God.")

But there is a huge leap from "Christ has come to teach his people himself" to "the mission of the Holy Spirit is to help us correctly understand scripture." Huge.

Quakers did not start out as Protestants--at least the brightest lights of movement did not. By 50 years later, of course, the cross currents were pulling many back to that shore. Those who wish to reside on that shore are welcome to do so. I live, in this regard, by Gamaliel's wisdom. But I think Liberal Friends could benefit it teasing out the difference between Protestantism and Quakerism.

It might help orient us.

peace and harmony

2009-01-15T03:37:00.000-08:00

Chuck Fager, a Quaker of renown, has recently posted about going to a "peace" conference and discovering that there was not much, by his light, going on there about "war"--about "large organized violent conflict."

It made me think about discussion going on in North Pacific Yearly Meeting, right now, in the process of our re-examination and revision of our book of Faith and Practice. This post is about that process, not about Chuck Fager's post. That post was the occasion for, but not the oject of, this one.

One idea brought up in the process has been re-claiming the label of "Harmony" for the testimony commonly called "Peace," these days. Without going into all this stuff about testimonies, suffice it to say that some Friends want to talk about the fact that when we think and talk about "peace" we have in mind these large organized violent conflicts and the external, political ways to stop and prevent them. We start to think about where we need to go (to give a piece of our minds--to "speak truth"--to some Congressman--"power"--or to a vigil or some other kind of demonstration), rather than the place from which we come (that place from which there is no occasion for war).

This political peace among nations, traditionally, was seen by Friends as a part of the overall harmony--the right relationship with God, with ourselves, with others and our environment--that the testimony speaks to. The political aspect, in some Friends' minds, has grown to define the testimony and, in doing so emphasizing political action as the way to achieve it. Some "peace minutes," for example, are difficult to distinguish from planks of the Democtratic Party platform. And that, some Friends of a more traditional "bent," is a real problem. Without a solid grounding in overall harmony the contentious political world can lead us into the roles and conduct that perpetuate, rather than threaten, the mores of our cultures of redemptive violence.

There was a time that the peace testimony had nothing to do with organizing to stop wars--it had to do with not participating in them. It did not have to do with external changes, changes to the world, that would make war obsolete, except insofar as that is the outcome resulting from internal changes in people--by attaining that perfection, that maturity, that transformation--that was one of the fundamental distinctions between Quakers and Protestants and that was foreseen by Friends in the context of the end times in which Friends believed they lived.

I think it's fine that the peace testimony has morphed to include stopping wars, rather than merely a refusal to lend our energies to fighting them, and that Friends no longer remain behind the hedge, eschewing political alliances with those outside the Society who share our concerns and scruples about large organized violent conflicts.

I've spent a lot of time (before and after being gathered to the Society) sitting in, holding candles and carrying signs. I still talk to people, and write to them, about my faith based opposition to war.

I support Friend Fager's work. I am a veteran (they once called me Sergeant Travis, USMC) and Christ working through people like Chuck when I was on active duty started me on the road to where I am now. (Far more Friends should support his work in North Carolina and should send him a check every year.)

The "lusts"--the compulsions of our hearts: our fears and our greeds, rooted in and supported by the "common sense" of our cultures of redemptive violence--are the origin of our wars. The military spending, for example, is a manifestation of these fears and greeds, but they are only a manifestation of them. Without the fears and greeds there are no such manifestations. Removing the fears and greeds is what will bring remove the manifestations, but working to remove the manifestations will not remove the fears and greeds.

That's what Friends traditionally believed. Whether we were talking about the struggles with those around us in the ongoing, quiet but desperate struggles for control of the emotional and other resources of our relationships, or with American government leaders who have had us engaged in a struggles with the likes of Adolf Hitler, the Vietcong or Al Qaeda for control of the world's resources, the faith and practice of Friends was what has been turned into a bromide, these days--"peace, let it begin with me."

Some Friends wonder, given the political context in which we pursue the testimony today, peace that begins with us (in so far as it does) can, in that context, stay with us. The query is: given the imperatives of the political process (that by definition and purpose mediates fears and greeds) how can those who participate remain in that place that takes away the occasion for all war?

Some Friends think Howard Brinton, in Friends for 300 Years, wrote about the harmony testimony, rather than the peace testimony for this reason. The political peace, the absence of war between nations, will come about when people become (or are transformed to be) capable of living in harmony with one another--not when our social, political and economic infrastructure removes this or that means of manifesting our greeds and fears. It is moving (or being moved) beyond the control of the spirits that use our greeds and fears to drive us to use this or that means of trying to eliminate our greeds and fears--not creating a world in which we are rendered "greed proof" and "fear proof" by this or that statute or compromise--that will end the large organized violent conflicts that rage around us.

Coming from, and staying in, that place will transform the world. It will not happen, Friends traditionally believed, the other way around.

My personal view, as a good Beanite Friend, is that there is a balance involved, here. Yes, individual spiritual transformation will influence the political structures in which we live. But the political structures in which we live can have an influence on our spiritual transformation, as well.

With an ear to the direct teachings of each of us from Christ, and our hands on the accumulated wisdom of our spiritual tradtions, the world will be remade. In the end, though, Penn was right when he said that a good system set up to govern people who are inclined to do evil will be perverted by them and that a bad system, governing people inclined to be good, will be made good by them.

Wear it as long as you can, Fox is reputed to have told Penn. The operative word is "can." When we have to lay it down because it's not who we are, any more, when we enter into that kind of harmony, that kind of right relationship, then we are a part of the Kingdom of which Jesus spoke. No matter what's going on around us, no matter where we go to confront and struggle with evil, we must remain, ourselves, in that Kingdom--the place that takes away the occasion for all war.

Some queries

2008-11-23T07:39:00.000-08:00

How does your religion enslave you? Others?

How does it set you free? Set others free?

Which do you think it was designed to do?

Which do you want it to do?

Neither?

Both?

gravity...

2008-10-19T12:20:00.000-07:00

I don't usually spend a lot of time accounting for gravity in my decision making. I go through my life doing this or that without wondering whether gravity is going to work. When I wad up a piece of paper and throw it across the room toward the wastebasket I don't have a plan "B" in mind, a plan for what I will do just in case that ball of paper goes up rather than down.

My faith is not like that. I don't go through life doing what love dictates without thinking about it. Despite the ambivalent conditioning I have received from my culture, and the clear revelation I have received from God, I have a plan "B"--just in case an initial approach of love doesn't work out. In fact, like many people, I have so often gone immediately to plan "B" without even trying plan "A:" approaching people and situations with love without thinking, as I approach them in regard to how objects will fall through space.

The epitome of this approach is United States foreign policy. We don't even try to use love as the basis of our foreign policy. We go with plan "B" from the get-go, backed up by out military and arsenal of nuclear weapons.

I talked to a man recently who is writing a biography of Elias Hicks. He told me that Hicks didn't believe that Jesus was born perfect, he was not really "God come to earth to take on human form." Jesus was born a man like I was, this historian/biographer said, and that in some way he attained holy perfection.

According to this man, Hicks wondered about what would be the big deal of the holiness of Jesus if he was born with it? What hope would that give to me? If, though, he was born in the same condition I was born in, and he attained perfection, that would be Good News, indeed.

So, when Jesus was at the river with John, when that white dove came down, and the words about my son with whom I am well pleased rang out, God was celebrating an event that never happened before. Moses couldn't do it, David couldn't do it. But Jesus, Jesus got it done (or it got done in Jesus).

Notwithstanding the notional dispute about the nature of the baby Jesus, when he stepped out of that river we know it is written that he always went with plan "A"--he faced every situation he encountered with love. He had no plan "B." If plan "A" doesn't seem to be working, the way I read the Bible, then we don't get what "working" means within the context of the Kingdom.

While I doubt I am ever going to be transformed to the point that I will never go to plan "B," I can see, looking back through time, that the work of Spirit done in me has developed my ability to--more and more although not always--at least give plan "A" a try before I go to plan "B."

I will probably never automatically act in every situation with the kind of faith in love that I have in gravity. But I am thankful for the work of the Spirit that has improved my ability to at least give love a try before I go to plan "B." I am also thankful for the now-proven promise of being given even more power to love, initially, in those situations where plan "B" would have been my approach.

more on convergence

2008-10-16T10:34:00.000-07:00

I have been reading Martin's blog and its comments and think this discussion is very important given who we are, where we are and when we are.

I appreciate the comment that 'convergence' will never please everyone and that one can be satisfied with that.

I aspire to be faithful to living such that, notwithstanding the obvious "reality" of that position, my walk does not manifest, validate or testify to its ultimate validity.

My aspiration--and I am confident that of anyone who might read these words--is to live in The Kingdom (if we want to use that language) even though sometimes I find myself in situations in which it seems to me I am the only inhabitant of that Kingdom (or realm or space, or relationship or community) within eyesight or earshot. I know that all of us know what I am talking about, here, and know that the way to increase the population of that Kingdom is to treat those who seem like aliens with the hospitality that erases the line between host and guest.

My oldest daughter no longer brings home things to tape to the refrigerator. Instead, she brings me books from her college classes. "Jesus for President" took up much of my airplane time over the past three days and showed me some "moves" I can use skillfully to reach out to those who are turned off by phrases like "the risen Christ working on us"--a phrase with which I personally resonate.

I do think that we all belong together and that in being together, abiding together, we will all converge; but not in some kind of grand compromise of some sort. This idea--of abiding in the Spirit with people who do not seem, to us, anxious to abide, at all, let alone in what seems to us to be the Spirit--is hardly new to Quaker faith and practice. Until 1827 or so it seems to me to have been the way of being religious together, it seems it was a basic part of "Quakerism"--of the faith and practice of Friends.

The phrase "straddling the divisions until they close beneath our feet" is constantly in my mind, not only in regard to Friends, not only in regard to Christians, but in regard to everyone, everywhere. But we will not get there, I don't think, if we are not together, if we are divided by language and notions of things we can never really know.

are you feeling excluded?

2008-10-12T17:01:00.000-07:00

I have been thinking about how people feel excluded or included.

I wonder whether sometimes we feel excluded or threatened when someone expresses something with which we are not in unity when all they were doing was expressing their take on something and meant nothing ill toward us.

I know that sometimes things are said and done that are intended to exclude people but I wonder how good we are at discerning when that is what is going on and when something entirely innocent has happened?

Can we hear things with which we disagree without wanting to fight or flee?

Can we forebear?

Even if something is said or done to hurt us, or to chase us away, what is the skillful practice? What is the response we should make in such a situation to conform ourselves (and perhaps to situation) to the Light?

Can we resist the strong impulses that come up, impulses we know are not consistent with love of neighbor, love of enemy?

Maybe that's what I am going to say...

2008-10-11T07:17:00.000-07:00

I am off today to be a minor panelist at a conference here in Portland that is billed as "Christian-Buddhist Dialogue."

I feel very much in over my head but trust that God will give me the words to say in the brief time allotted to hear what I might say. I didn't seek this and did a lot of processing before saying I'd do it. I had the help of Friends in making my decision; in fact, the invitation came from Friends who were contacted by the conference organizers asking for someone to "represent us" in this dialogue.

I am, of course, not the best "representative" for our Christian "side." The Christian-Buddhist Dialogue is something that goes on inside my head every day; a Buddhist practice of meditation, listening to Dharma talks and reading Buddhist literature sits easy on top of my Christian walk.

Yeah, I know what some Christians (and even some Buddhists) would say about that but what other people think of me is sometimes none of my business. It's always the business of that Guide who is in constant contact with me and holding it all up to me. No mirror, indeed.

I don't say that every "religion" is "right" or "equally valid" except when I say it ironically: pretty much all, for example, seem to chime on in agreement about redemptive violence when the chips are down. They are all equally valid.

I don't find the word "religion" very helpful, frankly.

I find the phrase "our way of being religious together" or "living out our spirituality together" or "working out our salvation together" more helpful, more skillful, if you will, more descriptive of what perfects, matures, completes--transforms--makes me more fit for the purpose: love God with all your...

I know it's not about "notions"--those concepts about the origin, the nature and the intent of God that cannot be proved and that divide us, both inside and among the various spiritual traditions. It's about how one lives out one's life, how one's practice, one's walk, leads to a convergence with Christ, the Spirit, God, Goddess, the Divine, the transcendent, the ultimate concern, the Big Kahuna, the Great Perhaps, The Unknown God, _______ (the blank left for anyone to fill in as moved) .

Whether the Eight Fold Path (I hafta dig a spiritual tradition that deals in so many lists) or the Fruits of the Spirit--it's about what I am becoming.

Friends have always known that one could be "saved" without ever hearing the name of Jesus or holding a Bible. Fox, Penn, Woolman; far back Friends said that the Light was available to all and that those who heeded it and submitted to its guidance would be transformed, conformed, to it. Farther back the book of John--no doubt written in that name by Friends--said it.

Maybe this is what I am going to say, today. I'll know once I open my mouth.

Pray for me.

You can even hold me in the Light.

Just don't call me "Christo Centric."

The feeling, the knowledge, I experience every time that rock rolls away and unseals the tomb of my heart, the tomb into which I consign Christ when I crucify It so I can follow my many vanities, that's when I know I am a Christian. Confronted, again, with love and support in that metaphorical garden of ressurection, ready to go back to work with/on me, I know I am not anything "centric." The name does not belong to every spirit that tries to use it, but Christ by any name is not just something that is part of my life. I am, rather, part of Its life--whatever It is being called at the moment.

And I know that millions of others have (and have had) that same feeling, share that same knowledge and guidance, even though they would never in a million years or in forty days and forty nights describe that shared experience--the knowledge of that guidance--in those words.

"Straddling the divides, until they close beneath our feet"

convergence and beanism?

2008-10-08T04:44:00.000-07:00

I don't have time to do any of this. (Yeah? Then whose time is it?)

This morning I read a post about convergent Quakerism that surprised me a little.

It made me think about standing on the sidelines of the convergent movement, not sure if I really wanted to play and not sure if I was really welcome.

Notwithstanding indications of diversity, it has sounded to me, at times, from some people's mouths, very much like what was going on was about drawing people out of the the current domains of the Society and into a newly developing domain--more division based on some kind of similarity of belief striking Christian, even evangelical, chords.

Perhaps I was (and am) wrong about that, misreading or misinterpreting. Maybe there are personality things going on (it would not be the first time that I turned people off either with what I actually said about something or what they read into what I actually said. And it would not be the first time I did the same thing).

What was written in that post this morning struck me as a great explanation, frankly, of Beanite faith and practice. We belong together not, as some think this mislabeled "liberal" theology "teaches," because we are all "right" but because we are all necessary to one another's perfection. Division deprives us of the edification available through contact with those we exclude or from whom we flee in pursuit of doctrinal purity, of more "comfortable" fellowship.

Listening does not imply that one is easy or in unity with what another says. Sharing fellowship is not approval of everything someone else does. But both make one available to the work of the Holy Spirit that is often accomplished in fortuitous opportunities between and among unlikely people.

A Friend I know states her spiritual condition as "straddling the divides until they close beneath my feet."

Is convergence about the closing--as opposed to merely politely visiting across--those divides?

Is it about taking the change and the edification found in convergent fellowship back and entering into it, enlarging its space, where one has been planted?

Is it about not only bringing everyone along who will come, but also actively and patiently extending a hand of love and humility to those who hold back and even actively resist, waiting for those not yet ready, or unready to become ready, in the confident expectation that they will be along as they are made ready, because they will be made ready (but not by us)?

Is convergence about once again making the Society a place where people share a way of being religious, together, rather than a place of believing or not believing the same propositions, together?

Is it about a place of spiritual practice living in (and in conformance with, being conformed to) the Light, rather than a "safe" space where all encountered will share the same doctrines (even non theological doctrines) or agree that no one will talk about what they believe for fear of offending and riling up others; where, upon hearing things with which they are not in unity Friends will not become offended and riled up?

I don't know that there are answers to those questions, or if anyone has thought or wants to think about convergent Quakerism in those terms. I am just riffing, however, off of Greg's Gambles because he certainly seems to be speaking a language familiar to mine. If it is not the same then it certainly appears to rhyme with mine.

I do know that some of what I have written about Beanite faith and practice has made some "sad" who hold up convergence. I have been asked whether I would not do better if, rather than supporting and encouraging inclusiveness, I took my own Christian faith to meetings in North Pacific Yearly Meeting and talked it up with those I found there.

I don't know what to think about that question, but I know what I am led to do, consistently, every day, every time my hand goes to the work.

An old song says "Hold on loosely and don't let go."

Joel Bean, when asked why he and Hannah did not divide from their yearly meeting when it went so far to isolate and finally excluded them, responded “I was directed to His own perfect example. He never separated Himself from His people in all their opposition and enmity toward Him. He did not disown the Church of His Birthright, though it disowned Him." (letter to R.H. Thomas, 2nd Month 8, 1899).

Is convergence about an eventual "convergence" of all Friends?

Or is it another new domain of an already fractured Society?

Or is it neither of the above and I am just so far off of the farm I can no longer hear the rooster crowing? Oh, that's certainly not so--after all, even on my best days the sound of crowing reaches my ear/heart at least three times. ;-|

I'm thinking people probably have their own answers to those questions (including the answer that says those are stupid questions to ask), and that all those answers will not be the same. But I am wondering whether, really, anyone knows what convergence is really about (quite apart from what they want it to be about) or where it will go (quite apart from where they think it will go, or where they want it to go). We bring children into the world and, in the words of a modern prophet, even though we save, when their rainy days come we find them outside digging the lightening.

But if there are elements of united, independent and balanced spirituality in the convergence movement then Gamaliel's advice (Acts 5:34 et seq) is probably best to heed. In fact, it always is.

three questions....

2008-10-05T06:40:00.000-07:00

I recently looked at a website about an upcoming conference.

I am sure that this will be a very fine experience. I am not interested in commenting on it or the book that describes the phenomenon around which it is organized. I am interested in the three the questions, however, that the book asks about "The Great Emergence" of a new Christianity.

What is this thing? How did it come to be? Where is it going?”

These are the three questions that, when asked not about something like an emerging version of Christianity but, rather, about God, caused the destruction of unity of the Society of Friends as well the fracturing of the Christian movement since who knows what point how many thousand years ago.

No one knows what God is, nor can ever know.

Know one knows how God came to be, nor can ever know.

Know one knows where God is going, nor can ever know.

We can only know what God is leading us to do, moment to moment, and do it. Like the micro organisms eating the detritus on the forest floor we can never know the context in which what we do takes place. We can guess, we can speculate, we can convince ourselves and others that we know but, in the end all we can really know--and all that really matters--is that we go on eating the detritus we find on the forest floor.

Love your God with all year heart, and your neighbor as yourself. We don't know that from a book, or a sermon--we know that from eating the leaves. We can't prove it and will fail to live up to it if we try to in any other way than by doing it, but we know it.

Yet, all the doctrinal divisions that exist within the Society of Friends grow from asking and answering these questions: what is God? where did God come from? where is God going? These are the questions that Rachel Hicks referred to in her memoirs in 1880:

“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…Had love of God abounded in the heart, it would have been seen that obedience to Him in all things was the plan of salvation ordained by Him from the foundation of the world, and we should then have remained a united people of great influence in gathering the 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!”

Rachel Hicks
“Memoir”
(New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1880), p 39

Had love abounded in the heart it would have been seen that obedience to Him was not in the seizing of clerk's tables, not in the law suits over ownership of meeting houses, and not in the contemporary Society of Friends divided by the cherished notions of the domains of which this "society"' is currently composed.

Distracting from that love, leading us away from sharing and being transformed by it, are unanswerable yet continually discussed questions about what God is about, where God comes from, where God is going.

Early Quaker literature refers to questions like these, asked about the Divine, as "notions" and entreats Friends to eschew them as seeking knowledge that is both unnecessary and destructive.

The emphasis, instead, was to be on heeding the Light--obeying leadings and conforming to them--without any concern about how to explain it all, only about the transformations being brought about.

Fox and Woolman and others made plain that one can be transformed even without ever having heard the name of Jesus or having seen a Bible. Penn made that clear with what seemed like unending examples of people who were not Christians yet manifested the transformation that was the center of the Quaker faith and practice. These people were not persuaded of propositional "beliefs." Instead, the way they lived their lives was changed.

I think it's fine that people are interested in a new emerging Christianity. I don't think there is a thing wrong with people asking what this new Christianity is, where it came from, or where it is going.

I do know, however, that people who asked these kinds of questions about God--and then divided over the answers up with which they came (answers that were and never could be anything but a vain and speculative way to feed our pride)--reduced a small but great people, who had an impact of a magnitude beyond their numbers, to a marginalized and fragmented collection of separated domains more concerned about what each other believed than whether they were living out and being conformed to the leadings toward love and unity they receive daily from a source the nature of which, the coming into being of which, and the destination of which no one will ever be able to understand, explain or prove.

Questions like these feed that spirit of contention that Naylor's famous testimony eschews. It's the spirit of contention that animates "the world;" a world that once was being transformed by the way Friends lived out their religion together. It is the spirit that has now, because Friends have given themselves over to it and its notional, propositional "beliefs," in many ways conformed the Society to the world.

Many Friends today are concerned about the future of "Quakerism," what it should look like in the 21st Century. Some who fervently wish to re-invent it are re-laying foundations of exclusion and division, notions and propositional beliefs. Rather than a focus on living out their spirituality with those who are led and aspire to live the same way they focus on gathering those who share their beliefs.

But nothing is new that divides Friends (or the Creation) or keeps them divided. Nothing like that will restore the Society or the manifestation of the Spirit to which it once witnessed in the world.

What was new, long ago, was a faith and practice that brought people of very diverse belief together and, notwithstanding those differences of opinion (and theological belief) made it possible for them to be gathered into a fellowship and live out their religion of transformation together.

I sometimes think I know that the unity I describe will happen, again. If it does not happen through a re-emergence of a Quaker faith and practice like that upon which the movement was founded then it will happen through the operation of the Light in another people, at some other time, perhaps, in some other place.

But I can't really know that. All I can really know is that I am supposed to love God with everything I am and everything I have. That's my pile of leaves--and notwithstanding the shortcomings and lapses--I am making my way through it, becoming something different than I was, and having an influence I can never fully know, with each mouthful.

Getting Through the Launching

2008-08-18T05:50:00.000-07:00

I started the countdown more than 400 days ago. I told myself, and others, that I was not going to have RR’s leaving for college sneak up on me. By being aware of the day’s passing, and how many more days remained before my oldest would be launched, I would make as much as I could of each of them.

Last Wednesday, the day before that “final” good-bye, I realized that keeping this count was a spiritual discipline. Watching those days disappear from the desktop of my computer that kept track of them I was prompted to say things to her that needed to be said, telling her things she needed to hear. My doing that prompted her, modeled for her and gave her permission to do the same; saying things she needed to say, telling me things I needed to hear.

In all those days we did not say everything that we needed to say to one another, or hear everything that we needed to hear. But we said a lot, and we heard a lot.

On that day before leaving her at college I knew that what I had said up to that point was all I would say for the time being.If I tried to say anything "profound," anything more than “I love you,” I would break down, break up, break apart.

When we reached that good-bye I knew we had said and heard enough, to get us, or at least me, through. And that’s a good thing because I could not have said, or heard, anything at that moment for the muting, deafening peel of the rolling thunder of emotion that surrounded us and shook the ground, solid ground it turned out, upon which we were standing.

On the plane, going home without her, I read an article that quoted the Chief Executive Officer of Campbell’s Soup. Reflecting on what had just happened in our family, I paraphrase him: one cannot talk one’s way through something one acted oneself into. One can only act oneself through such situations.

All the talking—or enough of it--has to be done, for me at least, before a moment of good-bye like that one. The time for talk is past; it’s time to act one’s way through it. In this particular situation, there will be time for more talking, later, but good-bye is a moment I have to just go through with it.

on the law...

2008-06-22T08:57:00.001-07:00

I was cleaning out the garage yesterday and realized that The Law/the law alone cannot save me, even if I keep it with complete faithfulness. But it can save others from me.

What about Jeremiah?

2008-05-25T05:52:00.000-07:00

We are at the beach with Rachael and HYM (Her Young Man). He is the kind of high school senior you hope your daughter brings home. He is Jewish and his faith and practice is central to his life and is as much a source of orientation and wonder to him as mine is to me.

We talk.

He took a pamphlet from an evangelical crew that had its pitch set up near the shore and later in the evening he asked me what I thought about the language "...His people rejected Him..."

I understood immediately what he was getting at. I said, though, that I didn't think that was an instruction to Christian antiSemetism. It was, I said, the archetype of the hero betrayed by his own, about the establishment throwing off internal threats to itself. It's what has happened everywhere to prophets, throughout history. It wasn't, I said, what charged people up for the pogroms.

This morning, though, I'm not so sure. I still believe that I am right in what was intended by that language--there is such language throughout the New Testament. The example that comes to me most readily is that about a prophet having no honor in his own country. It does not say that a prophet has no honor among the Jews and, although he had no "honor" in that location where it is written he uttered those words, he had plenty among other parts of the Jewish people.

The difference between last night and this morning, though, is that I am not so sure that this kind of language--notwithstanding what I think it meant when it was used--hasn't been read exactly as HYM thought, to create a case for discrimination based on the idea that the Jews killed Jesus.

Of course, Christians kill Jesus every day or rather, we kill Christ. How many times has the Easter story played itself out in my life when, on one dark "Friday" or another, I decided to stifle the voice trying to lead me away from this or that temptation and locked it in the tomb of my heart? Each time, of course, within three days (or less), out it came, again, seeking me and, with or without my humble nod in its direction, picked up right where it left off with me (OK, maybe a couple of steps back from where it left off with me).

The very statement "The Jews killed Jesus" kills Christ.

I don't know what happened all those years ago. The record is at best unclear and not free from various agendas. I don't trust the direction I can parse out of Book or hear from those who argue from it (I admire the law but am fearful of the excesses to which the mentality of those of us who do are prone), as much as I do the Spirit that gave rise to it. That Spirit, readily available to me, rarely occupies me with judgments long ago that have nothing to do with anything I did (although sometimes, if I lock it in the tomb...).

But whoever did the killing, it wasn't everyone around at the time called a Jew and it certainly wasn't anyone around now called anything. And the story is that he had to die, if one is centered in the propositional beliefs of the Christian ideology.

This is not a message for HYM, of course, it's a message for me. It reduces itself to something basic to Christianity, to all spirituality.

In Christ there is no Greek or Jew, no man or woman.

"There's a Light that shining in the Turk and the Jew,
There's a Light that shining, Friend, in me and in you."

We are not, as I am led to understand, supposed to be doing groups. So why does it matter the group from which killers come? If Islam is the enemy then so is Christianity. The killer is in all of us--as individual souls--and seems to come out most valiantly and most hideously when it seeks to kill killers, to be sarcastic with the sarcastic, to lie about liars.

"But you can't kill the devil with a gun or a sword."

But here is this blessing of a wonderful young man who, from the perspective of the other end of the stick, can see things in familiar words that I never saw, notwithstanding all the times I have read them. I am anxious for him to wake up so we can talk about this, some more, at breakfast; so I can tell him that this morning I appreciate as well as I understood last night what he was trying to tell me.

Who killed Jeremiah? Does it matter?

Who's doing the killing right now? How are they doing it? How am I involved?

community

2008-05-17T09:30:00.000-07:00

Community is those upon whom our well being depends, those whose actions shape our lives, and whose lives we shape, in return. The condition of our community, its ability to provide for our well being, is determined by the extent to which we realize the other testimonies in our shared life. The way in which we live out simplicity, harmony, integrity and equality is the way in which our community will provide for us, and will shape our lives.

From into my face to the face of God...

2008-03-26T05:33:00.001-07:00

I heard a chaplain whose ministry is at a VA hospital talking about how he gets a notice on his computer screen each time a member of the US military is killed in Iraq. It shows the name, the home town, where the person died and how, among other details. He says it's a moving experience and that it has had a profound impact on him.

It reminded me of being a young Lance Corporal in the Marine Corps, in 1967-68. I was working in the Casualty Reporting Section at Fleet Marine Force Pacific Headquarters. It was my job, each morning, to go down to the Communications Center and pick up a stack of messages. These pieces of paper documented the death or wounding of a Marine in Southeast Asia. Once I got this stack of papers up to the office my fellow Marines and I took information from each message and did various kinds of processing.

The dead all got their own, separate message, three pages, stapled together. The wounded were listed on a single sheet, like a roster.

Over time, I saw names that I recognized from boot camp, and one day I say my older brother's name on the roster of wounded--although he was not in the Marine Corps and I knew him to be safely in Austin, Texas, working at my dad's all-you-could-eat buffet. But it was his name, first, last, middle. I looked at it for a good long time. I cut out that entry and put it under the clear plastic cover on top of my desk blotter.

After a time I could not do that job, any more, and had to be transferred. That daily routine began the process that moved me from Goldwater Republican to Kennedy Democrat and on and on right up to the present, in which I am a 60 year old non-partisan member of the Religious Society of Friends.

I'm not much on making people do anything. I would entreat all, however, to make a practice of taking a few moments to read the details, in so far as one can, given the state of our current media, each time one comes across an account of a soldier who has died. I wouldn't limit it to US soldiers in Iraq, either. I cannot help but think that one will be edified, if simultaneously unnerved, by doing this practice.

And I think it is a spiritual practice. I could tell from that chaplain's voice that it was a spiritual practice, a discipline, for him. Although I didn't know it at the time, my carrying those messages and processing the information in them was a spiritual practice for me. As surely as any regimen of prayer or mediation, any participation in the life of the meeting or contemplation of scripture, that daily observance, that acknowledgment of the fact of what was happening to real people, of the reality of death in war and the result of that for so many people, changed my condition. I was changed in a way that only my getting into sync with, being conformed to, the Spirit could possibly have transformed me.

Radical Inclusiveness -- Beanite Tradition -- Part Two

2008-03-21T14:13:00.000-07:00

I saw a comment on another blog recently that differentiated radical inclusion in civil society from that in a religious community. Membership or association with the religious community is voluntary, it was said, whereas one is in civil society with no alternative but to stay. That is why, as I understand the argument, civil society owes all in it a radical inclusiveness whereas a religious community does not.

Makes sense.

I wonder, though, if all would agree that our membership in or association with the spiritual communities of which we are a part was the product of our voluntary choice. Would some of us say that we were led to that community, quite contrary to our inclinations or plans? Is there some will at work, quite apart from our own, that has us where we are, where it/It wants us to be? Could it really be, as I have thought sometimes, that all who wash up on the beach of our monthly meeting, no matter how unlikely that seems given what they look like, do so because, whether they stay long or not, they all have something for us, and we have something for all lthem?

This comes to a brutal impasse when the following question frames any situation: Should someone stay, or be allowed to stay, in a spiritual community if, as a corporate body, it believes that s/he is not living by its rules (or beliefs)? Should they leave? Should they be excluded?

Joel and Hannah Bean, both enrolled ministers in a yearly meeting, witnessed against changes that were made in the faith and practice of that yearly meeting. The yearly meeting had been inundated with new members who had little background in or grasp of that yearly meetings' Gospel Order. These newcomers became part of the monthly meetings in this yearly meeting in the wake a great wave of revival that passed through their part of the country. When the agents of revival moved on they left those they “revived” to find local spiritual communities to call home. Many, thus, came to a Quaker meeting for the first time.

Those Friends who were members of the yearly meeting before its numbers were increased by the “revived” were unable to maintain its faith and practice, its Gospel Order; the right order traditional to their Orthodox Yearly Meeting. To cope with the number of the “revived” the yearly meeting came to adopt a faith and practice comfortable to the “revived,” one that seemed practical to deal with so many new members with so much to learn about Quaker tradition. Most of these new members, in so far as they had experience with a religious community, had an expectation that it should look like a Protestant Christian church.

As the meetings and the yearly meeting were conformed to that model, and away from the Orthodox Quaker faith and practice, many of those there before the revival became uneasy. The new members' expectations were changing the faith and practice of the yearly meeting more than that faith and practice was integrating the new members into Quaker faith and practice. Unable to move the yearly meeting back to its former faith and practice, many of these pre-revival Friends left and found a different yearly meeting of which to become a part.

Joel and Hannah Bean did not leave, however, at least not initially. They chose to remain in fellowship with those rejecting the Orthodox faith and practice, albeit urging Friends, new and old, to return to it.

As to why they did not choose to leave their yearly meeting and find a spiritual home more comfortable to and conforming with their yearly meeting’s former faith and practice Joel wrote:

“I was directed to His own perfect example. He never separated Himself from His people in all their opposition and enmity toward Him. He did not disown the Church of His Birthright, though it disowned Him.”

Joel Bean
Letter to R. H. Thomas 2nd Month 8, 1899
Among the Bean papers at Swarthmore Library

In the end they were separated from their yearly meeting, although not by their own choice.

It seems to me that Joel and Hannah Bean tried to live out a testimony in the tradition of Friends:

Question: But if I do not presently see that service in a thing that the rest of my brethren [sic] agree in? In this case what is my duty, and theirs?

Answer. It is thy duty to wait upon God in silence and in patience, and as thou abide in the simplicity of Truth thou wilt receive an understanding with the rest of they brethren [sic] about the thing doubted. And it is their duty, whilst thou behavest thyself in meekness, to bear with thee, and carry themselves tenderly and lovingly towards thee.

"True Spiritual Liberty," William Penn, 1681
(condensed by Lewis Benson), Tract Association of Friends

Some contemporary Friends probably would not use this "Christo-centric" language but all can translate this instruction easily into words with which they are comfortable and through which they can appreciate both the truth and Truth they contain.

I have not found explicit reference to this testimony in the literature or papers of the Beans. It does not appear to me that the Beans or the members of the yearly meeting who found their continued presence so vexing actually lived out this testimony as faithfully as Friends inclined to "come down" on one side or the other (or both) of this situation today might wish they had.

From what I can tell, silence and sometimes patience did not always characterize the Beans' “abiding in the simplicity of Truth.” Some his Joel's writing seemed to be in the tone, volume and practice of a Jeremiah or Hosea.

It is also not possible to say that those with whom the Beans tried to abide always bore with them and or carried themselves tenderly or lovingly toward them. Perhaps the proviso of condition on their duty to do so (“whilst thou behavest thyself in meekness”) provided them a justification for the apparent lack of tenderness or love in, first, removing the Beans from the list of enrolled ministers after they moved to California and then, later, disowning them.

(To be fair, it is unclear whether this disowning, which took place years later, was due to the same animosity that led to their names being removed from the rolls of ministers or whether it was due to a simple “clearing of the rolls” of names of Friends not seen at meeting for a long time. Meetings then, as now, paid assessments for members on their rolls. It appears that some who came to unity with this disowning of the Beans may have done so for the former reason and others, for solely the latter. In any case, the disowning was later reversed).

All this digression aside, I want to recommend this formula described by Penn for dealing with disagreement within the meeting. I think it is the formula that at least guided if it did not perfectly describe the abiding strategy/testimony the Beans. Their (imperfect) example is one to consider when Friends find sharp differences between their own faith and practice and that of their yearly meeting. It is also one for the yearly meeting to consider when it finds Friends holding to faiths and practices that differ from that of the established corporate unity. Perhaps a more universal use of this mode of dealing with conflict among Friends might prevent future lamentations like this one:

“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…Had love of God abounded in the heart, it would have been seen that obedience to Him in all things was the plan of salvation ordained by Him from the foundation of the world, and we should then have remained a united people of great influence in gathering the 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!”

Rachel Hicks
“Memoir”
(New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1880), p 39

Again, whether her language resonates with us, or not, we can all certainly translate it into spiritual (or non spiritual) terms that makes her message, and the Truth and truth of it, clear. Throughout the history of the Society there have been many occasions, and today there remain many occasions, where differences among the various faiths and practices of Friends have pulled them out of right relationship with one another, to their own personal detriment and to the detriment of the Society as a whole. It will be for someone else to explain the benefit of all this division and schism. It is for me to entreat Friends (and friends) to consider another testimony from long ago.

For you may be sure that separation neither restores any to love the Truth, neither gathers any to God, but rather scattereth and driveth away some that was gathered in love to Truth by the painful and faithful labourers that was truly sent of the Lord.

William Dewsbury to Edward Nightingale
Quoted in Braithewaite’s “Second Period” p 477

Again, we can each of us translate this parochial language so as to see in it a plea for the all inclusive unity/love that is at least one of the aspirations of probably every spiritual tradition, including that and those we in the Society of Friends call our own.

North Pacific Yearly Meeting seems to still be a "united" yearly meeting, as was its predecessor College Park Association of Friends, founded in 1889. The circle of fellowship is wider and the inclusiveness is more radical, although it is perhaps no more radical, in our own time, than the Association was 120 years ago.

North Pacific Yearly Meeting also remains an "independent" yearly meeting, not affiliated with any of the other domains of the Society of Friends. In theory this could mean that it is in fellowship with all of those other domains and yet neither the yearly meeting, or those that occupy those other domains would probably agree with that latter statement or be open to such fellowship.

Perhaps, in the future, there will be such a thing as "interdependent" yearly meetings, consciously and expressly in fellowship with all other yearly meetings. But that will happen only if all yearly meetings in the Society similarly, consciously and expressly, become "interdependent" in this same way. To be affiliated with any fewer than all other yearly meetings would seem to be to still endorse the division of the Society and to acknowledge that we can never be Rachel Hicks' "...united people of great influence in gathering the nations to the peaceable kingdom..."

"From the top of this hill the Lord let me see in what places he had a great people to be gathered...Here the Lord opened unto me, and let me see a great people in white raiment by a river side, coming to the Lord...:

George Fox
Journal, Chapter Six

Radical Inclusiveness -- Beanite Tradition -- Part One

2008-03-20T08:24:00.000-07:00

Just to emphasize, at the outset, that this is One Quaker Take and not an "official" statement adopted by North Pacific Yearly Meeting...

North Pacific Yearly Meeting traces its genesis back to Joel and Hannah Bean. For reasons too complicated to relate, here, they began a worshipping group that invited all Friends to fellowship, regardless of where they held membership in the Society of Friends. When they did that, in 1889, it was a radical move because it followed on the better part of a hundred years of schism and division that left the Society of Friends divided and in disarray and it was a direct and intentional response to that division and disarray.

The group was characterized as "united" (in the sense that Friends from all domains of the Society were welcome) and "independent" (in the sense that it was not affiliated with any of the then existing domains of the Society). My understanding is that the Beans preferred "united" and that seems consistent with some of Joel's earlier writing encouraging re-gathering Friends.

Updating our Faith and Practice here in North Pacific Yearly Meeting we have looked back on this beginning, and the intervening development of that group into Pacific, and Inter-mountain Yearly Meetings, as well as into our own.

Although there is not a general knowledge or understanding of the history of all of this among us, the term "independent" is still used by many to characterize North Pacific Yearly Meeting. This term became more important recently with discussion among Friends here about affiliation with Friends General Conference.

The term "united" is far less well known or important to Friends in North Pacific Yearly Meeting, even though, it occurs to me, it may be the more important, as it seems to have been for the Beans, for an understanding, by us and by those who see us from the "outside," the basis of our unity as a yearly meeting.

As radically inclusive as it was a hundred and twenty years or so ago, a "united" group in which any Christian Friend is welcome is far less radical today.

My own survey and analysis of our yearly meeting, and my experience as a member, makes apparent to me that we are a "united" meeting in the sense that Friends are in fellowship here whose spiritual orientation is Christian (we'd probably say "Christo-centric"), something spiritual other than Christian, and even orientations the holder s of which would not characterize as spiritual, at all.

That is radical inclusiveness, indeed.

And it causes us some issues.

First among those is the fascinating phenomenon that in a group where no one would claim that there is a creed or set of beliefs that one must embrace to belong some of us have become insistent, at times, that certain terminology (and the beliefs they reflect) must be or not be used in the Faith and Practice.

Another of these issues is, given such a radical inclusiveness, where are the limits? While it is likely (although not certain) than none would say that one can believe anything and share in the unity of North Pacific Yearly Meeting none can say, either, what is beyond the pale.

Struggling with this first issue has brought many of us to understand that the Faith and Practice must have an "and/also" orientation. Friends must see themselves in the book and must accept that they will also see things that are not descriptive of them but are descriptive of others in the yearly meeting. This is how it will be in a "united" meeting based on a radical inclusiveness. Understanding the nature of this inclusiveness is essential to getting a Faith and Practice written without dividing us. Sometimes, as one Friend put it, Quakers just have to get over "themselves."

The second issue will not be resolved in the writing of the Faith and Practice, nor can it be. The last time, for example, the Faith and Practice was revised the issue of taking same sex marriages under the care of meetings in North Pacific Yearly Meeting was, in hindsight, only moving within the pale. Such things are not worked out by writing minutes; they are worked out in the hearts and lives of this Community of Friends and only then manifested in minutes and in the Faith and Practice.

This means that it will likely always be unclear what one would have to do (although it may be more clear that it would be what one would have to do, as opposed to what one would have to believe) in order to be "disowned" or be deemed a "heretic" here in this liberal (or the Liberal liberal) yearly meeting . (No, there is no process for disownment or for declaring someone a heretic included in our Faith and Practice nor, to my knowledge, in the faith and practice of any among us, although, as I say, it might seem from some of what some of us say sometimes that there might be).

It is important that these issues be "named" among Friends within North Pacific Yearly Meeting as they are crucial to our understanding of the internal, mutual "enculturation" process that defines us and in protecting and nurturing that process. This is a spiritual community built more on a way of being religious together than it is built on a set of specific beliefs. That means it is a highly participatory spirituality that becomes a husk if that participation flags.

This yearly meeting did not become what it is, what it is struggling to become, through some decision that was made, somewhere, sometime by some group of people. It is what it is because there is something at work among us. (Please don't ask for a definition of that "something" because it seems to me that trying to define it stops its work.) This is leading us in ways we cannot comprehend or appreciate until it becomes a-borning. We cannot see what has moved to and is moving toward Bethlehem to be born. We can only see that it did and still is.

I realize, by the way, that some in the broader Society of Friends might claim that this which is at work among us is not really of God or the Spirit. I can only acknowledge their concern, ask their prayers and refer them to Gamaliel's advice in Acts 5:38-40.

It is incumbent upon us to say what we know, in so far as we know it, which means, at a minimum, making clear to the Society of Friends as a whole what is the latitude and longitude of North Pacific Yearly Meeting. That is part of what writing a Faith and Practice is about.

We know that there are Friends who shake their heads in wonder at what we are and what we do, but we also know that there are Friends who see their own reflection in our condition. We know that these others in the Society will be supported and encouraged by us, as we have been supported and encouraged all along by them.

It takes a long time to write a Faith and Practice because it involves individual Friends sharing their developing faiths and practices with one another, and learning from and teaching one another and, above all, developing the love and appreciation they have for one another and for their way of being religious together, for the radically inclusive community they create together by living it out.

Men, Women and the Illusions Thereof

2008-02-25T06:14:00.000-08:00

A recent blog-post caught my eye. The gist of it is that war is the cause of the gender conflicts in human society.

An interesting take, for certain, and I appreciate the perspective that patriarchy has not been a benefit to men.

Most men have received little of the perceived "benefits" of what are commonly defined as the rewards of patriarchy. These benefits--like the differences between men and women--turn out to be self (and other) destructive illusions. Men who have been "relieved" of the drudgery of child rearing, for example, find themselves alienated from their children; men who are able to control their wives find hostility and passive aggression seeping out everywhere in their relationships.

I don't think that the problem between men and women is war. I think that's a manifestation of the problem. My experience is the problem is that regardless of sex, we are all made crazy trying to live up to--and force others to live up to--concepts of male and female that are unattainable because they clash with who we are.

All those traits we think differentiate men and women don't, really. Empathy, rationality, nurturing, etc--they are all on a continuum in everyone and as we kill off or repress those tendencies that aren't consistent with what our cultural conditioning says is appropriate for someone with our secondary sex characteristics we just kill off and repress ourselves. And insofar as we try to make others--children, spouses--conform to those notions we do the same to them. No good comes of that.

People will fight, in the military and the domestic spheres, until they are transformed by the Spirit to conform to the Spirit and thus are reconciled to on another. Then, in the military and the domestic spheres, they will be at peace, in harmony with themselves and with others.

That's long been the faith and practice of Friends. Some may prefer to leave the "by the Spirit to the Spirit" out of that equation, these days, but the test is the same: is your life increasingly changing such that characteristics like harmony, simplicity, equality, community and integrity (or the eight-fold path) describe you more each day? If so, keep going. If not, consider your direction and how to change it.

In so far as things external to our own condition "make" us fight with one another it is those illusionary things we are trying to be, and not to be, that give evil that ability to control us. There is nothing inherent in evil that gives it that kind of power.

But I don't believe in God....

2007-12-16T20:45:00.000-08:00

How can one be seeking the will of God if one does not believe in It?

Wrestle with that until your hip is out of joint.

There are all kinds of voices that we hear and just because they are spiritual doesn't mean they are from God/the divine/whatever. Mara/the Devil/Id screams at us every day, urgently.

The key is what I hear in the words of a contemporary prophet, that were written, as I heard the tale, before he was baptized in Pat Boone's swimming pool:

"I cannot think for you,

you will have to decide,

Whether Judas Iscariot,

Had God on his side."

I used to think that if the voice was speaking to me about me then it was God, but if it spoke to me about others it was not. But that doesn't say much for Amos or Ezekiel, does it?

I heard a dharma talk once in which the speaker said that a thought bubbled up out of his psyche and I thought, "Ha! It did no such thing, it was the voice of God you heard." But in coming to that conclusion I almost missed the voice of God in his words because I could not get beyond his attribution of them.

Whether someone "believes" in God or not it is my experience that "God" believes in all of us enough to speak through all of us, to each of us, at times.

What is the fruit of the words?

Even if I am an atheist and deny that God speaks to or through me, where does my ministry take me or take others? (Don't have a ministry? Really? How many moles do you have on the back of your neck?)

It's a religious society--not an ideological movement. Perhaps the "ism" on the end of Quaker misleads some of us most comfortable with Christian symbols into the kind of "Christianism" with which evil can do so much work.

It doesn't matter the package, I am thinking/knowing, so much as whether, under the ribbons and bows (or the dirt and grime), one finds that which the Christian tradition describes in Galatians 5:22.

Whether I/we am/are inclined at the moment to "work" to escape rebirth (polishing that mirror, are we?) or seeking everlasting life, our "success" is described in that passage, our failure described in the passage above it.

We live between two lists (whether we think they come from one God or another or from our "reason and experience" as human beings)-- both speak to and through us. Turn down the one, said Mr. Penington, and turn up the other. OK, OK, he said to beat down the one...but "beating" is so violent and we never beat even an egg or our cross town rivals...

In the words of that same contemporary prophet I quoted above:

"Tie yourself to a tree with roots,

'cause you aint goin' nowhere."

culture wars

2007-12-01T12:54:00.000-08:00

I came across this blog.

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/11/religion_kills.php

It's a rant of sorts about a 14 year old boy who refused medical treatment, based on his religious beliefs, and died.

"Religion is child abuse. It strips kids of the critical reasoning abilities that can save their lives. His crazy aunt killed him as surely as if she had beat him to death with a baseball bat." (His aunt is a Jehova's Witness)

Comments to this included:

"The judge is an accessory to murder."

"...the Judge is culpable and should be tried himself..."

"The parent have just killed their own child, it is child abuse."

"No matter what, that aunt deserves to be burned at the stake. I'll hold judgement on the judge - it could be he was protecting civil liberties and isn't exactly a fundie. I don't have enough information. But if he's a fundie who thinks the kid was "righteous" to do this and Jeebus will protect him, then he should exit the judicial system most rickytick."

"I will not let my son be infected by the disease that is religion.
It ruins the mind. What that woman did is child abuse.
And the judge is an coward."

"All religions at one point stop people from thinking rationally (or they want people not to think)."

"Speaking of religion killing, in light of recent events in the Sudan, I have renamed my ball python (formerly "Snakers") Mohammed. Cruel stupidity should always have consequences. Let the backlash begin."

"...whether or not some unprovable sky pixie will smile upon him if he forgoes medical care."

"I don't need some holier then thou preacher that molests little boys telling ME how to live MY life."

I was troubled when I read all this. I would probably like and get along well with most of those who wrote comments in response to the posting in this "science blog." Yet, look at what they think about religion and religious people. Tbere is no understandng or recognition that religious people could be anything except fundamentalists, Jehovah's Witnesses and the like.

So how does it come to be that these people don't know that there are religious people in the world who are not creationists, who are not against stem cell research and are not demanding that science pass religious screenings?

And Shouldn't we be concerned about that?

I think so.

First, it's not fun to be treated poorly because someone thinks that we are something that threatens them. My daughter is heading off for college this next fall. How will it be with her if some people on campus (say some professor in a biology or chemistry class), hearing that she is a Quaker, will treat her with contempt, assuming that she is something she is not, that she poses a threat to them?

Second, the fact that people think that religion is about this kind of thing keeps them from exploring their own spirituality.

It's probably not appropriate to use the word too much but the "popular" sense that fundamentalism as exemplified by the religious right is "religion" is a result of blasphemy. The characterization of God presented by the likes of Jerry Fallwell et. al. (e.g., God punishes American with hurricanes because of gays and abortions), is patently absurd and transparently political. Yet, many believe that this is "religion" and they want no part of it.

We in the liberal domain of the Religious Society of Friends do not evangelize and it would not serve us well to do that. Yet, I wonder, how can we project a different face of religion to the world beyond our hedge?

There have been times when the Society was concerned about presenting the truth about itself to the outside world because it felt threatened. This is less important to me (although, as I write, above, I am also concerned about it). More important, I think, is the fact that so many people are deprived of the opportunity to benefit from the Light.

There is no doubt that there is a "culture war" going on. We are not exempt from this struggle and it would not serve us well to be thought of by each side as a manifestation of the (distorted view they have of the) other. Perhaps we are among those who will step forward to promote our "peculiar" testimonies in this situation.

Aside from the view of religion expressed in this blog, I am troubled by the nastiness of the tone. I am certain that the point of view of the so called christian right cannot prevail--it is divisive and promotes alienation. It is an attempt to fight against evil with evil means of manipulation, control and oppression--not to mention suppression of truth in favor of myth. In dividing its own house (all of us) it will inherit the wind.

We cannot expect to divide the house and receive any other legacy.

Tie your camel...

2007-10-31T06:22:00.000-07:00

I heard a Sufi talk about trusting Allah but tying one's camel.

Some people think that they have to do everything, that only their actions make things happen, that there is no God. These people become frantic and eventually frustrated. There is no one to trust--or blame--other than ourselves.

Others think that God makes everything happen and our efforts are of no avail, one way or the other. These people become lazy and resigned to the repitition of what has always happened and to caprice. God is responsible for everything. Nothing is required of us.

The third way is to realize that we do what we can and if the result is not as we wish we trust Allah to know what should be.

We are not responsible--there are so many different people doing so many different things and all these different actions interact so as to bring about a result.

Our actions are not without consequence, nor are they determinative. We need to act, to throw the weight we have on to one side or the other of the balance. In this way our actions become a kind of prayer. And, once we have acted, once we have prayed, then we need to trust God with the outcome.

Staying Together

2007-09-22T15:24:00.000-07:00

"Only a strong authoritarian control could have prevented the separations (of the Society of Friends)..."

So says a Quaker blogger explaining why he doesn't "bemoan" the fractured nature of the Society, today.
http://www.quakerranter.org/the_quaker_time_capsule

I disagree. No strong authoritarian control could have prevented the separations. It was, rather, strong authoritarian control, or the aspiration to it, that actually caused the separations.

Another force, one more often associated, albeit mistakenly, with the Society, by both those inside and out of it, would have prevented these divisions: Love. Whether we call it love or charity or compassion--these divisions came to be and remain because of an absence of this fruit of the spirit, the absence of manifestation/testimony to this transformation of Friends from worldly to spirit.

The fact that these divisions occurred, and are maintained today, are a testimony that we are not what we claim(ed) to be; a people living in the power of the spirit. We are, rather, a worldly people, as stuck on ourselves and separate from and set against our neighbors as any other people on the earth.

I go farther with this. We are not only divided within the Society, we are spiritually separted from people outside it, and we are apparently as satisfied with that division as we are with the internal divisions.

"For you may be sure that separation neither restores any to love the Truth, neither gathers any to God, but rather scattereth and driveth away some that was gathered in love to Truth by the painful and faithful labourers that was truly sent of the Lord."

William Dewsbury to Edward Nightingale
Quoted in Braithewaite's "Second Period" p 477

"Question: But if I do not presently see that service in a thing that the rest of my brethren [sic] agree in? In this case what is my duty, and theirs?

"Answer. It is thy duty to wait upon God in silence and in patience, and as thou abide in the simplicity of Truth thou wilt receive an understanding with the rest of thy brethren [sic] about the thing doubted. And it is their duty, whilst thou behavest thyself in meekness, to bear with thee, and carry themselves tenderly and lovingly towards thee.

True Spiritual Liberty, William Penn, 1681
(condensed by Lewis Benson), Tract Association of Friends

"Our life is love, and peace, and tenderness; and
bearing one with another, and forgiving one another,
and not laying accusations one against another, and
helping one another up with a tender hand."

Isaac Penington,
1667

"I was directed to His own perfect example. He never separated Himself from His people in all their opposition and enmity toward Him. He did not disown the Church of His Birthright, though it disowned Him."

Letter from Hannah Bean to P. Doncaster
January 4, 1900

"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. Had love of God abounded in the heart, it would have been seen that obedience to Him in all things was the plan of salvation ordained by Him from the foundation of the world, and we should then have remained a united people of great influence in gathering the 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!'

Rachel Hicks
'Memoir'
(New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1880), p 39

"In a true community we will not choose our companions,
for our choices are so often limited by self-serving
motives. Instead, our companions will be given to us
by grace. Often they will be persons who will upset our
settled view of self and world. In fact, we might
define true community as the place where the person
you least want to live with always lives."

Parker J. Palmer (1977)
Faith and Practice (10.19)
London Yearly Meeting

"We cannot love each other into wholeness unless we know each other well and have that knowledge anchored in God's love and truth."

Sandra Cronk
Gospel Order, p 31
Pendle Hill Pamphlet

"That which God aimed at in a covenant was to keep him and his people together."

Isaac Penington
Works, Vol II, p 36

(Quotations prove nothing. They only amplify my view and indicate to me that I am not the only person who is led to this understanding of right order.)

...it [a Society that] has taken its stand on a half truth...

2007-08-27T16:29:00.000-07:00

Rufus Jones to Joel Bean October 25, 1893

"It is hardly necessary for me to say that you have not in any degree lost your place in the hearts of your friends because it has been your lot to suffer persecution, but rather, as I believe, have strengthened it by simply and fearlessly saying what seemed right to you to satisfy the deep convictions of your own hearts. The right of soul privacy seems to me an established principle of Quakerism, that a man shall not be forced to suffer for what at any given time he may be thinking to be truth. We find that the most saintly men have reached the great truths from which they fearlessly uttered by rising from error to glimpses of truth and so on to half truths and finally to the truth. Taken at any early stage of their pursuit of the truth and forced to declare their thought conscientiously they would have fallen under condemnation, but granted what I have called soul privacy have reached convictions which they could victoriously declare and stand upon. Hopeless as the present state of our Society is I have faith in its future for I believe it is feeling for the truth, and though it has taken its stand on a half truth just now and things are in a crude state, yet God is so wise and so able to bring all things up to better, that I believe he will not forsake a people which has been so faithful in the past and which has possibilities of almost unlimited usefulness in the future."

Dropping in at Swarthmore...

2007-08-22T13:48:00.000-07:00

I have been working the last couple of days at the Friends historical library at Swarthmore, doing research on Joel Bean. They have his papers all boxed and cataloged.

I had a couple of specific questions in which I was interested, and I have learned some things that move me toward answers to those, but I was also curious to read some of the "manuscripts" with titles like "The Light," and "Saul and David," and so on. Turns out that most of these are handwritten notes for sermons or other kinds of talks. It's good that he had good penmanship. It's been very interesting and edifying.

I was especially taken with a composition book in which he wrote, in longhand and rhyming couplets, about his childhood for the benefit of his daughters. It's very sweet and interesting. I wonder how much reality was sacrificed for the sake of the rhyme scheme. For example:

"When Joseph John Gurney went over our State,
He traveled our road, and drew up to our Gate,
We were called to his carriage; my brother and I
A text book received, by Elizabeth Fry;
He wrote his name in it, then pausing to say,
A few words by love prompted, he went on his way."(p 5)

Lots of interesting information. What will I do with it?

A Gathered Meeting?

2007-07-05T13:23:00.000-07:00

My FCG workshop this morning touched on the idea of a "gathered" meeting--that special meeting from which Friends leave feeling that they have been a part of a unity, joined together in what happened in a special and spiritual way. "Covered" is another adjective that people use to describe such a meeting.

Or, perhaps it would be better to say how they describe their experience of such a meeting. Someone in the workshop said that she had the experience of having felt a meeting to be "gathered" and someone else in attendance didn't feel it was anything like that.

That made me think of the Tuesday night meeting for worship/plenary here at the Friends General Conference Gathering. Two young friends spoke in a meeting for worship "format." Precocious would be an understatement from my point of view. I don't usually like the large scale meetings of the plenary style that we have at FGC (or even NPYM annual session, for that matter) because they seem disjointed and what happens often does not meet my own needs or my expectation of and for a meeting for worship.

This large meeting, however, was an exception to that experience.

At least, it was for me.

The next day a friend asked me how I viewed the experience and I said it was very powerful and edifying. He said that he thought so, too, but that he had heard some comments indicating that some in attendance didn't think it was very good. They thought that the "format" of meeting for worship was not appropriate for the message.

I mentioned this in the workshop this morning, agreeing with the woman whose experience was that sometimes one leaves a meeting thinking it was a powerful experience while others didn't see it that way.

Another woman in the workshop said that she thought that there might have been some personal blocks and barriers that people had to receiving the messages last Tuesday night as I had received them; they may not have been able to hear because of an aversion to overtly Christian language, or they may not have been able to hear important things from people so young (19 and 25).

I have been thinking, since, of the barriers that keep me from entering into a unity, at times, with people because of factors like this.

A later and unrelated conversation I heard about this Tuesday night plenary was that young people, the high school and the adult young friends, were not represented very heavily in the meeting. They were annoyed that there was a dance, jointly sponsored by the two groups, that was going on at the same time, and that the young people would have chosen the dance over hearing from their peers.

Aside from the scheduling problem--if one had the expectation that this plenary was at least partly for the young people--I think one has to accept realities about reaching people. Jesus left the temple to reach the tax collectors and the other outcasts of his time. If people wanted these young people to reach the young people in attendance at the Gathering--given how separate the young people's Gathering is form the Gathering in general (a topic about which much could be said)--then an effort should have been made to take these speakers to them. (Perhaps that was actually done and the people of whom I heard that complained about the young people not showing up didn't know that there was another time, another place that the connection was made).

We all have unrealistic expectations of others, especially "others." Whether we think that the modes of communication that reach us should reach everyone (or that people should know what reaches us and approach us that way if they expect us to respond), or we think that people should prioritize their time to suit our values or our expectations of them, we often fail to see ourselves in the shortcomings we perceive in them.