A Quaker Bible Study

I spent years, on and off, studying the Bible, trying to understand God, reality and my life--believing it was all there and that I could piece it together.

Sola scriptura, as it is written. 

Then I was dragged into the Inner Light, where my reliance on rationalism was broken, my condition(ing) spoken to.

My mind, I was shown, can make whatever use pleases me of scripture, but no Authority lives there that can make use of me.  It’s not the Word of God, it’s just words about God, a compilation of notions—speculations, inferences, reasoning--about It’s nature, character, and plans—things I can argue about, even believe, but never know or need.

Still, among those lurking notions, pregnant with opportunities for my mind to mislead me (and others), I recognize the Light working on the people depicted in the Bible, as It works in my life, as It works in our lives in our Bible study group.

Could anything offer a dozen or so Friends from two yearly meetings more opportunity to disagree and contend with one another than reading the Bible(s) together?        

And we do.

Yet, we remain Friends, and that peculiar love, compassion and reconciliation—the convincement to which we aspire—matures in us on Monday mornings, turning those pages together.  Gathered into The Life, we are brought to know, connect, support and encourage one another. 

The verses may illustrate our broken conditions, but it is the Light that moves us through them, together, toward wholeness.   

I Can Still Do Something Wrong

I was told more than 20 years ago that in the Society of Friends, at least the domain in which I have been planted, there are no rules but it is still possible to do things wrong.  In the fullness of time it has been opened to me that I should think less in terms of "wrong" and more in terms of "ineptly" or "unskillfully."

From my own lack of skill in Friends' practice I can testify to two such that seem to be missing, often, in conducting Friends' business.

First, I have sometimes ineptly rushed a matter to a meeting for business.  Anymore, when I first hear about an issue at meeting for business I know I am in the midst of confusion turning quickly toward despair.

I am especially susceptible  to quaking when an item is added to the agenda as the meeting for business begins.  Rarely are "emergency issues" actually emergencies and very frequently they don't belong at a meeting for business, at all.  Best to leave dealing with these for another post.

The problem thus created--that few understand what it's about--can be ameliorated, to some extent, with a period limited to clarifying questions (and for the clerk to rigidly keep discussion in that mode until all such questions have been answered), but once that is over substantial amounts of time are still likely to be taken up by people who do not understand but, thinking they do, lead us off into the thickets of their misunderstandings.   Then more time is lost trying to bring them back to the actual issue.

By the way, a skillful clerk, realizing that Friends are heading into such a thicket, must not allow this go on but tenderly intervene to stop them  and ask the clerk of the committee whose business is at hand to clarify the nature of the business.

The second inept thing I have done is to not pay attention to an issue until the last minute.  This shows up when a threshing session has been held and notes taken, a committee report has been prepared and both notes and report have been circulated to all.  Still, at meeting for business someone tunes-in for the first time, stands up and says "This is the first I have heard of this but..."

This too oft-heard phrase--also an occasion for me to quake--seems, to those who have been engaged all along, to be accurately (if uncharitably) translatable as "I couldn't be bothered with what the rest of you have been processing for a while but I am going to talk about it off of the top of my head, anyway."

It has been opened to me that if I am just now emerging from the dark on such an issue it is likely problems occurring to me have already occurred to someone else earlier in the process.   

Committees do need to write reports and notes from their meetings such that they represent their process of coming to a recommendation, including courses of action they considered but set aside and why.   When they do not it shows a lack of skill at Quaker practice.

But I need to read (and even talk over with others) those reports and notes, in advance.  It might also help, as I do that, to leave myself open, in individual worship or prayer, to hear from Christ about it--just in case, you know, my busy life and my incisive reasoning are drowning out that still small voice.  The true nature of things seen in the Light is more obvious to me than when I think them through in my own power.

This lack of preparation is deadly to the morale of a meeting for business when a string of questions are asked that boil down to "Did the committee think of this?" or "Why didn't the committee decide to do that?" This is especially true when, caught up in our own power, these represent not a true request for information but a rhetorical  prelude to our going on at length, entranced by the sound of our own voices and the occasion to demonstrate our powers of logic, about why the "this" or the "that" would be superior to what the committee is recommending.

Again, a skillful clerk must intervene to halt such off-topic discourse, and, again, a committee report can prevent it from starting if that report is skillfully written.

So, the gist of this, to me, is that notwithstanding the widespread notion that there are no rules in a Liberal Quaker meeting there are at least two unskillful things I struggle with, and see others struggling with, in conducting of business.  The first is the inability to adequately present Friends opportunities to prepare themselves to process business, and the second is in inability of Friends to take advantage of such opportunities.

Thinking about how to work with this, though, I have to start with the realization that how most of us got here, and who we were, coming in the door, is where these problems begin.  Most of us showed up at a Quaker meeting, hung around for a while  and then concluded that we knew all there was to know about what was going on.  In fact, I didn't have a clue, for a long time.   It was difficult for others to help me understand my condition as a new comer because whether addressed, usually too obliquely,  through continuing adult education or individual mentor/elder-ing my attachment to my notions about what "Quakerism" was "to me" (or to who I "was") sometimes led me to respond by playing one of the cards in the suit of  "Who made you the Quaker Pope?"  Pride.

My embarrassing experiences with my lack of skill in these matters now tempers my frustration when these two problems hamper and even hamstring a business meeting in which I am taking part.   I have to keep in mind that it is important to the meeting and the Society (as it is to my own condition) for me to be patient and gentle as we bring new Friends (and long time Friends clinging to notions) along.

I, too,  came into this totally wrapped in my "self" and in living my life out there in The World. I was reared a Protestant where, for the most part, not much is demanded from members of the congregation.  One can be involved, of course, but one can also just show up every Sunday and be done with it, if that's what one is after.   This was a barrier to my seeing the faith and practice of Friends for the narrow gate it is.  

I didn't get that Quakers did not so much abolish the "hireling infrastructure" that kept things going for the community, as they elevated the laity and placed the responsibility on the community.  

I also did not get that fulfilling this responsibility transformed the community.

Finally getting these things, it was still quite an adjustment for me, only gradually made, to give over the time necessary to make the spiritual discipline of participating in the life of the meeting work (both for my own edification and that of the meeting).  

It took some time for me to realize that this is most important piece:  learning to act in the good order is not empty ritual or adherence to forms.  Things work better when we are all skillful at the Quaker practice (everyone knows what's coming and how it gets there).  Animosity and contention grow when we ignore good order--and that ignoring is often increased when we are in contention.  

Taking the time and effort for good order has changed me,  and these changes are part of my convincement and perfection.  Orderly participation in the life of the meeting (including doing its business) is an entry into the The Life (the Kingdom of God).  It manifests the Sermon and the Fruits of the Spirit in us, it glorifies (magnifies) God on earth.  

This is why it is important for clerks and elders (e.g., Ministry and Oversight Committees) to constantly keep in mind the good order for doing business and bring Friends  who have gone off into the weeds (and that will be all of us, from time time)  back to the path.   This means continual repetition of things like "Please have your committee report completed at least a week before business meeting so we can send it out to all well in advance of the discussion," and "Please be sure to read this in advance of business meeting and contact the clerk of the committee if you have questions or concerns."

This all requires sacrifice of my "self."  It takes time and forbearance.   For the Quaker faith and practice to "work"--both for the meeting and for me--I have to accept and talk up good order, including how business is done.  

The larger concern, though, is that faithfully doing business is one more example of how being a Quaker is more than a Sunday morning thing.  The Quaker faith and practice requires sacrifice of my "self"-importance through the laying down of doing things that interfere my doing that practice faithfully and giving over to it the time and energy thus gained.  

To abuse an analogy, if it looks like a swan, swims like a swan and flies like a swan then it's a swan.  If it doesn't then, as all of us have been (and even continue to be) at times, it's likely just an ugly duckling on its way to manifesting perfect swan-hood.  Swans take time.

Standing Aside

North Pacific Yearly Meeting Annual Session ended a week ago and it was a rich and edifying experience.

One of the most edifying things, for me, was asking the question I was moved to ask of a Friend speaking at a plenary on behalf of a committee charged with supporting and encouraging a discernent process over the past year.  I asked whether her expressing her own views about the business at hand while charged to foster discernment on the question was good practice.  I asked because, during the past year members of this committee, on occasions when they acted as a members of the committee (including during this plenary), freely and openly expressed their personal view on what the outcome of this discernment should eventually be.

Sometimes, on these occasions, they said things like "Speaking now as an individual and not a member of the committee..." This disclaimer, the committee member answered me at the plenary, prevented her expression of personal opinions from implicating integrity--hers or that of the process it did not influence their conduct of the discernment process or the views of others.  (I note as an aside that, traditionally, the very act of advocating, at all, compromises the Friends business process.)

My settled view is that Friends participating in discernment should never hear the personal views of those charged to support and encourage their process.   Friends may have an idea of what those Friends think the color of carpet to be chosen should be, but they should not hear about it as the discernment process is taking place.

I came to this as clerk of Bridge City Friends when we were a preparative meeting.  During those two years there were times, following after clerks I had seen, I "stood aside" from clerking and otherwise freely expressed my views on items of business.  Accumulating experience during those two years it was revealed to me that this was not edifying, to me or to the process.  Subsequently finding validation of that revelation in the literature of clerking, I stopped doing it.

I know that there is no settled unity on this, and if Friends disagree with me that's fine.  However, I will--as I did at this last annual session--insure that when people who are charged to support and encourage discernment also express their personal views in public they are asked about how they see doing so implicating the integrity of the process (and their own).  I will ask this of them first in private (as I did in this situation) and, should they continue, I will ask it in public.  It's something all Friends need to consider when someone is, in one moment, speaking for the process and in the next is advocating for the outcome.  (As I say, advocating, at all, is a problem.)

In corporate discernment processes the role of the clerk or facilitator is to be mindful of the process, not the outcome.   I have found that, aside from compromising my ability to do that, expressing my own opinions while in that role corrupts the process for others.  Preventing, in so far as possible, that corruption requires the sacrifice of self from those supporting the discernment--one cannot serve the master of one's own position on a question and the master of serving the process.  ("One's own position," is another obvious problem, here.)

Clerks and those involved in supporting discernment should not underestimate the influence they have on the process, both because of their selection to "leadership" and because they have far more opportunities to talk than anyone else.

It might seem ludicrous to us, if we are not looking carefully at ourselves, that such things could possibly corrupt our participation in meetings for worship for business.  It might corrupt others, but we know how to keep our our own feelings from influencing how we support an even handed discernment process.  We are seasoned Friends.  That's why we were selected to be in this position.

But hearing such rationalizing is why I don't find it ludicrous, at all.  Hearing it tells me that there is a problem.  When I hear such self exoneration I often see such corruption.  Thus it is apparent to those who, as it is written, know what to look for.  Often, however, we do not think to look for them in ourselves, forgetting that everyone's  measure of maturity is limited and oversight of all of us is necessary, especially when we are in a position of authority and have an interest in a process. Our minds are excellent accomplices to our rationalizing what we want as being right--and how we go about getting it as "Quaker process."

I have heard that a visitor from another domain of the Society said, after observing one of our Annual Session plenaries for business last year, that it as the least worshipful he had ever seen.  This hearsay did not surprise me.  That plenary featured Friends making advocacy speeches they had prepared in advance, supporting their own views.

It has been of concern to me for quite some time that the mores of American democracy and the world of non-profits have drifted into the business process of Friends, at least here in the Liberal domain of the Society where I am planted.   This may be because we attract people who, in other aspects of their lives, are used to "doing business" in that way.  They easily mistake what's going on in meeting for worship for business for that same process and, too often, they employ these mores here, complicating and even corrupting the process.  

Our business process is not supposed to be a reconciliation our diverse views, a compromising or overcoming of opposition that creates (or forces) something we can all live with (or not).  We are supposed to finding the will of God and then reconciling ourselves to that.  It's hard enough to stay in that low place while sitting among Friends doing business, subject to the wolves of our own egos, wills and vanities  It's even harder to do while trying to tend to the process from the facing bench, where there is ready access to the levers of rationalistic and psychological influence that, whether one is aware of it or not, we can (and do, sometimes) use to subvert the will of God, and substitute our own will--sometimes because we are so caught up in our will-worship that we could not see the will of God if it were written on the wall and labeled as such.

Those charged with supporting discernment, in my experience, should give their undivided attention to the integrity of the process.  As I say, no one has to agree with me about this.  It is, however, for all to consider.

Christian, Not Christo-Centric

Back from Annual Session and I have a lot to think and write about in the coming weeks.   I want to start with something of a personal concern.  It is a fairly small thing, but it challenges my peace because it is symptomatic of one of the reasons our Society has reached its current, much reduced condition.

A Friend, a good friend, referred to me as "Christo-centric" at Annual Session.  She meant nothing negative by it and surely did not know that to call a Christian Quaker Christo-centric was similar to calling a Sunni Muslim a Shia, although the differences between those two groups is far less than that between Christo-centric and Christian Friends.

There are many fine explanations of what Christo-centric Christianity is about and the Google machine can give more subtle distinctions than I can in my summary to draw the contrast.  Christo-centrism is a Protestant notion that moves the "person" of Christ to the center of religious practice (or makes it the main notion of belief) but only in certain offices.  Given the uncertain state of our pre-destined souls, Christ is the only agent who can punch our ticket for the afterlife and so that is where the Christo-centric are led to concentrate, to the diminution if not exclusion of all others of its offices.

Christo-centric theology goes beyond that, at least among those concerned with nuances, but on the steeet tends to keep Christian minds pre-occupied with "everlasting life" and sends the message that they have been given a pass on righteousness in the here and now.  Can't help ourselves, you know, the Powers run the world.  Sermon on the Mount is a great set if ideals but, really, the best we can do is "believe" in Christ (that is, affirm one set or another of "orthodox" notional propositions about "his" nature, character and the "work he did" for us while walking around among us).  If we accept the validity of those propositions we can be saved.

A faith and practice quite different was opened to Fox and Friends.   Sure, they affirmed an afterlife, but they believed that living in the Kingdom of God, here and now, would take care of whatever lay beyond the grave.  Christ, The Light, was to be "believed in," but that meant actually doing what Christ told us to do, what the Light showed us we needed to grow out of, in this life.   The Powers were to be confronted and redeemed by living as guided, and their experience was that this guidance pulled them closer and closer to living lives exemplified by the Sermon on the Mount, more and more described by the Fruits of the Spirit.  Friends of the Lamb's War generation rejected the institutions and doctrines of Christo-centric Protestantism--explicitly.  They set out to confront the Powers (including the church), to redeem them.  And it cost them.

The fact that 300+ years later there are many Christo-centric, Protestant Friends, so many, in fact, that most Friends don't know there is a difference between their faith and practice and that of Fox, can be explained.  First, that founding generation was comprised of people brought up as Protestants so that many of those notions came into the Society with them and were never completely eradicated in them.    They left marks that could be used later (by Friend Gurney, for example) to legitimize their later amplification.  Second,  the relentless heat brought on Friends by the hostile Protestant establishment finally, in succeeding generations, caused Friends to at least  appear to pull back to the mainstream as they retreated into Quietism behind their hedge.   Much of the effort of second and third generations of Friends (Barclay and Penn, for example) was aimed at showing that Quakers were harmless, not so different, and hammering out "compromises" that obscured distinctions and gave the establishment the satisfaction of believing that Friends conformed to their notional norms.  "Affirming" rather and "swearing" did not confront the idea that there could be two standards of truth and that one had some latitude to lie if one was not "on record" as telling the truth.

I am among the Friends who have found themselves brought to that faith and practice, not to "Christo-centric" or "Christ centered" belief.  I am not preoccupied with heaven and "believing"  but with hearing and obeying, living in the Kingdom of God on earth (although I more often call that "living in the Life").  I do what I can and hope/expect to be able to do better in the future, as what I have done in the past has enabled me to do better, now, than I did then.

That this confusion exists about the difference, or that there is little awareness that there is a difference, is due to the gradual invasion, growth  and legitimization of the Protestant faith and practice among us which, culminating in the 19th Century in the United States, keeps many Friends in the dark today.

The suffering and hardships endured during the decades of persecution of Friends by the Protestant establishment of its day was not some kind of tragic misunderstanding.   That establishment understood with clarity the threat the Quaker faith and practice posed to the Power they called a church and the wages they received by serving that Power.  They set out to destroy that faith and practice and, looking around, it's apparent they have almost succeeded.  But, as it is written, the darkness cannot comprehend (eclipse) the Light.

Some interesting Quaker process questions came to the fore during the business plenaries at Annual Session and I'll be addressing that next time.

It's just the same old Protestant stuff, over and over again.


My "experience" is as unreliable a source of grounding and authority as the Bible is.   Both lead me to draw my own inferences and then be guided by these rationalistic notions--instead of being guided, day by day, by what God is telling me directly.

I have laid down both the Protestant notion of reasoning my way to righteousness  from the Bible, and the "Quaker" notion of reasoning my way to righteousness from my own experience.

Neither has or can improve my condition because both come down to worshipping and relying on my own reason.

If I hear God and do as I am told then I am fine.

It's all the theology I need.   In fact, it's all the theology I can handle.   Anything else just gets me in trouble.

civil persecution in the name of freedom of religion

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")

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...

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 ...

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

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

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 ...

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.