More On Non Theism

The Friends General Conference Gathering here in Wisconsin has given me enough to write about for months. I have a journal full of things from my work shop on language in the Society of Friends, from the Bible Half Hour, and from lunch conversations with my partner (I'm just tired of saying "my wife." Partner doesn't quite work but it will do until I figure out something more apt). And I have learned much from the fact of the non-conversations with my children, one in the high school and the other in the middle school program. They have disappeared but for the one mandatory daily check in and the non-scheduled phone call, such as the one I made to my oldest who was on the St Croix River during the tornado alert yesterday. Their absence is a different and instructive experience. Those in the nest are emptying it, right before my eyes.

Did I say tornado alert? I did. What does a boy from Oregon think about a tornado alert? An awful lot when he is in the interior hall way of a college class room building and his oldest child is on a river, somewhere, and his youngest is without a cell phone and in an unknown location. Tornado? My partner was somewhere not answering her cell phone so I just left her a message to call me from Oz if that's where she was. Turned out she was not. She was in a gymnasium watching my youngest play a game called "wink" with the rest of the middle school kids. Wink is an FGC game, apparently. Wink is...well, don't ask.

But before the tornado alert (which obviously had a big impression on me) I was at a session billed as a theist and non theist in a "non debate," "non dialog" kind of exchange of some kind. Two more such sessions will be held and I'll be there for both. These are both inclusive people and there is no hint of someone not belonging. In fact, the theist Friend wanted to do this in response to the now infamous review of "Godless for God's Sake."

The theist representative put forth a metaphor of the Society of Friends as being a "gathered community," sort of like a bus full of draftees on the way to boot camp. All were put on that bus by a force beyond their control. Some will like some of the others on the bus, and some will like others of the some on the bus. But all are on the same bus and all belong.

During the question period I asked the non theist Friend (with whom I have had a cyber relationship for quite some time and with whom I finally came face-to-face yesterday) whether he owned this metaphor.

My understanding of his answer is that he did not. As a non theist the idea of gathering implies to him a power or force that is working on these who share this bus-space and that, of course, gets us into theism. His preference, it seems, was to refer to the Society as "assembled" as opposed to "gathered," and the distinction is telling. People, in this sense, assemble themselves. People assemble themselves as Friends, he seemed to me to be saying, because they are drawn by the history and the ideas associated with the Society, not by some "force" or "power" pulling them in. It was an intellectual attraction, rather than a sensed calling.

On my way to my personal morning Bible reading this morning, at 4:30 AM, it came to me that this is actually the way that I first came to a Quaker meeting. When my partner told me, around the first birthday of my oldest, that she would grow up in a spiritual community it was the idea of a spiritual community--not the feeling of being gathered into one, that motivated her. She let me choose which community and I said "Quaker" because of some support work Quakers had done with me twenty some years earlier when I was in the Marine Corps, and because of the odd book I had encountered, since then, about Friends. (Quaker ideas. No call from God).

My sense of Truth, of God, is very much experiential, now, and very slightly intellectual. I hear IT telling me what to do and listen for IT. It's nothing I figure out or deduce from what my notions are of God and IT works. But that's not where I started. I started with a few notions about what Quakerism was and, over a long number of meetings and other experiences with the "space the words come from" began to experience Truth as that "person" (thanks to Doug Gwyn for the metaphor) that must be obeyed.

This is not to say that non theists or anyone else who comes to the Society will, in the end, express the experience of God as I do, as a theistic "force." It's just to say that I came through the same door and hung out with the same orientation for a long time, thinking of the testimonies as "values" and trying to reason from those to figure out what I should do in and with life. I am sure that this is not what all non theists see themselves doing, and I am sure there are plenty who self-identify as theists who approach things that way.

But the point is that "other" and "self" are entwined around one another, even as they emerge as "distinct" entities. But, hey, that's been the point of the Bible Half Hour...