A Place to Stand

Travelling in the Electronic Ministry

2009-04-07T10:04:00.000-07:00

The world is changing and Quakerism must adapt or disappear. That’s actually a good thing and we should welcome it. New circumstances call for us not to mechanically attempt to relive the past, but rather to consider carefully what parts of Quaker tradition are essential and what parts are merely of antiquarian interest. Everyone should try this on their own but here is my attempt to get down to the central core of Quakerism: We believe that God speaks to everyone. He calls each of us to a new and more abundant life. Moreover, he speaks to us not just collectively but individually. God will give any person who wants to listen personal advice on how to deal with the specific events happening in their life. This being true, there is no need of a middle man. We do not need a priest to tell us what God wants us to do. We do not even need the Bible to tell us this. This is not to say that we should ignore the Bible or the advice of other people, but these are secondary helps. Each of us can and should directly listen for and follow God’s advice.

More traditional Christians rejected Quakerism as a dangerous doctrine. If everyone felt free to listen to God’s advice on their own then, they argued, this opens the floodgates to ranterism. People, being what they are, without a pastor or at least the Bible to constrain them will rationalize that whatever pops into their heads must be from God. Many modern secularists echo this idea. The dangerous actions of George Bush, are the direct result of his dangerous belief that his violent and reckless ideas were really God’s personal advice to the President. Quakerism recognized the danger of individuals mistaking their own whims for divine guidance and emphasized that the advice of weighty Friends was a crucial factor in helping individuals tell the difference between their own personal feelings and God. Quakerism isn’t pure individualism. There is a need to rely on collective wisdom because the voice of God is often hard to hear over the noise produced by the world. “Sense of meeting” is a sounder guide than the autocratic rule of any priesthood (because in practice these priesthoods are just self-appointed bureaucracies.) Individuals should rely primarily on their own sense of God’s will but for help in discernment depend on the decentralized advice of fellow seekers. This remains grounded in the local face to face relationships of the monthly meeting.

If this is the essential core of Quakerism, then how do we apply this insight in the 21st century? What, if anything, does it tell us about blogging, Facebook and Twitter? Quite a lot actually.

First we should distinguish between electronic intervisitation and electronic ministry. Facebook is almost exclusively an avenue for intervisitation and most blogs are primarily a form of intervisitation. Keeping a Facebook page or blogging are ways to keep in touch and share the ephemera of life. Intervisitation has traditionally been recognized as a good thing and been much encouraged. Paradoxically as travel has become easier intervisitation has decreased among us. Venues like Facebook may change that. Intervisitation was encouraged because it strengthened the bonds of community and allowed Friends to learn each other’s special needs so that we could love each other in practical down-to-earth ways. The dangers to be avoided were time-wasting on triviality and, more seriously, the temptation to gossip. These dangers are also present in electronic intervisitation. Perhaps all that is needed here is to update our queries to make Friends mindful of what is good and what is potentially harmful about such activities.

Second, there is the issue of electronic ministry. Some Friends see their blogs as more than intervisitation. They feel they have some message to share with the world and maintaining a blog is their way of sharing it. This is ministry rather than intervisitation and Friends traditionally took greater care to provide oversight for ministers. While traditional Quakerism recognizes a free and unprogrammed ministry open to all, it is also mindful of the dangers of unguided ministry. Individuals are encouraged to speak during meeting for worship as a way of learning if their messages are genuine or not. Feedback from the other members of meeting is essential. “Friend, your ministry today spoke to my condition” is not meant as flattery. It is meant to provide useful feedback. Elders were appointed to be particularly responsible to provide both positive and negative advice to individuals seeking to develop their gift of vocal ministry. In many modern meetings this function is taken over by a Ministry and Counsel Committee, but the intent is largely the same: to provide collective guidance to individuals about their efforts at ministry. When ministers would feel a leading to travel and share their messages with more distant groups of Friends additional care was taken. Monthly Meetings would be asked to give the minister a Travel Minute approving his or her leading to travel. Friends mindful of their responsibilities would not travel in the ministry without the collective approval of their Monthly Meeting. In addition often an elder was sent with the Friend to listen to the ministry they gave to the distant Friends and to report back to the local meeting what took place. Finally, the distant Friends were asked to endorse to travel minute, that is, to report back as well.

Can we replicate this for the 21st century? Certainly we can. Friends who feel that their blog is not just for intervisitation but also for public ministry can make their monthly meeting aware of what they intend to do. They can ask that the blog be monitored by the elders or by the corresponding committee of the monthly meeting. And they can record this approval on the blog itself. This would create an electronic equivalent of travel minutes and travelling companions in the ministry. Members of the monthly meeting could even read comments recorded on the blog as the equivalent of endorsements of travel minutes.

Dennis

2009-04-06T14:11:00.000-07:00

Dennis and I were almost exactly the same age. Our mothers are sisters and we saw each other fairly often while we were growing up. Dennis and I were both unusually sensitive children, but the subtle differences in our families made a huge difference in our lives. My father was a great dad. He was a steelworker back in the days when unions were strong, and there were only two kids in the family so we were able to have a house and a car. There was money for music lessons and occasional family vacations. Neither of my parents went to college but when I graduated from high school I left Trenton for college. Dennis wasn’t so lucky. His father drank a little too much and worked at less well-paid jobs. Their family lived in apartments in a rougher part of town. We would visit Dennis and the other cousins in those apartments from time to time and it used to make me sad. If you’ve never seen the living conditions of the urban working poor in this country then you might not understand how hard it would be on a sensitive child. Conditions are crowded and noisy. Dreamy kids, like Dennis and me, need to dream. To dream you need a certain amount of solitude, quiet and the soothing presence of Nature. I had all these things but Dennis, just one more rung down the economic ladder, had none of them.

I went off to college, majored in philosophy, dreamed and lived my dreams. Dennis was stuck on the streets of Trenton and eventually turned to drugs. He didn’t use drugs very long but his body and mind were so damaged by them that he never recovered. On my last visit to Trenton to see my mother, I also visited Dennis. We sat together on the porch while he smoked cigarettes and we talked about our lives. He marveled that I had been able to become a college professor. There was no trace of jealousy in his wonderment. There was no trace of anger or bitterness over how his life had turned out. There was just joy and appreciation for my success. I was glad that Dennis wasn’t bitter. I am not at all sure I wouldn’t be.

I got the news recently that my cousin Dennis had died of lung cancer. They found the cancer when he went to the hospital and it was already very far advanced. He died within a month of his diagnosis. I'm sure that some would read the story of our two lives and draw the conclusion that I am a success because I worked hard and earned it and that Dennis was a failure because he used drugs. But to me it is a sadder story of one sensitive boy who got what he needed to thrive and another who didn't.

Real Change

2009-01-23T10:52:00.000-08:00

I got an email out of the blue the other day from an old friend from grad school. We brought each other up to date and he told me a little about his career changes, messy divorce and a bout with cancer. He’s out of academia now but he still gets up and works on philosophy from 6:00-8:00 every morning before starting for work as an executive in a software company. He kept up the same schedule during the cancer treatments never missing a day of work. I had to smile a bit to myself that he hadn’t changed a bit—still the same tough son-of-a-gun I knew back in grad school. It confirmed a thought that I have long held: people usually don’t change very much over the course of a lifetime. And it got me to wondering if he had changed in any way for the better.

This constancy is partly a good thing. My friend’s toughness is surely an admirable trait and it would be a shame if this part of his personality changed. But the sad thing is that our personal defects seem to be equally resistant to change. Intellectuals, like the two of us, will often deceive ourselves into thinking we have changed for the better when all that really changes is we come up with new, more sophisticated rationalizations for who we are. The measure of real change can be found in Paul’s letter to the Galatians. Are you really changing? Don’t tell me about the latest realization you have come to. Look for the fruits of the Spirit. Do you manifest more love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control? If so, great. If not, stop kidding yourself. Most people’s friends and families are not fooled by our self-congratulatory talk, but they tend to go along anyway. Why don’t they puncture these rationalizations more often? Why do they play along? Perhaps it’s because they judge correctly that we “can’t handle the truth,” or putting the same point less dramatically, we just don’t want to listen to unpleasant truths. My family does a pretty good job in holding up a mirror to my faults and I’m thankful for that. Being made aware of your faults doesn’t mean that you will overcome them, but without that awareness real change is virtually impossible. And for reasons that I surely do not understand it seems to me that suffering is another necessary condition for real change. You can learn to talk a better game without any suffering but no genuine change of heart occurs without at least a little cross-carrying.

Even so, however, awareness and suffering are not sufficient to produce change. This is no automatic or mechanical process. Suffering is an inevitable part of human life and part of the mystery of life for me are the ways that suffering opens up opportunities to change. But the fruits of the Spirit only come when we open ourselves up to change. I hope to see my old friend face to face soon and I hope that when we meet both of us will be able to truthfully see some positive change has come from the past thirty years of living. But if not, I hope both of us will have the courage to say so

Betrayed

2009-01-15T10:44:00.000-08:00

I said good-bye to Jim this week. We had lunch and he helped me with a project I am working on and then we talked about his leaving. Jim moved to North Carolina a couple of years ago when he got laid off from his New York law firm. It’s tough to start over when you are in your late fifties and Jim was not able to make an adequate income here in North Carolina because there is simply less need for his specialty here than in New York. So he is going back to take a position with another firm. He is ambivalent about this for a number of reasons. I think he genuinely likes our little meeting and the slower pace of life is also appealing. So he asked me what I really thought of his going back. I told him I understood that he was at a difficult phase—too young to retire and too old to be really attractive to a lot of potential employers. I wished he could stay and still hoped that maybe he would find something appropriate locally, but I know he’s got to find work. Of course going back to New York is not sure thing. With the economy still headed down there are going to be a lot lawyers looking for new jobs in the near future. Then I brought up something I thought was bothering Jim. Didn’t he still feel betrayed by his former employer—the one that fired him in his fifties? I knew beforehand that this was how he felt but I thought it might do Jim some good to talk about it and to have me express my agreement with those feelings.

Betrayal hurts and I think this culture doesn’t generally acknowledge just how deeply it hurts.

Later on the same day I was with another group of people. Someone we hadn’t seen for a few years had dropped in unexpectedly and there was some jovial chatting. Somehow the conversation turned to honesty and one man there bragged that he had nothing to hide or be ashamed of. There must have been at least one raised eyebrow and a short pause until he added a further little joke to the effect of “except for my adulteries but nobody takes that seriously.” This isn’t an exact quote but it was the intended sense. I very briefly considered commenting that perhaps his wife took them seriously and in fact perhaps she even feels betrayed. I didn’t feel as though I should offer such a comment to someone who is not a Quaker and probably wouldn’t think that I should be offering my opinion on such matters. So, I just said good-bye to the group and went home largely because I felt that doing so was expressing my disapproval in an appropriately understated way. It was the second time in one day that I felt called upon to offer a little witness that betrayal is just plain wrong.

Faithful in the Little Things

2009-01-06T07:14:00.000-08:00

My wife and I drove up to Richmond to get the car and to return the car we borrowed. We were both a little nervous driving the highway again after the accident, but by taking turns with the driving it wasn't excessively stressful on either of us. I continue to ponder what it is I am supposed to learn from the experience. One thing is form a conscious intention to be thankful. I've done that and I think that over time sticking to this will change me for the better. Another point comes from a comment made on the last post that I should devote more time to my family. At first I didn't take it very seriously since I already devote a lot of time to my family. But as I sat with this over a period of days I began to see that I should indeed devote more attention to them. Over my Cheerios and bananas this morning it became clear that there was a small task I was led to do. We homeschool our youngest child, Mark, who is just getting ready to go off to college in the Fall. If left completely to himself he will spend all day every day on math and science. We largely want to go with his strengths and let him follow his own interests. This works well for the most part but one consequence is that his writing skills have not kept pace. This past year I have been trying to get those skills up to what he will need for college, but it has been a struggle. Time for new writing assignments. Yesterdays efforts to write essays had not gone well. He freezes up when the assignment is too hard for him, and much time is thus wasted. This is frustrating because in one sense the writing assignments shouldn't be too hard. "Shouldn't" that is, if his writing skills were up to normal. But they are not, so I really need to let go of that "should" and start where he is. In fact he's made great progress with his writing this past year though he still has far to go. So I gave it some serious thought and set him assignments that were just a tiny bit harder than the last assignments he was able to complete without freezing up. He was working successfully on these as I left for work this morning.

It seems paradoxical that one of the results of this experience has been to add more to my to-do list, but for the moment that's where things stand. I'm sure I will have to do some cutting of that list shortly and I'm not clear yet on what to cut. But the most important thing is to be promptly faithful in doing small things that I feel clear I should do. When you are faithful in small things the bigger things gradually become clear too.

Not an Accident

2009-01-02T10:24:00.000-08:00

We were on our way back from a family gathering up in Virginia. My brother had driven down from Maine with two of his children to visit his oldest daughter, Julie, and see her new baby. Our two boys had never met their uncle or their cousins so this seemed like a good time for it. It was about 5:00 PM of New Year’s Eve and we hoped to be back in Greenville before it got too dark. My wife was driving and I was considering setting my priorities for the coming year. My name has been put forward to be the next clerk of the Yearly Meeting and this involves finding time to visit each of the monthly meetings within the Yearly Meeting some time before our annual session in July. I also have some major projects going on at work and last year I began doing some major and minor repairs around the house and these aren’t quite finished. Lately I’ve found myself too busy for regular exercise and I know that’s not something I should allow to slide. In thinking of all this it was becoming clear to me that I couldn’t do a good job at all these things and I was going to have to decide what to do and what not to do. But it was also clear to me that this wasn’t something I could be totally rational about. Whether some of these projects could go forward or not was going to depend on what other people decided and that wasn’t under my control. So with my eyes half closed I settled into turning all this over to God and asking him to take over and direct me into which of these projects I should put first and which I should let go of. It was very much like sitting in Meeting for worship turning over my personal issues to God. I had just reached the point of turning it over when it happened.

My wife had put on the blinker to change lanes and was moving over to the center lane when another car came flying up from the far right lane at a very high rate of speed and cut into the center lane without warning. My wife swerved sharply back to the left to avoid the collision. She lost control of the car when a tire blew out and the car began to spin. It did two complete 360’s through three lanes of heavy traffic moving at 70 mph until we landed on the right shoulder. The cars behind us stopped and we determined that everyone was OK. The car that caused the accident sped off. Amazingly, we did not hit the concrete median or the guardrail or any other car. We had one tire still intact but the other tires and rims were shredded. We were able to call some old Friend/friends who now live in Richmond and they cancelled their New Year’s Eve plans and put us up for the night. The expenses of fixing up the car are going to put a big dent into the family budget. In fact we are going to have to dip into the savings to pay for this but ever since the car stopped I’ve been feeling incredibly thankful that all the people involved are fine. I won’t forget the State trooper grinning and saying, “Technically, since you didn’t hit anything and no vehicle hit you, this wasn’t a traffic accident. It was a traffic incident.” Still, it was one heck of an incident.

So what does it mean? I don’t think that the timing of this is a coincidence. In my experience putting yourself completely in God’s hands leads to events that shake up your life. Sometimes these events are painful and sometimes they are just scary, but the end result is spiritual growth. For reasons that I don’t understand people seem to need events like this to shake them up to allow them to grow. God understands all this and arranges for what we really need when we open ourselves up to allowing him to do whatever he chooses. I’m still not clear about what my priorities are going to be for the coming year. I’ll be looking for Way to open on some of these things and for Way to close on others. I’m clear about not needing to be in charge of the course of events.

It’s for You

2008-11-26T08:01:00.000-08:00

When real vocal ministry occurs it doesn’t just reflect what is on the heart of the Friends speaking. It is a message for someone present. Since I lack a gift of vocal ministry I don’t get messages addressed to other people. God often speaks to me during worship to shed light on issues I am struggling with or showing me ways I can serve others, but since these messages are for me there’s no point in sharing them out loud with those gathered. Messages intended for vocal ministry are different. The minister gets the letter and the name on the envelope is not the minister’s. Usually the minister can't read the address. But they know that if they speak, the addressee will get the message. As a person present at the vocal ministry, since you never know if the message is for you or not, you should always listen. I got caught not listening last week.

Just before meeting I had gotten a phone call from a stranger asking me to help another person who I also didn’t know. Was this genuine? Might it be a scam? There was some risk here. Nevertheless, I briefly went within to seek guidance in this matter, heard that I should offer help, and agreed to let the stranger come and stay with us a few days over Thanksgiving. As we rushed to get to meeting, I didn’t even have the chance to discuss this with my wife. While I felt clear that I had done the right thing, I was thinking about how I would explain to her that a stranger asked me to allow another stranger to stay with us for Thanksgiving and I had said yes. This is what was on my heart during meeting for worship.

My wife gave the only vocal ministry during this meeting. She related the story of a Friend who had a leading to go abroad. He followed the leading. He went to the port to get on the ship. But at the last minute he was led to turn around and go back home. She said that despite appearances the Friend was being faithful (and wasn't just crazy). Honestly I didn’t pay much attention. Last night I got a call from the stranger who was looking for a place to stay over Thanksgiving and after a minute or two on the phone it turned out he was looking for a place to stay in Greenville SOUTH Carolina, not Greenville NORTH Carolina. We both laughed over the mix-up. We then chatted a bit and he told me more about his troubles and hopes and plans. Meanwhile my wife got on the phone to find the contact number of Friends in the other Greenville. I got off the phone and wondered if maybe I had been mistaken about my leading to offer to help in the first place. The whole thing sounds more like human error than action under the guidance of an infallible God. Nevertheless, I didn’t feel foolish. I felt as though I had I had been faithful. So my head was skeptical about the whole affair but my heart was light.

Just before we went to bed my wife reminded me of her vocal ministry and pointed out its relevance. (Which I had completely forgotten by this point!) Now the message seemed extremely clear and pertinent. Like that Friend of old I had been faithful to what I was given. I should not listen to the doubts of my practical mind. Good comes from being faithful even though from our human vantage point we sometimes can’t see enough of what’s going on for it to make sense to us. In other words, just obey and don’t worry about the results.

Next time I hear vocal ministry I’m going to be more attentive to the possibility that it’s for me.

James

2008-11-20T08:54:00.000-08:00

It has gotten cold these past few days. Below freezing at night and with temperatures in the 40s during daylight. So when James came over to me at chess club last night and asked for a few dollars to buy kerosene for his heater I wasn’t surprised. Last winter when it got cold I paid for his fuel a few times, so with the temperature dropping I saw this coming. I hesitated for a while before deciding what to do. Christian charity makes this an easy decision one might think. But the decision wasn’t easy.

For the last fifteen years I’ve played chess Wednesday nights at our local chess club which meets in one of the local coffeehouses. James has been a fixture in the club for even longer than that. He’s a black man slightly younger than I am and he lives at the margins of society. James is small and thin, he speaks very softly and certainly doesn't look threatening. James looks like someone who has been defeated by life and now just wants to get by as quietly as he can, without any trouble. He has a felony conviction from over twenty years ago stemming from his alcoholism. Back in the days when he was drinking he was out-of-control. He tells me he doesn’t drink anymore and I believe that but I have heard from others that he uses drugs occasionally. I don’t know whether that is true or not. I suspect he smokes a little pot once in a while. I do know that James works intermittently at his trade of bricklaying, but that he cannot support himself. At times he lives in the homeless shelter and gets his one meal a day at the soup kitchen. Other times his mother lets him sleep on her porch. One might think his mother’s reluctance to accept him back into her home was cold-hearted, but it must be considered that back in the day when he was drinking he assaulted her and stole from her. Last winter James was living in the storage shed at the back of his mother’s property. My wife made him a thick comforter for the winter, as she has done in the past. I would drive him to the gas-station where I could buy him kerosene for his heater. This worked fine for the better part of the winter but late last winter James got careless with the kerosene heater and set fire to the storage building, which was partially destroyed. I felt bad about this. Was I responsible for the damage to his mother's property because I had bought the kerosene?

These thoughts quickly ran through my head as James explained how cold he was during the day. At the moment, his mother will let him sleep in the house at night but she won’t let him stay there during the day. James still has the heater and the remains of the shed. Could he have money to fire up the heater when it got really cold during the day? It’s clear to me that no rule or principle could tell me what to do here. Would James use the money to keep warm or would he cause another fire or buy some pot? As a human being I can’t depend on my own wisdom to figure this out, so I went within and silently asked God for guidance. The answer came in less than a minute and I pulled four dollars out of my wallet and gave them to James.

Was it the right thing to do? I’m convinced that it was. What makes it right is not that it will make some big difference in James’ life; what makes it right is just that I tried to listen to the Inner Teacher and do what he directed me to do in that particular time and place. I don't know what will become of James this winter but I can truly say that I was faithful.

Do Quakers Still Hold to the Peace Testimony?

2008-11-10T10:05:00.000-08:00

I suspect that only a fairly small minority of Quakers today still accept the peace testimony. The majority combine the some version of the traditional Catholic just war theory with a heightened distrust of the rationales offered by our political leaders to justify their wars. Most Quakers today oppose most or even all of the wars the United States has fought in their lifetimes, but they do so only because they reject the specific justifications offered by our leaders. They do not reject all war without qualification or exception. But they do actually oppose actual wars, so isn’t the modern Quaker position on war functionally equivalent to the traditional peace testimony? No, it is not. And our tradition of speaking the plain truth should make us face the difference.

I was in high school and college during the Vietnam War. While I felt the challenge of Jesus’ call to radical obedience, just war theory appealed to my rational side. My father had served in World War II and the fight against Hitler seemed right to me. Wars were often, perhaps normally unjust, but to reject all war seemed too extreme. Like the majority of Christians for the past two thousand years I decided that Jesus was wrong and that “common sense” required the rejection of pacifism. The use of deadly force in self-defense, whether at the individual level or at the national level, was legitimate. A responsible person was very slow to use violence but the option should never be taken off the table.

It has only been in the past decade or so of my life that I find myself coming to reject just war theory as a worldly compromise with divine Truth and, somewhat to my surprise, accepting the undiluted peace testimony. The peace testimony, like the simplicity, truth and equality testimonies, is not a philosophical position. They are not something you come to believe by considering the arguments pro and con. The testimonies represent a single unified way of living. They are called testimonies because those who enter into this way of life discover that they are fundamentally changed in the process over time and then are in a position to testify to its Truth. I capitalize “Truth” here because I am not talking about the literal truth of statements, however noble or abstract, but rather about the experience of living in the Truth. As you live more simply, you find yourself called to live more peaceably. As you live more truthfully, you find yourself treating others more equitably. It is a life that draws you in, changes you, radicalizes you, and makes compromises with the world seem less and less attractive.

As a philosopher I can debate with people who try to debate the relative merits of pacifism and just war theory interpreted as philosophical positions. I’m not interested in doing this. Doing good philosophy is much harder than it looks and the arguments that ordinary folk come up with are usually just terrible, but the more fundamental reason is that such argument misses the point. The peace testimony is a testimony not a philosophy. It is something to be lived, if you choose or not if you choose not. But in either event it is not something to be argued about.

The Ginker

2008-09-19T12:25:00.000-07:00

Shortly after graduating from college, getting married and starting graduate school I began playing poker on Saturday nights with a friend of mine from high school and his coworkers at the factory where he drove a forklift. We played poker for small stakes around a kitchen table, drank cheap whiskey and talked. Looking back on it now it provided me with some comfortable familiarity as I was entering an unfamiliar new social world in graduate school where things like summering in Italy were considered normal. But my social journey from son and grandson of steelworkers to college professor isn’t my topic; human nature is.

One of my poker buddies was called “the Ginker” by everyone. His personality and physical presence reminded me of Falstaff. People instinctively liked the Ginker because of his cheerful personality and they tended to shrug off his moral lapses as inconsequential. I vividly recall his telling the story of how, as a gas station attendant, he would routinely shortchange customers. In telling the story he pantomimed leaning his great bulk in front of the pump so that the customer could not see how much he was putting in the tank. Cheating each customer out of exactly one dollar per visit was his normal practice. My reaction to the Ginker was quite a bit more negative than anyone else’s. It was clear to me that he did not even rationalize his behavior. He did not make up a mental story to tell himself about how he “deserved” the extra dollar or how his miserly employer “left him no choice.” No, the Ginker knew that it was wrong to cheat people and felt that part of the fun came from knowing that it was wrong.

There was a time when I believed with Plato that no one knowingly does wrong. People do wrong only because they falsely believe that what they are doing is right. Their only fault is perhaps in the self-deception that leads them to believe their own rationalizations. But seeing the Ginker up close the way I did changed my mind. I saw that it was perfectly possible for someone to do wrong quite consciously and without any need for self-deception. Indeed, Shakespeare saw this so much more clearly than Plato. Not only is it possible for Falstaff to be like this; it is part of his charm. Many people love Falstaff precisely for this very trait.

So, how do we square the Quaker doctrine that there is “that of God” in everyone including folks like the Ginker who clearly see the difference between right and wrong and embrace what is wrong? I do so by recognizing that while “that of God” may not seem to have any effect on them it is in depth of their soul and continues to speak. The Ginker didn’t show up for poker one Saturday night and my friend, Jim, told the story of what had happened. Ginker had another friend who worked in a post office and they had hatched a plot to rob it one night. Ginker and his accomplices were driving away from the crime when they were stopped by a policeman who noticed a broken tail light. He became suspicious and made the arrest when he noticed a huge roll of stamps sitting on the backseat of the car. “That of God” in Ginker wasn’t able to convince him not to rob the post office, but I am convinced that it convinced him to just casually toss the stamps into the back seat of the car instead of prudently putting them out of sight in the trunk. If "that of God" in Ginker couldn't convince him not to steal, it could at least convince him to get caught.

Our belief that there is “that of God” in everyone should not take the unrealistic form of thinking that everyone is really following God’s will as best they understand it. I now think that this is just plainly untrue. Still, there is “that of God” in everyone and we should endeavor to speak directly to that part of the person even when that part is clearly not running the show. In speaking to that part we strengthen it and prepare for the day when it can actually take over the person’s life. There is a struggle that goes on within people, even when it looks like there is none. It is our duty to side with the right part and have faith that eventually that part will win. This may be a matter of faith ultimately, but it is not unrealistic.

How God has broken my pride

2008-08-21T12:40:00.000-07:00

Quakers believe in the transforming power of God. Modern Quakers tend to paint this picture in somewhat overly positive terms. If we value God’s power to transform us, it must be because we recognize that we need to be transformed, which is to say, that there is something seriously wrong with us. The negative part goes unsaid, or is even sometimes denied, but talk of transformation literally makes no sense without the negative part. Spiritual growth only occurs when we cooperate with God’s transforming power. God will not force us to accept this gift and understands that we resist it because it is painful. It is a kind of death. Our individuality, what makes us uniquely who we are, is in large part the unique pattern of our weakness and vice. To be transformed is to allow the old self to be killed.

My characteristic vice is pride. I think of myself as intelligent, capable and strong. When there are problems or difficulties in my way I will overcome them. Other people may be unable to do so, but that is because they are not me. People have teased me about this trait for as long as I remember. For example, one year my children gave me a tee shirt emblazoned with the motto: “Everyone is entitled to my opinion.” For years, I found the criticism unfair. “Of course, I think highly of myself. It’s the plain truth. It would be false modesty to think otherwise.” However, for decades a struggle raged within me that I was aware of but could not consciously articulate. Something was wrong about this way of thinking. Something within me needed transformation but I could not do it myself or even fully understand what it was. Unlike Paul’s transformation on the road to Damascus, my transformation has taken place over many years and in several stages.

God has used the health of my family as his primary tool to work on me. My wife and two of my children have, at various times, faced life-threatening health issues that lasted for months or years. During these recurring crises I have had to put my loved ones in the hands of doctors and essentially stand back and do nothing. The agonizing feeling of utter helplessness forces an awareness upon me of the real truth: I am too weak to do anything on my own. As the lesson is hard it has been repeated over and over. Each time I took the truth a little more deeply into my being and my pride slowly started to shrink. I am currently going through this cycle one more time. I must be a very slow learner indeed.

Of course my description of these events displays in its own way my egocentricity. The health issues aren’t just painful for me, the one standing by. They are even more painful for those actually suffering from them. I’ve been concerned in these pages with the meaning of this suffering for me, but surely it also has meaning for my loved ones too. Only I don’t know what that meaning would be and probably never will. Nor is it really my business. As C. S. Lewis put it in one of his novels, we should not try to eavesdrop on what God is whispering in other people’s souls.

Segregation

2008-07-17T08:04:00.000-07:00

A group of women in our YM organized a “Paint and Pray” weekend to do some work on the meetinghouse in Woodland and as an opportunity to get together. My wife was invited but, since I’m a man, I was not. Over lunch at our Yearly Meeting sessions one Friend expressed his disapproval of such segregated Friends gatherings. It got me thinking. Is this in right order or not?

We have an equality testimony that rejects invidious distinctions among people. At one point in our history it became common for there to be men’s meetings and women’s meetings. It came to be felt that this sort of “separate but equal” way of living out our equality testimony was not good enough. There was a tendency to assume that the men’s meeting was doing the real work, while the women’s meeting was doing “women’s work.” Separate men’s and women’s meetings were laid down and Friends no longer divide by sex. So are gatherings like the “Paint and Pray” weekend open only to women a reversion to the past? Upon reflection I find it to be in right order. Friends with common interests sometimes find it energizing to come together. Why shouldn’t some of these special gatherings be all-female? The practice bears watching however because if we were to find that dividing Friends into groups according to sex were to become the norm instead of an occasional thing then we would be back to “separate but equal” and that would not be in gospel order.

Upon further reflection I find that when it comes to young adult Friends (YAFs) such segregated gatherings are not merely an occasional thing. I would ask Friends to reflect seriously on the possibility that we are treating YAFs as implicitly second-class Quakers by encouraging them to meet so often among themselves and so rarely among us OAFs (older adult Friends.) Two recent blog posts suggest this to me. One is by “James Naylor” of Quaking Harlot. http://quakingharlot.blogspot.com/ “James” writes of her experience and wonders why so many of the YAFs who were specially trained and nurtured to become the next generation of Quaker leaders have instead dropped out of involvement with Friends organizations. James writes: "A series of events recently had me thinking, again, on why it is that so many young adult Friends seem to drift away…I have many lines of thought on this phenomenon. Currently, I am pondering how it is that few of my year in QLSP are actively involved with Friends." Another is the comment by Micah Bales http://valiantforthetruth.blogspot.com/ writing about the FUM Triennial: "Thursday night, after Bolling's presentation, the few Young Adult Friends present at this event gathered together, along with a few other YAFs who had come over from North Carolina Yearly Meeting (Conservative), which is holding its annual sessions in nearby Greensboro. There were about a dozen of us, and we shared together about our experiences in the past few years, as well as about our frustrations as young adults in a religious community that alternately pampers us and patronizes us. There was a great sense that we are hungry for a more intergenerational life in community. We are, first and foremost, adult Friends. We just happen to be part of a religious community that tends towards the upper age range. Christ is teaching his people himself, and it's not limited to any age group. "

The common thread here is that something is out of order in the way we are dealing with YAFs. I would ask Friends to seriously consider the possibility that our frequent sponsoring of segregated YAF events “pampers and patronizes” people who are essentially Quakers who just happen to be younger than we are. Query 12 of our Yearly Meeting's queries for the monthly meetings has it right, I think. “Are our younger members appointed to committees and encouraged to share in other responsibilities of the Meeting?” This query directs us to treat younger members of meeting in the same way we treat older members. It advises us not to treat them as unique or special. It does not pamper, it does not patronize, and, Friends, it is good advice.

Been a Long Time

2008-05-15T12:24:00.000-07:00

I haven’t been keeping up with this blog lately. I was a little shocked myself when I saw the date of my last post. This is what I’ve been up to.

My attempt to set up a chess program for underprivileged kids over on the east side of Greenville has been sputtering forward in fits and jerks. The city has purchased some sets and Nate has been put on the payroll of the Intergenerational Center to train adults to work with kids. It’s taken plenty of phone calls, emails and meetings to get the project this far. We don’t have a viable program going yet but it is out of the dream stage and is now small but real.

I put in for an internal grant from the university to construct some critical thinking modules for web based instruction. The grant was approved so now I have to do the work! I’ve taught critical thinking for thirty years and even spend a period of several years working on computer based instruction a decade ago. But now I’ve got to retool my material for the web.

I’ve been putting more energy into my research as well. For the past two years I’ve been participating in a reading group of philosophers associated with the medical school across town. I have shared my ideas with them and they have been encouraging me to develop my views on ethics as a book. I have an outline put together and put several hours each week into working on it. In addition to this I wrote and submitted two articles for publication in philosophy journals as well as a report on the philosophy roundtable we had at last summer’s FAHE meetings.

Also I noticed that I’d been neglecting home repairs for too long and decided that I would devote every Saturday to doing some project that needs doing around the house. I’ve gotten a lot of projects done but still have a long list to work through for the rest of the year.

My brother’s wife of twenty-five years died of cancer this Spring and we traveled up to Maine to attend the memorial service and to see how my brother and his children were doing. I have been calling my brother once a week since his wife's cancer recurred and I had been concerned with his state of mind. We spent two days with him and the day after the funeral I could see that he was doing better. I’ll still call every week and we plan to see him again this summer, but I’m not so worried about his ability to cope as I was.

Quaker business has also taken up some of my time. I continue to travel down to visit the worship group at Beaufort once every month. We have several new attenders at meeting and we usually go out for coffee after worship on Sundays and we host a dinner at our house every Tuesday night. I’ve served on the Planning Committee for Yearly Meeting and as co-clerk of our Earthcare Witness Committee and on the Personnel Committee at the University where we hired two new members of the department.

Sometimes when people stop blogging it is because they are depressed or otherwise feeling low. This has not been the case here. I’ve been happily busy doing things I feel I ought to be doing. So to those who have expressed concern for my well-being, don’t worry. I’m doing fine.

Being Led into the Unknown

2008-01-25T13:11:00.000-08:00

Leadings from the Spirit come in many forms. One I think is pretty common but not often talked about takes the form of an order to report for duty. When such a leading strikes you know that you are supposed to go to a certain place or to be with a certain person. But that’s all you are told. You don’t know if you are supposed to be there to talk to them or to listen to them. And you certainly don’t know what it is you are supposed to say. This is actually the kind of leading that I feel the most comfortable with. Given the size of my ego, which God has managed to whittle down over the years but which is still much too large, thinking that I am being lead to say or write something always comes with a question attached: is this a genuine leading or just my own sense of self-importance talking? But with “report for duty” leadings that’s not a problem.

Such leadings require a fair amount of plain old-fashioned faith. One can feel a little foolish making what is sometimes a big effort to go somewhere with no clear idea as to what you are going to do when you get there. As someone who normally thinks of himself as quite rational, who likes to think out the whys and hows ahead of time, it demands more flexibility than I'm used to. My wife has such leadings often and is very quick to follow them and each one is a story unto itself. I vividly recall a time when we had been driving most of the day with a van filled with the high school chess team I coach. We made it to Charlotte during rush hour and my logical self wanted to find the hotel and check in. Then my wife had one of these leadings.

“Turn off here!”
“But that’s not the way to the hotel.”
“I know. Turn off anyway.”
I’ve learned to recognize this tone of voice, I turned off. A few more seemingly random turns and we found ourselves in a very rundown part of Charlotte looking at a rundown little restaurant.
“OK, let’s go in and order dinner.”

So we did. The owner of the restaurant came up to us and my wife chatted with him. It turns out he was from Ethiopia and had been in America only a few years. He knew he had a cousin in America but had naively not understood how big America was and so had never found him. He felt so isolated in Philadelphia that he moved to North Carolina hoping to find his cousin who he believed lived somewhere in the Tarheel State. To keep the conversation going my wife mentioned that she worked with a woman who was from Ethiopia. The restaurant owner asked what her name was and when told remarked that his cousin was married to a woman of that name. A few more questions and it became obvious that my wife’s coworker was indeed married to his cousin. Phone numbers were exchanged and it finally became clear to this rational mind why we had to get off the highway at just that place.

As I said following such leadings requires faith that one is being led and letting go of rational control can feel a little uncomfortable, but once you lighten up and learn to go with these leadings it’s actually fun and, in this case at least, the food was great.

Double Standards

2007-12-03T09:28:00.000-08:00

Homosexual relations is an issue that sparks lively debate among Quakers and is probably the main source of division between programmed Friends and unprogrammed Friends. It is even a source of some tension among conservative Friends with Ohio and North Carolina conservative Friends not being in unity on this issue. And of course FUM has been shaken by divisions over homnosexuality recently. Will T. in a recent post on his blog has raised the point that any discussion of the issue of homosexual relations really needs to take place within the broader context of sexual morality in general. I quite agree with Will about this.

Liberals tend to look at matters of sexual morality primarily through the lens of the testimony of equality. They see traditional morality as deeply stained with double standards. Heterosexuals are encouraged to marry and enjoy a lifetime of sexual fulfillment. Heterosexual marriage is seen as a spiritual blessing to be given the full support of the community. Homosexuals, on the other hand, are told that their only option is life-long celibacy. To make the same commitment to love and support their partner is condemned as sinful. From this point of view the traditional condemnation of homosexuality looks simply outrageous and the deployment of Biblical verses in support of this double standard looks like hypocrisy of the worst sort.

A different sort of double standard pervades traditional views of heterosexual relations. While marriage is held up as an honorable institution for both men and women, the two sexes have not been held to exactly the same standards. While adultery is condemned for both men and women, a woman caught in adultery is treated far more severely. While youthful sex without any thought of eventual marriage is officially condemned, among males it traditionally evoked at worst a frown and often an encouraging wink. Needless to say, the same behavior by young women was dealt with harshly.

I suspect that in past centuries the hypocrisy of this double standard was simply invisible to most people. Our greater awareness of the testimony of equality makes such a double standard unacceptable now that we fully see it. But once seen how is the discrepancy to be fixed? One way is to make the lowest most permissive standard the norm for everyone. Back in the sixties many argued that the only reason to support less permissive standards in the past was our inability to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. Reliable birth control and “safe sex” meant that sexual restraint and fidelity were an anachronism. The old double standard can be replaced with a uniformly permissive standard.

Some liberal Quakers would heartily endorse the line of argument sketched above but many would not. Elimination of a high standard for women and a low standard for men does not necessarily imply a low standard for everyone. We could instead hold both men and women to the same high standard which formerly applied only to women, or, somewhat more realistically, find some compromise standard and apply it consistently. Many thoughtful people having lived through the sexual revolution of our times have come to believe that sex without commitment holds dangers that “safe sex” ignores. Even within marriage there is a tendency to treat the other person as a mere means to the satisfaction of personal desires. There is, after all, a strong streak of selfishness within every human being. This reality makes casual sex a great spiritual danger. Conversely, a marriage in true gospel order contains spiritual blessings that people who have never been thus married cannot possibly foresee. To advise those with less experience to enter into such unions when the time is right and to avoid casual sex until such time is the path of wisdom.

But if such advice is good for heterosexuals then how is it any less good for homosexuals? Are the dangers of casual homosexual relations any less? Is the value of merging your life with your loved one any less? I cannot see that there is any meaningful difference here. This is a dialogue that is really just beginning within the Society of Friends but two things are clear to me: we must avoid double standards for different classes of people and we must not rush to embrace a permissive lowest common denominator in our moral teachings.

Death and Thanksgiving

2007-11-21T10:50:00.000-08:00

I really used to enjoy the bustle of preparation for the traditional Thanksgiving feast. I like to cook and so don’t feel that it is a burden and my wife, who cooks most of the time, is generally quite content to let me take over on the big eating holiday. My feelings about Thanksgiving changed a few years back when James, a stray cat we took in, took sick about a week before Thanksgiving, growing progressively weaker for days. He took up residence in my son’s bedroom right off the kitchen and I would go in and check on James periodically while I prepared the food. He died quietly with a little shudder just before I got ready to pack everything up and take it over to my mother-in-law’s house where the clan would gather for the feast. Needless to say, I didn’t feel particularly thankful that afternoon and the memory has come back every following year.

Thoughts of death are stronger this year. Three of our neighbors died this year, the most recently just last week. I had worked with her husband for years before his retirement and would visit with them intermittently during Karen’s final illness. Karen seemed to be angry about dying. To me it seemed that she felt she had much more to do and see and feel. She was an English professor and did not “go gentle into that good night.” Dylan Thomas would have been pleased, but it made me reflect on the some of the very weighty Friends I have known who have lived their whole lives among conservative Friends who do indeed go gentle into that good night. I have seen a sense of peace, acceptance and indeed of thanksgiving among elderly Friends who know that their time has come upon them. Though they don’t talk about death—as a rule it seems Quakers don’t speak of death--I could sense that they felt close to the Spirit and felt themselves passing imperceptibly into another world. It wasn’t that they firmly believed in some doctrine of the resurrection, but rather that they felt they had lived their life partly in this world and partly in the other one and were now disappearing into the kingdom of heaven. There was no need to cite Bible verses or to make any loud show of their faith. The reality of the spiritual world was as commonplace to them as this world is to most of us.

Despite my preoccupation with death lately I think I will be able to enjoy Thanksgiving again this year. I'm thinking of death but I’m not ready to die. In fact I would say that now in my midfifties I appreciate life more than I ever have in the past. The feeling of being driven to “accomplish something” has largely vanished from my psychology. Mediocrity no longer feels like failure. Doing the little that I can do, and that is indeed very little, finally feels like enough. So I find myself wishing that God would just grant me fifty more years of life just as it is right now. But I know that that cannot be. The last of my children will move out and make a life of their own. Old age will not leave my body or my mind intact. But for now I am alive and very well. So I do feel thankful. I am thankful to be alive and that feeling is enhanced by the knowledge that it cannot last. What is to become of me while I remain is unclear and still less is it clear what will become of me when I too have to leave. But, Dylan Thomas to the contrary, I hope that I pass gently into that sweet night.

The Life and Power that will save the Earth

2007-10-16T08:14:00.000-07:00

Below is an email I sent to members of our Yearly Meeting committee on environmental concerns. I thought I would share it with the wider audience of Friends here on QuakerQuaker to get your reactions.

Friends of the Earth Committee,

Representative Body meets October 28. I would like to gather as many of us as possible to discuss the work of the committee. I would also like to encourage those who can’t attend Rep Body to contribute by email using this list. Perhaps we can meet between 10 and 11:00 the morning of Oct 28 prior to the start of the sessions. Alternatively perhaps we could meet over lunch or after sessions at 3:00. As part of the Yearly Meeting Planning Committee I want to meet with them as well but I would give this committee priority in case of a time conflict.

I see Nan once a month and correspond with her more frequently by phone and email, so we have shared some ideas already. What I would like is for the committee as a whole to come to unity on how to move forward. I will try to summarize the thoughts Nan and I have shared so far as a starting point.

Environmental issues are hugely complex and give many people a feeling of helplessness and even hopelessness in the face of massive challenges. It is easy to feel confused, overwhelmed and guilty about not doing enough. The good news is that many millions of people around the world are getting concerned and feeling the need for action as well. What do we as Quakers bring to the table that is our unique contribution to this vital work?

I don’t think that Quakers have the financial or human resources to save the planet by ordinary political methods. The amount of time, effort and money we could put into advertising or letter writing campaigns would not do it. This is not the distinctively Quaker contribution that we are being called to make.

Instead I think Quakers have a unique tradition of seeing what more secularly minded liberals see as social problems as being really spiritual problems. We oppose war with the standard tools of bumper stickers, meetings with elected officials, attending demonstrations etc. but we know that our effectiveness in peace work is not a matter of what tactics we employ but rather of cleansing our hearts of the greed and hatred that gives rise to war. To the extent that we live in the life and power that takes away the occasion for all war we are effective. The world looks powerful with its weapons of mass destruction but we know that Love is yet more powerful. If our actions are guided by that Love they will be strangely and mysteriously powerful in ways and times we cannot predict in advance.

What we as Quakers can bring to the mostly secular environmental movement is this spiritual wisdom. It’s not ultimately about tactics and whether or not I should buy a hybrid or take the bus instead. The change must start from within. We must live in the life and power that loves and cherishes nature and not in the worldly spirit that seeks to intelligently use nature. If our hearts are in the right place the details and tactics will gradually become clearer. Love casts out fear. Fear clouds the mind and tempts us to try to make things happen according to our human sense of time and wisdom. Love of nature and an appreciation for its beauty need to be the core of our witness. If this is our core then “that of God” in other people will pick up the rhythm and resonate with us and the total effect will be much more powerful than our numbers suggest.

Concretely what I see us doing is finding some time to visit with other people and attempt to share whatever part of the vision we are able to share. In other words good old-fashioned traveling in the ministry with a message about love for Nature.

I hope to see many of you in Durham on October 28th. And in the meantime please share whatever thoughts and reactions you have to what Nan and I have come up with so far.

Richard

Speaking in Parables

2007-10-01T13:48:00.000-07:00

Every generation has similar experiences of the divine but we need language in which to communicate these experiences to each other. Natural language is designed to talk about natural things. So when we want to create words to talk about spiritual things we have to borrow words from the physical realm and adapt them by analogy to talk about spiritual things. So, in the end, we all must speak in parables.

In part we can pass this language along from generation to generation but there is danger in that. The danger is that we will start using the words mechanically, repeating them by rote and not tieing them to the spiritual experiences they are meant to convey. For example how many of us will speak of God the Father mechanically. When Jesus first minted this new metaphor it was shocking and new. Jesus said that God was "Abba" an informal expression rather akin to "Daddy" in English. The metaphor of a divine King to be feared was being put aside. God was as tender loving and close to us as a parent to a little child. Do we still hear the meaning behind the metaphor? Often we do not.

To some extent every generation must invent a new language for talking about the spiritual. So in my last post I made up my own metaphor of pushes and pulls. They aren't literal pushes and pulls of course, but those who have had experiences like mine might (if I picked a good metaphor) say to themselves "Yes, I've had that experience." Of course my metaphor is rather trivial and easy. It is certainly not as profound as Jesus' insight. But each of us offers what we have to offer.

I don't put my metaphor out there to suggest that everyone use it. Use it if you wish, if it doesn't work for you, forget it. What we need to do is talk about our experiences more. Shared experience of the divine is the very heart of Quakerism. I urge Friends to use whatever language seems natural to them and not to try to tell others what language they must or must not use.

Please share your stories in whatever language comes most naturally to you.

Pushed or Pulled?

2007-09-22T07:55:00.000-07:00

What do leadings feel like? Quakers talk a lot about being led or following leadings. What does this feel like? How do you recognize the experience? How do I distinguish an idea whose source is genuinely divine from my own thoughts and opinions?

Not all leadings feel the same. I suppose one could even claim that each one is unique, but it is not much help to people to say that. So being a philosopher I will find a distinction. I find that I experience two general classes of leadings: pushes and pulls. Judging both from my own experience and from the writings of other Friends pushes seem to be more common. Pushes are felt as imperatives to do something that may or may not make rational sense. One feels impelled to do this thing come what may. There is a restless uncomfortable feeling that comes from not doing it and a sense of ease and relief from being obedient. The internal drive gives one the strength to go forward in the face of obstacles and to speak with conviction in urging others to join in with carrying out the mission.

My wife has frequent push experiences and I’ve learned to just go along with them even when they don’t seem to make much sense. I remember once taking a van full of teenagers to the state chess championship. We had arrived at the outskirts of Charlotte but were still pretty far from the hotel when we got caught in rush hour traffic. I was pretty glazed after a four hour drive from the eastern part of the state where we live. Suddenly my wife urgently told me to pull off the highway and take the next exit. We found ourselves in a seedy section of town. I was totally lost but she was still telling me where to go. We found ourselves at a dingy Ethiopian restaurant/pizzeria and stopped for dinner. My wife struck up a conversation with the owner who had emigrated from Ethiopia a few years ago. He lamented that he knew he had a cousin in North Carolina somewhere but he hadn’t been able to find him. My wife mentioned that her boss was Ethiopian. The coincidence turned a little amazing when it gradually became clear that her boss was his cousin’s wife. My wife quickly gave him his cousin’s phone number much to his joy and amazement. And I could finally see the reason why I had to get off the highway at just that point in time.

Recently I had one of the pull type experiences. Perhaps you heard on NPR about the controversy which took place in our town over the renaming of Martin Luther King Boulevard. The west side of Greenville is mostly black and the east side is mostly white. A few years back the city council had named the western half of 5th Street “Martin Luther King Boulevard.” Some local activists thought that the eastern half of 5th Street should be renamed as well, but the white community living along 5th Street objected. The city council responded by rescinding the name “Martin Luther King Boulevard” from west 5th Street and instead naming a stretch of highway outside of the city as the new “Martin Luther King Boulevard.” This decision was much resented by the black community and the controversy got bitter and generally worsened race relations in Greenville.

Since we are about to elect a new city council I arranged a lunch meeting with the councilman from my district to discuss what could be done to improve racial relations when a new city council is seated this Fall. Larry mentioned that the city had just purchased a large property over on the west side of town and was planning to develop it into a place to serve the needs of the community there. I said that it would be a good idea not to stereotype black teens and assume they are only interested in activities like basketball. I suggested a chess program.

I didn’t feel any inner push to bring the topic up. I play chess every Wednesday night with a racially mixed group at the Barnes and Noble. I also coach chess at one of the local high schools, so the idea just naturally occurred to me. I felt no push to bring it up and didn’t speak with any real conviction. I was very casual about it. But Larry’s enthusiastic reaction both surprised me and pulled me in. I had no previous knowledge that the city had purchased the property in question and was looking for programs to fill it, so I had given no prior thought to what a chess program there would look like. But as Larry encouraged me to talk I found myself filling out reasonable sounding details off the cuff. In the end Larry promised that the city would come up with some money for such a program and told me he would put me in touch with the assistant city manager to develop more detailed plans. I’ve since talked to several other people about the idea.

In this case the leading has been overwhelmingly a pull type experience. As I mention the idea to people I can see “that of God” in them responding positively to it. I see a light in their eyes and a note of optimism in their voices as they offer encouragement and promise to help make this happen. This has definitely not been something I planned. As a matter of fact I felt like I already had plenty to do right now and have no time to take on any new projects. But this plan, not of my making, is pulling me forward despite all that. It is a leading and I need to obey it though the leading seems to be centered outside of me in external events and not welling up from inside of me as an internal push. But no matter. Whether pushed or pulled a leading is a leading and obedience is the only thing required. So for now I can report that I have been faithful.

What of other Friends? I believe push experiences are pretty common but how many of you have had leading of the pull variety. I would like to hear other Friends’ stories.

The Face of Quakerism

2007-09-05T13:42:00.000-07:00

Is Quakerism an organized religion? Just barely. And it is that way by design. We have no Pope, no bishops, no creeds, no sacraments and minimal organizational structure. The programmed side of Friends is a bit more like regular Protestant churches. They have a professionalized clergy that serves a leadership role, but even among these Friends their power is understated compared with normal churches. So without Popes, bishops or even pastors who represents us to the rest of the world?

Traditionally Friends recognized that there was a distinction between public Friends and private Friends. Ministers, especially those who traveled, were the face of Quakerism outside local meetings. Without creeds it was especially important that those who ministered publicly and preached outside their local meetings served as good representatives of Quakerism. To travel as a minister carried with it a special responsibility. Before the minister was clear to present him or herself as a public representative of Quakerism the local meeting had to record its approval of the soundness of both the minister’s preaching and his character. The travel minute given to the minister was their assurance to others that this Friend could represent them. In the past becoming a public Friend was something that could be done only with corporate approval. One could not simply decide on one’s own to become a public Friend.

Today these institutions are in a much shakier condition. How does one become a public Friend today? I’m afraid that the corporate discernment by monthly and yearly meetings often plays little role in the process. One way to become a public Friend is to create a blog and write controversial posts or place many comments on other people’s blogs. This will create the impression that the highly active blogger is a weighty Friend whose words genuinely represent the corporate wisdom of the Religious Society of Friends. I note in passing that it seems that Scott Simon has become a public Friend simply in virtue of having a job with National Public Radio. I’ve noted recently that journalistic pieces have appeared trying to explain what Quakerism is to the general public. They seem to rely heavily on what they glean from public Friends whose views are not consonant with any larger body of Friends. I’m not sure how we could get people outside the Society to grasp the difference between one person’s opinion and the corporate discernment of a larger body, but it bothers me that they don’t seem to understand the difference.

Soon after I started blogging some ministers and elders of the Yearly Meeting came to me to tell me that they were reading my blog and approved of what I was doing. Later I printed up copies of all my posts and made them available to the entire body of Ministers, Elders and Overseers who met at Yearly Meeting sessions this summer. If anything I’ve written poorly represents North Carolina Yearly Meeting Conservative, I want to be informed promptly of the problem. I like the fact that Quakerquaker provides a forum for dissident opinion within Quakerism, but I worry that the picture it presents misleads some people about where the center of gravity in Quakerism lies.

Healing Visions

2007-08-30T13:40:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago I took the train up to New Jersey to visit my mother. I choose the train for a couple of reasons. First, driving just wears me out. I wouldn’t have been good company for my mother if I got there exhausted. Second, I can read on the train. I brought work with me and spent the eight hour trip productively. Third, it is easier on the environment to ride a train. On the way up and back I spent part of the time looking out the window. What I saw was frankly ugly. Shabby buildings covered with graffiti, weeds and trash. The words to “America, the Beautiful” kept coming to mind in a kind of mockery. We have not taken good care of America. We have disfigured her. I know there are still lots of beautiful places but it seems that the places that humans live and work in have gotten depressing and ugly over the years.

The practical, rational side of my mind shrugs and says that litter, weeds and graffiti are trivial compared to water pollution, destruction of habitat, and global warming. Worrying about beauty seems romantic and self-indulgent. “Be practical” says my rational self. But the Spirit whispers a different message in my soul. We need beauty. Our souls starve without it. Ugliness is more than a mere symptom; it is part of the disease itself. We need to heal the Earth and part of the healing is the recovery of her vibrant beauty. At the moment I feel led to be more sensitive to beauty and to try to preserve it and enhance it in whatever little ways I can.

What are your leadings Friends? The environmental crisis facing the earth is so huge that many people feel overwhelmed and helpless. The crisis has been building for a long time and since it involves all 8 billion people living on this planet the momentum is enormous. What is your vision? We need them all. The whole picture is too big for any one of us. No person knows how to heal the Earth. But the Spirit knows. Many of us right now are getting little visions, little pieces of the big picture of how the Earth is to be healed. We need to be faithful to what little we are given and share them and act on them as lead. Rationally it will seem that whatever we do it will be too little, too trivial, too symbolic, too personal and too late. But it is not. If enough of us are faithful to the pieces of the vision that we are shown, then gradually the Earth will be healed.

Saved From What?

2007-07-31T10:58:00.000-07:00

“God, in and by this light and seed, invites, calls, exhorts, and strives with every man, in order to save him. If this light is received and not resisted, it works the salvation of all, even of those who are ignorant to the death and sufferings of Christ, and of Adam’s fall. It does this not only by bringing them a sense of their own misery, but by allowing them to share inwardly in the sufferings of Christ. They participate in his resurrection by becoming holy, pure, and righteous and by recovering from their sins. Those who have outward knowledge of Christ are also saved by it, since it opens their understanding of the right use and application of things delivered in the scriptures so that they may make saving use of them. But, this light, can also be resisted and rejected both by the ignorant and by those who have outward knowledge of Christ. God is then said to be resisted and pressed down and Christ is again crucified and put to shame among men. To those who resist and refuse him, he becomes their condemnation.” Barclay’s Apology

For me, this passage represents the core of the theology of early Friends. Some of it is no doubt very congenial to modern Friends, but other parts are more challenging. Contrary to the exclusivist theology of many evangelical Christians today, this is a highly universalistic Christianity. The faith which saves a person is equally available to Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, etc. and it is not required that these people adopt Christian theology in order to be saved. Nor does getting your theology right assure salvation. Knowledge of the historical Jesus and the acceptance of “orthodox” Christian belief about Jesus are neither necessary nor sufficient for salvation. Faith saves but faith isn’t a kind of belief system.

But as one goes a little deeper the teaching sounds less liberal and more traditionally Christian than first appears. Knowledge of Christian teaching is not useless or irrelevant, as some liberal Quakers believe. On the contrary it opens the understanding in ways that are helpful. There is no suggestion that Buddhist or Muslim religious teachings are equally valuable. Another part of this theology that runs counter to much modern liberal thought is the insistence that we need to be saved for our sins. This is not a happy optimistic doctrine that since there is “that of God” in everyone then we are all fine just as we are. On the contrary, human beings in their natural state are anything but fine. The light or seed within each of us enables us to see that we are not fine, that we cannot fix ourselves by our own willpower but that we can be transformed by a power greater than our own. Many modern Friends strongly resist the idea that they need to be saved. “I don’t buy into all that stuff about sin. I don’t need to be saved. Saved from what?”

For those Friends who have developed an allergic reaction to traditional Christian language I suggest the following. Approach the truth from another direction. Buddhists practice what they call mindfulness. It is the practice of simply observing the spontaneous reactions of the mind to daily life. When a driver cuts you off in traffic, observe the sudden flare of anger. When a shopper drops a box of detergent on the floor in the grocery store, observe your disdain. Buddhism, like the Sermon on the Mount, finds what is inside our hearts to be more significant than our actions. Steadily observe what is there. Avoid getting into an argument with yourself about whether or not your reaction is justifiable or not. That will distract you from seeing what is really going on inside. Don’t expect it to be 100% negative either. There is good in us too. You will observe some instances of compassion and sincerity but you will surely observe nasty stuff too. Pride, anger, envy, contempt, cynicism or whatever happens to be your special vice will arise in regular predictable patterns, almost like clockwork. This is what you need to be saved from.

Echoes

2007-07-23T09:26:00.000-07:00

Is the voice that speaks out in vocal ministry truly the voice of God or is it just some of the better reflections coming from ordinary human minds and personalities? There isn’t any doubt that vocal ministry is partially the latter. The divine message, passing as it does through a real human personality, picks up some of color from that mind as it passes through. But is there any real divine message at the core or are we just fooling ourselves about that? As I’ve said before in these essays, I don’t think there is an hard, incontrovertible evidence but that there is plenty of soft evidence for those who are inclined to look.

Yesterday I attended worship in the morning in my home meeting and then in the afternoon drove up to Woodland, NC for a memorial service for Henry Pulliam. Friends came from all over NC to attend as well as plenty of relatives and community members who came to honor this gentle Friend. The last piece of vocal ministry came from his twin brother Bruce. I don’t know how Bruce’s ministry effected others but its effect on me was sharp. The theme and some of the exact words Bruce used were the same as those spoken by another Friend hours earlier in Greenville. How did Bruce echo the previous message without having heard it himself? He did it by speaking the words he was given to speak.

Once a month I worship in Greenville and then travel down to Beaufort to meet with a small worship group there. Since I’ve been doing this for two years I’ve noticed similar echoes on more than one occasion. Whenever such an echo occurs I’ve learned that this message is being repeated for me. It is something that I personally need to pay particular attention to. By repeating something to me, that no one else will hear as repetition, it is God’s way of saying “Hey, I’m talking to YOU!” Stubborn as I am I’ve learned to pay attention. There’s something in that message for me and if I meditate on the message for a day, a week or sometimes longer, there will be spiritual fruit that results in due course. That these echoes are not mere coincidences is shown by the fruits that they yield.

There’s no point in mentioning the specific echo I heard yesterday because I haven’t lived with it fully enough to take the nourishment from it yet and besides I think the message was for me and not for everyone reading this. What I have to say to those who are reading this is: God has something to say to you. He’s patient and not too proud to repeat himself, bearing in mind that we are a little hard of hearing. Listen for echoes that are meant for you.

All Who Thirst

2007-07-06T09:29:00.000-07:00

When Jesus meets the woman at the well he makes a bold and unbelievable offer. Drink the water that I offer and you will never be thirsty again. She is a Samaritan and a polygamist and sassy to boot but the offer is laid out for her and she immediately accepts it. It is clear from what Jesus says on this and other occasions that the offer is to everyone. If you are thirsty, come and drink this spiritual water and a well will spring up inside you.

The woman at the well responds to Jesus’ offer. Why doesn’t everyone? The answer plainly is that most people simply aren’t thirsty. Jesus is offering a solution to a problem that they don’t recognize. Most people find what the world has to offer sufficiently attractive. They feel no spiritual thirst, so spiritual water does not interest them. To the worldly mind the world does not appear perfect. It can be frustrating. The joys it promises are often briefly offered then rudely snatched away or turn to ashes in the mouth or are left tantalizingly out of reach for years at a time. But it is those pleasures that occupy the minds of the average man or woman. Most of these pleasures are innocent in themselves. It is foolish and dishonest to say that the world is evil and its pleasures bad. No, even the “lowest” pleasures of the body—food, drink and sex—are good. And so are the pleasures of friendship, laughter, security, the respect and admiration of other people, the beauty of the natural world and even genuine pride of being smart or handsome or successful. The world’s goods are really and truly good. Most people are not dissatisfied with these goods; they just want more of them. They have no idea that there is something totally different that they could want instead.

The desire for more worldly good tempts people to cross moral boundaries in order to get more. One sees, or even starts to look for, ways of getting more at the expense of others. The ordinary decent person recognizes this and tries to exercise some self-control and is generally pretty satisfied with the results. They compare themselves with other people and the “Lake Woebegone Effect” kicks in and everyone feels that they are “above average.” On a typical Sunday morning the churches are full of people who are thus pretty satisfied with themselves. Their presence at worship is proof in their own minds that they are doing fine. They have some of the good things the world offers and they don't cross moral boundaries very often. They are not thirsty. Jesus’ offer of spiritual water can gain no traction in their minds. Friends, I’m pretty sure that there are plenty of similarly complacent Quakers. Only those who are thirsty for something other than what the world can give will come to meeting for worship expectantly waiting for something real to bubble up.

Language Barriers

2007-06-26T10:50:00.000-07:00

I came of age in the 60’s and at that time the influx of religious ideas from Asia, particularly Hindu and Buddhist teachings was very stimulating to my imagination. Since that time Americans have been increasingly exposed to religious traditions other than Christianity. There are in our meetings many Friends who have picked up concepts and language that originated in India or China and use these along with or even in place of Christian language. There are even those who consider themselves Buddhist-Quakers or Taoist-Quakers. Is this a good thing or a bad thing?

This question arouses considerable feeling among Friends and at times tempers have flared. In my opinion the matter calls for serious discernment. The view of those who see problems in our being too open to other religious traditions needs to be seriously considered as does the view of those who feel that any criticism of hyphenated Quakers is a betrayal of the our courage to be open to continuing revelation. It will probably come as no surprise to regular readers of these essays to discover that I think both sides are basically correct.

Both sides see themselves as being the true followers of Quaker tradition in this matter but arguments based on what earlier generations of Quakers thought are of little weight here. In the first place Fox, Barclay and Penn were living in a different world. The nonchristians they met, Jews and Native Americans, weren’t asking to be admitted to membership in the Society of Friends. So it is an issue they never had to face. There is no clear precedent to be cited. Secondly, the question is before us now. God is as much present in the world today as he was in the 17th century. It seems to me that we can repose more faith in God that he will lead us truly in this matter than we could in some murky precedent.

There is a real problem that could arise for meetings if they were to be flooded with hyphenated Quakers of many different varieties. The problem is not that the character of the meeting would change; the problem is that the meeting could lose all character and become a Tower of Babel. The reason we form religious societies is because in unity there is strength. In seeking to know God’s will for me and faithfully follow it I profit enormously from the help of other Friends, especially those of long and deep experience. To ask for and receive that help Friends must speak a common language. Christianity and Buddhism are like different languages. For a Christian Friend and a Buddhist Friend to help each other discern the shape and texture of a leading requires a lot of careful listening. And there is no doubt in my mind that such listening, not easy under the best of circumstances, is made more difficult by language barriers. It is easy to imagine a meeting full of Quakers speaking in many different spiritual languages being overwhelmed. The effort to deeply listen and offer mutual correction might prove too difficult and a tepid “I’m OK; You’re OK” relativism prevail in which individuals are indeed free to be whatever they want to be, but where all effort at communal discernment of Truth had vanished.

It is easy to imagine that happening and for all I know it may actually be happening in some meetings, but fear of this outcome should not lead us to close our hearts to those whose languages are strange to us. I recently participated in a clearness committee for a hyphenated Quaker. Those of us on the committee are all Christians. The Quaker we were trying to help is primarily fed by Native American spiritual tradition. The problem of different spiritual languages arose but did not pose an insurmountable barrier. The Friend in question respects Christianity and has made real efforts to learn Christianity as a second language. For our part the Christians on the committee made similar efforts. We had to proceed more slowly, give more thought to our choice of words, and especially to listen more deeply with longer periods of silent waiting. But God’s Spirit was over us that evening and Truth prospered.

For the continuing miracle of corporate discernment of Truth we must be able to speak to each other of spiritual things. It is easiest to do this if there is a strong core of weighty Friends in the meeting who speak a common language. But if there is such a core it has no need to fear the addition of newcomers who speak other languages. It takes additional effort to weave them fully into our community without destroying the sometimes fragile unity we have created, but everyone who is sincerely seeking to follow God’s will should be welcome among us.

Hyphenated Quakers

2007-06-11T08:00:00.000-07:00

Buddhist-Quakers, Wiccan-Quakers, Jewish-Quakers, what sort of religion has this become? Along with these Native American spirituality, Taoism, Sufism, Zen, Feng Sui and a host of other ideas alien to the Christian tradition are now part of the reality of what the Religious Society of Friends has become. There is no question that this is something very different from the Quakerism of George Fox and John Woolman. The question before us is: what to do about it?

Quakers like to think of themselves as unique and in important ways we are, but we are really less different from other American churches on this point than we think. The world has been getting smaller and lines of communication have been opening wider and wider between the various cultures of the world. Not only are there books on these nonchristian religious traditions available in your local bookstore, but it is all over the internet and large numbers of Asians have moved to the United States and are our neighbors and coworkers. It is not just Quakers who are exposed to these ideas, it is every American.

This massive exposure insures that a significant minority of Americans will adopt some of these ideas. The virtual monopoly of Christian theology on the religious ideas of Western civilization is at an end. Quakers notice this trend affecting our meetings. In fact, however, it is affecting virtually every church in America. Quakers are different only in that the phenomenon is much more visible in our meetings, and especially in the unprogrammed meetings. But the same thing is going on less visibly in mainstream Christian churches. It is hidden from view because of the hierarchical structure of normal Christian churches. In those churches a pastor preaches and the laity listens. There is very little actual two-way conversation and the preacher’s opinions are tacitly taken by everyone to be more or less “official.” So, most of us just assume that the people in the pews all believe more or less the same things that the church officially teaches. But in reality many of them do not.

When sociologists dig below the surface and try to find out what the people in the pews really believe the results are fairly surprising. Some traditional Christian doctrines are no longer widely believed and significant minorities are coming to believe in Eastern ideas like reincarnation. But the continuing existence of priests, bishops and creeds prevents these views from being openly expressed in normal churches. Quakers don’t have the heavy layer of human authority to suppress these views. As a result we are much more likely to hear what people are actually thinking. Moreover, our tradition of tolerance probably attracts a higher percentage of nonconformists to our meetings. But I can assure Friends that there are plenty of hyphenated Episcopaleans, Presbyterians, Methodists, Catholics, and even Baptists out there. It’s just that most of them are in the closet.

Once we recognize what is happening and that it is not unique to Quakerism we can start to think seriously about what to do about it. But, as that is a very big topic, I will leave it for another day.

Coaching

2007-06-08T10:05:00.000-07:00

For the past ten years I’ve coached the chess team at one of our local high schools. Devoting one afternoon and one evening per week to coaching chess is not something that makes much sense on the face of it. It takes a considerable amount of time and energy that could more rationally be devoted to advancing my career and besides I’m not that great a chess player. So why am I doing this? The answer is that a couple of “coincidences” occurred that pointed quite explicitly in this direction. I knew I was being lead in this direction.

But leadings usually don’t clarify themselves for us all at once. At first I thought that this must be about getting the kids to work hard and develop discipline and intelligence through chess. I threw myself into it with elaborate plans for chess training regimens. It was frustrating when I realized I often couldn’t keep them focused on chess very long and that they were more interested in laughing and fooling around. It became obvious that we were not going to be tremendously successful at chess. I'm a type A personality and I hate losing. This was hard for me but I forced myself to relax and accept the situation. So, by and large, we talked less about chess and more about other things: their girlfriends or lack thereof, their problems with school, drug use, all the things that occupy the teenage mind. I learned to listen to them and offer advice. At first it seemed me that they never took my advice seriously. They seemed to just laugh it off and continue to do or not do whatever it was they were doing. Since they weren’t my own kids, this didn’t upset me. But it didn’t exactly make me feel useful or successful.

More than once I thought of packing it in and doing something else with my Tuesday afternoons and Thursday evenings. But since I knew I was clearly being led to do this I plodded on despite not seeing any positive results. But faith requires continuing to be faithful during times when you can’t see. Like Abraham when the Lord says go, you go. If you keep the faith eventually you do get to see at least in part.

Here is one story—or rather two. Ollie (not his real name) had been an honors student for his first two years in high school but this year was a disaster. He found he couldn’t concentrate and in the middle of the term was failing all his classes. Over the weeks we talked about this and tried to figure out what was going on. Eventually he told me about his girlfriend--Sally. Sally had been abandoned by her drug-addicted mother to be cared for by a succession of other relatives who didn’t really want her. She’s an intelligent and sensitive girl who has been damaged by an environment of drugs, abandonment and sexual abuse. I began to see that this relationship was Ollie’s problem. I took lifeguard training when I was a teenager and one part of the training stuck with me. A drowning person is often so desperate and so strong that they will push the rescuer under in their violent struggle to survive. When this happens the rescuer must pull away and get some air before even thinking about continuing the rescue. So I advised him to pull away. Remain friends with Sally but stop dating. I reminded him that he was only 16 years old and in my opinion he wasn’t strong enough to save her. This was not welcome advice but after about a month he did as I suggested. I’ve been getting regular reports since then.

School is out for the year but I ran into Ollie in the local coffeehouse last night. He managed to pass all his classes by acing his final exams. We talked a bit then he went over to talk to with a group of his friends. He will be alright I think. I do still worry about Sally. But Ollie is still in touch with her and thinks she is OK for now. He says she desperately wants to finish high school, go to college and leave this town and never come back. Obviously I haven’t seen everything. I don’t know how either of these stories will ultimately play out. But I’ve been shown enough for today.

Divorce

2007-05-18T08:49:00.000-07:00

With divorce as common as it is in our society at present, it is a little hard to remember that throughout most of its two thousand year history Christianity did not permit divorce at all and that less than a century ago it was permitted only under very limited circumstances. When I was a child in my experience all marriages were permanent. Not only were my parents married but no friends, neighbors or relatives had experienced divorce. I did not meet a person whose parents were divorced until I got to college. The swiftness with which this all changed is really very remarkable.

At present many thoughtful people are wondering what to think about all this. The new norm of temporary marriages and even more temporary informal couplings creates a lot of obvious pain for people. Was the old system better or did it cause even more pain and just hide it from sight? Some want to go back to the old system and others counter that this is impossible even if we wanted to. Humpty-Dumpty can’t be put back together again.

What does the New Testament teach about divorce? In Mark Jesus states unequivocally that divorce is never permitted and that if a man or a woman gets a divorce and remarries that this is adultery. He parenthetically comments that Moses, not God, wrote the law permitting Jewish men to divorce their wives (Jewish women could not divorce their husbands) “because of the hardness of your hearts.” Luke shortens the story somewhat but the prohibition on remarriage remains absolute. This is too much for Matthew, however, so he makes some changes to retain some male privilege. Matthew inserts a phrase that adds an exception to the absolute prohibition in Mark: “except on the grounds of unchastity.” (Again, with language that assumes that only men can initiate a divorce.) Remarriage after divorce is adultery only in the case of the remarriage of a divorced woman. There is no such restriction on remarriage for men. Paul seems to follow the absolute prohibition on divorce and remarriage in Mark and Luke with one interesting exception. If a Christian is married to an unbeliever and the unbeliever wants a divorce, the Christian can consent to the divorce.

In reading these passages I see that they agree in broad outline (Lifelong marriage is good; divorce is bad.) But disagree about details: (No divorce ever; divorce only on grounds of adultery; divorce only in mixed marriages.) Those who hold to the view that the Bible is completely consistent and without error obviously must be willing to do some fancy “interpreting” to make the contradictions in the details go away. Those who favor the exceptions of Matthew and Paul will have to say that Mark and Luke just “forgot” to mention the exceptions. Those who favor the absolute view will have to say that the exceptions referred to by Matthew and Paul merely offer reasons to support permanent separation, not actual divorce.

I don’t think that the Bible is perfect in every detail. I think it was written by people who had experienced the inspiration of the Holy Spirit but had to do their best to interpret it through the limits of their human understanding. That they were people who, in Paul’s words, saw as in a glass darkly. In other words pretty much like us. The general truth that marriage is good and divorce is bad is a sound and important teaching. The details are something we work out as best we can according to our own fallible and limited understandings. And since Christ has come to lead his people we are not limited to pouring over the Bible to find light on the subject. The men who wrote the New Testament apparently never considered the possibility that a woman might be caught in an abusive relationship and realistically fear for her own life and the lives of her children. But are we being faithful today if we ignore this fact? Nor did they consider that homosexuals can form lasting and loving bonds. Unlike Paul, we have seen wholesome homosexual relationships. Are we being faithful if we ignore this fact too?

In our time the weakness of the institution of marriage confronts us as a spiritual crisis but the solution is not to try to blindly recreate the past. The good of marriage is an important truth that needs to be upheld strongly, but the details of what that institution should look like need careful and faithful rethinking to fully acknowledge the needs of people other than heterosexual men.

Proof Enough

2007-05-14T10:50:00.000-07:00

North Carolinians like to describe our state as a valley of humility lying between two mountains of conceit. The huge plantations of Virginia and South Carolina produced an aristocratic culture of pride and leisure that contrasted with the far more humble and democratic culture of the Old North State. Tarheels are also quietly persistent. They are rather soft-spoken about their beliefs but that doesn’t mean they are easily swayed. I like to think that along with a tradition of small family farms the local culture is also a product of a long and old Quaker tradition. I see the position I’ve been staking out in this series of essays as a reflection of that culture. Think of it as a kind of “Andy of Mayberry” philosophy of religion.

There are some who will claim to prove the existence of God beyond a doubt. Look at the magnificent order and beauty of the universe. Its grandeur extends far beyond ordinary human experience down to the finest detail of an atom and up to the cosmic scale of galaxies in collision. Surely this is definite proof of the existence of God. On the other side there are those who claim to prove that God does not exist. Look at the magnitude of the pain and suffering in this world. This world was not created with us in mind. We are brought into existence and exterminated by forces that are blind to the suffering that they cause. The world that science reveals has no place for a God. Both sides are quite certain that they are right and convinced that only stubbornness or stupidity can explain why other people see things differently.

One reaction to these contrasting claims of certainty is to reject both and make belief a matter of blind faith. Since you can’t prove that God exists and can’t prove that he doesn’t, you simply have to choose. Reason has nothing to do with it. Such a rejection of reason is no more appealing to me than the dogmatisms it avoids. The position I am staking out in the middle of the road doesn’t pretend to certainty, but only to be supported by enough evidence to be reasonable.

The traditional rationalistic proofs of the existence of God like the ontological or cosmological argument simply don’t work. The wisdom of the Quaker tradition was to reject these scholastic arguments in favor of personal experience. At around the same time that rationalistic arguments were falling out of favor, modern science was establishing itself on the firmer foundation of repeatable experiments. Instead of appealing to what had seemed self-evident for centuries, Galileo could challenge his opponents to look through his telescope and see Jupiter’s moons with their own eyes. Despite early resistance people gradually came to trust these new empirical methods because they worked. This science enabled people to build bridges that didn’t fall down and to cure previously incurable diseases. It’s tough to argue with that kind of success.

Fox discovered and announced to everyone who would listen that Christ had come to lead his people. He challenged his opponents to look into the telescope of their own hearts and see for themselves whether or not this was the truth. “This we know experimentally” however, was a bit of an exaggeration. The focus on this internal telescope is pretty blurry most of the time. Early Friends quickly learned that the focus was sharper when two or more gathered in expectant waiting worship. They also learned to rely on each other for help in the interpretation of the data and to seek confirmation in the synchronicity of “Way opening.” I have spent the last two decades of my life trying to follow leadings and living among others who are doing the same. I have seen the results and am convinced that the source of these leadings must be something that far exceeds ordinary human intelligence.

God does not seek to overwhelm us with proof that would force us to submit to him. Instead he offers advice and guidance in a still, small voice that we can choose to listen to or choose to ignore. For those who do choose to listen and live within a community of mutual support, there is a gradual accumulation of evidence which makes this way of life seem more and more reasonable as time goes on. To the skeptic who scoffs at this I do not have enough evidence to force them to agree. It seems to me that the search for "irrefutable proof" is a kind of mental violence that is contrary to the spirit of a loving God who wants us to be his friends and not his slaves. The evidence that I have been given is sufficient for me to live my life and that is enough for me.

Worshipping in Spirit and in Truth

2007-05-07T12:50:00.000-07:00

To the average Jew in the time of Christ the main issue dividing Jews and Samaritans was where worship, meaning primarily animal sacrifice, was to take place. In Exodus Jews were allowed to perform these sacrifices anywhere that was convenient but in Deuteronomy it was specified that they had to occur only at the Temple in Jerusalem. Jesus, radical rabbi-prophet that he was, in his conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well, sweeps the issue away as irrelevant. Should we worship at the Temple with the Jews or on the mountaintop with the Samaritans? It’s time to look at worship in a whole new way “God is Spirit. And those who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth.” How much of the old way of understanding worship was Jesus intending to sweep away?

Most Christians have thought that animal sacrifice at the Temple was part of an old order that was being swept away but that it was to be replaced with new rituals. Instead of the real blood of real lambs being offered the symbolic “blood of Christ” was to be offered in the form of sacramental wine along with a symbolic flesh in the form of bread. From a theological direction the death of Jesus was also understood as a final blood sacrifice that served to atone for the sins of humanity. Traditionally Quakers have thought that the way most Christians have understood the new spiritual order established by Christ was not radical enough. Christ was not merely calling for the elimination of the traditional outward symbols of worship practiced by the Jews, he was really pointing towards the elimination of all outward symbols. Quakers did away with the bread and the wine of the communion service. They did away with baptism rituals with physical water. They eliminated the physical signs and symbols in favor of the invisible and the purely spiritual. Catholic worship was once quite ornate with bells, incense, colorful vestments, choirs, and stained glass windows, most of it conducted in a language none of the ordinary people could understand—incomprehensible holy words in Latin. Protestant reformers wanted to purify religious worship by eliminating the mumbo-jumbo and getting back to the pure and simple.

Catholic worship tended to be a kind of theater. Protestants at first were keen on simplification but over the course of time some of them have gotten pretty theatrical as well. After all, people like theater. The use of stage lighting, highly trained singers, musicians and even dancers, professional sound amplification, polished rhetoric in the sermons and carefully choreographed transitions from one event to another are calculated to keep the audience entertained. As a dyed-in-the-wool conservative Friend I find this sort of performance pretty depressing. Worship appears to have been replaced by sophisticated entertainment.

With varying degrees of insistence many Friends in the pastoral tradition want to bring back externals and physical symbols. Hymn-singing, choirs, and prepared sermons have been reintroduced by pastoral Friends some time ago. Now many also want to bring back the physical symbols of bread and wine and baptismal waters. But there is a countermovement alive as well. I hear some talk of minimizing the role of the paid pastors, of increasing the time set aside for waiting worship, of increasing numbers of small circles of worshippers meeting together outside the formal worship time. And I find it especially interesting to hear of such changes going on not just in pastoral Friends churches but among other Protestants in the emerging church movement. Perhaps what we are seeing is a “Quakerization” of a significant number of evangelical Protestants. I’d like to think that our faithful witness to our peculiar view of Christianity has had and is continuing to have a positive effect on the billion Christians who do not call themselves Quakers.

Sacrifice

2007-05-03T11:27:00.000-07:00

Question: What can I do to please God?

Answer: Collect a healthy young animal. Hold it very firmly and then with a very sharp knife cut its throat. (Watch out, they tend to kick at this point!) Then turn the animal upside down so that all the blood spills out. God will be very pleased to see this.

The question is still one that we ask today but most of us find this answer not merely implausible but positively barbaric. What kind of a God would be pleased by this sort of thing? The ancient Jews didn’t see anything barbaric about it. In fact the Bible records in great detail of how these killings should take place. This is largely what the Jews meant when they spoke of worshipping God at the Temple. It was the centerpiece of Jewish religion in the days of Jesus. The great King David had established a capital at Jerusalem on the border between the Northern and Southern Kingdoms to help unite them. His son Solomon continued the work of unifying Israel by establishing a Temple in the capital city for these animal sacrifices. Later, it was decreed that animal sacrifices were not to be performed anywhere else, but only at the Temple.

The Jews were hardly unique. Every culture around them had similar beliefs and practices. In one of the Socratic dialogues Plato has Socrates ask Euthyphro, a Greek priest, about this and he describes it as a kind of trading skill between gods and human beings. We give them what they want (dead sheep apparently) and they give us what we want (good health, money, children etc.) Socrates responds incredulously to this: what benefit could the gods possibly get from us? And Euthyphro is confounded. He cannot explain what benefit the gods get out of our killing sheep. Socrates rejected popular Greek ideas about the gods as crude and unworthy of the Divine.

This view of God’s nature and what he wants from people did not go unchallenged in Judaism either. Several of the prophets teach that what God really wants is justice, charity and purity of heart. One of the key differences between the Jews and the Samaritans was that the Samaritans did not worship at the Jerusalem Temple but at their own place. The Samaritan woman at the well asks Jesus about this difference and Jesus replies that “God is spirit. And those who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth.” And so it was. Shortly after this when the Temple was destroyed the Jews, who had outgrown this crude concept of worship, never went back to it. It took a few more centuries, but the rest of world gradually followed their example. Only a few isolated holdouts remain.

Progressive Revelation does not merely mean that new ideas are added to old ones. It means that we rethink and reinterpret old traditions. Our concept of “sacrifice” now means something substantially different than what it meant to King Solomon when he first built the Temple at Jerusalem. We now see it in the perspective offered by Jesus’ life and death. Instead of feeling called upon to cut a lamb’s throat we feel called to take up our own personal crosses. To think that it is somehow always more correct to see things as our ancestors saw them is to lack the confidence and faith shown by Jesus and the prophets. Revelation continues.

Behind the Hedge

2007-04-23T12:17:00.000-07:00

Why did Quakers at one time dress and speak rather oddly? Did this serve a purpose or was it just a rather silly affectation? Such peculiarities set them apart from other people in a way that made everyone aware of who was a Quaker and who was not. I’m not advocating a return to plain speech and plain dress in everyday life, but I do think that we modern Friends ought to consider what we gave up by assimilating with the broader society.

Friends who dressed and spoke in deliberately distinctive ways were signaling to the world that they were different. This can be a useful thing. It tells the world “Don’t bother asking me to fight in your war, the answer is no.” Since most people who know Quakers at all know of our peace testimony that much is clear. But we have other testimonies as well and distinctive dress and speech can send messages about them too. “Don’t bother asking me to lie, the answer is no.” “Don’t bother to ask me to bow to human authority, the answer is no.” “Don’t expect me to treat women as inferior beings, the answer is no.” “Don’t ask me to buy that extravagant piece of junk, the answer is no.” I don’t wear plain dress or use plain speech and so I’m asked these questions, explicitly or implicitly, quite often and have to say “no” a lot. There are days when I think to myself it would be easier to just wear a funny hat so that people would leave me alone about it all.

The pressure exerted by the world on us to conform to the world’s values is relentless. Young men, and these days young women too, sometimes have to explicitly say no to war, but it’s not a daily issue for most of us. However, challenges to our commitment to truthfulness, simplicity and equality assault us in a thousand little forms day after day. Bosses, coworkers and neighbors do not share these values and so we are asked to go along, be a team player, or at least not object to their ways of doing things. But faithfulness to our values requires that we not go along. It can wear a body down. It can make you feel tired and weak and very much alone.

Back in the day when Quakers wore distinctive clothing they also tended to live and work together as much as possible. They did not pull apart from society as radically and completely as the Amish but they still spent much more time with other Quakers than we do today. Distinctive dress and speech reinforced feelings of unity. Gathering together behind the protective hedge of Quaker distinctiveness allowed Friends to support each other. Today we need that kind of support more than ever because we live in a world that seems determined to seduce or bludgeon us to accept its ways. Being among people who share and affirm our values is uplifting. Time spent among Friends can be time to repair the damage done to our psyches by the world.

This is why some Christian Friends long for a purely Christian meeting. They would feel safer and more protected there. Hearing ministry spoken in their own Christian language sounds dearer to them. They feel especially wounded when someone within the meeting criticizes them for being Christian. They feel as exposed and attacked as they do in the world, here in the one place where they long to feel safe. But there are many Friends who are refugees from abusive “Christian” churches for whom Christian language is threatening and not comforting. These Friends would feel safer and more protected if the word “Christ” were never spoken in their presence. This is a problem in many meetings. Love and unity are hard to maintain among us when some Friends are hurt by neutral “Light” language and other Friends are hurt by ministry that explicitly speaks of Christ. All the advice I can offer is for Friends to be brave. If someone’s language feels like a slap, turn the other cheek and try to respond lovingly to this Friend. Listen to them carefully for signs that Love speaks back through them. Remember that others quite different from you are also looking for a place of love and shelter behind a hedge guarding them from a hostile world.

One Hot Summer's Day

2007-04-19T13:17:00.000-07:00

“Dad, you should try blogging. I’ve been keeping a blog for a while now. I think you’d like it.”
Having grown up with a philosopher my daughter knows that she’s going to have to come up with an argument to get anywhere so…
“You’ve been complaining for years about writing for other philosophers. How it takes years to get stuff published and even when you do how only about a dozen specialists read it and how narrow professional philosophy has become and on and on. Well, if you had a blog you could publish stuff right away and real people would read it.”
She’s a clever girl, turning my own arguments against me this way. Really clever. But still philosophers are hard to convince, just on principle.
“I don’t think I have time for that sort of thing. Besides do people really read other people’s blogs? I doubt it.”
“Look, just go on Quakerquaker and look around. See what other people are writing and the comments that people are posting. Just have a look. At least look at my blog.”
“Well, OK. I guess I can do that.”

It was August and to tell the truth I was in something of a funk with my writing. It takes a lot of work to publish professional philosophy—journal rejection rates are typically 95%. The controversies that rage in the philosophical journals are extremely narrow and nobody seems to change their mind anyway. I was really feeling that it just wasn’t worth the time and effort. So I spent a quiet August afternoon reading Quakerquaker instead. It turned out that there was a lot of interesting stuff there. I decided to try it.

At first my posts were pretty badly written. Writing academic stuff for decades had left an ugly mark on my style. But I was amazed by the number of people who were reading and commenting on my posts. When you publish a paper in a professional philosophy journal you are lucky to get three people who write to you. I got 23 comments on my first post. I was amazed.

Pretty soon I was hooked. I looked at Quakerquaker every day. I wrote posts frequently and as I did my writing loosened up and I learned how to focus on one central point and write for an audience of normal people. Meanwhile I had to continue my regular academic writing. Blogging had one unanticipated effect. In the Spring I shared a draft of a paper I’ve been writing recently with the philosophers who work over at the Medical School on the other side of town. One of them said that she really liked the paper, but she was a little concerned that it didn’t sound like standard academic writing. The style was too personal, passionate and interesting. She thought that editors might reject it for those reasons. Maybe she’s right, but I think I’ll stick with the new style anyway.

The best result of blogging is that it has given me a new sense of how good the larger Quaker community is. We have our differences of course but where else will you find people laboring with each other with so much cooperation, good-will and patience. I’m proud to be a part of it all.

Suffering

2007-04-17T09:03:00.000-07:00

Quakers have a lot of valuable traditions to uphold and a number of them look like they could be on the point of disappearing. These days few meetings record ministers and elders. People still offer vocal ministry and others offer spiritually grounded advice but the sense that the meeting community has an obligation to discern and nurture these gifts has grown weak. Things are looking up however. Due to the faithful efforts of a few Friends there seems to be a renewed interest in the practice of recording elders and ministers. For many it’s rather like finding some rusty old tools in the basement, cleaning them up and being pleasantly surprised to find that they really do still work. Using these nearly forgotten tools can breathe new life into a monthly meeting.

This post is not about ministry or eldering however, it is about oversight. This is also an old Quaker practice and the tradition here is in very bad shape at present. My wife is recognized as an overseer by our monthly meeting. Lloyd Lee Wilson once told me to say she was “appointed” rather than “recorded” as an overseer because ministry and eldering were understood as “gifts” but overseeing was an “office” like that of presiding clerk. While I bow to Lloyd Lee’s far greater understanding of Quaker history I have to say that it seems to me that in my wife’s case it is very much like a gift. At the very least I can say she is very strongly led to do what overseers do.

Suffering is everywhere and it is certainly found in our meetings. People get cancer; they lose their jobs; their spouses leave them; their kids run wild and get into trouble, and on and on it goes. These events and many more like them can throw a person into emotional and spiritual turmoil. The image we have of Quakers coming to meeting for worship from perfectly well-ordered lives, waiting in worship for an hour, drinking a cup of tea at social hour and then going home again to those perfectly well-ordered lives is an illusion. Yes, we would like to keep our lives pleasant and orderly but that isn’t always the way we are. Sadly, a lot of people stop coming to meeting when they are in pain and their lives are messy because they think that only perfect Quakers go to meeting. Or they keep quiet about it because they think ugly reality has no place among Friends.

Those in meeting with a special charge to look out for the suffering of members of the meeting were called “overseers.” It was because Quakers were realistic that they made sure that someone was paying attention to these needs. As Christians they did not believe that suffering was something shameful to be ignored. They embraced suffering as part of their spiritual path. When you see suffering, don’t turn away; offer whatever help you can. When it is your turn to suffer, bear it with as much dignity and grace as you can, knowing that you are following in Christ’s footsteps. Suffering is part of the mystery of our lives. Dealing with suffering in our own lives and in the lives of others is how we learn to love one another. Not everyone has a leading to be specially attentive to the sufferings of people in meeting. But by setting up a permanent body of Friends specially charged to tend to suffering we signal to each other than suffering is normal, natural and nothing to be ashamed of. So that when our turn comes we can freely share our suffering with the meeting community. Friends, just because we worship out of the silence does not mean that we should leave our members to suffer in silence.

I am curious to know how oversight stands among Friends elsewhere. Many monthly meetings have Ministry and Oversight committees. Do these committees actively and energetically perform the function of overseers? Do any meetings still recognize that some of their members have a leading to do this important job? Am I married to the last overseer in Quakerdom?

Christianity and Other Faiths

2007-04-07T10:38:00.000-07:00

I happened to watch Franklin Graham preaching on television about a month ago. I’m not a fan of his but I was curious to see what he had to say about other faiths. I had to wait until near the end of the program but he got around to the subject eventually. “People ask ‘What about all those Buddhists and Muslims, are any of them going to heaven?’ I say there will be plenty of them in heaven and they will get there the same way as anybody else—by accepting Jesus Christ as their savior.”

I took him to be saying that only professing Christians go to heaven. Buddhists can go to heaven only by renouncing their religion and accepting Christianity. Otherwise they go to hell. I’m pretty sure that most Americans disagree with this. They think it’s intolerant and narrow-minded and that a God who would condemn every Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim etc. to hell would be a rather nasty bully. Nevertheless, Franklin’s opinions about non-Christians probably match what many Christians have thought over the centuries up to the present. And thinking that you have to believe something like that to be a Christian is one big reason that many people have for refusing to say that they are Christians.

Franklin Graham is an exclusivist. Exclusivists think that their religion is true and is the one road to salvation and that other religions are mostly false and do not lead to salvation. A look at the New Testament will show why this view has been common among Christians. It is emphasized both in the gospels and in Paul’s epistles that faith is essential to salvation. If faith means “sincere assent to the central doctrines of Christianity” then Buddhists can’t be saved. Churches write creeds and ask their members to assent to them. The creeds take on great significance because it is believed that all those who refuse to assent to them go to hell along with those whose assent isn’t sincere. There is a cold logic to exclusivism which implies that hell is going to be very full indeed.

But this train comes off the rails if faith is something other than “sincere assent to the central doctrines of Christianity.” Along with many other modern liberal Christians I think that faith is something quite different—faith has more to do with what is in a person’s heart. (Terminological note: “Conservative” Quakers are usually liberal Christians.) By denying this common understanding of faith liberal inclusivist Christians open themselves up to charges of being revisionist historians who falsely impute their own modern ideas on Jesus, Paul and Fox. But is it really so far-fetched to suppose that early Christians had a heart-centered rather than a head-centered concept of faith?

Jesus was a Jew but he is certainly no Jewish exclusivist. He thought that Jewish tradition contains much human error and distortion along with genuine Divine revelation. He sets out to correct these errors by reporting the Father’s will as he knows it directly in the here and now. The spiritual food and drink which he asks others to partake of is to listen to the will of the Father and obey it. As Paul develops his version of Christian teachings he emphasizes the necessity of faith. In explaining faith he uses two important examples: Jesus and Abraham. To understand faith you have to appreciate what these two men had. Did Abraham “sincerely assent to the doctrines of Christianity?” Did he “accept Jesus Christ as his personal Savior”? Plainly not. But God spoke directly to Abraham and he listened and obeyed. This was the faith of Abraham.

I think early Friends had a similar view of faith as something directly experiential. Fox believed that God spoke to everyone as he spoke to Abraham and Jesus. God’s revelation did not cease when the last book of the Bible was written, it happened in the here and now. God spoke to everyone and a person of faith is anyone who listens and obeys to the best of their ability. Does this necessarily exclude Buddhists? Is it impossible for them to listen and obey as Abraham did? I don’t think so.

Nobody ever asked Jesus or Paul or Fox if they thought that Buddhists could listen to the voice of God. The question never comes up directly. But the question is important for us because Buddhists and Muslims are our neighbors and coworkers. We can’t forget that they exist. So we can ask what we think early Christians or early Friends would have said. I think the most consistent answer would be for them to admit that people who lack Christian beliefs in their head could nevertheless have real faith in their heart.

That’s my answer and I’m sticking to it.

Primitive Christianity and Quakerism Today

2007-04-03T09:23:00.000-07:00

Here are some quick (too quick) thoughts on primitive Christianity and where Quakerism is today. I’m just going to assert (dogmatically?) what I think about this and not try to give arguments to back it up at this time.

Primitive Christianity, early Quakerism and the center of the Quaker spectrum today all represent an inclusivist, liberal theism that is distrustful of “notions.” Some explanation of the terms is in order. Inclusivism is the view that one’s own tradition represents the best approach to truth but that other traditions contain much of value that we can learn from. Inclusivism sits in the middle between exclusivism (our tradition is right everybody else is wrong and going to hell) and pluralism (every tradition is equally right so it doesn’t matter what you believe). Inclusivism gives an individual a stable place to stand yet is inherently tolerant and open to new ideas and different perspectives. Liberalism always has to be defined in context (like “expensive” or “tall”) to have a definite meaning. In this context liberalism means to side with the powerless and oppressed against the powerful of this world, to favor the equality of all people regardless of race or gender, and to oppose the use of force to compel obedience. (Notice that I do not include “sexual freedom” in my definition of liberalism.) The way Jesus included women, Samaritans, Romans, tax-collectors, children, lepers, adulterers, etc. praised peacemakers and turned the other cheek in both word and deed, criticized the orthodox and the powerful of his day all these things make him a liberal according to this definition. I think Fox and other early Friends were just as liberal in this sense as Jesus. Finally there is distrust of “notions.” Jesus’ theology is about as simple as you can get. He listens to the voice of his Father and obeys. This means eternal life. The voice isn’t described. The Father and Jesus’ relationship to him isn’t defined. Eternal life isn’t defined. This lack of definition is displeasing to intellectuals who proceeded to build their sandcastles in the air and publish long and complex creeds and bash each other over the head with them. But Jesus won’t waste words explaining words. He simply calls his hearer to enter into the life which gives the experience which gives meaning to the words. Start living this now and you will come to understand a little bit of it later. It is the same with early Friends. Don’t put trust in notions and especially don’t try to preach about this stuff without experiencing it for yourself (“What canst thou say?”)

Does this inclusivist, liberal, notion-distrusting minimalist spirituality live on today? It does at the center of the Quaker spectrum. There you will find inclusivist Christians mingling with inclusivist non-Christian theists. They have somewhat different words and concepts that they use to articulate their experiences but they generally understand each other. The point after all is not whether you prefer to say “Christ” or “Light” but rather if you’ve got a real personal experience that you refer to or if you are just parroting words picked up out of books that sounded good to you. Which words you use matters far less than whether or not the words represent your experience or are empty notions.

At the left and right edges of Quakerism you will find people who don’t fit this picture very well. There are some evangelical Friends who are pretty heavy with theological notions and not very open to learning from anyone who doesn’t talk their language. On the other extreme are ultraliberal Friends who have adopted a scientistic world view that tells them that nothing exists except matter. I also count such talk which denies the reality of spirit as equally full of notions. Some of the people at both extremes are really victims of their ideologies. These notions have gotten such a firm place in their heads that it leads them to be distrustful of their experience. Their experience is constantly pulling them towards the center but their notions are constantly pulling them back to the edge. We need to address “that of God” in them, i.e. their experiences of the Spirit, and call them to join us in the solid center.

Integrity Part II

2007-03-15T10:22:00.000-07:00

When Quakerism burst on the scene in 17th century England it was a radical force. Quakerism traveled across the Atlantic Ocean to the new colonies and was a radical force there as well. Very slowly however the life and power that once made Quakers count for far more than their numbers began to grow cold and faint. Recovering this fire and intensity won’t be easy but in the series of essays I’ve been trying to articulate what I think is the right direction.

“Let your lives speak.” Early Friends’ words had power not because they were better educated or more articulate than their contemporaries. Their words had power because they had integrity. Will I offend Friends by suggesting that our words lack the same power because our lives do not reflect the same intense commitment to living as citizens of the kingdom of heaven? Modern Friends talk a great deal about the peace testimony and relatively little about the testimony of integrity. Many Friends clearly enjoy talking about the peace testimony but the way it is discussed speaks volumes to me about how the original Quaker vision has been obscured. Talk about the peace testimony is often unQuakerly in two important respects. First, it often drifts into complaints about the violent words and actions of other people. Second, it tends towards intellectualism and abstract principles. Traditional Quakerism would oppose both tendencies. In traditional Quakerism I would focus 99% of my energy, prayer and attention on the beam in my own eye and speak truth to power to George Bush and company the other 1%. Second, Quakerism is an experiential religion not an intellectual one. We don’t come to understand the peace testimony or any other testimony by thinking about it. Living it takes precedence over understanding it. As you live it you come to understand it more and more. To intellectualize the peace testimony is to fall in love with “notions.”

This is why there should be much more attention paid to integrity than to peace. The challenges we face in our daily lives to live with perfect and complete integrity are much more numerous and powerful than similar challenges to live the peace testimony. Exaggeration and distortion are standard operating procedures in the modern world of business and the professions and those of us who work in that world are constantly under pressure to conform to that standard. Here are daily opportunities to experience the testimony of integrity. In living that testimony we will experience in thousands of tiny ways the pain of the cross and the glory of the crown. And the more faithfully we live it the more “peculiar” we will seem to our worldly neighbors. But if we are relatively inconsistent about this, as I am, it doesn’t make much of a statement. If we are content to be a little more truthful than the average guy we shouldn’t pat ourselves on the back for this. To make a statement with our lives our commitment to integrity must be extreme. To recover the fire and excitement of Quakerism we need to imagine what it would be like to live this testimony 100% of the time. This would make a far bigger statement than coming to work dressed like the guy on the Quaker Oats box.

Two Stories about Integrity

2007-03-06T08:57:00.000-08:00

The Plan: In my life as an academic I am often called upon to write or approve official reports. There are pretty strong institutional expectations of what you should say and how you should say it that often come into conflict with my strongly felt personal need to tell the plain truth. Recently every department in the university had to produce a strategic plan for what it hoped to accomplish in the next few years. We were told to write something that would fit smoothly with the documents already created and approved at higher levels. My problem with this was that these documents weren’t telling the truth. Our institution is full of very average American college students but the documents were full of inflated language which made it sound as if this were Harvard. But they wrote as if they were ashamed of being what we in fact are and felt they needed to pretend that we were much, much more. Like the rest of the University, the Philosophy Department was supposed to go along with this. After some grumbling we produced a plan that actually said nothing but echoed the grandiosity of the University plan. I would much rather have told the plain truth. “The Philosophy Department intends to teach our classes and conduct our research as we have always done.” With some misgivings I went along and voted to approve the plan. Afterwards I felt bad about it. I felt that I was not faithful to my leading. I should have quietly and persistently protested the dishonesty even though I would have been voted down.

The Trick: Over coffee with a colleague he told me that his student evaluations last term were the best they have been in twenty years. He had a theory as to why this was the case. It seems he has a very strict policy about late assignments. One student emailed him with a story about her personal problems that prevented her from handing in several assignments on time. She begged for an exception to the policy. My colleague explained that this would be unfair to the other students but he would ask them about it. The class is on-line so he posted the student’s email for the class to read and asked them if he should give the student an exception. Apparently the students enjoyed debating this so much that it resulted in the highest level of student satisfaction with the course he ever saw. This led him to the idea of repeating this event every semester. If no student actually asked for an exemption he would simply make one up. No difficult matter for an experienced teacher. He asked me what I thought. I told him that I would not do this. Although one might consider this a “white lie” that didn’t harm anyone I still considered it a violation of trust. Students should be able to believe what their professors say. Our integrity should be absolute. Since he is an atheist I could not make an argument in spiritual terms, but I did say that while the possibility of being found out might be small it was still possible. And that the harm done to the student’s sense of trust might be great if the deception were discovered.

Most Americans who live and work in business or the professions are inundated by language that is full of exaggeration, half-truth, pomposity, empty jargon and down-right lies. Most people understand that this is the way the world works. And they are OK with it most of the time. They consider it naïve to think that the adult world could function if people just told the truth. Quakers are peculiar people. We never get used to the disrespect the world shows for the truth. We protest and drag our feet over the most trivial and normal of lies.

Though the world thinks us painfully naïve what power we have comes first and foremost from individual members of the Society of Friends maintaining the highest personal moral standards. As we refuse to make war we must also refuse to compromise with the truth. Early Friends were a force to be reckoned with, despite their paltry numbers, because when they spoke truth to power they spoke with an integrity that was far beyond the ordinary. If we modern Friends are to recover the life and power that takes away the occasion of all wars we will need to go deeper and be more deeply transformed. We cannot hope to change the world by clever strategies. We can only hope to change the world by being different from the world.

Don’t Tell Me What to Believe!

2007-02-16T14:02:00.000-08:00

In political philosophy one of the major issues is how much power to give to the state and how much power should be reserved for individual citizens. Giving all power to the individual would mean anarchy of which reasonable people are rightly suspicious. On the other hand giving all power to the state is totalitarianism and that may be even worse. So political philosophy generally revolves around getting the most appropriate balance or compromise between the state and the individual.

The Enlightenment encouraged people to think of themselves and others as overwhelmingly guided by “rational self-interest.” That is to say, people typically consider what will satisfy their own desires and rarely consider the effect on other people. It was deemed wise to accept it as fact that human nature is thus selfish and good social policy not to try to change human nature. Despite the negative sound of this it was argued that this selfishness properly controlled would work to the betterment of all. If each individual is considered equal under the law and protected from coercion and fraud, then self-interest will lead to honest trade and a continually rising level of prosperity for all. The state should not tell anyone what to make nor how much to sell it for. So long as force and fraud are suppressed the invisible hand of the marketplace ensures the wealth of nations.

Reds generally buy this picture while blues are increasingly suspicious of radical economic individualism. The same invisible hand that stimulates economic activity also seems to be burning up the planet and concentrating wealth into fewer and fewer hands. But I do not want to pursue that issue here. In this essay my concern is with belief not money.

The parallel between economic activity and truth is tempting but highly deceptive. Should we see our pursuit of truth through the lens of individual rights vs. the regulatory power of the state? I will argue that looking at the matter this way is a huge mistake but let’s do it anyway for a minute. Surely we would want to side firmly with the individual. Censorship is bad. The government doesn’t really know what is true and will suppress inconvenient truths not damaging falsehoods. The truth is best served by each individual seeking it without any interference by anyone else.

This line of thought is very plausible and explains a lot about the modern Quaker resistance to “creeds.” (I put “creeds” in quotes because the resistance isn’t just to creeds but to anything remotely resembling a creed.) It is also completely wrong. Censorship and authoritarianism are wrong but epistemological individualism is equally wrong. And the correct path is not some compromise; it is something totally different. The truth is so different from economic goods that any analogy between the two is highly misleading. Economic goods are personal and impermanent. When I buy stuff it is for my own use and enjoyment and in using it I generally use it up. When I learn a truth from you I do not deprive you of that truth. On the contrary truth multiplies and strengthens as it is shared. Unlike oil the more we use it the more we have to share. Jealously hoarding the truth is just crazy.

What is this third way that totally rejects both the appeal to authority and radical individualism? It is called science. Science will not tolerate appeals to authority or attempts to censor challenging ideas. But it is equally contemptuous of individuals who insist that they have a “right” to think anything they please. In science all rights and all authority are possessed by Reality and the community of scientists humbly bows before it. Reality is no respecter of age, nationality or reputation. Any individual scientist may announce any new finding that she thinks she has discovered but these findings have no legitimacy unless they cohere with the entire body of findings of the whole scientific community.

When Fox said that we know these things experimentally he was not kidding or even exaggerating. Quakerism is the scientific method applied to Spiritual Reality. And Reality, as William James put it, always pushes back. It reveals itself to unexpected people in unexpected ways. It constantly surprises and humbles those who sincerely seek it. The key difference between the natural sciences and Quakerism is that our grasp of the nature of Divine Reality is far more tenuous and fluid than our grasp of physical reality. Why this should be so is a bit mysterious but I think it has to do with the fact that this Divine Reality is a Who not a What and so must be approached with courtesy and gentleness.

Coming Together

2007-02-12T13:37:00.000-08:00

Individually human beings are too small and too weak to get much done. Thomas Hobbes put the point sharply, life as an individual in complete independence of others would be “nasty, brutish and short.” Looking on the positive side human beings can accomplish wonders when they manage to pool their energies to accomplish a common end. Human beings built the pyramids and the Brooklyn Bridge by working together. If we are to live well, or even decently, mechanisms must be in place to make it possible for groups of people to work together.

One way, unfortunately, is to use coercion. All those people who came together in the blazing Egyptian sun to build the Great Pyramid for the Pharaoh would probably have stayed at home in the shade drinking beer if the Pharaoh had not had the power to compel them to do it. A very different way of getting several people to work together is to convince each of them that goal is worth the effort. Friends don’t coerce friends. Friends persuade each other to pursue common goals by finding opportunities to bring shared values to life. We see this sort of common action inspired by a shared vision of the Good in many different settings. Team sports, when they escape the corruption of egoism and money, exemplify such unity. Happy families find unity in shared daily activities. Unity of purpose is found in the ordinary friendships that happen among people who work together or go to school together. It also arises explosively during natural disasters when people drop their individual agendas to come together to deal with the emergency. This sort of unified action not only accomplishes results; it feels great. Most people have the dull aching sense that they do not get this feeling often enough. Such coming together should be the normal background pulse of our lives. Instead it is all too rare.

The Enlightenment held up a model for human interaction which was neither so harsh as the master-slave model nor so idealistic as the friend-friend model. It was a compromise between the two that was seen as both humane and realistic. It is the commercial model. And honesty compels me to admit that it has produced wonders far greater than the pyramids. The Brooklyn Bridge was built by capitalism with free labor. If the pay had been too low the workers would have chosen to stay home and drink beer instead, but the pay was adequate and the bridge became a reality. This is far, far better than the slave labor that built the pyramids but it falls far short of the ideal for human beings.

A favorite truism of mine, because it cuts in both directions, is the good is the enemy of the best. The hard honest individualism of the Enlightenment is good. It is better than authoritarianism and slavery. But it is not an ideal that we should strive for, nor should we ever be satisfied with it. Many progressive people are attracted to the extreme individualism of representative democracy and free market capitalism. But a truer progressivism is found in a deliberative democracy and a socially conscious capitalism.

These Enlightenment ideals are differently valued by red and blue Americans. The reds tend to favor radical individualism in the marketplace but are suspicious of it in people’s personal lives. The blues are suspicious of unregulated economic individualism and see the need for community and consensus in that area but tend to resist community standards of accountability when it comes to personal decisions. The genius of the Quaker vision is that it has always been ahead of the Enlightenment and has never fallen for the temptation to place an excessive emphasis on the individual at the expense of the community. Quakerism is the future and this future has been around for over three hundred years waiting for the rest of the world to catch up. We will not settle for the merely good but insist on an uncompromising vision of the best—the peaceable kingdom where everything is in gospel order.

Community

2007-02-07T14:30:00.000-08:00

Think about the difference between a really good marriage and a merely acceptable one. In a merely acceptable marriage there will be an absence of verbal and physical abuse, the two parties will tolerate each other and learn to live together without getting in each other’s way. In a really good marriage on the contrary a much deeper unity comes into existence. The life of each is no longer a purely individual life; it is a shared life. It becomes a life from which neither can become separated by anything less than death. What is this mysterious union? It’s not so mysterious really. A life isn’t something that just happens. A life is something that a person creates over time by choices large and small. When two people come together and make their choices together the life they create is more one than it is two. Together they decide what careers to pursue, where to live, whether to raise children and how to raise them. Trivial decisions are still made as individuals but all the major ones are made by the couple. For a good marriage to happen the two individuals must share, or gradually come to share, their deepest values and beliefs.

An action is the result of both values and beliefs. Two people with different values and beliefs simply cannot act as one, though from an outside point of view they may look as if they were in unity. Take some trivial example. Suppose the wife wants to create a beautiful home that will be welcoming to friends and family. Suppose the husband wants to create an impressive home that will signal to the world that he earns a good income. They might both agree on which sofa to buy but these two people are not sharing a life together. They are cohabiting.

Aristotle wrote that friends hold all things in common. People crave true friendship and do not feel truly whole without it. A good marriage is a kind of friendship but society requires a wide array of different kinds and depths of friendships to bind people together and help them live rich and satisfying lives. A person can be happy without being in a good marriage but a person cannot be happy without friends. Modern society as it has developed is not a healthy environment for cultivating friendships of any kind. It encourages an excessive individualism that is toxic to true friendship.

Once more the Enlightenment is to blame. The Enlightenment sought to free the individual from the tyranny of oppressive tradition and authoritarian power structures. The struggle to free people from oppressive institutions isn’t finished but the momentum in the direction of individualism has gone so far that it is turning people into isolated atoms unable to connect with each other in deeper ways. Individualism is good insofar as it creates space for the free development of the individual’s understanding of their own beliefs and desires. But like many good things when taken to extremes it becomes destructive. Excessive individualism destroys the possibility of the shared beliefs and values that make true friendship possible. It takes a truly strong and independent mind to resist the temptation of excessive individualism.

The problems facing us are not merely a matter of an ideology of individualism. The problem is also very much a matter of societal structures that keep tearing people apart and atomizing them despite their best intentions. But I do think that ideology matters. If we understand that excessive individualism is part of the problem we can look for ways to resist it. If we fail to understand this, we will continue to go with the flow.

The Solid Center

2007-01-25T10:19:00.000-08:00

Where do we want to be? The center. When we get there we will find plenty of the inspiration that we seek. That answer was too easy. It doesn’t say nearly enough. We need to describe what that center looks like from the point of view of someone standing there. This will be hard, but not impossible. After all, we have experienced the inspiration in bits and pieces. It is not just something we have read about in books and lived only in imagination. We’ve been there. We have found ourselves standing in the middle of challenging situations, knowing that we are exactly where we were meant to be and knowing exactly what we were meant to do and doing it and feeling great. At those moments we know that the kingdom of heaven is not some far-off future event. It’s here and it’s now.

What canst thou say, Friends? Have you felt this? I know you have. Spiritual intimacy will come in our meetings when more of us screw up the courage to talk openly about these moments. We do need to talk about our worries, our challenges, our shortcomings and the negative things that we experience. No one should feel they have to keep their problems to themselves. After all, one of the things we are called to do is to bear each others burdens. But in our time I feel the need is greater for us to share our little stories of victory and faithfulness. We live in a time when hope is in desperately short supply. I know many of you have such stories but hold back from telling them because you don’t want to sound “holier than thou.” I vividly recall Louise Wilson in the course of a long piece of vocal ministry shaking her head over and over and saying “Don’t look at the shadows, don’t look at the shadows, look to the Light.” The shadows really are powerless against the Light. If you have lived in that Light even for one minute this week then you have a new story to tell and there is probably some Friend who needs the inspiration that story will give them. Your story will not have a parting-of-the-Red-Sea kind of dramatic quality to it but don’t think less of it for that reason. God really does live and breathe in the mundane details of ordinary lives. Sharing your story will strengthen you as well. You will find that talking about your experiences enables you to enter into and act out of the center more surely and more often. It is one of the ways to gradually make your contact with the center more solid and more real.

I have to add a caution however. There are times when one of these stories is on the tip of my tongue and I hear an inner voice warning me not to speak. I recall one time ignoring it and speaking anyway and feeling a chill come over me as I realized that I was being unfaithful at that moment. Don’t force yourself to tell these stories. Tell them as led but only as led.

Uninspired?

2007-01-20T09:21:00.000-08:00

Why isn’t Quakerism more inspiring? Some of us do find Quakerism inspiring; it provides the vision that puts a spring in my step on run-and-not-be-weary days and helps me get out of bed on walk-and-not-faint days. But even for those of us who do find in this peculiar version of the Christian faith a source of spiritual food and drink that others do not see or understand something is lacking. Quakerism is not all it could or should be. We have too many walk-and-not-faint days and not enough run-and-not-be-weary ones. What’s missing?

In the gospels Jesus speaks of mysterious food and water that bubbles up from within people from an inexhaustible supply. This sustenance he identifies with “doing the will of the Father.” Of course every Christian will agree that we should do that. Good-hearted atheists will agree too though they will balk at describing it as God’s will and prefer some more secular equivalent like “doing what’s right.” Quakers rightly have not worried very much about the words people use to describe this spiritual reality but they have insisted on something that most other Christians have denied: that the will of the Father is very specific and personal and to know the crucial details requires that we be constantly alert—that we listen. The Jewish Law tried to capture God’s will in generalities—don’t steal, don’t commit adultery, don’t bear false witness, and most importantly love your neighbor. These generalities are helpful. They provide “cruise control” for those times, all too many, when I’m not really listening. But generalities like this aren’t enough. When there is a confused teenager in front of me I need to know which truth to tell and what words to use and I need to know it now. One size definitely does not fit all.

This is where Jesus’ message, repeated by Fox, blasts its way through. Stop, listen, the Source never goes away, you will be given the words then and there whenever you need them. Those who take this seriously enough to really try it find that it works so often and so well that it is real and isn’t just a result of the better impulses of our own personal subconscious minds. We can say we know this experimentally.

So what is missing from modern Quakerism? Why isn’t it more inspiring? Because while this is a walk you can and must try to walk by yourself it is also a walk that you should and ultimately must walk in fellowship with others. We are branches on a vine. A cut-off individual branch inevitably withers. This food and drink that bubbles up within each individual isn’t meant just for that individual; it is meant to be shared in a community of listeners and doers of the Word. This is why we meet for worship together and don’t just meditate alone. This is why we are called a Religious Society of Friends. There is too little sharing of this spiritual food and drink among us. Why is that?

Because the sharing is meant to be reciprocal. I'm talking about sharing not preaching. It is quite different from trying to use these experiences to “prove” God’s reality to those who don’t believe. I would never try to use the spiritual food and drink that the Spirit has given me as a weapon to “make someone believe.” Real sharing occurs only among people who have similar experiences. Which Friends in our Meeting are kindred spirits with stories to share? They can be hard to find. What we don't want is to get into a debate with someone who thinks all this "God stuff" is silly. Those who consciously reject the idea of God aren’t yet ready to hear these stories. I wouldn't chase them away. They are coming because they are responding to a call from a God they don't yet believe in. Quakers have always known that we need to treat such people gently and just wait for God to work on them from the inside out. But they are not the people we need to talk to in order to be fed.

Inspiration comes from the inspired. When Friends stick to politics and other "safe" topics spiritual power becomes dampened. On the other hand, when inspired Friends find each another both are made stronger. There is an increasing number of Friends who are getting their courage up. They are actively seeking out spiritual friends among Friends. The Quakerblogosphere is part of that but ultimately the real work has to be done face to face.

(This post is part of a series which begins on January 1, 2007.)

Being Tolerated

2007-01-16T12:56:00.000-08:00

The Enlightenment promised progress through Reason. Science and Democracy would conquer Superstition and Aristocracy. The connection of Reason with science is obvious but its connection with democracy is not. Real democracy is not identical with voting; voting is merely a means not an end in itself. The essence of democracy is a system in which public policy decisions are made as a result of a free and open debate about the public good. Democracy, in this idealistic way of looking at it, requires an informed electorate whose primary goal is the good of everyone and not merely their own narrow interests. Anyone who thinks their ox has been gored needs to feel free to speak out but fundamentally democracy is an open forum in which the public reasons together about what is best for all of us. Majority rule not based on such a debate is the tyranny of the majority.

To participate in democracy as I should I must do much more than say which policies I like. I must offer reasons in support of those policies. To participate in the give and take of rational democratic debate I must be sensitive to evidence that would undermine my case. I must be bothered by harmful consequences of the policy that leave me untouched. In short one must be both public spirited and rational.

It is here that Enlightenment distrust of religion skews the picture. There are a significant number of people who think that religious belief is inherently irrational. If this were so, then religious people could only be second-class democratic citizens. Their public policy preferences would be “faith-based” and not “reason-based” and so could not be part of a rational policy debate. Facts could never cause such people to change their mind. They would be legitimately pushed to the margins. We could still allow them to vote but like children they would be unable to participate in the "reasoning together" which is the heart of democracy. In short, they are merely to be tolerated.

It is true that people on the conservative side of the Red-Blue divide often say and do things to feed this stereotype. But it is a stereotype. On average religious people are no more and no less rational than ardently secular types. The stereotype of the conservative voter is an evangelical Christian who laughs at science and evidence. The stereotype of the liberal is an arrogant snob who laughs at religion and common sense. These stereotypes feed off each other and poison the well from which we all drink.

One Wall or Two?

2007-01-13T09:57:00.000-08:00

Whenever I hear someone talking about the wall of separation between church and state it makes me cringe. Perhaps it’s the nit-picking philosopher in me but the misuse of the word “the” bothers me. There isn’t one wall of separation between church and state, there are two. And, as is the case with other rights, the challenge to legislators, jurists and citizens is to choose wisely where one right clashes with another.

The first wall between church and state is the one which prevents the government from “establishing” any one religion. The other wall prevents the government from interfering with the “free exercise” of religion. The two walls taken together effectively separate church and state. The state is forbidden to help (the establishment clause) or hurt (the free exercise clause) one religion or religion in general. It creates confusion to write as if there were one wall and all we had to do was keep it “high.” In reality there are two walls and we must keep them in balance.

When the government’s powers were relatively small it was probably sufficient to watch out for deliberate efforts to promote or attack particular religious interests. But history has led to several rounds of expansion of federal power. Abraham Lincoln used the Civil War to dramatically expand the powers of the federal government. Franklin Roosevelt used the Depression and World War II to the same end. Big government isn’t inherently worse than small government but it is inherently more dangerous. The stronger the government the more watchful citizens need to be of their rights.

With a big government it is no longer sufficient to watch out for intentional efforts to promote or hinder religion. The unintentional effects are too large to safely ignore. The American left thinks that the Religious Right is trying to promote its own religious agenda. The Religious Right thinks that the Secular Left has been attacking them. Both sides think that the other side is the aggressor and their complaints about being attacked are paranoid and delusional. Dialogue between Left and Right would not be so polarized if both sides would recognize that there are two walls and it would be hard for Solomon himself to keep them in healthy balance under present circumstances.

Take the teaching of evolution in the public schools as an example. Such teaching is not religiously neutral in its effects. Learning real science explodes the foundations of literalist readings of Genesis. Genuine science is not inimical to religion in general but it is the enemy of some particular religious interests. There is no doubt that good science education causes the smarter kids from fundamentalist families to reject a lot of their parents’ teachings. These parents are not being paranoid when they feel that the public schools are undermining their efforts to raise good kids. Like most of my readers I think these parents are wrong about science and wrong about how to read the Bible, but a little more empathy on our part might help advance the dialogue. These parents are mostly good people who are legitimately worried about the harmful effects a secular society is having on their children. They are not our enemies; they are our neighbors. If we recognize that what is really driving them is a concern for their children’s well-being we will start to find common ground upon which to stand while resolving our differences.

(this is the fifth in a series of posts on the topic of fostering constructive dialogue across the Red-Blue divide.)

Inclusive Vision

2007-01-12T12:31:00.000-08:00

Philosophers of religion distinguish three positions you can take about the variety of faith traditions in the world. At one extreme is exclusivism. The exclusivist believes that her religion is 100% correct and that everyone else’s is 100% wrong. The other extreme is pluralism. The pluralist believes that all the major faith traditions are equally correct. As in the fable about the blind men and the elephant they think that each religion has a different, limited but equally valid grip on divine reality. In the middle are inclusivist positions. The inclusivist says that his faith tradition is the best but admits that it is not perfect and that there is much value in the other traditions as well. This label really picks out a range of opinion from views that are so conservative as to be practically exclusivist to views that are so liberal as to be almost pluralistic.

Extreme positions are attractive in one way. Consistency is easier for extremists since they reject wholesale whatever doesn’t fit their assumptions. Those who seek compromise and balance risk being labeled as “flip-floppers.” Despite this I think inclusivism offers the best place to stand for those who want to participate in a real meaningful dialogue among a wide variety of sincere seekers after the truth.

It’s hard to dialogue with an exclusivist. Constructive dialogue is possible between people who disagree about important issues so long as each is willing to concede that the other is at least partially right. These points of agreement are necessary to provide the shared premises with which they can reason together about their remaining points of disagreement. Exclusivists concede nothing. When it comes to religion they are right and their opponents are simply wrong. Exclusivism is most common among evangelical Christians and radical atheists. I am not hopeful about being able to include exclusivists of either sort in meaningful dialogue.

Pluralism offers a much better starting point. Still I have certain reservations about it. By granting too much too soon pluralism tends to dissolve into a murky relativism. In their eagerness to embrace the other, pluralists give insufficient emphasis to what they personally are bringing to the table. Just as there can be no productive dialogue unless there are points of agreement upon which to build, there can be no productive dialogue unless there are clear points of disagreement upon which to labor together. It is hard to talk to someone who clings too stubbornly to their opinion, but it is equally hard to talk to someone who gives up too easily and doesn’t have any firm opinions at all. Another problem I have with pluralism is epistemological. How could anyone possibly know that all religions were equally true? It has taken me a lifetime to begin to understand my own faith tradition. To compare these traditions to my own in full seriousness I would have to understand those other traditions just as well and one life isn’t long enough to accomplish that.

To me, inclusivism offers the best hope. Each individual should come firmly grounded in their own faith tradition. They should be prepared to explain and affirm those spiritual truths they have grasped during the course of their walk. But they should also be eager to listen to new insights and new truths that others coming from a different tradition and different experiences will have to offer. Inclusivists will most naturally assume that they both have something to teach and something to learn. It is the best place to stand for people who love the truth but admit that their own grasp of the mystery is limited.

(This is the fourth in a related series of posts.)

A Vision Grown Old

2007-01-11T08:37:00.000-08:00

When a person has a vision that truly inspires they are indeed fortunate. They can live actively and put forth full enthusiastic effort day after day because they believe in the value of what they are doing. They can run and not be weary; walk and not faint. Such “excellent activity” is precisely how Aristotle defined the happy life. Those of us who lived through the sixties can remember how it felt to help destroy American apartheid under the leadership of a black Baptist preacher inspired by the ideals of nonviolence. It felt great to participate even in a small ways in something so big and so right. We didn’t feel this way all the time of course and a lot of the visions we shared then seem pretty lame now, but a little inspiration goes a long way. Where can you get that feeling now?

The Enlightenment was born a full three centuries ago and has not grown old gracefully. The attack on aristocratic privilege was a main part of it in the early days. This battle was pretty much over in about a hundred years. Quakers started early: refusing to address aristocrats as “you” instead of the commoners “thou” and refusing to take off their hats to anyone but God. But success poses the inevitable challenge: “what’s next?” What was next was the expansion of the goal, what in our tradition is called the testimony of equality, to include women, people of color and all those who are denied power and respect. These battles are far from won. Yet where is the inspiration?

The problem lies in another side of the Enlightenment: its distrust of religion. The original religious target of the Enlightenment was the Catholic Church. Its close connection with and imitation of the aristocratic classes made it a natural enemy. Moreover, the Church itself sought to combat democracy, free inquiry and science. Nor was Rome the only problem. Protestant churches became closely tied to civil authorities and when they got in power they were no less repressive and authoritarian. Under relentless pressure from the Enlightenment the power of religious authorities to suppress free thought and free inquiry slowly drained away. As was the case with the attack on aristocratic privilege early success was followed by an expansion of the original idea. But in this case it has been a disaster. “If some is good, then more is better” doesn’t always work.

Right and proper resistance to the efforts of religious authorities to impose uniformity of thought on the people by force gradually morphed into the idea that religion itself, that is any genuine spiritual orientation, was the natural enemy of reason, equality and progress. Complete contempt for spirituality became seen, in some quarters, as essential to the progressive mind. This is the tragic mistake. Not only is the rejection of spiritual truth not essential to progress; it is antithetical to it. The false and bleak worldview of materialism sucks the life and hope and energy out of the human mind. This fact explains much about the state of the world today.

(Note to the reader. This is part three of a series of postings.)

Visions

2007-01-09T12:06:00.000-08:00

Visions are powerful. Ronald Reagan had a vision and articulated it so persuasively that America and the rest of the world moved strongly in that direction. Fundamentalist Christians also had a vision early in the 20th Century. This vision created a movement. From a base of local churches they built a counterculture of their own colleges, publishing houses, bookstores, youth missions and radio stations. They have convinced the media and much of the public that their intolerant and uncharitable worldview = Christianity. Now they have their own President. Visions don’t have to be correct or good to be effective. They do have to be simple and resonate with people’s deepest hopes and fears. Even if we deplore these visions and where they are taking us we need to acknowledge their power.

It is widely felt that liberals, religious and secular, are losing the battle for hearts and minds because we cannot articulate a clear vision. Skepticism about the conservative visions of free markets and dogmatic Christianity is growing. But no contrary visions arise to counter the ones that dominate the scene. Knowing that we need a new vision is the first step but it is a small one. Creating one takes more than trying out various slogans on focus groups. This is not a mere marketing problem.

Creating new visions usually involves a look into the past to reexamine old visions that have lost their power. In 18th Century Europe progressives of many nationalities became united by a common vision we call the Enlightenment. Reason would save the human race from poverty, oppression, and superstition. The enemies were the aristocracy, the Church, and Aristotle. The weapons of progress were science, free speech, free markets and democratic constraints on government. The Enlightenment quickly scored notable successes. Kings fell and elected representatives rose first in the United States and then across Europe. Religious toleration became the norm as barriers were erected between church and state. Slavery was abolished. Common laborers were granted rights. Even women were finally allowed to vote. And science marched gloriously on. But every successful revolution begins at some point to choke on its own success as people discover that it is much easier to criticize the old order of things than it is to make a new order really work. Visions can also die when the rhetoric slowly grows too radical.

The aspect of this that concerns me here is how the Enlightenment attack on a Church grown corrupt slowly evolved into dogmatic materialism and an attack on spirituality in general. Complaints about churches using force to repress free thought and free inquiry slowly escalated into talk of “opium of the people.” Praise for science gradually hardened into scientism: the belief that science is the whole truth and everything else is false. I think that the majority of progressives instinctively know that there is a deep truth about reality that science does not express. The division that exists between those who seek a tolerant enlightened spirituality and those who think that everything which hints of God reeks of superstition is strangling the progressive movement in our times. The new vision will awaken only when we clearly and forthrightly reject scientism.

Culture Wars

2007-01-01T09:04:00.000-08:00

First, a personal note. It has been nearly a month since I’ve written a new post and some might wonder why. The reason is that I’ve been sick most of December. I came down with a cold in the early part of the month and this dragged on interminably during which time I had to give and grade my exams. Then just as I was starting to feel better another cold hit. So reduced energy levels, the holidays plus moving to a new office at work haven’t left me time to do any more blogging than to write a stray comment or two on other people’s blogs.

In the header of Quakerquaker there is reference to a “palpable sense of renewal and excitement” going on in the conversation which takes place in the Quaker blogosphere. I think that is broadly correct but it doesn’t always look that way. When Christian Quakers try to talk to Nontheist Quakers, no matter how much else we have in common, genuine progress towards mutual understanding seems hard. And people are trying hard. The civility and politeness of everyone involved in these conversations is very encouraging. If name-calling would break out, as it so easily could, there would be no point in trying.

This polarization bothers a lot of us and there is a desire for a convergent Quakerism. One strategy is to attempt to find unity by going back to the views of early Friends. There are some limitations to this approach however. First, not everyone agrees that what early Friends thought should be decisive for us. The appeal to Fox and company as authoritative has its limits. Second, and even more importantly, an interpretation of history necessarily reflects not just “the facts” but also the point of view of the interpreter. Honest people, and I think this really does include most Friends, try to be objective and not allow their point of view to unduly bias their reading of the history. But there is no doubt that a Christian Friend and a Nontheist Friend are inclined to select different passages from Fox and company, interpret them in different ways and also to view the broader culture of 17th and 18th century England and America from different angles.

So, Friends, now listen to me because I alone see things as they really are without a trace of bias or any personal limitations. (Just in case anyone out there is incredibly obtuse. Yes, this was a joke.)

The polarization between Christian and Nontheist Friends needs to be viewed not in the context of Quaker history but rather in the context of the culture war. Politically America is polarized into red and blue and we see the same desire for a positive convergence and the same frustration about how to achieve one. Of course there are people who don’t want to find a middle ground because they are quite sure that they are totally right and the other side is totally wrong. Such people just want to win. But there are a lot of people who sense that neither side is 100% right and want to find a viable convergent option.

The culture war is an undeniable social fact but it is also one that is hard to understand. Everyone recognizes it when they see it but what exactly are we seeing? For one thing the two sides harbor a lot of diversity within their ranks. Are all Republicans alike? All Democrats? All Christians? Certainly not. Yet, Democrats feel more comfortable with environmentalists, peace activists, and supporters of gay rights than Republicans do.

Quakerism is undoubtedly a blue religion. Christian Friends (like me) see the Society as essentially a religious fellowship while Nontheist Friends see the Society as an essentially liberal fellowship. These two points of view do not contradict, but they are a source of tension.

I hereby invite the Nontheist Friends to set me straight as I’m sure you will. The topic is much too big to handle in a single essay and I tentatively plan on a follow-up essay on the Enlightenment as the historical source of this tension. Stay tuned.

Witness

2006-12-08T07:15:00.000-08:00

“What if everyone did that?” is a simple commonsense question that many people use to tell the difference between right and wrong. The basic idea is expressed in all the great religious traditions as well as in Kant’s categorical imperative. It seems simple enough but it is surprising what people come up with when they try to apply it.

Applying this question to participation in war the answer to me seems obvious. What would happen if everyone refused to participate in war? Well, there would be no more wars and that would be very good. Clearly, that is not how most people see it, since they are convinced that pacifism is actually a bad thing. How can they apply the Golden Rule and come up with a different answer? The thought process goes like this I think. The larger community thinks pacifism is naïve. It is obvious to them that everyone is not going to be a pacifist and so they cannot take the possibility of everyone being a pacifist seriously. Instead they take it to be more realistic to consider what if all Americans were to refuse to use violence in self-defense against bad people. What if every American refused to defend his country? The result of that would be very bad, they think. The difference between my application of the Golden Rule and the average person’s in this case seems to be that I take “everyone” more broadly to mean all human beings and not all Americans. The ordinary person thinks it’s naïve to take “everyone” to literally mean everyone. War, they think, is just a given. The only ethical question they are willing to take seriously is which wars a responsible person will agree to fight.

So I’m convinced that pacifism satisfies the Golden Rule but still I must recognize that I live not only in a small community of fellow pacifists but in a larger community of people who believe some version of just war theory. How can I live simultaneously as a member of two communities which embody conflicting values? I want to be a good citizen of both communities yet I also want have the integrity of a life lived from one set of values.

The opinion that pacifism is unrealistic makes sense. I agree that war is going to be around for the foreseeable future. I also agree that if war is not eliminated then if some societies unilaterally reject the use of force and their adversaries do not then they will become victims of international aggression. Can a pacifist admit all this and still defend pacifism as a reasonable position? I can.

The problem with pacifism is not with the idealistic future in which everyone is a pacifist. That would be fine. The problem is with getting there. But just as it is unrealistic to assume that everyone in the world will embrace pacifism tomorrow, it is also unrealistic to assume that all Americans will do so. No, the majority of Americans will continue to believe in the use of force for self-defense when I wake up tomorrow and for as many tomorrows as I have left. So, realistically, my witness for pacifism will continue to be a minority witness for as long as I can foresee. Is such a witness within a just war community good or bad for the larger community which rejects pacifism? I think it is good for the larger community. It serves as a witness for peace. It serves as the gadfly which stings the lazy conscience of the mass of Americans who take the rationalizations of their leaders all too uncritically. It forces them to at least take their own just war theory a little more seriously and to actually ask the sorts of questions which their own values demand of them: is there a peaceful alternative to this war? Will this war prevent more harm than it creates? The more real pacifists there are in a society the louder these just war questions become when the issue of going to war becomes a live option. As pacifists we are making a real contribution to the larger community even if we do not share their values.

Way Closing

2006-12-05T08:26:00.000-08:00

Quakers often talk about God leading us to take on some task. When some coincidence occurs that makes it possible to actually start the work we say that Way opened. The flip side of this experience is Way closing. Since I just had such an experience a few minutes ago it seems appropriate to share it.

For the past few years I have been speaking at the graduation ceremonies which we hold for our philosophy majors. It felt right to start doing this, has felt right to continue doing it but recently I began to feel that I should lay it down (at least for now.) I had been pondering just how I would tell my chair that I didn’t want to do this anymore, and thinking to myself that I’d really have to do it one more time until I could work something out. Then I get an email from my chair telling me that someone else had come to him and volunteered to do the talk. I smiled as I read the tone that suggested he was a bit concerned that I would be hurt or offended that someone else was taking over the job.

Real leadings are specific and respect our very finite capacities in a very large world. I don’t think that any of us are lead to reverse global warming, end war, create social justice or anything so big as that. Instead we are lead to do our own little part. And when we have done what we are called to do it is nice to get closure. Having an opportunity to serve suddenly open and then a month, a year or a decade later having it close again just as suddenly provides a reassuring sense of “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

I have observed that too many Quakers wander around with a sense of guilt that they have not done enough. As Christians we are not supposed to feel that way. We are supposed to feel utterly free in our obedience. Our yoke is supposed to feel light. If the yoke feels hard and the burden heavy this might be because it’s one you have picked up at your own discretion and not at the prompting of the Spirit. Such guilt feelings can drive these Friends into badgering and hectoring others with calls that they should “do more.” When Friends feel the urge to nag other Friends in this manner they should pause and reflect and seek the guidance of weighty Friends about whether it is a genuine prophetic call to witness to a stiff-necked people or whether it is only a bit of well-intentioned do-goodery.

I am suffering from a cold at the moment, exams are looming and I am feeling delighted to have this particular little duty gently lifted from my shoulders. I know that some time in the near future Way will open again and I will see some new job with my name on it. But right now I feel like a little celebration.

Listening and Getting it Right

2006-12-04T12:12:00.000-08:00

I’ve lost count of the times I have been around people making fun of the President for saying that God told him to invade Iraq. On the one hand I agree with the criticism. I don’t believe that God told him any such thing. If God did tell him that then God gives pretty lousy advice. But once in a while the opinion is expressed that anyone who thinks that they can talk to God and get his advice is out of their mind. I don’t agree with that.

There’s nothing wrong with people who talk to God and hear answers. God doesn’t turn his back on people who do suffer from mental illness. He talks to them too. If he only talked to the mentally ill that might make us suspicious. But many of the people who quite sincerely say they talk to God are perfect exemplars of mental health. Critics to the contrary, there are a number of objective markers of mental illness (drug and alcohol abuse, failure to maintain stable relationships, inability to hold down a job, inappropriate emotional responses to events, etc.) and people who report a strong faith in God and an active prayer life generally score higher rather than lower on the mental health scale.

How then can I be so sure that W wasn’t listening very well when he asked God what to do about Iraq? There are several indications. First is that the President told a number of lies to the country and to the world about why he was invading Iraq. God doesn’t like lying. Second is that this course of action hasn’t worked out very well. God doesn’t give stupid advice. Third is that no spiritually mature people of my acquaintance were inclined to confirm that this was indeed God’s will; on the contrary they had grave doubts about it.

The story illustrates some points about discernment. When Quakers say they have a leading from God to do something they are aware of the possibilities to test the leading. It’s not simply a matter of using my own intuition to see if the idea is really from God. There’s more to it than that. If the matter is important, affects other people and there is sufficient time, then one really ought to look for empirical confirmation outside your own consciousness. Is the leading consistent with past experience of God? How do weighty Friends feel about this leading? One can formally request a clearness committee or just informally discuss it over somebody’s coffeetable, but if time permits one shouldn’t act on any serious leading without input from the community of seekers. Finally, one ought to be on the lookout of Way opening. These will be events spontaneously occurring that make the path clear. Those who shy away from traditional Quaker language might want to call them Jungian synchronicities, but the facts are the same. Things will happen that look like coincidences and signal that the leading is genuine.

Not every case will warrant such serious threshing to discern true from false leadings. On occasion the leading is something that must be responded to immediately. Sometimes one is lead to suddenly run home, without any particular rational reason, and finds a naked toddler wandering in the street. Or one is suddenly hit by the leading to help a nasty old anti-Semite carry her groceries up to her apartment. (To use two examples of leadings that other Friends have offered recently on Quakerquaker.) There’s no time for clearness committees or even much reflection. Like Abraham one hears the call and says “yes, Lord.”

Anyone who hangs around Quakers long enough has a few stories like this to tell. The proof is found in living out these leadings. God does speak to us. We are not crazy. Like Fox, we can say this is something we know experimentally.

The Legal, the Ethical and the Moral

2006-11-29T12:16:00.000-08:00

In the past twenty years many philosophers have been drawing a distinction between ethics and morality. While no two philosophers draw the distinction in exactly the same way this is how I do it. The law represents the minimum that society will tolerate. Fall below the standard set by our laws and we will be forced to hurt you. But communites are not content to identify this minimum. They also establish ethical standards which define what it means to be a good and not merely a decent person. Ethical standards, which communities seek to instill in the young, serve as the social glue that makes the community something tangible and real. The standards are sometimes expressed as rules like the Ten Commandments but more often they are expressed as stories told of exemplary lives. “This is the story of Jesus (Confucius, Achilles, etc.) go and live as he lived.” The standards and stories differ from one community to the next but they also overlap to a much larger degree than one might think. (Is there a hero who does not display courage?) The bar is raised one final time with moral standards. Morality contrasts with Ethics in being at once both more individual and more universal. Some individuals hear a call to standards that are higher than those which bind neighbors together into a community.

The culture wars currently going on in America are a symptom of a serious weakening of standards at the level of ethics. For ethical standards to be real there has to be deep and widespread agreement within the community that certain things are good and other things are bad. These standards are enforced not by police armed with handcuffs but by raised eyebrows and disapproving stares. The consensus necessary to maintain such standards is in serious disarray. Cheating has become pervasive from Enron to the many plagiarism mills available on line. And when cheaters are caught they are frequently unrepentant and dare the rest of us to say anything that would express our disapproval. An ethical vacuum has opened up.

The response of the religious right has been to turn to the power of the state to enforce ethics. This attempt to replace failing ethical standards with harsh legal ones is in one sense understandable but ultimately a tragic mistake. The law cannot be used to heal the damage that has been done to community and trying to fix it that way just causes more damage. Our shared understandings of what is good are unstable at this period of history in part because they are in flux. I do think that the vacuum will not last forever and that a new ethical consensus will gradually emerge which will be different from the old and not necessarily lower or weaker in the long run. In the short run the attempt to use the law to buttress the old standards is doing more harm than good.

Friends, I would venture to suggest, tend to respond to the vacuum in the middle by making the opposite mistake. We hear the call of standards higher and more stringent than those of the community. While the usual ethical standards are content with self-defense and just war theory we are called to pacifism. While ethics enjoins us not to cheat our neighbor, Christ calls us to give him our cloak and walk an extra mile bearing his burden. We hear this higher call and mistake it for ethics. We think that we have the right and obligation to make our neighbors feel guilty about not being pacifists, about not actively working for social justice, about not being vegetarians, etc. I think that we should hold ourselves to the highest moral standards but not confuse these with ethical standards. Holding other people to our moral standards is not what we are called to do. We need to hold firmly to those standards, be the best example that we can be and let God do the rest.

Old Self/False Self

2006-11-25T08:44:00.000-08:00

Many years ago I met another philosopher of religion who recounted to me his theory that there were indeed many distinct religions in the world (I think he put the number at seven, but my memory is a bit hazy), but they were not the familiar traditions of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc. Instead within each of these great historical traditions he identified multiple strands distinct from each other and present in all.

There is ritualistic religion which loves candles, prayer beads, incense, colorful robes, icons, and cozy old meetinghouses. Then there is ethical religion which establishes rules of conduct and tells people that the path to heaven in straight and narrow. There were others but I never got around to reading his book and I’ve forgotten what they were. The idea struck me at the time as basically sound with lots of room to quibble about details.

In my own spiritual journey I embraced Christianity as I understood it way back once upon a time. Then I came to reject it in favor of something vaguer but more universalistic. And lastly there has been the slow arc of a return to primitive Christianity as I now understand it. It may be because the vision is so stuck in the eye of this beholder that I see this primitive Christianity present within the other great faith traditions as well. What I find useful in the concept of many religions within the many historical traditions is that much of what I reject within Christian tradition I also find and reject in Judaism, Islam, Buddhism etc. And what I accept in Christianity I also find and accept in the others too.

There is much to write about here but as I like to keep these essays short I’ll focus on one idea that is very important in both the western religious tradition (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) and the eastern religious tradition (Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism). That is the idea of our two selves. In Christian tradition there is the old, bad worldly self that must die in order for us to be reborn as new selves. We must die in one sense in order to live in a richer sense. This is the central idea of Paul’s epistles.

The eastern religious tradition superficially sounds very different. There is no talk of sin but much talk of illusion. Buddhism propounds the deliberately paradoxical doctrine of “no soul”: enlightenment consists of understanding that you do not exist. What this means is obscure. (Of course, if I understood it I would be enlightened but I’m not enlightened. But then if I were enlightened I would understand it and hence I would exist, which contradicts the doctrine. Oh, never mind!)

Here is the simple Christian/Buddhist truth as I see it. Human nature is selfish and egocentric. While we can and do empathize with others our default frame of mind is to think about and care for ourselves first. Sympathy tends to be a passing fancy and we revert to the “common sense” of me first over and over. This natural point of view is both morally perverse and metaphysically false. If we could but see the world as it really is we would see that we are all cosmically connected and that love, joy and beauty are never found in our selfishness but only in our connectedness. The belief that life is a war of all against all and that we are but brutes who must kill to live and are ourselves soon to be snuffed out is the illusion. The truth is on the side of hope and love and faith.

At least that’s how I see things now.

Quaker Romanticism

2006-11-24T10:03:00.000-08:00

Besides being a Quaker I am also a philosopher. In these posts sometimes the one shows a bit more than the other. Philosophers are fond of drawing distinctions, which often seems like pointless hair-splitting to others. But at times I cannot help myself.

I am proud to say I am a romantic in one sense of the word and proud to say that I consider myself completely unromantic in another sense.

Good romanticism is the belief that at bottom the world makes sense. There are real values worth living for and sometimes even worth dying for. There is heroism in facing the tedium and danger of ordinary life without deliberately imposing that pain on others. Heroic because this requires taking a bit more of that pain on oneself than is strictly necessary. And that underlying it all is a mysterious Power that brings all things to good in the end. That after the cross comes a crown. In a word it is the romantic belief that God is real. This romanticism is good because it makes us stronger and freer. It is good because it is the truth.

There is also a bad romanticism that refuses to see weakness or evil where it does not want to see it. And where do we not want to see these things? In ourselves and in those we love. It is there in Fox, Barclay, Naylor, Penn and Woolman. It is in Paul and the evangelists, in the Old Testament and in the New. It is in old-fashioned plain Friends and in articulate, hypereducated modern Friends. It is in our elders and our ministers. It is in all of us.

The good romanticism accepts that faith begins a process that culminates in a state of perfection that will render us fit subjects of the kingdom of heaven, the peaceable kingdom in which the lion lies down with the lamb. The bad romanticism views this process of sanctification through a gauze of unreality. We are all equal, one sort of bad romantic thinks, so no one is any further along on this path of killing the selfish self. To identify one person as an elder or as a minister dishonors the rest of us because among Friends all the children are above average. Another sort of bad romantic thinks, there are the holy ones who have gifts because they are perfect. Elders and ministers do not continue to painfully work out their own salvation in the midst of weakness and pain. They are perfect already.

Good romantics, of the sort I hope that I am, recognize that there is good vocal ministry, not-so-good vocal ministry and some words spoken during the meeting for worship that cannot rightly be called ministry at all. Those we properly name as ministers are those whose gifts lead them to frequently give good vocal ministry. There is also wise advice and counsel which is really helpful to the hearer. And there is also not-so-wise advice and self-righteous hectoring and badgering. Those we properly name as elders frequently give good advice and are able to do so because they have a gift that enables them to discern truths about the spirit of the person in need of the advice.

Meetings sometimes make mistakes in naming these gifts. Those without any real gift are sometimes named. And in many meetings people with these gifts go unnamed. Naming someone as having a gift when they do not is surely the worse error. It can encourage the sort of ministry and eldering should be discouraged. It can also puff people up and make them proud when they should be humble. The best elders I have known have been unusually humble. There is also the danger that naming elders and ministers will discourage people not yet named from trying out their gifts. If individuals had to wait until their gifts were recognized by the meeting then those gifts would not have the chance to grow, develop and be recognized. That is why we insist that our meetings for worship be open to vocal ministry by all.

Despite the pitfalls I think that a realistic romanticism will see that the advantages of naming elders and ministers outweighs the risks. By identifying those who elder or minister very well it serves as a clear signal to less experienced Friends. It serves as encouragement for those possessing these gifts to use them. And in the case of elders, it serves as a sign to those who need wise advice where to seek it. Finally it helps the meeting as a whole to use its collective power of discernment to find and nurture the real gifts within the body.

We are all connected

2006-11-20T12:44:00.000-08:00

Quakers believe that there is a Divine Spirit in all human beings guiding them in the ways of humility and love. Some people hear this kind of talk and think “that’s very nice but how do you know that it is true?” Friends have traditionally taught that we know this by our own experience. We do not believe it just because it sounds nice nor do we believe it because we read about it in some book that seemed convincing. We find this to be true in our own experience.

Everyone gets little glimpses of the Spirit from time to time. These openings are fleeting and the reaction of our worldly mind to them is often skeptical. The old self dismisses the first stirring of the new self as whim, fantasy or coincidence. A while back I wrote a post on two elders from Rich Square Monthly Meeting, Mary Littrell and Janie Sams. Mary had passed away a few years ago and I recorded a story which I had heard a Friend tell after her death. Janie was still living when I wrote but had retired to a nursing home and I knew she was in poor health. About Janie I shared a story of how she had eldered me and how it had borne fruit.

A few days after I wrote that story word was circulated that Janie Sams had passed away. My wife and I attended the memorial service on Saturday and while there I learned more detail. Janie closed her eyes for the last time and spoke her last words on the same day that I wrote my story about her. I am sure some will dismiss this as a mere coincidence but I think it is evidence that the Spirit is real and we are all connected.

Janie’s life was a triumph. She exuded a kind of humble joy that seemed completely natural. My own life has been marked by spiritual struggle, particularly with my own special demon of pride. Janie, and a few other Friends, astonished me by making the Christian life look easy. It has been a blessing to me to have as such role models before my eyes. Otherwise I might have doubted that real victory over self was possible or worse, become satisfied with myself as I was.

We drove home through the farmlands of eastern North Carolina. The cotton plants dry and black still loaded with thousands upon thousands of glowing white balls awaiting harvest. As we thought about Janie and what she meant to us and to those who had spoken at her memorial we enjoyed a really spectacular sunset which seemed to me a crown of glory for a life well lived.

"Ye must be born again"

2006-11-16T09:43:00.000-08:00

I mentioned in an earlier post how I started attending Quaker meetings in Princeton, New Jersey before moving to North Carolina. When the worship group we found in Greenville visited Rich Square Monthly Meeting over twenty years ago to see about affiliating with a larger body of Friends I was given a copy of this Yearly Meeting’s Faith and Practice. One passage from the Advices caught my attention:

For although we recognize the children of our members as objects of our care, and partakers of the outward privileges of Christian fellowship, we would earnestly remind all that such recognition cannot constitute them members of the Lord’s Spiritual Israel. Nothing can effect this but the power of the Holy Spirit working repentance toward God and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, let the words of our Holy Redeemer have due place with us all, "Ye must be born again." May all of our members become such on the ground of true conversion, and be prepared in their several places to bring forth fruit unto God.

The language disturbed me at that time. This sounded not just Christian but positively fundamentalist. I didn’t understand it and was pretty sure I didn’t like it, but I decided to stick it out and see what these people in North Carolina conservative were really like and not judge them too quickly.

Much to my surprise over the years I have gradually come to accept and love the language of our Advices, even the part about being born again. The way I understood it at the time went something like this: to be born again is to accept as true a few points of orthodoxy. The result of believing these things is that you are guaranteed a spot in heaven. The result of not believing these things is that you go to hell. Say the magic words “I accept Jesus as my personal savior” and get your ticket punched for the train to heaven! I still think that a lot of shallow self-described Christians think that this is what being born again means but now I’ve come to understand the expression in a very different way. Liberal Christians, Friends included, need to take this concept back and claim it as our own. What follows is my own personal account of what it means to be born again.

Jesus often speaks to us in the gospels in shockingly emphatic metaphors because we are more than a little hard of hearing. It is not just the world around us that is messed up. It is us. Human beings are selfish, arrogant, cowardly, cruel, petty, vindictive and very good at hiding the truth from ourselves. It’s not just that we need to try a little harder and we will be fine. Only really radical change will transform us into the sort of people who can enter the peaceable kingdom and look like we belong there. Fortunately such radical change is possible. It is not possible by reading self-help books or getting a membership in the health club. It is only possible by accepting the help of a Divine Friend. The transformation is not instantaneous. The old self persists alongside the new self as Paul witnessed. But the recognition that radical change in me is necessary and the decision to accept Divine help is the first momentous step in a long process of spiritual growth.

Having the faith of Abraham or Jesus, that is trusting God enough to obey commands that make no worldly sense, is the first step that begins a process of transformation from ordinary narrow selfish human nature into a perfect divine nature.

Mary Littrell and Janie Sams

2006-11-05T13:01:00.000-08:00

Eldering has fallen into disuse among Friends largely because of false and negative stereotyping. The stereotype is that it is done by gruff, moralistic, and insensitive people. Many assume that it is an unpleasant if not painful experience to be eldered. The truth about eldering will only be recovered if people can experience it for themselves. But we have a chicken and egg problem here. People won’t experience it if we create conditions in which people feel that eldering is unwelcome; and the negative stereotypes that keep eldering from happening will persist until we learn more about eldering. Nevertheless, eldering has existed in an unbroken tradition in our Yearly Meeting going back to colonial times and so there are Friends who do not have to rely on books for their knowledge.

Eldering is less well understood than the vocal ministry. Vocal ministry occurs in public and is better known for that reason. Since eldering takes place privately and behind the scenes most Friends are mostly dependent on hearing about it from those who have been eldered. What follows are two stories of eldering.

One of the functions of elders is to mind the ministers and help them develop their gift of vocal ministry by critically listening and giving feedback. At the memorial service for Mary Littrell a very large, loud and charismatic Friend with a powerful gift of vocal ministry reported on how he had frequently been eldered by her. She would send him little notes after listening to his vocal ministry. The notes kept pointing out how in his enthusiasm he kept speaking past his leading. The message he had been given to share was genuine, Mary said, but he persisted in embellishing what the Spirit gave him with his own thoughts, opinions, observations and deductions. After telling us about this the Friend added with a little smile, she was always right. What was striking about the story, which moved some to tears, was how much he cherished this memory.

Janie Sams didn’t conform to anyone’s stereotype of an elder. Janie was about five foot tall and had a high-pitched speaking voice that sounded like singing. Her smile was one of continuous childlike delight. In trying to reconstruct my memories of Janie my daughter reminded me how Janie used to turn around in meeting for worship to make faces at her two younger brothers to make them giggle. I must confess that I was completely oblivious to these goings-on.

My first few years in North Carolina Yearly Meeting conservative were spent on the back bench. I would watch and listen and say very little. From time to time I would say something at business sessions. I generally read our monthly meeting’s State of Society report and the answers to our queries but mostly I was content on the back bench. On one of our walks between buildings during the Yearly Meeting sessions Janie Sams came up behind my wife and I and said “Mary, we need to hear your husband’s voice more often in the Yearly Meeting!” I had been eldered by Janie.

I was taken aback. Why would she address the comment to my wife and not to me? And, more importantly, was I wrong to hold back as I was doing? In truth I instantly knew she was right. With the passage of time I can even understand why she spoke to my wife instead of me. I am pretty strongly countersuggestive (if you say po-ta-to I am pretty sure to say po-tah-to and vice versa), so if Janie had spoken directly to me I would have been strongly inclined to argue with her. Her way of putting it so authoritatively and addressing it to my wife left no room for discussion. Like a skillful billiards player she chose to carom her shot off the rail.

Janie’s eldering bore fruit. Within a short time I abandoned the back bench and began a long stint as the Yearly Meeting Recording Clerk. I believe this was good for me and good for the Yearly Meeting. Our spiritual life both as individuals and as a community is strengthened when those with a gift for this sort of insightful individualized advice and counsel practice these gifts and develop them. These gifts are present among us but are now too rarely used. I hope some day to see a rediscovery of the practice among Friends everywhere.

Eldering--in practice not in theory

2006-11-03T08:58:00.000-08:00

Eldering, which I discussed in an earlier post, has generated a lot of interest and controversy. The central issue seems to be whether eldering is so easy and natural that anyone with a little common sense can do it or whether it is so difficult that only help from the Holy Spirit makes it possible. I hold that it is a gift and others respectfully disagree. I'd like to add a few more reflections.

When my wife and I first came down to North Carolina we had been worshiping at the Princeton, New Jersey meeting affiliated with Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. We felt at home there as if we had discovered where we belonged and were not sure what we would find in North Carolina, but since jobs teaching philosophy were, and still are, rare and very hard to get we went. We encountered a worship group in Greenville which was going through the process of figuring out if they wanted to affiliate with any Yearly Meeting. As part of this process we traveled up to the Rich Square Monthly Meeting which is part of North Carolina conservative. Having read their book of discipline before making the drive I had some reservations because it was more Christian than I was comfortable with at that time. The openness of Friends there, especially George and Lib Parker, put me at ease. We became a monthly meeting under the care of Rich Square and were regularly visited by Friends from that meeting. We began attending the Yearly Meeting sessions and have never missed one since. As an intellectual I had read a lot about religion. As a teenager I had read Huston Smith's Religions of Man and that lead me to read more about Hinduism and Buddhism. Eventually though I became dissatisfied with mere reading and felt that I couldn't really learn Buddhism without personal experience of life in a Buddhist community. Reading words like "compassion" and "detachment" would never give me their meaning in the way that seeing how Buddhists tried to live compassion and detachment would.

In North Carolina Yearly Meeting conservative I came across a group of people who were living out a tradition of Christian community that went back unbroken to colonial times. Each generation learned what it was to live as a Quaker by watching the older generation live it. Most Quaker meetings today consist mainly of people like me who have learned mostly from books. Here was an opportunity for a different kind of learning. I now think that this was the reason Way opened for me to come to North Carolina.

One of the things that struck me very forcibly was the almost continuous gentle instruction offered by a number of experienced Friends. We sometimes think of eldering as hectoring people about their faults. Real eldering as I have experienced it is done in such a sweet spirit that one feels blessed rather than cursed. I have learned more that is of spiritual value from a series of casual remarks made in lunchrooms and on walks between the meeting rooms at our Yearly Meeting sessions than I can hope to explain. The most important thing is this: that people are made better by showing them bits of the Light. This way of dealing with people was totally foreign to my way of thinking at the time and no amount of ordinary life experience would have taught me this lesson. I had to see it in action by people who had made it a deep part of their being.

Eldering, the gift of spiritual guidance, takes place in a low-key nearly invisible way. Eldering, by its very nature, tends to be directed at one person out of sight of others. Ministers, by contrast, do their ministering out in full view. Eldering is a nearly invisible undercurrent that promotes the advancement of Truth without fanfare. And I remain convinced that doing this right is impossibly by ordinary human power--even for those who have spent their lives in and around Quaker meetings. Just as only a few are really gifted with the ability to deliver messages from the Spirit that are meant to be heard by the meeting only some can discern spiritual hurts and holes and make helpful suggestions on how to move forward. Well-intentioned advice by those not gifted doesn't succeed because it doesn't speak to the secret places in the person's spirit that need to hear it.

The bottom line is that I have seen real eldering and I can affirm that it works.

Quaker Camels

2006-10-30T10:58:00.000-08:00

The Bible is full of passages that hurt. One very natural response to such painful words is to dull their sharp edges with a smoother interpretation. This makes the reader feel better but runs the risk of missing the point.

Curiously, the Bible itself contains evidence of this human reaction to its own messages. Many stories are told more than once within the Bible and the way the story changes in the retelling tells us much about who we are. Scholars tell us that the first account of Jesus’ ministry was the gospel of Mark. Luke and Matthew then took the gospel of Mark and added new material to create their own longer gospels. But they also deleted some passages and what they chose to cut is often interesting.

For example in Mark the rich man runs up to Jesus kneels before him and asks “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” In good rabbinical fashion Jesus answers the question with a question. “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.” Matthew tells the story a different way. The man doesn’t run up to Jesus in enthusiasm and doesn’t kneel before him in a sign of respect. And he asks a different question “What good deed must I do to have eternal life?” And Jesus response is a little different too. “Why do you ask me about what is good? There is only one who is good.” Then Jesus gives an abbreviated version of the Ten Commandments but oddly inserts a fictitious commandment “you shall not defraud.” When the rich man says, with a promptness that suggests a pretty high degree of self-satisfaction, that he has obeyed the commandments Jesus looks at him with love and tells him he must do one more thing: sell all his possessions and give them to the poor. The man is shocked and walks away.

We know the end of this story. Jesus says that the rich man is a camel who cannot pass through the needle’s eye and enter the kingdom of heaven. Despite his enthusiasm he hasn’t the strength to obey Jesus’ command. Matthew deletes the sharp edges from the story. The elements in Mark that make us sympathize and identify with him are gone: his running, his kneeling, and Jesus’ love for him. The shocking things Jesus’ says are also blunted. The clear implication that he is not God and Jesus’ insertion of the fictitious commandment are gone too. Matthew's story is less shocking than the original on which it is based.

Many Friends will fail to identify with the protagonist of the story because he is rich and we are not. Jesus is sticking it to those greedy rich folks; he’s not talking to me. Don’t be too sure. Jesus' attention was always directed to spiritual realities not to physical externals. What did Jesus see in the man that was holding him back from the kingdom of heaven? Was it really his bank account? I do not believe so. More likely it was the sense of superiority his money gave him. To pass through the needle’s eye his inflated sense of self would have to grow much, much smaller. Do modern Friends with their progressive views display a similar sense of self-satisfaction? Are we as proud of our education and sophistication as the wealthy are of their money? Would we fit through the needle’s eye in the condition we are in?

Volunteers

2006-10-23T13:17:00.000-07:00

Every gardener knows about volunteers. Volunteers are those little seedlings that pop up in unexpected places from compost or from seeds dropped randomly from last year’s crops. An experienced gardener will be on the lookout for volunteers and know how to distinguish between a zinnia and a tomato and move each seedling from wherever it happens to sprout to the spot in the garden where it belongs.

An ideal monthly meeting will be like a well-tended garden. The gifts of the Spirit will spring up as tender plants in curious places and the experienced members of meeting will recognize them early. Recognizing a budding gift of vocal ministry is something with which most Quakers will be familiar. In unprogrammed meetings individuals will experiment to see if what is bubbling within them is really a message from God to be shared, a private communication from the Lord meant for them alone, or just some random personal thought. As an experimental religion we encourage people to learn by doing. Experimenting, however, is of value only if you can correctly interpret the results. It is for this reason that the person who thinks they have a message to be shared needs feedback from experienced Friends. If it was a message from the Spirit meant to be shared with the meeting, then it will resonate with what is going on within some of the Friends listening. When it does the Friend who heard the message has a responsibility to go to the one offering the vocal ministry and tell them: “Friend, thy message spoke to my condition.” The absence of positive feedback should be enough to tell Friends who are confusing a personal thought for a message to be shared what they need to know. This was how, over the years, I learned that I did not have a gift of vocal ministry. This isn’t something to be ashamed of, as if it made one a second-rate Quaker! No, God has different work for each of us to do. I can say without bragging that I am a good recording clerk and contribute to the life of the Meeting in other ways. But I needed to learn that the messages which I get during worship are intended for me and not for the meeting as a whole.

The tradition of recognizing and recording a gift of vocal ministry is still familiar to most unprogrammed Friends. But the gift of eldering is largely unappreciated and in danger of disappearing as a living tradition. Too many of us think of eldering as a negative thing. We speak of any critical remark intended to point out some Friend’s error as “eldering.” Most criticism is no more genuine eldering than blurting out some random thought is genuine vocal ministry. Real eldering requires a gift of the Holy Spirit and must be Spirit led. I know what real eldering sounds like and the voice is gentle but authoritative. It is more often positive and encouraging than discouraging. Eldering is a gift that some have and others don’t. Real elders can listen carefully, discern clearly and humbly share what they have seen with others. It is a gift, which like vocal ministry does not appear all at once in a person. Like vocal ministry a fledgling elder will get better as she uses her gift. Eldering requires recognition, practice and encouragement if it is to grow.

How can a Monthly Meeting learn to recognize an elder? Most Monthly Meetings will form clearness committees to assist Friends going through major life decisions like marriage, divorce, serious illness or career change. If we pay attention we will notice that some people listen better and offer more constructive advice than others. These Friends are your elders whether you recognize them or not. Recognizing them will help them to develop their gifts and will help those who could be served by those gifts to know who in the meeting to approach for advice and counsel. Eldering is a tradition which needs to be kept alive in those Yearly Meetings which have preserved the tradition and which needs to be rediscovered by those who have let the tradition lapse.

Sin: an introduction

2006-10-17T08:56:00.000-07:00

"The preacher gave quite a sermon this morning."
"What'd he talk about?"
"Sin...He's against it."

(Family Joke #107)

Early Friends were against sin too. And their opposition to sin was intense and uncompromising. In fact what made early Friends different from the Christians around them was their refusal to allow the sharp edge of Jesus' moral teachings to be blunted. There are a thousand reasons to compromise with the ways of the world but Fox and company would listen to none of them. They would not serve in armies and were thrown into prison. They would not swear oaths and had their property confiscated by the courts. Nor was their clarity about the difference between right and wrong limited to the Quaker distinctives like pacifism and the refusal to take oaths. The demand to be completely truthful, gentle and charitable permeated every minute of their ordinary lives.

Modern Friends are much more ambivalent about sin. There are complex reasons for this and not all of them are bad. We see that our views about what is right and wrong are at least partly formed by social conventions or by dark psychic forces over which we have little insight. We have also seen the horrible effects of fanaticism. Millions perished in the gas chambers and the gulags. Gallons of blood are spilled daily in the middle east by those who are uncompromising in their moral vision. Modern people of a liberal persuasion, including most Friends, see plenty of examples of moral certainty gone terribly wrong and don't want to be like that.

Another factor is that those of us who are over 50 have lived through a sea change in society's opinions about sexual morality. When I was growing up no child that I knew in school, in the neighborhood or among my dozens of cousins had parents who were divorced. Sex outside of marriage was unquestionably wrong and the only gray area was for couples engaged to be married. No one who mattered in my world expressed the slightest doubt about this moral code. Now that consensus is gone.

One response to the loss of consensus is to fall back on individualism. Each individual is to decide for him or herself what is right and what is wrong in each situation as it arises. Each of us has a measure of the Light Within and it is up to each of us to follow it. I'm sure I'll raise some hackles with this but this kind of breezy romanticism is totally unrealistic and gets it all wrong. Early Friends were serious-minded in the extreme and would never have fallen for the illusion that whatever impulse pops into their head must necessarily be a prompting from the Inner Guide. No, they were acutely aware of the need to distinguish between worldly impulses, which are often clothed in very pleasant sounding rationalizations, from the quiet commands of the Living Christ. While they did not trust the moral opinions of 17th century English society they did trust and rely upon a much smaller society--the Religious Society of Friends.

The individual human mind is a hall of mirrors in which we see the world and more particularly ourselves just as we wish. A speck in your neighbor's eye will be clearly visible but the beam in your own can go unnoticed for decades. Left to our own devices, without a good reality check, we would live in illusion from cradle to grave. Part of the reality check comes from the people around us. We rely on those who love us to tell us the unflattering truth on a regular basis. (It helps to be married to someone like that.) And in the silence of the meeting for worship we need to ask our Inner Teacher to reveal our faults and limitations and show us how to humbly walk whatever walk we are given.

Speaking truth to power is part of what we are about. But our moral vision cannot be confined to complaining about George Bush. We have to cultivate a sense of our own sinful nature if we are to really experience the radical change that in fact we are in need of.

Be Perfect Now

2006-10-06T12:19:00.000-07:00

Edward Hicks in his lifetime painted over a hundred versions of The Peaceable Kingdom inspired by Isaiah "the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf with the young lion and fatling together, and a little child shall lead them." In the background he sometimes included a representation of William Penn making a treaty with the Indians suggesting that the vision could be lived. European lions could lie down with Native American lambs.

The fire and intensity of the early Quaker vision, in this writer's opinion, derived from their passionate insistence that the command "Be perfect" meant exactly what it says and that no excuses, qualifications or hemming and hawing were acceptable. Other Christians would and still say that to live according to the demands of the Sermon on the Mount is unrealistic and represents a standard that is applicable only to life in the hereafter or after the Second Coming. Then we will be pacifists. Now we must wage war against our neighbors because they are willing to wage war against us and we must at least be able to defend ourselves. Perfect honesty will be possible in heaven, but now a little deception once in a while is essential. Fox called such arguments for compromise with the world's standards "pleading for sin" and he thought that those who so pleaded were mere "professors" i.e. ones who merely profess to be Christian but do not live as followers of Christ.

The early Quaker vision, as I see it, was that those who listen to the voice of the inward Christ will hear that they are not to wait until the wretched world around them is swept away and replaced by the kingdom of heaven. Those who listen will live now as if the kingdom of heaven were already here. Sensible worldly Christians, who thought that some compromise with the brutality of the world is essential, found this demand to be rude, crude and impossibly demanding. Quakers interrupted the church services of the compromising Christians with these impossible demands and were frequently beaten and thrown into prisons. We sometimes think of these early Friends as innocent victims of religious persecution, and to a large extent they were, but they were also outrageous men and women with an outrageous message.

One has to say that the compromising Christians do seem more realistic. We can't really be perfect can we? We can try our best and be a little better than we were yesterday and that should really be enough, shouldn't it? Early Friends insisted that it was not enough and that from personal experience they could testify that perfection was within our grasp even in the middle of this wretched world. How could that possibly be so?

The New Testament tells us of Jesus command to be perfect and also that the yoke is easy and the burden light. Can we affirm the truth of this in our experience? These are some of the passages I spoke of in the previous post as ones that cut. I don't feel perfect. I am frequently reminded of this when I see myself getting angry at the irritating, irresponsible and stupid things people do. But I can affirm at least a glimmer of this truth.

Paul recorded his experience as a struggle between a new self born in Christ and the old natural worldly self that stubbornly refused to die. Two selves. The old sinful selfish self and a new perfect Christlike self. I use my own experience to try to understand what Paul meant by this. What I think he meant was that much of the time, maybe even most of the time, he found himself to be the same old person he always was with all the old familiar faults. But he also experienced moments in which he knew he was being perfectly obedient to the voice of God. To have faith is to hear and obey the will of the Father in heaven. To obey is to be perfect in that moment of perfect obedience. Unfortunately these moments are only moments. I cannot live more than a few minutes in perfect harmony with the Inner Light, eating the food of which the world has no knowledge, drinking from the water that Jesus offered to the woman at the well. But these moments, though fleeting, are nevertheless real experiences.

I suspect that Edward Hicks painted all those versions of the Peaceable Kingdom as a way of trying to make those fleeting moments of perfection more permanent, to give them some kind of tangible presence in this less than perfect world. Our human reality now is one where we simultaneously live in two worlds. Mostly we live in a brutal world where carnivores eat herbivores and most certainly do not lie down with them. But we also can step across an invisible divide and dwell for brief moments in the Peaceable Kingdom, experience it, know that it is real and hope to attain it permanently in some form and fashion currently beyond our imagination.

The Authority of the Bible

2006-09-28T12:07:00.000-07:00

Human life is insecure. We wonder about our place in the universe, whether there is a God, is there an immortal soul, how should we live, is there any reason for hope? Epistemology concerns the distinction between knowledge (a belief that is not only true but also proven) and mere opinion. Can we ever know the answers to these questions or must we be content with opinion? Is epistemological insecurity part of the human condition?

We would like secure knowledge about these important issues but it proves elusive. Quakers, like other mystical traditions in both the West and the East, have sought to find truth through personal experience by going within. Others have less confidence in this route. Many people who say they have spoken with God seem arrogant, deluded, dishonest or even insane--and there is little doubt that some of them are. Liberals of all kinds are typically scornful of our President's claims to have gotten God's personal approval of his wars. Given the difficulty of discerning the difference between the genuine voice of God and our own whims and fancies it seems that the most we can hope for are true opinions with some measure of justification falling far short of proof.

To Christians who find direct personal experience of God to be too subjective to be trustworthy there remains another alternative: find proof in the Bible. I do not think that any reasonably thoughtful and educated person can find this alternative plausible if they give it a serious test. Luther very naively thought that if he made the Bible available to the common people that every fair-minded person would come to the same theological conclusions. In reality the Bible is far too messy and conflicted to yield clear and simple answers to any of the important questions.

For example, in the early books of the Bible it is evident that its authors do not believe in life after death. The rewards promised to Israel for fidelity to the Mosaic Law are all very practical and down-to-earth: fertile flocks, fertile wives, rain, good health, victory in battle. In the Wisdom literature of the Hebrew Bible the fact that these earthly rewards do not in fact seem to accrue to the faithful becomes problematic. Job defiantly insists that his sufferings are not a punishment for sins. And the vanity of vanities includes the observation that the wicked flourish while the just perish and concludes with advice that we should enjoy whatever fleeting pleasures this life has to offer because nothing good will come to us after we are dead. In the Prophets hopes and visions are announced that the vanity and injustice of this life will be healed and corrected in some glorious future day. In the New Testament these visions of a new creation are repeated with renewed fervor and anticipation but even Paul admits that he sees this future state in a glass darkly. And of course Jesus taught in parables. Those who say that the Bible has some unified view about our place in the universe and the reality of Spirit have not, in my opinion, ever read the Bible seriously. To think that the Bible will cure the epistemological insecurity of the human condition is foolishness.

So many modern Christians, including many Friends, simply reject the Bible out of hand. I think this is a mistake. We should not think that the Bible offers simple, easy answers or even that it is infallible. We ought to grant the Bible some authority. In practice this means that we should read the Bible looking for truth and not merely for truth as we already see it. We have to be willing, really willing, to let it show us truth we do not see and perhaps do not want to see. There is a tendency of liberal Friends to grant the Bible no authority whatsoever. If Paul says something with which we disagree, we think "well, that's just Paul's opinion--the nasty old misogynist!" Paul may very well be wrong about some things, I think he is, and he admits that he doesn't see everything clearly, but we miss the opportunity to learn from him if we dismiss him cavalierly.

We should let the passages of the Bible with which we disagree cut us. We should wrestle with them and be wounded by them and force them to yield their truth. One difficult passage for me has been the one about not judging lest ye be judged. "Oh really," my mind declares "I am supposed to pretend that I don't really see and understand what these people are doing? Whatever happened to speaking truth to power?" It reminds me of the scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail in which one of the heroes has been killing all the innocent wedding guests and then the host says that we shouldn't make a big deal about "who killed whom." It isn't honest to pretend you don't see what you do see and humans have vices and faults that are easily seen. (Our own faults and vices are not easily seen but other people's are.) After years of letting the passage cut me I've come to understand that there is a difference between seeing clearly the wrongs that people do and judging them for those wrongs. It is the second we must give up.

I should add that I do not think that every sentence of the Bible will yield this sort of truth. Some of it frankly is just filler--think of the tedious geneologies, the details about sacrifices at the Temple, the repetitive history of the monarchies and battles, the fulminations of prophets against the enemies of Israel. Not every line will bear fruit. And we should, after long and serious consideration, be willing to say that we disagree with some of the biblical authors about some weighty matters. As, for example, I find I disagree with Matthew about eternal damnation. But we should not disagree lightly because to do so is to run the risk of failing to learn truths we do not want to see.

Read the Bible seriously with an open mind and more importantly an open heart and know that doing so entails some unavoidable risks.

Are Muslims going to hell?

2006-09-20T13:11:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend my wife and I attended a Quaker wedding in Virginia. At the reception we found ourselves seated with one of the bride's brothers who didn't know anything about Quakerism and asked. He had heard my wife pray out loud during the wedding and I think he was a bit surprised. He might have had the impression that Quakers didn't do that sort of thing. So he wanted to find out what we were like really. When liberal Friends find themselves in such a situation they are often a bit perplexed. It is common to fall back on some vague stuff about the testimonies or the Inner Light and then to define ourselves negatively as "not fundamentalists." The problem with this is that many people will come away with the impression that we don't stand for much of anything. I don't think that impression is correct. Lately when such situations arise I have been consciously trying to describe Quakerism in clearer and more positive terms. Hence the name of this blog.

One of the issues that did come up was what do you think about Muslims? Like many people he probably thought that if someone was a real Christian then they had to believe that all those Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, etc. were all going to hell. I could tell he was a little confused when I tried to explain that God was within every human heart and that everyone listened to the degree that they were willing and able.

I'm not unhappy with this answer but I would like to expand on it a little more in this space. Affirming that God is real and offers direct guidance to people and that this is the same God whom Jesus called his Father and whom Paul identified with the Risen Christ does not mean that anyone who fails to affirm this is going to hell. It also does not mean that those who do believe this, or say they believe this, are automatically better at listening and obeying that Inner Teacher. In a comment on the previous post, lorcan gives an excellent example of faith. He listened to the prompting of the Spirit who told him to reach out immediately to help the old woman who had taunted him. In that instance he showed the faith of Abraham which Paul says is what saves us. Could the same thing have happened had lorcan been a Muslim or a Buddhist? Of course it could. The main difference is that the Muslim or the Buddhist, while equally faithful, would have describe the event in words they learned in their own tradition.

Words ultimately get their meanings from our experience. A child learns Christian words, or Muslim words or Buddhist words in their religious training but those words at first don't really mean anything to the child. They just trustingly learn to talk the way their elders talk. But some of those children grow up and as their experience of the Spirit deepens those words begin to take on meaning and stop being just rote noises. So while a deep Buddhist or deep Muslim would not describe their experiences in the same words those words come pretty close to meaning the same thing.

So are words important or not? They are important. We need to use them to communicate our experience to each other. I need to be able to use the language that expresses my experiences smoothly and I need to allow you the same freedom to use the words that suits you best. But if we are going to communicate we need to try to get below the words to the experiences that those words are meant to express. And in the depths of the Spirit we experience a loving God who not only does not want to fill hell with Muslims and Buddhists, but has no need of a hell at all.

Forgiveness

2006-09-14T11:17:00.000-07:00

How do we discern the difference between our own whims and fancies and the gentle nudging of the Spirit? Firstly we look to subjective factors. The two feel different and with practice one can get better at noticing how they feel. Secondly, one can lay the supposed leading in front of experienced Friends and ask for confirmation or correction. If the matter is of some importance a clearness committee is appropriate. And thirdly, one looks for Way to open. There will be odd coincidences in one's ordinary life that confirm and emphasize the point.

A while back a nonFriend friend of mine commented that the concept of forgiveness didn't make any sense to him. The person did what they did, it was wrong or it wasn't. How could saying "I forgive you" change anything? I was astounded that he really didn't seem to me to understand this simple idea. "To forgive someone is to agree to treat the person as if they hadn't done you any wrong," said I. As I tried to explain forgiveness to him I found I was getting a little clearer about it myself and noted with a little quiet surprise that I had never thought very hard about it myself. But this nudge of the Spirit sank quietly into my mind and rested there for some time. After a while I began to notice that coincidences were popping up to remind me of the Lord's Prayer. Since Quakers don't recite rote prayers at first I paid little attention. But with several of these reminders popping up repeatedly my attention finally focused on the subtly imbedded command to forgive included in the prayer. Had I really forgiven everyone I should?

I realized that I hadn't thought very much about forgiveness. My life has been pretty quiet and fortunate but over the course of fifty-five years I've gotten poked in the eye a few times by people. Having resolved not to seek to punish those who had hurt me I thought no more of forgiveness. I thought I was clear on the issue. But all these reminders caused me to gradually realize that forgiveness is something deeper and more positive than I had thought--it is not the mere absence of revenge. When we forgo revenge there is still a nasty part of us deeply hidden that would secretly not mind a bit if the guilty party were punished by God or fate for their sins. We won't do it but something in us will stand back and smile if God does. Forgiveness goes deeper than that. We have to be able to ask God not to punish for our sake. We haven't really forgiven until we have asked God to forgive those who have hurt us. Once I had this concept of forgiveness in view, in place of my formerly shallow one, I found myself able to tell God that as far as I was concerned anyone who had ever hurt me was to get a free ride. And to my surprise I found this extended out into the future--hurts yet to come should be forgiven before they should be committed. Some of the Psalms ask God to smite our foes and rejoice when God smites them. I now think that Jesus is asking us to stand utterly defenseless against those who hurt us in this world; not even to rely on God's defense. We must be willing to leave justice completely behind to walk towards the kingdom of heaven. I'm not sure to what extent I am really able to forgive all past, present, and future hurts in this radical sense, but at least I know what I am called to do and I'm willing to try.

The Visit of Mr. Smooth

2006-09-13T11:42:00.000-07:00

The theme of my blog is that liberal Christian Quakers need not be embarassed to talk about what they believe because it is perfectly reasonable. Unlike evangelical Christians who find themselves in conflict with biological science and serious Biblical scholarship, a liberal Christian worldview fits all the findings of modern research without a hitch. Many people don't believe this. They think that science not only proves that Noah didn't ride out a world-wide flood in a home-made boat crowded with moose, mice and kangaroos, it also proves that there is no God and no soul. It proves that everything is made of matter and that the spiritual is just a figure of speech.

On the contrary I say that God is real and offers us constant guidance and advice, which followed lead us step by step into the kingdom of heaven. Why do so many well-educated people think that new evidence makes this wildly implausible? It is because so many of our society's intellectuals have adopted naturalism as their personal philosophy. Everyone who goes to a good university is exposed to this viewpoint, which is typically presented as if it were as scientifically solid as evolution or the theory of relativity. In philosophy classes they will also be exposed to some of the arguments for naturalism and, despite the fact that it was only in Philosophy 101, come away with the impression that these arguments are perfectly solid.

I've personally been obsessed with philosophy for forty years and have made my living teaching it for about thirty of those. I say this not to "pull rank" and suggest that my readers take my philosophical opinions on authority. What I suggest is that you not let any philosophers "pull rank" on you. To this end I tell the story of the Visit of Mr. Smooth.

Mr. Smooth is one of the few public philosophers who you will see on PBS once in a while and whose books you might find while browsing in Barnes and Noble. He is not a "pop" philosopher however, he holds the rank of full professor at a very prestigious university and is the author of many serious philosophical works. He visited our campus a few years back to talk about his most recent book defending naturalism. At the conclusion of his talk, one of my colleagues (how I wish it had been me!) asked him about some material that appeared in the appendix. "The argument there is quite curious," my colleague exclaimed, "it appears to be an admission that a crucial premise of the argument of your book is based on the assumption of XXX. Is that true, or am I misunderstanding you?" "Indeed, it is true," Mr. Smooth explained. "My argument does entirely depend on the assumption of XXX. The reason I put that in the appendix is that I know that almost no philosophers these days think that XXX is true. They are aware of the objections to XXX and think it completely untenable. That is why I stuck it in the appendix. If I had put this in the body of my book then people would not have taken my book seriously."

In my forty years of doing philosophy I have found that all the arguments for naturalism are similarly tissue and straw. They get by in my field because at present the discipline is overwhelmingly full of naturalists who view each other's arguments with a certain amount of professional jealousy but from the standpoint of basic sympathy.

Don't take my word for it that naturalism is supported by smoke and mirrors, but don't take the naturalists word for it either. Before deciding to believe that science has proven that God could not possibly exist take a good, hard, critical look at the arguments.

Of Atheists and Onions

2006-09-08T11:26:00.000-07:00

At yearly meeting a Friend puzzled "why would someone who wasn't a Christian want to be part of this yearly meeting?" My wife, not generally known for excessive timidity, rather forcefully reminded him of the things within the Christian tradition that are offensive like sexism and militarism glorified in parts of the Bible. There is plenty of space in yearly meeting for people with a firm faith in God who have problems accepting Christianity due to all the bad stuff it has been intertwined with.

But it's not so clear what place a committed atheist has in the yearly meeting. Wouldn't it make more sense for them to direct their energies into the Sierra Club or Habitat for Humanity or any one of a number of secular organizations dedicated to peace, justice and charity? Over the years I've pondered about this and decided that I do not want to see the atheists go their own way.

People, and atheists are people, are like onions. There is a conscious layer of their minds which is all they seem to be. But beneath the relatively superficial conscious lever are layer after layer of thoughts and feelings. The Centurian tells Jesus "Lord, I believe help my unbelief." There is belief in his conscious mind but he knows himself well enough and is honest enough to see layers of unbelief below the surface. The sort of person who claims to be an atheist generally means that there is disbelief at the surface of their mind. But just as the centurian had unbelief in the submerged part of the iceberg so too atheists can have belief submerged within them. Indeed the nominal atheists who find themselves so attracted to Quakerism that they cannot bear to be separated from it have, unless I am badly mistaken, rather large portions of their deeper selves tuned to God.

It is faith that leads us to the kingdom of heaven but faith isn't belief, and it certainly isn't identical to the beliefs that float in the shallows of our minds. Paul writes about the faith that justifies being the same faith had by Jesus and by Abraham. Well, neither Jesus nor Abraham affirmed the Nicene Creed or any other theological manifesto. Their faith lay in their willingness to listen to the immediate voice of God and to obey to the best of their ability. Jesus says that he has food that no one can see that sustains him: this "food" is to do the will of the Father.

Can an atheist have such faith? Yes, but it is undoubtedly harder for someone to listen to that voice and obey it when intellectual barriers in their head keep them from believing that it could really be the authentic voice of the Father. Atheists who share our faith ought to be welcome in our meetings. We all have spiritual "hearing problems" and so should be sympathetic and bear each others burdens. Part of learning to see that of God in others includes learning to see the faith in the heart of the nominal atheist. Listen past the words to what lies beneath them--there's actually a lot of faith in some of these so-called atheists.

There are atheists however whose lack of faith runs deeper than the superficial conscious levels of the mind. These deep atheists will scoff at the faith of others and being in their presence is uncomfortable. But such folk are rarely attracted to Quakerism as far as I can see.

The Bottom Line

2006-09-01T06:47:00.000-07:00

My wife woke me up this morning to tell me that the eye of Tropical Storm Ernesto was right overhead and the roof was leaking. The day got better. The water was coming in from a small space between the roof and a vent pipe. The bottom half of Ernesto was dry so we could expect more wind but the rain was pretty much over. Also the university closed down for the day.

In philosophy I would describe myself as a moderate pragmatist and an antireductionist. In simplified terms this means that I think the world is infinitely complex and that hence there is not one but many different true theories about the world. Rational choice among the many true theories (we don't want to choose false theories) is guided by considerations of utility. Our actions are guided by our beliefs and true beliefs work better than false beliefs. But not all systems of true beliefs work equally well. Our attention needs to focus on those truths that are most useful. Keep your eye on the bottom line and don't waste your time on the true but trivial.

By their fruits you will know them. As I read them both Jesus and the Buddha had a keen sense of what was spiritually important and what was distracting trivia. Before we distinguish the spiritual wheat from the chaff we have to have at least some vague idea of the bottom line. What would count as a good outcome? Paul gives some very specific practical things to look for. He doesn't just say "love" he gets much more specific. Love is patient and kind and not boastful arrogant, rude, irritable, resentful or pushy. In another place he says we can look for: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. And look for the absence of fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkeness, carousing and the like. Modern Friends might want to edit and update these lists a bit but the point is still sound.

Beliefs and practices which consistently render people more patient, joyful and kind and less angry, pushy and arrogant are the "keepers." Beliefs and practices that don't have these effects are useless.

When the early Quakers looked at people who professed to be Christian they saw a lot of people who seemed to be making no progress at all in these terms. Men went to universities and got degrees in divinity and positions as priests or bishops and their lives and character showed them to be spiritually bankrupt. Early Friends, by direct experience of the people they knew well, found that simpler beliefs and practices had the power to transform lives that conventional Christianity lacked. The looked at the Anglican Church and asked "how's that working for you?" and walked away from it. Many people come to Quakerism today from other churches after having looked at them and found them wanting. But many are looking at their own monthly meetings and getting the feeling that there isn't much spiritual power there either.

One disadvantage of modern times is how transient we are. People move in and out of our lives with dizzying frequency. As a consequence it is much harder for us to see whether there is a transformative power at work in their lives because real transformation goes pretty slow most of the time. Many of our contacts with other people are too fleeting and superficial for us to know what's going on within their souls.

But this transformation is the bottom line and Christocentric language isn't transformative in and of itself. I think we, individually and corporately, need to ask what is essential to turning on this transformative power. Here is my answer. Faith in and obedience to a personal God who knows my concrete situation and offers me specific advice on how to deal with my unique life is critical. Relying on my own intellect to figure things out doesn't work. Fox put the point in Christocentric language "Christ has come to lead his people." The Christocentric language isn't essential but relying on the leadership of a Divine Friend is.

A Brief Pause

2006-08-28T13:17:00.000-07:00

I've been writing a lot on this blog lately but I am likely to slow down significantly in the next few weeks. Our department has two final tenure decisions and four promotion decisions to make before the end of September and I've been chosen to chair ALL the committees.

When I do return I will try to write more on Christianity and exclusivism. Here's just a word or two for now.

Philosophers of religion identify three positions that a religious person might take with regard to other religions. The first is exclusivism. This says that my religion is right and is the way to salvation (or enlightenment or whatever the goal is) and all other religions are wrong and are not the way to salvation. The second is inclusivism. This says that my religion is the most correct and the best way to salvation but other religions possess significant truths too and salvation is possible for their adherents. The third is pluralism. This says that my religion is true and is a way to salvation but other religions are equally true and valuable. While we think of Christianity as exclusivist, and fundamentalists are exclusivist by and large, it need not be. For example the famous Catholic theologian Karl Rahner was an inclusivist. However, I find Christian pluralism to be the most interesting position and will try to show how it does make sense and why Quakers should be interested in it.

Subtle is the Lord

2006-08-25T12:16:00.000-07:00

I'm now going to begin writing brief posts about all the major reasons Quakers have for not exploring their Christian roots. This one will be the most like a college lecture. If it's not to your taste don't worry about that. This post is about an intellectual's solution to a problem that only intellectuals find bothersome.

There is a general impression that people have that modern science simply leaves no room for God. First, I will explain the substance behind that impression. The problem really resides in physics not biology. This is all about Newton not Darwin. Newton's system was impressive because it was universal--it was applicable to objects on earth and in the sky--and it was deterministic--if you knew the relevant masses and velocities only one exact result was possible. Newton's laws of nature were air-tight. In our commonsense experience the world is a very chancy place--lots of things are possible. But with Newton it begins to appear that this is an illusion. We only fail to predict what will happen because we do not know enough about the distributions of matter and energy in the present. In reality the only thing that can happen is what does happen. Natural law has no loopholes. The prior state of a material system determines the subsequent state of that system. Everything is determined down to the tiniest wiggle of an atom. There is no room for God or the soul to gain any traction in the material world.

In the older more natural way of viewing the world God could make people sick or make them well; he could make it rain or cause a drought. He could be just another agent in a world full of possibilities. Now once God has created a world such as the one we are in all he can do is stand back and watch. Meanwhile science marches on. Unexplained natural phenomena get explained within this general framework of physical law. At the dawn of the 20th century intellectuals were confidently predicting that soon everything would be explicable within this framework.

Then, rather suddenly, the bottom fell out of this world picture. Quantum mechanics comes along and wipes determinism out at the level of the smallest things and replaces this with probabilities. The old picture is then turned on its head. Instead of a Newtonian world that is actually deterministic and only appears full of openness and possibility the opposite is the case. The macroscopic world appears deterministic because it is composed of so many little probabilistic things. Reality is probabilistic and open; the world is deterministic only in appearance.

Since prior states of physical systems only determine probable outcomes logical space opens up for things outside the system--God or the human will--to determine which of the outcomes compatible with natural law shall be actualized. So we have in a sense come full circle. Originally humans believed that the natural world was dense with possibility and open to nonphysical agency. During the Newtonian period of almost exactly two centuries the world seemed to lose its openness to possibility. Now beginning with the 20th century possibility reemerges and with it room for God to operate.

In this new intellectual world now about a century old there is room for God to operate subtly. Tweaking an atom here and there and relying on the butterfly effect large macroscopic events can be manipulated invisibly from the bottom of nature without any colorful "parting of the Red Sea" theatrics. Jungian synchonicities or "Way opening" no longer have to be matters of "mere coincidence" or the projection of our subjective hopes. Subtle is the Lord.

A God Worth Believing in

2006-08-24T07:06:00.000-07:00

Before I begin responding to the reasons (six or maybe seven) that thoughtful modern people have for rejecting Christianity I will discuss briefly various conceptions of God. The first point that requires a bit of emphasis is that people, when they are not speaking carefully, will often slide back and forth between talking about God and talking about various concepts of God. Too often real confusion is the result.

There is a big difference between water and ideas about water. There is a big difference between Mr. Smith and anyone's ideas about Smith. Most prescientific people thought that water was an element, but in fact it is a compound. Or suppose that everyone thinks Smith is a vicious murderer when in fact he is innocent. Ideas should not be confused with the objects those ideas are about. When we speak of fictional characters, like Sherlock Holmes, then perhaps there is little point in making this distinction since only want to talk about the idea. So people who believe that God is fictional may see little point in distinguishing between God and our human concepts of God.

The conflict between science and religion actually predates the theory of evolution. In the 18th century Newtonian science seemed to preclude God's active involvement in the world and Deism became a popular option among the well-educated liberals of the day. God could create the world but after that it was strictly hands off. Having created the world he had to step back and watch it run its course. A God that is thus removed from all real contact with the world, who is rendered strangely impotent, seemed not worth believing in to some and all we could rationally hope to believe in to others. In order to avoid conflict with science even more bloodless and abstract notions of God have been adopted. God as an impersonal ground of Being totally unaware of our existence; God as the totality of matter and energy in the universe; God as a symbol of what is best in human beings. The problem with these concepts is not that it's difficult to believe that these beings exist. The problem is that their existence doesn't make any difference to our lives.

It seems to me that it is not profitable to discuss the existence of God if "God" is defined in such a way that wouldn't particularly matter whether or not he existed. Paul encountered something on the road to Damascus and it interacted with him. Jesus spoke as if he knew the Father personally and interacted with. Fox could testify that Christ had come to lead his people. The common element in all this is an experience with a living God who is directly active in people's lives. I don't see why we should be interested in less of a God than that.

The Many Reasons Why People Reject Christianity

2006-08-23T12:34:00.000-07:00

There are many reasons why people reject Christianity. Different reasons carry weight with different people. Exclusivism is one problem. The idea that Buddhists are wrong and as a consequence are all going to hell bothers many. Another problem is the conflict with science. The media will often say that "Christians" reject evolution and favor Creationism instead. Related to this one is the idea that science in general, rather than biology in particular, is opposed to God. The idea is that the God hypothesis was useful when we were mostly ignorant of how the world worked. Now that science has filled in the gaps there is no room left for God. Another, one that gets less attention than it deserves, is the revolutionary impact of objective Biblical scholarship. Another problem (one which has always bothered my wife a great deal) is the sexism that pervades the Bible and much of Christian practice. Another problem is that many modern people are turned off by the ideas of sin and hell. Each of these problems hits fundamentalist Christianity very hard and liberal Christianity gets tarred with guilt by association. Here's the handy summary list:

1. Exclusivism
2. Conflict with biology
3. Natural science leaves no room for the supernatural
4. Serious Biblical scholarship
5. Sexism, racism, militarism and all the other bad isms
6. The negativity of sin and hell

I am trying to keep these posts short and focused. Trying to deal with several issues at once often confuses more than it clarifies. The point of THIS post is simply to list the biggest problems without offering solutions to any of them. It is also to invite my readers--few in number but mighty in spirit--to add problems to this list. What am I leaving out? And which should I deal with next?

Anger on the Quaker Blogosphere

2006-08-22T06:45:00.000-07:00

I'm still quite new to the Quaker blogosphere, both posting and in reading the posts of others. I've been sampling some of the blogs flagged by Quakerquaker. What strikes me is how much Quakers like to argue with each other. Posts with anger and accusation get by far the most comments. I find this disappointing. It is the world's way, Friends. Quakers traditionally did not use words to batter each other into submission. Truth emerges out of the silence. A quiet understated answer after much waiting and listening is the way that our tradition teaches.

Where there is anger there is always pain. If we respond to anger in a natural and worldly way we will fight fire with fire. Anger will provoke anger. But if we wait and go deeper we will perceive the pain that motivates the hurtful accusations. And we are called by Christ to absorb these blows in Christian humility and respond with charity.

In these posts I've deliberately tried to avoid getting autobiographical but I should make this admission. I've got a sharp tongue myself and the advice I'm giving here is hard for me to follow.

Between Intolerance and Shallowness

2006-08-21T07:25:00.000-07:00

Quakerism is undoubtedly a religious movement with its roots in the Christian tradition. But it is also a movement which rejected parts of that tradition. Today Quakers are struggling with that tradition. There is a feeling among many that liberal Quakerism has gotten too far from its Christian roots and in consequence is losing something of great value. Others disagree and distrust any return to our roots. We are better off, they think, for having left Christianity behind. Friends have been through this before. Those with some historical perspective are wary of opening up this issue. They recall the Hicksite-Orthodox division which occurred over just this issue of how Christian Quakers should remain.

I understand the concern but fear of division should not paralyze us. Friends, we need to talk.

The biggest barrier that liberal Friends have with exploring their Christian roots is that they associate Christianity with exclusiveness. Indeed we are surrounded by people in this culture who identify themselves as Christians and plainly say that Christianity teaches that all Christians go to heaven and all non-Christians go to hell. Since this is what "Christianity" means to many people it is no wonder that liberal Friends want no part of it. If Christianity is essentially intolerant then recovering more of our Christian roots would mean becoming at least a little more intolerant. The move back to a more Christian Quakerism would be a move in the wrong direction. (Those who are new to these pages may want to read the earlier posts.)

Why do some Friends feel that exploring our Christian roots would be a good thing? What do these more conservative liberals think is missing in many liberal meetings? While I realize it may be hurtful to say so, I must put this into words. We feel that what is lacking is depth. Recognizing "that of God" in other religious traditions--whether it be Tibetan Buddhism or Native American sweatlodges--is a good thing but deep experience requires steady single-minded devotion. Those who spend decades following a Buddhist path or immersing themselves in Native American culture sometimes look at outsiders who show interest in their traditions as mere spiritual tourists. It would be quite unfair to imply that all Quakers who take an interest in non-Christian traditions do so as tourists. I know some who have devoted very significant amounts of time and effort and have gone deep and learned much. But there is no denying that a smattering of this and a hint of that is ultimately unsatisfying. God is only found by going deep.

This is why many liberal Friends want to return to their Christian roots. They sense that a sincere exploration of the Christian tradition in depth will yield the kind of fruit that a superficial exploration of many traditions fails to produce.

What I Believe

2006-08-18T07:37:00.000-07:00

I won't speak for anybody else but I do think that what I believe is in line with what many liberal but not too liberal Quakers now and in the past have thought. Here it is.

There is a God. He is real and active in the world and in us. He is willing to provide concrete guidance in our lives and he assures us that we can, with his help, live into the New Creation.

This isn't much. It's pretty simple. Why do I think these things are true? Personal experience, my own and that of others I have known over the years. Do these simple truths make any concrete difference--yes.

In previous posts I contrasted Quaker theology with the more conservative forms of Christian belief, especially Calvinist and Catholic. Now I want to distinguish what I believe from the beliefs of those at the extreme liberal edge of Christianity. These extreme liberals dispense even with the minimal beliefs I've outlined above. They hold fast to the Golden Rule and the corollaries I talked about in the last post while rejecting the idea that God has any kind of independent reality. For simplicity we can call this view: Atheism plus the Golden Rule.

So long as you love your neighbor as yourself what difference does it make if you believe in God or not? This is a very reasonable question. Trying to walk this walk on your own without any Divine assistance is very, very hard. The Golden Rule is quite simple but applying it in the hurly-burly of real life is not. Yes, I know I should love my neighbor as myself but how am I to do that with this particular "neighbor" who stands in front of me at this particular moment? Does he need a gentle word of encouragement or a firm kick in the butt? If there is a real God who is different from me, then he knows the correct answer and is willing to tell me. I know from experience that I am often not smart or perceptive enough to figure it out on my own. But if there is no God then I am truly on my own. Secondly, the number of "neighbors" and the depth of their needs is emotionally overwhelming for anyone who takes this commandment seriously. If I did not believe in God, I would be crushed by the recognition of how great is the need of my "neighbors" and how small is my power to help them. Depression and despair lurk in such thoughts. But if God is real, then there will be very specific needs of very particular "neighbors" that it is my special responsibility to address. THIS is my leading and all the other worthy causes are NOT my leading. Recognizing that God is great allows me to accept that I am small.

These simple beliefs about God do make a difference.

Is the Golden Rule enough theology?

2006-08-17T10:32:00.000-07:00

In previous posts I explored some of the varieties of Christian belief. When the Protestant Reformation hit, Christians who were more conservative than the Catholic Church (like Luther and Calvin) broke off and formed their own churches while Christians who were more liberal than the Catholic Church (like the Quakers and the Anabaptists) did likewise.

Today conservative Protestant theology is active, well-organized and vocal. They have their own television stations, universities, publishing houses and political organizations. The voice of liberal Christians is much harder to hear these days.

What can we say for ourselves? Is it enough to say that we are not Calvinists, we do not believe that God automatically sends Buddhists to hell, we do not believe that evolution is "just a theory"? Surely we can say these things, but defining ourselves as NOT Fundamentalists isn't to say what we do believe.

Most liberal Christians will go beyond these negatives and insist on one cental truth: we must love our neighbor as ourselves. This is indeed a central point and worth emphasizing. Liberal Christians will also draw some corollaries from this central truth. Everyone should be treated with respect. This includes women. This includes those who are not white or American. This includes the poor. Violence should not be resorted to so readily. Wealth should be shared. Future generations should not be born into a ravaged earth. Holding to this central truth and its corollaries is good and is quite enough for some people. Walking this walk is enough challenge for many of us.

So is the Golden Rule enough theology? Many have the nagging feeling that it is not enough. After all, people who not only reject traditional Christianity but reject all forms of spirituality as outdated superstition, can and sometimes do firmly believe in the Golden Rule and try to live their lives in the light of this fundamental truth. Do Liberal Christians differ in any significant way from ethical atheists?

Quaker theology is not given to elaborate detail the way that Calvinist theology is, but it does have something significant to add to the Golden Rule which makes it different from ethical atheism. But more on that in the next post.

Theology Lite

2006-08-16T07:07:00.000-07:00

Everybody has a philosophy. That is to say, everyone has beliefs about who they are, what they are and their place in the universe. For some people these beliefs are very detailed and complicated, but for most people they are rather simple. Theology, beliefs about God, are part of everyone's personal philosophy even if what they believe about God is that there isn't one.

The various Christian churches have developed theologies that often run to hundreds of pages of text. Calvinists and Catholics each have their own contrasting heavy theologies. Liberal Christian theology, by contrast, has always been and continues to be comparatively light on detail. There are several reasons for this. One is that heavy theologies divide people and liberal Christians dislike such divisiveness. Secondly, both Calvinism and the Catholic Church have professional hierarchies and having a heavy theology is a way for those elites to maintain their superiority over their inferiors--their "flocks." Liberal Christians, especially Quakers, have minimized the professionalization of religion. Seeking God should be left to amateurs. Turning it into a business is really a very bad idea. Thirdly, tying salvation to faith and interpreting faith as "right belief" naturally tends to involve one in arguments about precisely what one needs to believe. Finally, Quakers and some other more democratically minded Christian groups emphasized actual personal experience over theory. Since our experience of the Divine is pretty intangible--we see as in a glass darkly--honesty ought to keep what we can say about God within some pretty humble bounds.

So the theology of Friends naturally and properly tends to be personal and simple. And that is all to the good. However, I think liberal Quakers of the modern age have gone a wee bit too far in this direction. Often Friends find themselves virtually tongue-tied when asked: what do you believe? They find themselves saying that they don't believe what Catholics or Calvinists believe, but such negative answers are felt as empty.

Modern Friends need a Theology Lite (More Spiritual; Less Dogmatic than Regular Theology!) We need to be able to articulate what we do believe without getting into needless, divisive distinctions not grounded in actual spiritual experience.

Theology Left and Right

2006-08-15T10:53:00.000-07:00

In the previous post I commented that many people think that all Christian theology is like what they hear from the Christian right. I want to add a little more in this post about the major differences to be found within Christian theology.

The most central issue in Christian theology is salvation. Luther broke from Catholic orthodoxy by proclaiming that salvation is by faith alone. The Catholics countered that faith is important but that faith without works is dead. To understand the differences among Christians it is necessary to focus on the concepts of faith and salvation and ask what exactly they mean.

Even though no serious thinker takes a simple-minded view of the relation of faith, works and salvation, nevertheless it helps to orient the reader by presenting three oversimplified views just to establish some landmarks.

At the extreme right there is that view that faith equals the belief that Jesus is the Christ and that he died for our sins. Believing this amounts to accepting the gift of salvation. There is nothing we can do to earn salvation or to produce this belief-state in ourselves. Everyone is born a sinner and as a sinner deserves eternal damnation. But God grants an absolute pardon to those who believe in His Son. There is nothing anyone can do to earn this pardon. There is nothing anyone can do to produce the appropriate belief-state in oneself that results in the pardon. God chooses those who will believe and is not influenced in this choice by any efforts humans make to be good. The choice is entirely arbitrary.

In the center is the Catholic view that our efforts to be good make us more receptive to faith. And our choices to do evil can lead to a loss of faith. In addition faith is strengthened by rituals and sacraments. Attending Mass, receiving Holy Communion, confessing sins to a priest, are all objective physical actions that produce grace in a person and aid them in their progress towards salvation.

At the exteme left is the idea that salvation is a reward for good behavior. Believing the right things or participating in the right rituals has little or nothing to do with salvation.

As I said above all three of these descriptions are oversimplifications, but they provide useful landmarks. Early Quakers rejected the Calvinist view decisively. They did not think that faith was entirely or even primarily a matter of believing the right things about God. Instead they were much more concerned to see faith in action. To put it bluntly, if a person didn't walk the walk, then no matter how eloquently and passionately they talked the talk they were full of bullshit. George Fox got beaten up for walking into churches and voicing more or less this opinion time and again. I think if he were alive today he'd express similar thoughts to many on the Religious Right.

And early Friends also rejected the Catholic idea that one can receive grace by participating in external rites and rituals. Water baptism, taking bread and wine, annointing of the sick and dying, these were all rejected as mere symbols that the naive interpret as spiritual realities.

Today many liberal Friends opt for something like the third view. Indeed early Friends' views were closer to that third option than to the other two, but what they really thought was more complex and more traditionally Christian than my oversimplification. More on that later.

The Myth of Christian Orthodoxy

2006-08-12T08:00:00.000-07:00

A lot of people talk about orthodox Christian belief. It doesn't exist. There was such a thing as orthodox Christian belief that begins about the time of Constantine and lasts until Martin Luther challenged the authority of Rome and survived. But before and after this long stretch of time orthodoxy simply does not exist.

It is useful to point this out because "orthodox Christian belief" (or "traditional Christian belief" or "authentic Christianity" or the equivalent) serves as a debating tool. One way the term is used is to identify MY beliefs as orthodox and YOURS as something else. This serves, in some quarters, as a substitute for giving any reason why my belief is right and yours is wrong. This trades on the presumed equivalence of "orthodox" and "right." This is a familiar enough debaters trick.

This trick has a mirror image. Those who want to reject any form of Christian belief will run the trick in the opposite direction. Step One: "Christian orthodoxy" is presumed wrong. This is accomplished by talking about an old man in the sky with a long white beard and making scathing references to Noah's ark and with the idea that all non-Christians go to hell. Step Two: one identifies all Christian thought with "Christian orthodoxy." Now there is no need to pay attention to the details of what any self-identified Christian has to say. Whatever he or she thinks it's "orthodoxy" and orthodoxy is obviously wrong.

Clearing the air of debating tricks is sometimes helpful in getting a serious dialogue going. Before the organization of early Christianity into what became known as the Catholic Church self-professed Christians believed all sorts of things. (Just go back and read Paul's letters with this in mind for a start.) During the long period from the fall of Rome to the Protestant Reformation the Catholic Church defined orthodoxy and enforced its understanding. But even in this period orthodoxy represented a RANGE of acceptable views not a monolithic theology. There was always active debate going on within the Catholic Church with various theologians trying to push the envelope in one direction or another. Indeed Luther originally was just one of those Catholic theologians pushing the envelope in one particular direction. Being somewhat fanatical in disposition he pushed so hard that he provoked the authorities. But instead of simply getting burned at the stake he found allies among the German princes jealous of Italian power and orthodoxy ceased to exist.

For Quakers it is important to understand that theological ideas that challenged Catholic orthodoxy were not all of the sort espoused by Luther and Calvin. If we call the Luther-Calvin challenge to Catholic orthodoxy a push in the direction of "right-wing Christian theology" (the term is anachronistic but I think it is helpful to people living in our times) we need to remember that there was also a push in the direction of "left-wing Christian theology" represented by the Anabaptists. Quakerism is a revolt from Rome that pushes the envelope in a direction opposite to Calvinism.

This is worth emphasizing because modern day evangelical Christianity has adopted a strongly Calvinistic theology. Many liberal Quakers think that any attempt to recover Christian theological language must be a move in the direction of Calvinism. A real return to Quaker Christian roots would never take us to Calvinism.