Thanksgiving
July 29, 2013 § 6 Comments
New York Yearly Meeting Summer Sessions 2013
I attended the Summer Sessions of New York Yearly Meeting last week and a lot of things came up that I want to talk about. Because I attended as staff (I am the communications director), I was too busy to post entries during the Sessions, so I plan to post them over the next few weeks. They have no organizing theme, except that events at Sessions prompted them all, so I am applying to them a Category tag of NYYM Summer Sessions 2013.
The theme of this year’s Sessions was “Keeping Faith: Answering that of God in All Creation”. Our plenary speaker was Freida J. Jacques, who is the Clanmother of the Turtle Clan of the Onondaga Nation of the Haudenosaunee (hoe´-de-nō-SHOW-nay), the People of the Longhouse, known more popularly to European Americans as the League of the Iroquois. The Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy live in the Finger Lakes region of New York State. The original Five Nations were the Mohawk, the Cayuga, the Onondaga, the Oneida, and the Seneca. In 1712, the Tuscarora, an Iroquois-speaking nation from North Carolina, petitioned the Haudenosaunee for membership, were accepted, and they soon migrated to New York State.
Freida Jacques spoke on the Doctrine of Discovery (see Doctrine of Discovery.org), which New York Yearly Meeting repudiated in a minute approved at our Fall Sessions 2012 (see the factsheet and New York Yearly Meeting’s minute). She also talked about the Two-Row Wampum Renewal Campaign: 2013 is the 400th anniversary of this treaty between the Haudenosaunee and the Dutch, establishing an agreement that the two peoples would travel down the river of life side by side, in peace and mutual respect of each other’s traditions. As part of the renewal campaign, a flotilla of canoes and other craft are right now travelling down the Hudson River and will land on August 9 on the East River in Manhattan near the United Nations headquarters. From there the participants will go to the UN for a presentation. Freida also told the extraordinary story of the Great Law of Peace, the Haudenosaunee’s name for the constitution of their confederacy (see the Wikipedia entry for a brief introduction and the text of the Great Law).
Freida began her presentation with her people’s Thanksgiving Address (see here for a video of one version of the address). In the Iroquois Thanksgiving Address, you give thanks to all of the beings and elements and other spiritual presences around us. This is not a prayer of worship to the four-legged people and winged people, and the waters and the winds, and Mother Earth, etc. It is an expression of thanks to them for doing the jobs that the Creator gave them and for all the gifts that they give to us two-leggeds.
All Haudenosaunee events begin with the Thanksgiving Address. I have been to several and each person giving the address does it her or his own way. I have known it to last 45 minutes. I have been told that at ceremonial events, it might take several hours. The poet Gary Snyder has written a very abbreviated version.
After all this prologue, here is what I have to say in this post:
Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving is the very soul of indigenous peoples’ spiritways. It has almost no place at all in the Christian and Quaker way. Why is this so?
Instead of thanks for the contributions of all other creatures and earth processes and the elements of mother earth, we have the doctrine of discovery and the doctrine of dominion. Thanksgiving is built into the very structure of the religions of the First Nations of Turtle Island, and this includes a spiritually vital and intimate relationship with place—a religious culture of place. Christianity and Quakerism are cosmic and universalist, in that we speak of “the earth”, rather than of our landbase or bioregion, in our prayers, our theology, and our rituals, and our practice is virtually the same wherever we are, irrespective of our place.
Many Christian and some Liberal Quaker families give thanks over meals. That’s about it. Our liturgies may or may not include thanksgiving. It is not in any way central, or essential, or even habitual in our religious practice. Most yearly meetings have only relatively recently included testimonies on earthcare in their books of discipline and these often do not even mention thanksgiving. New York Yearly Meeting’s Faith and Practice (for which I am more than partly responsible) does not mention thanksgiving at all.
I suspect that this is because of the Christian dread of paganism and of the worship of the Powers of the earth. Because of the theology of sin, beginning with the belief in a Fall in which nature—an animal, a fruit, and a woman—are the sources of all sin and suffering, which leads to a fear of the spiritual power of nature and of its “temptations”. And because of the overwhelming focus on sin, a negative worldview that sees the basic human condition as broken and that reorients any thankfulness we might feel toward the source of sin’s salvation; that is, toward Jesus Christ and his Father the judge. And because of the resulting focus on the spiritual goal of noncarnal existence in a nonphysical heaven. This stands in contrast to a worldview oriented toward the positive gifts in material life, toward their sources in the world, and toward the Creator who provides them.
This blindness to the gifts of the earth and the gift-giving of its Creator, this pernicious self-centeredness and pathological worldview, this lameness of heart, lays a chasm—an obstacle of absence—between us and an earthcare that is deeply spirit-led. It has taken us two thousand years to find our way across, despite the prophetic ministries of Saint Francis, Hildegard of Bingen, and others, and of Jesus the Christ himself, whose own spiritual practice was deeply rooted in the landscape and ecology of his landbase of Palestine (more about this in later posts).
I felt inspired by Freida Jacques’s address and her attitude of gratitude. I felt ashamed of my own smallness of heart and my own people’s thanklessness.
A short history of the gathered meeting
July 18, 2013 § 17 Comments
On July 8, Bill Rushby wrote this in his comment on my post on The gathered meeting and Jesus the Christ—some questions:
I think there are important questions that are being missed here. In discussing this blog, we have moved off into “rabbit trails” concerning the theological basis of Quakerism.
No one here has offered an explication of the concept of “gathered meeting”. And, at least in this blog and discussion, the origins of this idea have yet to be probed. It would be useful to narrate some specific experiences of gathered meetings, both in the ministers’ (and other) journals/memoirs and in the personal recollection of the parties to this discussion. The theological context of these experiences would also be relevant.
I have been trying to explicate the gathered meeting in terms of experience and testing early Friends’ testimony that the gathered meeting has its origins, as an experience rather than as an idea, in Christ. I have been trying to square their testimony, which I believe, and their experience, which I trust, with my own. And I was just about to start a series that does describe my own experiences with the gathered meeting. Some other commenters have done this along the way, as well.
My approach so far is something of a departure for me. Usually I start a project like this with research and then try to make that concrete. This time, I’ve started with concrete experience and haven’t done any research, though all along my intellectual temperament has has lured back into the realm of ideas and the whole thing has been an exercise in theology.
I do think that the “idea” of the gathered meeting came from scripture, as did almost all the “ideas” of early Friends. And I’ve said already that I suspect that Matthew 18:20 is the original source for the idea, though I believe there are others. I remember Bill Taber mentioning Acts 15 in this regard, the so-called Council of Jerusalem, in which the disciples decide whether to accept Paul’s mission to the Gentiles. And, as I note below, there’s Matthew 23:37. But in fact, I don’t really know where this idea came from for sure, or, just as interesting to me, when Friends began using the phrase “gathered meeting”.
Still, Bill’s comment reminds me that I have covered some of the ground he seems to be looking for already in an article I wrote for the January 2013 issue of Spark, New York Yearly Meeting’s print journal, titled simply The Gathered Meeting. It’s too long to publish in this blog, except in installments and I don’t know if I want to do that. You can read it by following the link above. But I do want to excerpt at least one section of it, headed A Short History of the Gathered meeting. Here it is:
The gathered meeting runs as the essential thread of spiritual ignition in our tradition. This began with the original gathering experience of Jesus’ early followers. It reemerged in the birth of the Quaker movement, and in it Quakerism has found its Guide ever since.
The first recorded gathered meeting in our root tradition was the baptism of Jesus, in which all assembled shared a psychic experience of God’s revelation in some way. This continued in the event we call the transfiguration, in which Peter, James, and John were all caught up with Jesus in a vision of Moses and Elijah. Whatever else those events were, they were gathered meetings for worship in which Jesus and his friends were all gathered up into a shared religious experience. The defining example of a gathered meeting in our root tradition was Pentecost, in which several thousand were converted to the Way that Jesus taught in a manifestation of the Spirit through the apostles’ vocal ministry shortly after Jesus’ death.
The term gathered meeting comes, I suspect, from several passages in Christian scripture, and especially, from Jesus’ teaching in the gospel of Matthew, chapter 18, on how to elder wayward members. It ends with this promise: “wherever two or three are gathered in my name, there am I also.” This promise is the foundation of Quaker worship, and especially, of Quaker meeting for business in worship.
The first recorded gathered meeting in our Quaker tradition was the fulfillment of George Fox’s vision on Pendle Hill of a “great people to be gathered” (see note below)—the convincement of the Seekers at Firbank Fell in 1652, the initiation of the Spirit that jump-started our movement. The journal of George Fox and of many other early Friends and continuing through all the periods of Quakerism into at least the middle of the 19th century are full of descriptions of meetings that were covered by the Holy Spirit and “the power of The Lord.” (“The power of the Lord was over all” was their way of saying that a meeting was so overflowing with the Holy Spirit that some Friends quaked.)
Note: I wonder whether Matthew 23:37 may have been on George Fox’s mind when he saw “a great people to be gathered” in his vision on Pendle Hill at the beginning of his ministry: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her brood under her wings.” A number of other biblical passages use gathering in the harvested grain or the flocks as metaphors for the final judgment, and these may also have informed early Quaker use of the word “gathered”; examples include: Matthew 12:30, 13:30, 24:31, 25:26, 31-32, and Luke 3:17.
The gathered meeting and Jesus the Christ—some questions
July 5, 2013 § 24 Comments
A couple of commenters a while back raised the question of why I have focused so much on the Christ as the gatherer of the gathered meeting. The answer is that I don’t really know why. Or rather, that this is the direction in which I’ve been led, all unexpected. I have not been systematic in my approach to this series. Rather, I have been following trains of thought and publishing them when they seemed seasoned enough.
I have explored ways in which I feel that the consciousness of the gathered meeting corresponds to the glimpses we get in Christian scripture of the consciousness of the Christ, which has led me to speculate about the Christ as consciousness. In this regard, I can say that I believe we are “gathered in Christ” when we find ourselves in the gathered meeting, though I have not directly experienced Christ in that way.
So Friends in all ages have said of the gathered meeting, that they were “gathered in Christ”. But how exactly does the Christ “gather” a meeting? On the surface, this looks like a question that can only lead to what early Friends called “notions”, airy speculation that is, at best, only a shadow of the truth. But for theistic Friends, for whom this talk of consciousness misses the point, that Jesus the Christ is a distinct divine person active in the world and in our lives and in our meetings and capable of relationship, not some vague “consciousness”, then the question of how Christ gathers a meeting seems to me more than just a diversion.
Presumably, if he exists (and I believe he does) and he is present in the meeting, and the worshippers sense his presence, then some kind of “hub and spoke” connection gets made between the Christ and the individual worshippers. But what about the “rim”? How does the presence of the Christ enable the worshippers to sense each other in a gathered meeting? For this is one of the signature characteristics of the gathered meeting.
The answer might be that the Christ acts as a conduit for communication between worshippers, that our consciousnesses flow through the Christ as the hub of a wheel, as it were, and then on out to the other worshippers along the “rim”, to whom he is present also. To use a cybernetic analogy, we communicate with each other through the Christ much as computers communicate with each other through the server in a computer network.
The Christ consciousness serves the worshipping community as the medium through which we become spiritually present to each other. (I am tempted to explore John 15 along these lines: “I am the vine, you are the branches”; or John 14: “I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you.”)
But I have reverted to my consciousness language again. This, as I said, may not satisfy the more theistic Friends among us, who, I suspect, focus more on communion with Christ than they do on communion with each other. They may have no such speculative and metaphysical approach to a “Christ consciousness” in the gathered meeting, but are satisfied simply to say that Christ gathers us and leave it at that.
I think I feel encouraged to pursue this consciousness angle because I have no direct experience of the Christ as the gatherer of the gathered meetings I’ve experienced. Moreover, I am hungry for more; the gathered meeting is all too rare among us these days. So I am seeking for ways to improve our chances of being gathered. I am looking for elements of both faith and practice that might foster the gathered meeting.
And I suspect that Christ is one of the key factors of faith. I can hear my Christian readers saying to themselves, no, Christ is THE key, the indispensable factor. But isn’t this just a confession of faith? Where is the evidence? Are there not gathered meetings in which no one experiences the Christ? Certainly, one does not have to believe in a divine Jesus Christ to experience the gathered meeting. So, in terms of actual experience, it’s not clear that a traditional faith in Christ is necessary. But that doesn’t mean that the Christ isn’t necessary.
In fact, I am inclined to agree that Christ is key. As I have said, I believe that Jesus the Christ actually exists, though I have not experienced him as such myself. Thus my own experience leads me to relax and expand my understanding of who and what the Christ is to explain what actually happens. This exploration of consciousness is part of my effort to do that.
I guess I’m evangelizing a new way to think about Christ. How did I end up here?
Through the Flaming Sword 