December | 2013 | Through the Flaming Sword

A ministry of encouragement

December 31, 2013 § 2 Comments

Robin M’s recent post really spoke to me:

“So if Quakerism and Quakers are just going to be discouraging, what are we supposed to do? The answer is perseverance. . . . ”

http://robinmsf.blogspot.com/2013/12/a-ministry-of-encouragement_30.html?m=0

What is the Religious Society of Friends for? — Corporate Spiritual Nurture

December 29, 2013 § 4 Comments

I’ve written quite a bit already about the next items in my outline of What the Religious Society of Friends is for—the role of the community in nurturing the spiritual lives of its members and attenders. I want to revisit some of those themes here and to expand on them to include more of the corporate worship life and fellowship of the meeting itself. Here’s the excerpt from the outline:

What is the Religious Society of Friends for? — Spiritual nurture in covenantal community: Engage in each other’s spiritual growth through a robust and nurturing culture of eldership; protect the communal fellowship and the community’s worship.

Take responsibility for the corporate side of personal spiritual nurture; that is, work together to name each other’s gifts and discern and support each other’s ministry.

By “covenantal community” I mean a meeting in which the members invite the meeting to actively participate in their spiritual lives and offer their own active participation in the life of the meeting. In concrete terms, this means:

Sharing your spiritual and religious experience with the meeting. Does anyone in your meeting know what your spiritual practice is? How you came to Quakerism? Why you stay? What you want from the meeting and whether you are getting it? If you were going through a crisis or a dry period in your prayer life, your family life, your work life, your creative life, would your meeting know? If you were facing an important decision and didn’t see clearly what to do, would you ask for a clearness committee?
- If you asked for a clearness committee, would the meeting know what to do? Would your meeting welcome deeper knowledge of your spiritual life? Would they be prepared to help you with a crisis in your spiritual or prayer life? Does your meeting have elders whose own depth of religious experience would equip them to mentor you or help you with your spiritual life? Are you yourself such an elder, at least potentially? Do you look for opportunities to serve the members of your meeting in these ways?
Eldering. Do you feel that there are people whose behavior disturbs your meeting’s worship or fellowship? Do conflicts trouble your meeting? If you were yourself bringing conflict or disturbance to your meeting, would you welcome loving eldering—the meeting’s caring attention to your behavior?
- Does your meeting act with confidence to protect the worship from inappropriate behavior? Does your meeting act with confidence to protect the fellowship of the meeting? Is your meeting in denial of the conflicts that trouble it? Does your meeting bring accountability up in any way with applicants for membership in its committees for clearness on membership?
Inviting the meeting to help you deepen your spiritual gifts, your vocal ministry, and the other ministries to which you feel called. Have you identified your gifts of the spirit? Are you engaged in some activity outside of meeting that is a ministry, that the meeting doesn’t know about? Do you think of it as a ministry yourself? Do you speak fairly often in meeting? Do you want to deepen your vocal ministry? Do you feel some obstacle to speaking in meeting?
- Would your meeting welcome knowledge of your leadings? Does your meeting do anything concrete to name each other’s gifts of the spirit? Does your meeting know the faith and practice of Quaker ministry well enough to take responsibility for it? Do they know how to conduct a clearness committee for discernment of leadings? Does your meeting provide opportunities to discuss ministry, especially vocal ministry, in general? Does your meeting provide its ministers with committees of support or oversight, or engage with them in any other way?

What if your answers to some of these questions are no? If our “no”s involve the personal queries about our own relation to the meeting, we can start thinking about how to reengage with the meeting. But often, our reticence stems from our sense that our meeting will not be there for us. So what then? What do we do when our meeting does not meet our spiritual needs, either because it does not have the resources, especially the human resources, or it doesn’t have the interest or the will?

Meetings often lack the will to be a true covenantal community in the way I am describing (that is, to work with their members and attenders in a meaningful way to enrich their spiritual lives) because it isn’t in unity about it whether to do it, let alone about how to do it. Some Friends just wouldn’t want to go there, and through tacit understanding, it just never even comes up. And we are so cautious about possibly hurting people or driving them away. In my experience, very often a solid majority of people in the meeting would be uncomfortable with this kind of meeting life, for a variety of reasons.

People come to a meeting and to religious life wanting different things. Most want comfort, support, spiritual companionship, renewal, recharging—peace. Far fewer want transformation, let alone the fire of the spiritual crucible. And yet a meeting should try to meet all these needs, both the comfortable and the uncomfortable.

So a meeting should try to accommodate those of us who want more engagement around our spiritual lives, but hopefully in ways that don’t threaten others, or force them to change in ways they don’t want to, or that pulls the community rug out from under them. This is a delicate balance and hard-to-achieve. Any experiments along the path toward greater engagement and accountability between members and the meeting would inevitably meet obstacles and inevitably, we would make some mistakes.

I’m not sure what to do about this. Naturally, we can’t force our meeting to change just for us, especially if we really are in the minority about this sort of thing. Some meetings might be led in this direction over time—a long time, probably—given some deft leadership.

But it’s awkward—and not often successful—to try to be the leader yourself, the person who teaches the meeting to how meet your needs; to teach the meeting how to conduct clearness committees for discernment, for instance, when you are the one who needs help with discernment; or to teach the meeting how to write a minute for travel when you are the minister who feels the leading to travel.

And it’s even more complicated when eldering is called for, when conflict or inappropriate behavior or weak clerking trouble the meeting. In these cases, bold and wise leadership is called for, and it’s not easy to take the initiative, especially if you’re not serving on a committee that would normally deal with such things.

Very often, in fact, the nominating process is one of the sources of the problem—people appointed to positions for which they lack the depth or knowledge of the Quaker way, or who in areas in which they have a strong opinion or an axe to grind that would obstruct the committee’s effective action. I have seen more than one committee on worship and ministry with a member or two who either know very little about Quaker ministry and/or are uncomfortable with its faith and practice, especially with the role of eldering, and would resist action in these areas. I am not sure what to do in these situations, except perhaps speak with nominating committee about one’s concerns, and see what the next cycle of nominations brings about.

In the easier case of personal ministry and spiritual nurture, the only thing I can think to do is to try the meeting first, to see how far you can go. And then, if it looks like the meeting isn’t going to be able to respond to your needs in a timely fashion, to try to create for one’s self, with others of like mind, a non-formal structure for spiritual exploration, support, nurture, and accountability independent of the meeting’s formal structures. For many Friends in smaller meetings or meetings less amenable to these ideas, this will mean some kind of regional group. In New York Yearly Meeting, the networking for this kind of engagement is quite lively at the Yearly Meeting level, but it hasn’t moved down into the regional meetings very much, as far as I know.

What I’m getting at is that, in many yearly Meetings, there might be opportunities for grassroots networking at the local meeting level around this kind of spiritual nurture that could converge with similar efforts taking place at the yearly meeting level, which could then be relocated at the regional meeting level without too much difficulty. New York Yearly Meeting is too big geographically and meets too seldom as a yearly meeting body to host groups that serve these kinds of spiritual needs very well. But a New York City spiritual nurture group, or an outer Long Island group, or a central or northern New Jersey or Finger Lakes group might be able to meet more regularly.

The model here might be the Experiment with Light groups, which are usually organized, if I am not mistaken, at the local meeting level, but often with participants from nearby meetings; and the spiritual nurture groups formed by the School of the Spirit and by the spiritual nurture programs sponsored by Baltimore and other yearly meetings.

And what would such groups do? The following ideas assume that the local meetings are not willing or able to serve your needs in these ways:

Hold extended periods of open worship, hopefully without a programmed time to end.
Provide opportunities to share the joys, challenges, and evolution of each others’ inner lives, personal practice, and the life of the spirit in general.
Conduct clearness committees for discernment of leadings.
Name each others’ spiritual gifts in some way, and find ways to help each other mature in your gifts.
Share your spiritual practices with each other and provide mentoring in them, if you feel qualified and others show interest.
Create structures for sharing and learning together the faith and practice of Quaker ministry and Quaker spirituality.
Provide support and oversight committees for those following a leading, especially those led to travel in the ministry or to pursue some specific service, and for those who feel called to vocal ministry.
They would not, however, intervene in local meeting situations that require eldering. This, I think, remains the prerogative of the meeting, even if it’s dysfunctional in this area.

Hopefully, within some meetings, such non-formal groups would prove to be seeds for a more robust culture of eldership based in the meeting, once members saw how it worked and how valuable it was for its participants. So these groups should not hide their light under a bushel. Nor should they evangelize out of spiritual pride. But they should be open and inviting to any who would want to participate. For this is one of the things that the Religious Society of Friends is for—corporate nurture and support of personal ministry and spiritual life.

What is the Religious Society of Friends for? — Prayer

December 19, 2013 § 7 Comments

The gift of prayer.

In my last post about family devotional life, I mentioned prayer, but deferred discussion because it is too big a subject to add to an already long post. And it’s bigger than “family” as a category. As I said then, I believe that a good discussion of prayer will take us to the heart of our religious life.

In his introduction to George Fox’s Journal, William Penn wrote that, as many and as great were Fox’s gifts,

“above all he excelled in prayer. The inwardness and weight of his spirit, the reverence and solemnity of his address and behavior, and the fewness and fullness of his words, have often struck even strangers with admiration, as they used to reach others with consolation. The most awful, living, reverent frame I ever felt, or beheld, I must say, was his in prayer.”

Today, the gift of prayer—the ability to sweep others in the meeting up into the Presence with the intensity and integrity of our prayer—is almost totally lost among us. At least that’s true of the liberal meetings with which I am acquainted. And I wonder about our programmed meetings. You at least do pray vocally in meeting. But do you program your prayer the way you program everything else? Can programmed prayer dissolve the invisible sheath that holds us away from the presence of G*d? Are those who do feel the spontaneous, spirit-led call to prayer free in that moment to sink to their knees and take the meeting with them?

To whom do we pray?

Prayer as it is traditionally practiced assumes a Being that is listening, that cares, that answers. That was the assumption behind the practice of prayer in my church and in my family when I was a kid.

However, I suspect that many Friends in the liberal tradition, anyway, just couldn’t with integrity teach their children to pray to a traditionally defined supreme being kind of god. Many of us just do not believe in such a god or have any experience of him (sic). So to whom would we pray?

And if you’re not praying to some entity that could hear your prayer and maybe answer it (or cherish it, if the prayer is not supplicatory), what do you do? I think a lot of us have just stopped praying in the face of this dilemma.

Instead, we “hold in the Light”. That’s better than nothing, I suppose, but it seems a bit weak. It feels weak to me because it has nothing to do with relationship—it is very abstract. On the other hand, simply addressing a divine being in the traditional way also seems a bit weak. Both do something to align the soul inwardly toward something we’re saying is divine. But both are too often just a vague exercise of the imagination—a form without power.

In my experience, prayer is effective in direct proportion to how focused it is, both in the mind and in the heart. The 19th century Indian master Ramakrishna used to hold his disciples underwater in the Ganges until they were about to drown. Then he would haul them up and say, “As badly as you wanted air just then, that’s how badly you need to want God.”

Well, that’s a bit extreme. But you get the idea.

This gets to the heart of the issue for Liberal Friends: just who—or what—is God for us? What is worship if there is no supreme being, or at least, no distinct identifiable spiritual entity capable of relationship with us? What is prayer without some one to address, rather than some thing—or nothing at all?

My own prayer journey.

My own journey in this area is quite heterodox; but maybe not so uncommon, in its broad strokes.

As I said in my last post, my mother prayed with my brother and me at bedtime when we were little. I wish I remember when she stopped doing that. I do remember that she would ask us to remember to pray during what I guess was a kind of transition stage when we got a little older and she wasn’t doing it with us. The prayer was a stock family favorite that actually made me somewhat nervous: “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray my Lord my soul to keep. And if I die before I wake, I pray my Lord my soul to take.” You can guess the part that caused some anxiety. Also, of course, our family prayed together before every meal, also a stock family favorite: “Come Lord Jesus, be our guest, and these gifts to us be blessed. Amen.”

My parents took for granted a traditional theistic God to whom you could pray quite naturally and they believed that he (sic) was paying attention, not just to our prayers, but to everything we did. However, when I went to college during the height of the ‘60s, a bunch of factors combined to undo this simple faith for me. I replaced prayer with meditation, for which I learned several methods, and with other practices that worked better for me than conventional prayer. I still practice them.

And then I reconnected with theism in a new way in a mystical experience in the mid-1980s and I recovered prayer as direct address to an identifiable Spirit (just not the traditional Christian God; I choose to call this being an angel, but that just begs the question of what I mean by “angel”, and that’s a discussion for another time). More recently I find myself praying sometimes to Christ, to what I think of as the Christ-spirit (but that, of course, begs the question of what do I mean by “Christ-spirit”).

The real breakthrough came only last year, in a meeting for worship with attention to the life of New York Yearly Meeting during its Summer Sessions. I finally found the address—the “to whom” that I might pray:
    Our Father who art in Heaven,
    our Mother who art in Earth,
    our Holy Spirit who art in all things living
        and in each one of us,
    we thank you for your transcendental revelations, and
    for your abundant beauty and providence, and
    for your abiding presence and
        the truth that you have awakened within us.
    We ask that you guide our steps and
        illuminate our minds,
    that you sustain and heal our bodies, and
    that you bring our hearts into lasting loving kindness.
    We pray this in the spirit of honest yearning,
    in the confidence of your revealing, and
    with the humble commitment to be faithful to your call.
        Amen.
So my own prayer life keeps evolving.

Recovering the gift of prayer.

From this sometimes intense and unexpected path, I have learned the following: Prayer life evolves. All you have to do is start where you are and practice. And there are ways to focus one’s spiritual attention that are deeply satisfying other than the traditional simple address to a spiritual being. On the other hand (in my experience), “spiritual beings” do exist, Christ included, and spiritual life conducted in the context of relationship with such a being is even more satisfying.

I was going to say here that you can’t just make it up, but upon reflection, I’m not sure that’s true. What I mean is that I believe it can be enough to just start with whatever you can do, practice it, and see where it goes. The sustained inward alignment works like meditation works. At a certain point, a standing wave gets established in your consciousness and you move to a new level; something deeper starts happening. Eventually, you can feel called into prayer, maybe even into relationship.

A multitude of forms await those who seek a vital prayer life, and the key is just to start, however lame it feels, and see what happens.

Finally, as I’ve said in other contexts, I think consciousness is the key. Whatever you do, doing it from a centered consciousness makes it better. It’s not necessary, of course not. But it is better—deeper, more consistent, more rewarding, more fulfilling. So learning a deepening technique and combining it with prayer really helps.

We don’t know whether George Fox used some “technique” or whether Jesus did, to find their center, to find the Presence that dwells there. We like to romanticize such prophetic figures and think of them as utterly self-taught, but that is rarely true. Jesus had John the Baptist; was there some schooling in the spirit done? (Of course, traditional theology holds that Jesus was himself already God, so he was always in the Presence; he was in fact the Presence itself. Yet he still prayed to his Father. A topic for another post.)

However, both men possessed a charism of great depth. Clearly they both lived in the Life in some powerful, natural way. I’m not in their league. I use deepening techniques because they work for me.

What is the Religious Society of Friends for? — Family devotional life

December 18, 2013 § 2 Comments

After closing my first posting on the family, I realized that I had left out an important aspect—shared family devotional life and the ways that meetings might help families develop and deepen family religious practice.

The family used to be the home of religious life for Friends. Families prayed together, worshipped together, read the Bible together. And not just for Friends.

When I was a kid, we read straight through the Bible one and a half times or so, one chapter a night after dinner. We went to (Lutheran) church every Sunday. My brother and I had a paper route, and we would come back to the house Sunday morning to a big breakfast, usually with something my mother had specially baked or prepared. Her sticky buns were incredible. We dressed up, my parents went to choir rehearsal while my brother and I were in Sunday School, and then we all attended service. We prayed before meals, and my mom prayed with us at bedtime when we were little. Right out of Normal Rockwell. It was the 1950s.

This kind of family devotional life is mostly lost to us today, I fear. So we should explore new ways to share our Quakerism in the family. We will have to accommodate the crazy lifestyles that most of us live today, but it’s more important than it ever was, I think, to try.

So we have two problems to solve: content—what do you do as a family? and time—when do you do it?

Content.

FGC’s bookstore has a couple of resources to check out:

Nurturing Children’s Spiritual Well-being, by Margaret Crompton; a Pendle Hill Pamphlet.
One Small Plot of Heaven: Reflections on Family Life by a Quaker Sociologist, by the incomparable Elise Boulding.

I’m not familiar with either one of these works, so I’m not sure whether they could serve as a practical guide for how to “organize” family devotional life. My guess is that we’re mostly going to have to make it up ourselves.

I see three possible places to start, three springboards families could use for conversation and practice around Quaker spirituality.

The first is a traditional one—reading the Bible (and other religious literature). The Bible has served Quaker families for generations as a reliable and powerful resource for religious life.

However, in my (adult) experience, the Bible is a dangerous book (that’s why I called my first blog BibleMonster): As soon as you get below the surface, it tends to raise more questions than it answers. And while we might believe, as a matter of faith, that the Bible is spirit-led, I personally treat its books and stories and poems the way I treat vocal ministry in meeting for worship: a given message may speak to someone in the meeting, while not speaking to me, or the other way around. A lot of the Bible probably spoke to readers when it was written, but that does not necessarily mean that it will speak to our condition today.

Furthermore, a lot of the Bible is just not appropriate for younger children at all (though I guess I was not so damaged by it myself, since I did hear it all—I think. Did my dad skip the very violent and bizarre stories in Judges or the esoteric rules of Leviticus? Did my parents discuss beforehand what was rated PG and what wasn’t?). Finally, parents might want to be fairly comfortable with the Bible themselves to present it confidently and usefully to their children, and many of us aren’t. However, this just means that we have a chance to explore it together. Still, reading and discussing the Bible together may not be as straightforward an option as it once was.

Then there’s Quaker faith and practice. That’s how my meeting organizes its First Day School, in a general way, and that works pretty well, touching in a more or less systematic way on the Quaker essentials over time. But First Day School is only once a week and First Day School is a school—kids come expecting to be taught in a way not too dissimilar from regular school. Family devotions should be more than just a teaching platform. It should be a time of sharing and of worship, as well.

The most useful approach, I think, might be to start with the spiritual lives of the family members. The parents can share what their spiritual lives mean to them—stories of the spiritual and religious experiences they’ve had, what they think they mean, what they do in meeting for worship—that kind of thing. A focus on personal sharing and stories means that the family devotional life stays real and concrete, and kids are always keen to learn about their parents’ lives. Hopefully, the stories generate questions and answers.

Then, more importantly, parents can ask their kids what’s going on inside of them, looking for opportunities to point out the Light at work within them, working with the kids’ accounts of their day and the day-to-day interactions of family life. My older son home-schooled his children and I was very impressed with how they could drop into school mode at the drop of a hat when he or his partner saw an opportunity to teach. We would be hiking in the California redwoods and suddenly we’re identifying trees or talking about the life cycle of the banana slug. It takes a little practice and attention, is all.

But I’m admittedly just groping here. I didn’t do this with my own children, who are grown now, until they were teenagers. Maybe I’m naive about what will work. All I know is that it would be worth a try to do something. And that you would probably have to stick with it for a while to find out whether you’re getting somewhere. Kids accept whatever you do up to a certain age, and then they reject whatever you do for a while. So this would be one protracted, basically life-long experiment.

Prayer. Finally, we have to talk about prayer. But when I started writing here about prayer in the context of family devotional life, the post started getting really long (and it’s already really long) and I found myself talking about other important related subjects, as well. So prayer will have to be its own post. More than one post, I suspect.

For I think that prayer is a really important topic that gets to the heart of our religious life. But as I said, prayer is too deep a subject to simply add to this entry. It deserves more, so it will have to wait. Meanwhile . . .

Time.

So when can families do whatever they might do together as a family practice? Not much time to work with, is there? Three time slots present themselves as possibilities for families with young children, two for those with older children.

Bedtime. I bet a lot of my parent readers read to their young children at bedtime. Here’s a chance to do something in addition to reading secular stories. I think it matters less how much time it gets, and matters more that it is regular and that it engages the imagination. At the least, there are quite a few children’s books written by and for Friends. We read the Obadiah series to our kids.

Dinnertime. Does your family regularly eat the dinner meal together at a table, without some media engaging everyone’s attention? I think this is really important to a family spiritually, whether or not anything “religious” takes place. If this is not your family’s practice, then maybe it would be good to check in with the testimony of simplicity, and ask the Light within yourself whether this feels right, to be so disjointed in lifestyle with your family that you can’t eat together. Just a thought.

Dinnertime, it seems to me, breaks down into three time slots: a chance to bless the food and the family before eating and to give thanks, a chance to talk during the meal, and a chance to do something more focused toward the end. Okay, so maybe not during the meal. And maybe not a chapter from the Bible every night. But something?

Sunday morning. If you’re coming to meeting anyway, then doing something together to prepare seems possible. No? Depends on your family, doesn’t it?

Mixed Quaker-nonQuaker families. I am married to a woman who appreciates Quakerism but she’s not gonna join herself. My children are grown and come from a previous marriage, but my ex and I both became Friends after a while, and we were always in tune about this kind of thing, anyway, so it worked out fairly well. Christine and I do not have children together, however. If we did have kids, I can see that it might be hard to get some family devotional life going. I honestly don’t know what you can do about that.

Even without kids, I find it very frustrating not to be able to share my religion with my spouse. I must pursue it on my own, and my married life necessarily competes with my meeting commitments—and my religious life competes with my family obligations, to Christine’s frustration.

This is presumably one of the reasons why Friends once disowned Friends when they married out of the meeting. “Yoke not thyself to an unbeliever,” said Paul somewhere in his letters.

Well, we do the best we can.

The meeting’s role. How can the meeting help their families with their shared devotional life? The obvious place to start, it seems to me, is with the religious education committee. These Friends presumably know the families already. At least, they know the kids.

The simplest thing would be to just hold a meeting about the subject for parents and even the children, at least the ones old enough to participate. At the least, you’ll have to provide childcare so that the parents can come.

Start, perhaps, with an open discussion. Find out whether the families are already doing something. Whether they want to do something. Discuss how to integrate the curriculum with activities at home. And take it from there.

The opportunity. One final opportunity for family practice, which I believe needs revival. Bill Taber, author of Four Doors into Quaker Worship and other really good writings and a long-time faculty member at Pendle Hill, was a Conservative Friend. He brought with him from his Conservative tradition the practice of the “opportunity”, the elder-days term for those times when a group of Friends found the Holy Spirit falling upon them spontaneously, unplanned and unexpected. Maybe while working, or whatever. Suddenly, everyone recognizes that they are called into worship, right then and there.

Bill Taber was keen to revive this practice and became its champion, so he was proactive about it. He would invite you to an “opportunity”. Or he would invite himself to your house for one. And this is what he would do:

Just talk for a few minutes to feel settled with each other. Then settle into worship. No agenda. No timeline, though usually twenty or thirty minutes or so would pass. Just sit together in the waiting, gathering silence, speaking if led, until it becomes clear that G*d is done with you. That simple. The powerful part is knowing when the Spirit is done with you. That part is not so simple. But extremely enlivening and deepening. Whoah—so good and powerful!

My opportunities with Bill were some of the most wonderful and worshipful experiences in my religious life. And it was great every single time. They deepened our relationship, they deepened my spiritual life, and they often led to real openings of the Spirit.

I encourage others to experiment with this practice, and especially in the family. Just a little informal meeting for worship together whenever you find the opportunity.

What is the Religious Society of Friends for? — Families

December 14, 2013 § 3 Comments

Providing religious education for children and supportive religious community for families.

This is one of the biggest challenges we face, as we all know. Lots of meetings are too small to have any families and so they are not likely to attract new families who are searching for a religious home, especially for their kids. Too often, meetings don’t have any adults who are not themselves parents to teach First Day School, and as a result, the parents too often end up teaching their own kids. If they are new, they often don’t know enough Quakerism to feel confident to teach it. And of course, they would prefer to be in meeting for worship.

The only solution, really, is for the meeting to make an up-front commitment to provide First Day School no matter what, staffed by Friends who are not those kids’ parents. And then, if you don’t already have one, be prepared to start a First Day School as soon as a family arrives—that First Day. (Or, if you have the money, you could hire a teacher, as my meeting has done this year for the middle schoolers.)

The big obstacles to staffing a First Day School are: too few Friends willing to give up meeting for worship, too few Friends with the temperament and/or experience needed for dealing with children, and a perceived lack of curriculum—lack of confidence in what you could teach.

Not much you can do about the first two except pray. For the third, though, there really is no excuse. There is a lot of curricular material out there, and for all ages. So much in fact that combing through it all is its own obstacle.

I really like what my meeting’s RE committee has done. Quite a few Friends, both parents and teachers, took the Faith & Play/Godly Play training, available from Friends General Conference. This gave them an approach, confidence, a strong sense of First Day School community, and content. They developed a two-year framework for covering the Quaker essentials, timing topics when possible with the Queries we read every second First Day in both meeting for worship and meeting for business in worship. And they meet regularly to map out the details for the next few months, both in terms of content and teachers. They include Bible study in every lesson.

This is ideal, to me: it is Quaker religious education, rich in Quaker content. It includes the biblical foundation for our faith. And it is strategic: after two years, these kids have touched all the Quaker bases at their level of understanding, and then they go through it again at their new level. This approach raises competent, confident young Friends.

Way too many meetings shy away from Quaker and especially biblical content. I understand. I myself, with some help from at least one other parent, prevented my then-meeting’s First Day School from teaching the Bible. When those kids became young adult Friends, they came back to us and complained that they hadn’t learned anything and that we were lucky they were still around. And a lot of those kids aren’t still around, my own kids included.

I was so wrong to do that. And my meeting should not have let me do it. We owe it to our children to give them a real foundation for their religious lives. And we have such a fantastic foundation to give them! They may let it go. They may actively reject it or rebel against it. Fine. But they will know who we are and they will know who they are, if they leave. And when they stay, they will know what they are doing as Friends.

The all-too-common alternative to teaching real content is to teach “Quaker values”. This usually means the testimonies, plus the unspoken social attitudes common in Quaker circles, taught through example, osmosis and behavior control: liberal political leanings, tolerance, embracing “diversity”, making nice and avoiding conflict, using passive aggression when you really are in conflict, and the other affects of white middle-class culture. Too harsh? Maybe.

Still, it is the case that Liberal Quakerism increasingly defines itself in terms of “Quaker process” and “Quaker values”, rather than in terms of content, the rich legacy of our tradition.

A few years ago, after being laid off during the Great Recession, I thought I would like to volunteer as a guest resource in local Quaker schools. And here in the Philadelphia region, there are a lot of Quaker schools, most of them under the care of some meeting.

I visited the websites of literally dozens of Quaker schools looking to identify their religion faculty to contact. There were none. Out all those schools, only two had religion faculty, and only one or two more seemed to include religion or Quakerism in their curriculum in any way. I couldn’t believe it.

We hear their ads on NPR all the time, and they all tout their (Quaker) values as essential to their model of education, though they usually leave “Quaker” inside the parentheses. And I bet they do a good job of teaching these wonderful values. But where is the Quakerism? And don’t tell me that most of their students aren’t Quakers. That doesn’t stop the Catholics.

This simply reflects the way Liberal Quakerism in general is progressively abandoning its content for its values. Well, we can’t do anything about those schools. But we can make sure that we teach Quakerism, its values and its content, to our own children.

We should be teaching them something else, too, something that I feel is even more important than our faith and practice. We should help them find their own spiritual path. We should help them to recognize spiritual experience when it happens to them. We should not just teach them about the Light within them, but help them discover it for themselves.

For the youngest ones, this will mostly mean, I think, leading them to the Light in the conscience, that voice inside them that alerts them to wrong action, that prompts them toward love and peacefulness and reconciliation, rather than toward anger and resentment. This is “values” instruction”, but not as a list of outward principles to live by, but as the movement of the Spirit within their hearts toward love.

For the older ones, especially around middle school, we can go deeper. My first conscious religious experiences happened in seventh grade. Looking back, I see that I was groping at least by sixth grade, though I didn’t recognize it at the time. Our role should be to help kids recognize G*d at work in their lives and in their hearts and souls.

As with virtually any instruction, nothing works better than stories. And we have so many great stories to share. First there are all those stories in the Bible, especially the prophets, first-hand accounts of hearing and answering the call of God. And the story of Joseph the patriarch—all about family, conflict, and reconciliation.

And then we have our own Quaker prophets: George Fox, John Woolman, Margaret Fell, Elizabeth Fry, Lucretia Mott, Alice Paul, Bayard Rustin, Larry Apsy, Rufus Jones, John Wilhelm Rowntree, John Bellers, William Penn . . . the list just goes on and on. Stories of real people waking up to the Light within them.

What is the Religious Society of Friends for? — Spirituality vs Religion

December 13, 2013 § 9 Comments

Religion as Corporate Spirituality

My one-line answer to the question, What is Quakerism for? is: bringing people to G*d and bringing G*d into the world. “Bringing people to G*d” has two parts: personal spirituality and communal spirituality.

The last post’s discussion of worship provides a segue from personal spirituality to communal spirituality—that is, to religion.

Several years ago I was a Friendly Adult Presence in a youth conference sponsored by Philadelphia Yearly Meeting and in one of the exercises, the young people were asked to sort themselves out by whether they had a spiritual life or not and whether they practiced a religion. The vast majority said yes to spirituality and no to religion. This made me feel bad.

I suspect that quite a few adult Friends have similar feelings. They are much more comfortable talking about spirituality and not so comfortable talking about their “religion”. For many Friends, I suspect, “religion” conjures traditional belief in a “God”, a supreme being, maybe even the trinity of Christianity, whom the community worships, and aspects of this traditional definition of religion just don’t work for them. Many, like me, I suspect, have no direct experience of such a God. Many may have had negative experiences of traditional worship of such a God. And thus many may be uncomfortable with “worship” when defined as adoration, praise, and supplication of such a God.

And then there’s Jesus and the intensely Christ-centered legacy of our own Quaker tradition. For many Friends, “religion” is relationship with him, placing him at the center of our individual lives and at the center of our life as a community. And again, for many Friends, this just is not their experience.

I’ve written about my own struggles with this question quite a lot—how confounding I usually find it to belong to what I believe is a Christian religious community and not be a Christian myself. As is happening right this second, every time I get to a certain depth in exploring Quakerism, in this blog and in my other writing, I find myself trying to identify who Jesus Christ is for me, and what Quakerism means without experience of him. And I mean experience of him, not belief in him; I have the belief, but not the experience. It is one of the central questions of my religious life. I believe it is perhaps the central question for modern Liberal Quakerism in general. I’m still working on it.

In the meantime, I keep beavering away at other questions while skirting this elephant in the room. Why? Because I feel led to, is the basic answer. But also in the hope that circling this central question will eventually lead to some answers. And finally, because I know I am not alone. I feel that I am exploring the issues I write about alongside many other nonChristian Friends, and I hope to be useful to others in their search.

So I do have a nonChristian definition of “religion” and “worship”. And I have a concern to bridge the gap between “spirituality” and “religion”, which I see as a misperception. I do not want a religion that is little more than a society for practicing individual spiritualities together. I have done that and it is not enough for me. The reason it’s not enough is that I have had collective spiritual experience, experience shared with others of something deep and profound. I have had religious experience. So my definition of religion starts with a definition of spirituality.

By “spirituality” I mean the faith and the practices through which we as individuals seek to open ourselves to the Light within us—to the presence, motion, guidance, teaching, healing, strengthening, inspiration, and redemption of the ChristSpirit acting in us—and the ways in which we try to follow its guidance in our lives.

“Religion” I define as the faith and the practices through which the community seeks to commune with the Mystery Reality that lies behind and beyond the Light within each of us as individuals, that lies between us or among us as a community, and that becomes real for us in the mystery of the gathered meeting for worship.

For the Light, the kingdom of heaven, is not only within us; it is also among us, as Jesus put it. It is the presence in the midst. It is the motion of love between us. It is the guidance, teaching, healing, strengthening, inspiration, and reconciliation of the Spirit acting through us as individuals and among us at the center of our worship and our fellowship. The presence within us and the presence in our midst—these are the same. This is our faith, born of our experience in the gathered meeting for worship.

Thus I define “religion” as the spiritual life, the faith and spiritual practices, of a community, the things a religious community does to renew its communion with the Divine.

This begs the question (again) of just what we mean by “the Divine”, which is one of Liberal Quakerism’s placeholders for whatever it is we are experiencing, when we don’t think it’s the traditional triune Christian God. I have dealt with this problem by using “G*d”, letting the asterisk stand in for whatever your experience is. Speaking this way, however—speaking around a more explicit naming of God—just throws us back into individualism, casting ourselves again as a society of individuals practicing our own spiritualities, rather than defining ourselves as an integral community with a clear focus for our worship.

The only thing that belies this individualist reality, the only hope in all this mess, it seems to me, is to be found in the gathered meeting. As I have written earlier, the gathered meeting seems not to care about name tags. I have felt a meeting become gathered in spite of its theological confusion and diversity. I once felt a meeting gathered because of its diversity, reaching exquisitely joyous unity as the result of deep wrestling with the plurality of our experience.

Anyway, I hope that thinking of religion as the shared spiritual practice of a community encourages some Friends to warm up to the idea of Quakerism as a religion. And I, at least, find great encouragement in the fact that this practice now and again delivers genuine fulfillment—both spiritual fulfillment; that is, individual fulfillment, joy, healing, and inspiration; and religious fulfillment, a corporate experience of the presence in our midst, of love and the healing of conflict, of inspiration and prompting to corporate witness, and of unity and joy in the knowing of each other in that place where words come from.

If only it happened more often.

What is the Religious Society of Friends for? — Worship

December 11, 2013 § 4 Comments

A reminder that the original post with the outline of my answers to the question “What is the Religious Society of Friends for?” can be found here.

Note on versions of the survey. After I first published this survey, some Friends with more experience in designing surveys suggested changes and I realized from a comment to this post that I would like to include a section surveying Friends’ own spiritual practice. So I have created a new version of the survey with these changes. But I have not changed the original survey because some people have already been taking it as it was originally published. Here’s the new version of the survey.

What is the Religious Society of Friends for: worship . . .

Give members the experience of direct communion with G*d that is our promise, by fostering deep silence, spirit-prompted vocal ministry, and the gathered meeting.

Many people find that their spiritual lives do not require community. But for Friends, the communal life of the spirit provides an indispensable context for their individual spiritual lives. And for us Quakers, the Quaker way of worship is the bridge between our individual spirituality and our communal religious life.

For, just as the faith and practice of Quaker ministry is the soul of personal Quaker spiritual life, the meeting for worship is the very soul of communal Quaker religious life. And in the meeting for worship, the two fulfill each other. The worshippers bring their vocal ministry to the community in the meeting for worship and, when the ministry is deep and spirit-led, it leads the community into the depths of collective communion with G*d.

Thus the purpose of the Religious Society of Friends is to foster worship “in spirit and in truth”, as the gospel of John puts it. And the purpose of the meeting is to do whatever it can to help its members and attenders find that Well, the wellspring within themselves and the Well at the center of the community’s worship together. The goal of the meeting for worship is to align itself with that Christ-consciousness, to sink into its arms, to rejoice in its embrace, and to follow its truth into peace and reconciliation, into new prophetic revelation, and into the world outside the meetinghouse doors.

Virtually all of us agree, I suspect, about how important the meeting for worship is, both for us as individuals and for the meeting as a whole. Yet I know a lot of Friends who are unsatisfied with at least some aspects of their meeting’s worship, who yearn for more spirit-led vocal ministry, in particular, and for the meeting to be gathered in the Spirit more often. It’s pretty common to hear Friends complain about the quality of their meeting’s worship. So what can we do about it? How do we foster “deep silence, spirit-prompted vocal ministry, and the gathered meeting”?

I’ve written elsewhere about the gathered meeting, how important I think it is, how to nurture it, how it is the fulfillment of the promise of Quakerism: that it is possible to commune collectively and directly with G*d when the meeting is gathered. But the gathered meeting, the deepest communion, does not just happen by itself—well, yes, it can come as unexpected grace. But it depends to a large degree on the depth of the silence and on the quality of the vocal ministry. The gathered meeting is much more likely to occur when the meeting commits itself to providing certain essential forms of support:

religious education that teaches the faith and practices of Quaker worship, vocal ministry, and eldering, so that everyone knows what they are doing when they gather to worship;
spiritual formation efforts that help the members find the spiritual practices that work for them as individuals, so that everyone knows how to seek the depths in their own way and with confidence; and
spiritual nurture efforts that help Friends mature in their practice;
a meeting space that is comfortable, welcoming, and conducive to centering;
a fellowship that is infused with love and emotional maturity, in great enough measure to transform conflict and to absorb or transform the inevitable occasional disturbances to worship; and
elders, Friends who have the spiritual depth, wisdom, and authority to take responsibility for nurturing and protecting the worship.

This last is controversial for some Friends, but I consider it very important.

Every meeting has a committee that is charged with the care and nurture of the meeting for worship and its ministry. Ideally, this committee comprises Friends who know our traditions regarding worship, whose experience of deep silence, spirit-led vocal ministry, and the gathered meeting prepares them to be spiritual nurturers, and who can act to protect and deepen the worship with the full encouragement of the meeting.

But how many meetings have the people they need to fulfill these responsibilities? And how many meetings actually encourage their elders to act on behalf of the worship, to be proactive about deepening it and protecting it?

Virtually every local meeting that I know is rather timid about this, at best. At worst, meetings are actually and actively allergic to any suggestion that something could or should be done proactively to protect or deepen the worship, never mind that someone should act toward these goals. In my experience, very many meetings are more or less paralyzed by a combination of factors and conditions that make action on behalf of deeper worship difficult. These include:

diversity of attitudes about proactive attention to worship and vocal ministry, in the meeting at large and also among those serving on the worship committee itself;
attachment to the status quo and resistance to change;
misplaced fear of leadership;
resistance to discipline as somehow unQuakerly;
strong personalities, especially when these Friends are either ignorant of or ingore-ant of Quaker tradition, or when they let their past wounds and their current baggage color their behavior;
a misplaced fear of hurting Friends’ feelings; and
the suppression of ministry, most often directed (in liberal meetings) toward Christians and ministry that is Christ-centered, evangelizing, biblical, or even just theistic; but sometimes also directed toward prophetic witness; ironically, this suppression often manifests as intolerance in the name of tolerance and exclusion on behalf of inclusiveness and diversity, out of a feeling that the ministry being suppressed is itself exclusionary or intolerant.

Also paradoxically and ironically, Friends often resist proactive attempts to protect or deepen the worship and the vocal ministry precisely because they fear that it will suppress the ministry they already have. God forbid that we should suggest that the messages we get are not spirit-led or not spirit-led enough. That would surely shut down those Friends who do speak, if not drive them away, and then where would we be?

It’s a problem. Even if meetings did not have to deal with the paralyzing factors I’ve described above, it would still be hard to know what to do. How do you try to deepen the worship without implying that it’s not deep enough, which seems tantamount to implying that the worshippers are not deep enough? Even though that may be true.

The only people who would want to hear such criticism would be those who desperately yearn for deeper worship, who know that deeper worship depends on them, and who know that they are not, in fact, deep enough, that they do need to dedicate themselves more faithfully to their own devotional practice. Well, that’s my condition, anyway.

The only way forward through these difficulties, it seems to me, is to have some open and frank conversations about our experience of worship, to get a reading on how well the status quo is serving everyone’s spiritual needs, as a prelude to talking about how to improve—or whether we can try to improve it at all.

Because it’s such a sensitive issue, it might work best to conduct an anonymous survey to start with, and commission some group or committee to gather the results and present a report. Ask some pointed questions and find out what the members and attenders actually think about their meeting for worship without putting them at risk.

If a significant portion of Friends are unhappy with the worship, it would be good to know. If they are unhappy, it would be good to know why. It would be good to know how many Friends are willing to tackle the problems, if they exist. And it would be good to know how many Friends are satisfied with the status quo, who don’t think there is a problem to tackle, who would resent any intrusion into a worship that works for them. After learning where we are, maybe we could have a good conversation about what to do next.

To this end, I have devised such a survey. It includes the questions to which I would like to know the answers. Please let me know what you think. Have I missed some questions that you think need to be asked?

I anticipate that even suggesting using such a survey will trigger some of the responses I’ve outlined. It is tantamount to suggesting that there is a problem with the worship, which some Friends are likely to resist. But what if we know that we are not alone in wanting deeper worship, that other people in the meeting feel as we do? Then we know there is, in fact, a problem. So there we are. It’s harder if we think we are virtually alone in our unhappiness. But maybe we aren’t alone? A survey like this is a way to find out.

These are just queries, after all. We use queries all the time to examine the quality of our religious lives. The only difference here is that these are a bit more pointed than the general ones we have in our books of discipline. But they have the same basic purpose.

If you bring this survey to your meeting, would you please let me know how it goes? I also would like to survey my own readers. Would you be willing? You can either download a Word doc of the survey, fill it out, and email it to me at sddavison@icloud.com, or you can click here to go to a web page that has a survey form. Filling out and submitting this form sends your answers directly to my database of answers.

And thanks!

What is the Religious Society of Friends for? — Community

December 4, 2013 § Leave a comment

Foster loving, supportive, and joyful community.

One of the most valuable and unique contributions Friends have made to the religious landscape is the faith and practice of Quaker community.

Faith:

We believe that the life of the Spirit flourishes best in the bosom of loving and supportive community and in community we share its joys and difficulties.
We believe—because we have experienced it—that the worshipping community, like the individual, is capable of direct, unmediated communion with G*d; we call this the gathered meeting for worship.
We believe that through this communion, the worshipping community can be called into collective ministry, just as individuals are called into individual ministries of service of various kinds.
We believe that the meeting has an indispensable role to play in nurturing, supporting, and overseeing the gifts and ministry of its members.
We believe that the meeting also should offer its members loving pastoral care, helping when able in matters temporal, emotional, and spiritual, sharing love in times of both trouble and joy. In particular, meetings conduct meetings for marriage and memorial meetings for those who have died.
We believe that the community helps us fulfill the commandments of love—to love G*d, to love one another, and to love our enemies.
And we rejoice in the fellowship of the Spirit that manifests in the gathered meeting for worship and our love for each other.

Practice:

We conduct our business affairs in meetings for worship, seeking to find divine guidance for our corporate life in that communion. We also conduct marriages and memorials as meetings for worship.
We have evolved tests and tools for the discernment and support of individual ministry and for pastoral care.

Community

I am supremely grateful for the wisdom and care of Margaret Fell and others like her who modeled for early Friends and for us how to nurture religious community; and for the genius of George Fox, who ushered in the infrastructure for Quaker community when he began “bringing gospel order” in the 1660s by organizing monthly meetings and other aspects of our corporate life.

I also believe that loving, welcoming community is one of the three essentials required for the growth of our meetings—for holding onto newcomers who come to test for themselves whether we are their new spiritual home. The other two are a ready and substantive welcome to young families—a first day school that does not require parents to teach their own children instead of joining the worship; and spirit-filled meetings for worship—the deep silence of communion and spirit-filled vocal ministry.

To fulfill this vision of Quaker community, we need:

clerks who know what they are doing;
members who also know “Quaker process”;
Friends with the gift of eldership, who are equipped to provide support and oversight for ministry, including vocal ministry, and spirit-led pastoral care;
Friends with the gift of hospitality, who know how to make everyone feel welcome and at home in the meeting’s fellowship;
Friends with the gift of administration, who know how to run the more mundane aspects of meeting life with joy, humility, and grace;
Friends with the gift of pastoral care, who know how to recognize the needs of our members and attenders and minister to them in good ways; and
the requisites for experiencing the gathered meeting (discussed here),

For many Friends, it seems to me, community is what they are here for. People have different religious temperaments and, while Quakerism is not equipped to fulfill some temperaments, we do offer those with a temperament for community life a uniquely fulfilling spiritual home. Because we have no paid professionals, we must do all the work of the meeting ourselves, and this provides abundant opportunities for Friends who have the community temperament to share their gifts.

This is true for all the spiritual gifts. What a tremendous blessing it is to belong to a community that recognizes our gifts and provides opportunities for their use. It is one of the great joys of my life that my meeting welcomes my gifts, and I am proud of the way my meeting tries to do the same for all its members.

Does your meeting provide opportunities for you and others to exercise their spiritual gifts? Is your worshipping community a rich environment for spiritual fulfillment?

Membership

Finally, membership—arguably the most important aspect of Quaker community, and yet one about which we are perennially confused and even dysfunctional. I have written about this before (Membership, and On Clearness Committees for Membership).

Membership in a Quaker meeting used to commit you to a covenant in which you invited (or at least expected) the meeting to engage with you regarding your spiritual life. That culture of eldership was quite intrusive and eventually (maybe fairly soon) became abusive and self-destructive. In revolt and for good reasons, we abandoned the communal discipline and mutual accountability that discipleship used to entail.

But now we are on our own with our spiritual lives, and it’s hard to follow the life of the spirit without help, at least when it becomes intense or when you are called into ministry. We are not meant to do it alone.

So I think we need to recover some new approach to helping each other along the Way. And that starts with how we conduct our clearness committees for membership.

Well, as I said, I’ve written at length about this before. But I do think that reforming our approach to membership is one of the most important imperatives for renewing the Religious Society of Friends.