Through the Flaming Sword

Last month, I facilitated the opening weekend retreat for Lake Erie Yearly Meeting’s spiritual formation program. I just got the evaluations from that retreat. Some Friends felt I lectured too much, though many more, I hope, appreciated the content.

I tried to dial my didacticism back and focus more on sharing and experience in my preparations. But I’m a teacher, and in the moment . . . To a degree, I’m irrepressible in that regard.

This experience confirmed for me that some Friends have a distaste for being taught. Maybe it’s a lot of Friends. A lot of Friends, in my experience, have a clear preference for sharing and discussion over being taught. Maybe it’s most Friends. Some Friends carry a staunch anti-creedalism that serves as shorthand for a distaste for doctrine, theology, religious content in general; I think it feels like dogma to them, which I don’t like either. They have a clear preference for “practice” over “faith,” never mind the faith section in our books of faith and practice.

All of this stems from a radical individualism in our religious culture, I feel. In this case, it manifests as the emotional insistence that nobody has the right to tell me what to think. It gets expressed through a clear preference for experience over thought, which borders on, or sometimes fully embraces, a hostility toward “being too much in your head”. Some Friends feel, I think, that the life of the mind has no significant place, or even any proper place, in the life of the Spirit.

Meanwhile, we do have a “faith” section in our books of faith and practice; we do have doctrine. By “doctrine” I mean we have something to say—to each other, to our children, to the world—in answer to their questions about our faith. Though we’re awfully afraid to say it.

You sometimes hear Quakerism described as a do-it-yourself religion, by which some Friends mean that each of us can do whatever we want. We’re DIY, alright. But that means that, since we have no paid religious professionals to do our Quakerism for us, we have to do it ourselves. And to “do” Quakerism, we have to know it. And to know our Quakerism, we have to learn it. And to learn it, we have to be taught; at the least, we have to teach ourselves. We have to study.

That’s been my path. Study—of the Bible and of Quakerism—is for me both a spiritual/religious discipline, meaning that I do it out of a sense of responsibility for my tradition. And it’s also for me a source of deep fulfillment and joy. Learning religious things gets me off; it always has.

Study is not everybody’s path. Hardly anybody’s, in fact. So most Friends are not going to learn Quakerism on their own. “Osmosis” doesn’t cut it, either. You can learn some of our conventions of practice by osmosis, and you can internalize some of our “values” through osmosis—and many Friends replace “faith” and “doctrine” with “values” as the essential element of Quakerism, so that’s that. “Content,” for many Friends, is subordinate to values, if not irrelevant, or even toxic.

Meanwhile, alongside my love of study, I have, I believe, a gift for teaching. I’ve taught religious and spiritual stuff on and off since I was a teenager, sometimes professionally, and often in Quaker circles. And I love it; it is very fulfilling, when I’m doing it well, and devastating when I’m not doing it well.

We Quakers fail, I think, to emphasize in our culture the joy one feels in expressing one’s spiritual gifts for a community that values them.

Do our communities value the gift of teaching?

Do our communities agree that you have to know your Quakerism to do it well?

If you want to play the cello well, you have to study the instrument and the music, and for that you need to be taught. Is Quakerism any different? Does your meeting have anyone with the gift of teaching or an interest in study? Does your meeting have any adult religious education programming? Does your meeting know what it’s doing, and is it doing it well?

Tagged: faith, religion, spirituality