January 18, 2014 § 3 Comments
Dear Friends:
In my post on “Doing G*d’s Work” two posts ago, I mentioned a blog entry by Howard Brod that touched on some of the same issues. I have gone back to reread that entry and, for the first time, I have read all the comments.
I think this entry and the discussion that follows is so good that I want to bring it to your attention again. Here’s the link:
Here are some of the quotes from the comments that spoke to me:
Our wide acceptance of people does attract many seekers, but it will only hold a small percentage. When I’ve spoken to those who have moved on, the most common response is that they wanted to move deeper into their faith exploration, but that the meeting was either uninterested or was uncomfortable with it.
When I sit on clearness committees for membership, people speak of wanting to be in a community of like minded people who share their values. When asked about their personal spiritual practice, most don’t have a response.
About 2 years ago, I attended a Quaker spiritual retreat that drew from multiple meetings (liberal and evangelical) over a 2 state area. When the group was asked “why are you here?”, every single liberal (and all were long time Friends) said, “because I need something more and my meeting doesn’t get it.”
In a nutshell, we accept people where they are, but we leave it at that. In my experience, we not very good at sharing our faith with one another, about nurturing spiritual growth or about gently challenging each other to take the next step in the Light.
And this:
Our testimonies, Quaker process and even unprogrammed worship have become our golden calf. We forget that there is Something More behind them.
But this is just a random smattering. The entire discussion is really valuable written ministry, in my opinion.
The Gathered Meeting—Good News!
June 21, 2013 § 5 Comments
Friend John Edminster has been a very faithful reader and supporter of this blog. A while ago he shared with me a draft of a little piece of his that has reoriented me in this project of exploring a theology for Liberal Friends. One of his points is this:
We do not need a new theology; we need good news!
I agree. This has made me rethink how I approach this project.
In an earlier post, I defined “theology” as a way of talking about our religious experience. A “theology” can be thrilling, energizing, even transforming for a person like me, for whom the life of the mind and the life of the spirit are inseparable. But for most people, theology is just ideas, interesting at best, boring at least, and at worst, destructive and divisive.
“Good news”, on the other hand—a gospel—is a way to transform the world we live in and the lives we touch. Real “good news” won’t speak to everyone, either, necessarily. But for those it does reach, nothing will ever be the same.
For centuries the gospel of Christianity has been that Jesus the Christ has saved us from our sins. I’ve already said that, based on my own reading of Scripture, the gospel of salvation is mostly Paul’s good news, and that the gospel of Jesus is much more focused on ministry to the poor. But what is my good news?
I suspect that many Friends may find the question presumptuous and impertinent. Christian Friends, who deify Christ, may rankle at a mere mortal claiming an authority that they feel rests only in the Christ himself (or maybe in the Bible, though Quakers have traditionally held that, since Christ is a living presence to us all, he remains the ultimate authority, not the Bible).
Liberal Friends, on the other hand, may rankle at the idea of gospel itself: “gospel” smacks strongly of evangelism, and even of evangelicalism, of proclaiming a message you think people should not just hear, but accept—or else. I myself am unafraid of evangelism. For I do believe we have something transforming to proclaim.
That is, I believe that I have good news to proclaim—not just some ideas I think are cool or that might be useful to Friends. It actually does feel presumptuous to me to say this, yes, but that is how I feel.
By comparison, my “good news” is not as profound or transformative as the “good news for the poor” that Jesus proclaimed in Luke 4—an answer to their poverty, relief from their suffering, and deliverance from their oppression. My “good news” is much more modest. Perhaps I should just say that I can testify to the joy I have found among Friends in the gathered meeting for worship. This my good news:
- that each one of us is capable of direct, unmediated communion with G*d*—we know G*d directly through the joy and transformation we experience in the gathered meeting;
- that, even more astoundingly, our religious community—our Quaker meetings—are also capable of direct, unmediated communion with G*d; we know G*d directly through the collective healing and love and unity and joy and transformation we experience in the gathered meeting;
- that G*d’s revelation continues unbroken from the beginning of creation until now—we experience G*d’s revelation personally in the form of leadings to ministry, and in other ways, and collectively in the guidance and healing and love and unity and joy and transformation we experience in the gathered meeting, especially in the gathered meeting for business in worship and our other gatherings for discernment; and
- that G*d’s love inspires us and strengthens us to live outward lives that testify to the truths G*d has inwardly revealed to us individually and collectively—individually, we are called to live our lives as testimony to the Truth, while collectively, we have been gathered into unity on a gradually evolving and expanding set of testimonies.
My good news is that, in the gathered meeting, we have directly experienced wholeness of spirit, both as individuals and as worshipping communities. For hundreds of years we have seen the promise of direct communion with the divine fulfilled in the gathered meeting.
The world is hungry for this experience. It has come to doubt the promise of such a thing. We can testify to its ongoing reality.
* Every once in a while, I remind my readers that by “G*d” I mean the Mystery Reality behind our spiritual/religious experience—whatever that experience is. I am using an asterisk instead of an “o” in order to wrest the word from the habitual responses we often give it when we read it.
Gathered by—what?
May 10, 2013 § 1 Comment
Toward a theology for Liberal Friends, Part 8
In my last post, I argued that the consciousness we enter when we’re in a gathered meeting corresponds in some ways to the consciousness of the Christ as we see it defined in Christian Scripture: the consciousness of being anointed in the Spirit, as Jesus claimed to have been in Luke 4, and especially as we see manifested in the disciples at the Pentecost and repeated at Firbank Fell and in Quaker meetings ever since.
This was the testimony of early Friends, that they were being gathered as a people by Christ himself and that he was gathering their meetings for worship, as well.
For who else would it be? or what else would be going on? We have the testimony of scripture and the testimony of generations of Friends to confirm it and it is a reasonable assumption to make if you believe in the Christ and his promise to be with us “whenever two or three are gathered”. But what if you don’t believe in the Christ as a spiritual Power capable of being present with us today? Other answers are possible.
In my conversations with a couple of nontheists about what gathers us, they answered, “We gather ourselves.” Personally, I don’t see how “we ourselves”, the individual worshippers, as the agents of our own “gathering”, can alone account for the transcendental, psychic character of the gathered meeting. If it is just we ourselves who perform the miracle of gathering, then there must be something transcendental within each of us to accomplish it, something in human consciousness capable of psychic interaction with others. And there must be some medium in which this interaction takes place. What do you call these things?
Many Liberal Friends are ready with an answer to the first question: it is “that of God” within each of us that unites us in the gathered meeting. They say that “that of God” in me is capable of communicating transcendentally with “that of God” in you. One Friend I’ve talked to about this referred to a passage in Barclay’s Apology in this regard:
[God] causeth the inward life (which is also many times not conveyed by the outward senses) the more to abound when his children assemble themselves diligently together to wait upon him; that as “iron sharpeneth iron,” so the seeing of the face one of another, when both are inwardly gathered unto the Life, giveth occasion for the Life secretly to rise and pass from vessel to vessel; and as many candles lighted and put in one place do greatly augment the light, and makes it more to shine forth; so when many are gathered together into the same Life, there is more of the glory of God, and his power appears to the refreshment of each individual for that he partakes not only of the Light and Life raised in himself but in all the rest; and therefore Christ hath particularly promised a blessing to such as assemble together in his Name, seeing he will be “in the midst of them” (Matt. 18:20).
This Friend posited “that of God” within each of us as analogous to the candles and “the Life” in Barclay’s metaphor. She or he (I don’t remember who it was anymore) equated “that of God” with Barclay’s “glory of God” and “Light and Life”.
I am inclined to agree that these may just be different names for the same thing. The rich and varied vocabulary used by early Friends for God and Christ makes some room for the use and meaning of “that of God” among Liberal Friends today. If “continuing revelation” could lead Fox and early Friends to coin nearly a hundred new and distinctive terms for the Spirit and its work within us and among us, including “Light and Life”, why could it not lead Rufus Jones and modern Liberal Friends to do the same with “that of God”?
This doesn’t get us very far, however. The phrase “that of God” just begs the question of what we mean by “God”, and what we mean by “that of”. So we are forced to backtrack toward Barclay and talk about God anyway, something that most Friends who use this phrase do not do. In fact, ignoring ironically the presence of God in their phrase, many Friends use the phrase “that of God” to avoid talking about God; they use it virtually in place of God.
Since the belief that “there is that of God in everyone” is the essential tenet of Liberal Quaker faith (if not virtually the only tenet), I will return to it in some depth in later posts. Indeed, because it is so ubiquitous and significant among Liberal Friends, I could very well have started this whole project with a discussion of this phrase. But I wanted to start closer to the historical core of our tradition.
As for the medium for the psychic dimension of the gathered meeting, this, I believe, is the real question. I know of no Liberal Quaker explanation for the psychic or metaphysical mechanism for the phenomenon of the gathered meeting. To be honest, though, Christian Quakerism isn’t any better. George Fox was hardly interested in metaphysics at all, Barclay is satisfied with “the glory of God” and “the Light and Life”, and Friends have followed their lead ever since. It has been enough to say we are “gathered in Christ” without bothering to unpack what that means or how Christ does it.
Metaphysics is by definition speculation; it therefore is not essential to a vital Quaker faith and practice. But it is fun (at least for me) and not irrelevant. In fact, I feel that, to be faithful to the testimony of integrity, we owe it to ourselves to be more robust in our thinking than we have been so far about something that is so important to us. So I want to delve more deeply into the psychic or metaphysical mechanisms of the gathered meeting in a later post.
Right now I want to continue exploring this thread of the Christ’s role in the gathered meeting. To sum up my point in this post, it seems to me that the alternatives I’ve heard to our being “gathered in Christ”—that we do it ourselves and that we are gathered in “that of God” within each of us—do not explain its extraordinary psychic, transcendental character. These alternatives raise more questions than they answer. But I feel equally strongly that saying we are “gathered in Christ” hardly does any better.
What does “gathered in Christ” mean and how does he gather us? That’s my topic for my next post.
The Gathered Meeting and the Christ
April 28, 2013 § 1 Comment
Toward a “Theology” for Liberal Friends, Part 7
As I wrote in the last post, the experience of gathering in the gathered meeting is a psychic bonding of the worshippers in a shared consciousness of presence, unity, and joy. The worshippers are present to each other, aware of each other’s presence, and we share a unity of mind and spirit. And the knowing and the sharing fill us with a sometimes marvelous joy.
This shared consciousness, this meeting of the worshippers’ consciousnesses, this intimacy between our minds and our spirits, this being conscious of each other’s intention, creates a super-consciousness—a living synergy of mind and spirit that is greater than the sum of our individual consciousnesses. This “greater-than-ness” suffuses us individuals with a fullness of mind, a fulfillment of spirit, and a transcendental joy. At least, that is how I have experienced it.
This synergy of the gathered meeting, the psychic sharing, the oneness that is greater than the sum of the one-nesses—what is this? How shall we name it?
Suppose we name it the Christ. (Let’s put aside for a moment the relationship between the Christ and Jesus—just for a moment.) I say “the Christ” because “Christ” is not a name but a title. In the Greek of Christian scripture, “christos” means anointed. (In the Hebrew of Hebrew scripture, “messiah” means anointed. Christos is the word the Greek-speaking evangelists used to say “messiah” in their gospels.) This word means a lot of things in a lot of different contexts. Let me try to describe what I think it means in the context of the gathered meeting.
First let me define the Christ in terms of consciousness, working from the testimony of scripture. Usually we define Christ as the person Jesus, in his aspect as God’s son, almost as though “Christ” was his surname. (I want to get more deeply into what “God’s son” means in a later post.) I will therefore most often speak of “Jesus the Christ” rather than of “Jesus Christ”. But here, let’s think about what “the Christ” means in terms of consciousness. I want to approach it from two different angles—the meaning Jesus himself gave to his role as the Christ, and the meaning that the tradition has given—and I want to put them both in the context of the gathered meeting.
The consciousness of the Christ—as Jesus defined it
“Christ-hood”, “messiah-ship”, as Jesus himself defined it can be found in Luke 4:16-30. This is the only place in the synoptic gospels in which he explicitly defines his role as the Christ, and this makes it, in my opinion, the most important passage in Christian scripture.
Luke emphasizes this importance in several ways with the structure of the narrative. These are the first words Jesus utters in his public ministry in Luke’s gospel. Luke puts these words in a formal setting: Jesus has just emerged from his sojourn in the wilderness after his anointing of the spirit at his baptism and his testing by the Adversary in the wilderness, and it is a homecoming—Jesus has returned to his home town to make a formal pronouncement about his mission, much as a modern politician will declare her or his candidacy in their home town. He sets the vignette in Jesus’ home town synagogue, a place dedicated to worship and teaching, to proclaiming God’s world. And the words themselves are formal—he first reads a quote from the prophet Isaiah, then makes a formal pronouncement that he is fulfilling the prophecy here and now.
Because of their importance, I quote at some length (Luke 4:17-21):
He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it is written: “The spirit of Yahweh God is upon me, because he has anointed me [‘christ-ed’ me, ‘messiah-ed’ me]; he has sent me to proclaim [evangelion, the root of our word evangelism] good news to the poor/oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted; to proclaim liberty to the captives and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year that Yahweh favors” [the year of Jubilee mandated in Leviticus 25, in which all debts are forgiven, all debt slaves are released, all families that have lost their inheritance to foreclosure are returned to their family farms, and all fields are to lie fallow].
And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
(Note that the text I have quoted Jesus as reading comes directly from Isaiah (Isaiah 61:1-2); it is not the text given in Luke. Luke, a Greek speaker, was working with the Septuagint, an early translation of Hebrew scripture into Greek. But the synagogue in Nazareth where Jesus has been invited to be a guest rabbi and read the Torah would have used a Hebrew text, not the Greek. The text reads slightly differently in Hebrew and Greek and, for reasons I won’t go into here, I prefer the original Hebrew.)
Jesus has just declared that he is the one who has been promised by Isaiah, who has been anointed by God’s holy spirit. “Christ-hood”, as Jesus defines it in his own case, is an anointing of the spirit. Christ-hood is a consciousness. It is the anointing, the inspiration, of the Holy Spirit, which has imbued him with the spiritual authority to proclaim God’s kingdom on God’s behalf, with the knowledge of the kingdom’s essential elements (its contents, if you will, his teachings), and with the charismatic power to implement it, to heal, teach, convince, and forgive in God’s name.
This consciousness was personal—it was Jesus’ consciousness. But it was also collective—it could be shared. Jesus could raise it up in others, as he did for Peter, James and John at the Transfiguration, and when he healed people or persuaded them with his preaching. And the community shared in this consciousness when the community itself was imbued with the Holy Spirit, as it was at the Pentecost, as it was when it met for the common meal, for community teaching and distribution of poor relief, as we see in Acts 2 and 4, and when it met to decide on Paul’s Gentile mission (Acts 15). The Transfiguration, the Pentecost, the lifestyle of discipleship that we see glimpses of in Acts—these we could describe as gathered meetings for worship.
“The Christ” (among other things) is the consciousness of the gathered meeting, in which the worshippers are imbued with the same spirit that anointed Jesus as the Christ.
Now this has all been my interpretation of scripture, just the kind of top-down, ideas-driven handling of our legacy that I said at the beginning of this series I was not going to rely on. I didn’t say I wouldn’t do it, only that I would not rely on it as the starting point or benchmark for my project of Liberal Quaker theology. Instead, I resolved to rely on experience, which we know to be true because we have experienced it. I diverted to this kind of theologizing in order to establish a context for what I will say in a moment. But first, let’s focus for a moment on the more common and traditional definition of the Christ—as savior. From there we will segue into the experience of the gathered meeting.
The consciousness of the Christ—as the tradition defines it
“The Christ”, according to traditional Christian theology, but here restated in somewhat new terms, is the consciousness raised up by God in Jesus for the salvation of God’s people, for their redemption, for their healing. It is the consciousness that saves us from the Adversary—from our tendency to do wrong and from the conflicts that prevent our unity. “The Christ” is the consciousness that redeems us from our debts (“forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors”), in which we are forgiven because we forgive each other for our failure to give each other what we owe each other—that is, love. The Christ is the consciousness that makes us whole as a worshipping community, and in doing so, it also makes the individual members of the community whole, if only for a moment. The Christ is the consciousness of those who live in the kingdom. The Christ is love.
That’s also a description of the gathered meeting. “The Christ”—among other things—is the consciousness of the gathered meeting, in which the worshippers are reconciled to God and made one, made whole, set free from the captivity of the self.
I am reversing the vector of semantics here: Instead of defining the gathered meeting as the work of the Christ, I am defining the Christ as the spirit of love, unity, and joy that we experience in the gathered meeting.
The gathered meeting is an anointing of the spirit, an ascent, if you will, into Christ-consciousness.
But where does Jesus the Christ fit into this? I will explore this question in the next entry.
What is the gathered meeting?
April 27, 2013 § 2 Comments
Toward a “Theology” for Liberal Friends, Part 7
The following is an excerpt from an article I wrote for New York Yearly Meeting’s newsletter Spark. The January 2013 issue was devoted to the gathered meeting and you can read all the articles on the gathered meeting in that issue here: Spark, January 2013. You can read my article in its entirety by clicking here: The Gathered Meeting.
We have two wonderful discussions of the gathered meeting in Quaker writings, that of Thomas Kelly in his classic little pamphlet of that title, and William Taber’s discussion in Four Doors Into Quaker Worship.
I would like to add my own observations and meditations, based on my own experience of the gathered meeting.
Several of the gathered meetings I’ve experienced have occurred during a meeting for worship with a concern for business, in moments when seemingly insurmountable obstacles to unity suddenly melted away and the body was able to go forward in joy, usually following some powerful vocal ministry.
In that moment, the worshippers are present to each other, aware of each other’s presence, and we share a unity of mind and spirit: we see our way forward together and the sharing fills us with a kind of joy. Joy—that is the hallmark of the corporate religious experience of gathering—a thrilling sense of knowledge, a bonding of the worshipers in a shared consciousness of presence, unity, and joy.
This shared consciousness, this meeting of the worshipers’ consciousnesses, this intimacy between our minds and our spirits, this being conscious of each other’s intention, creates a supra-consciousness—a living synergy of mind and spirit that is greater than the sum of our individual consciousnesses. This “greater-than-ness” suffuses us individuals with a fullness of mind, a fulfillment of spirit, and a transcendental joy.
In the gathered meeting, we are lifted up, and when we look around us, we see that others have been lifted up, as well. And we all know.
We know the truth, the truth of that moment, a momentary miniature of a transcendent truth that is deeper than what we are experiencing at the moment and yet one with it. Usually, this t/Truth comes through some inspired vocal ministry. When experienced in the meeting for business in worship, this vocal ministry gathers all the threads of seeking together into a bundle of greater truth that opens the way for the meeting into unity of purpose.
In the silence of a meeting for just worship, it can come as a cascade of increasingly powerful vocal ministries, in which each offering sinks us even deeper into that peace that passes all understanding.
In that moment, we also know each other. Not in some outward sense, but inwardly and psychically. We sense each other as present. We each know the truth of that moment, and somehow we also know that the others know! And they know that we know. And we know that they know that we know. We all have been gathered up into a cloud of all-knowing—not that we know all, but that we all know.
All this is real. We know that it is real because we have suddenly found ourselves in unity and in joy.
And yet it is transcendental. It transcends the senses, certainly, since no one has said or done anything to confirm its reality—we just know. It transcends usual consciousness. And it transcends individuality—it is a collective experience.
And this knowing of each other and of the Truth and the joy that comes with it—this is knowing God. Or, to turn the semantics around, the mystical collective knowledge of God is, for Friends, the concrete experience of being gathered, of being lifted up into the cloud of all-knowing in the gathered meeting for worship.
So I’ve brought God into the conversation again. In the next post I want to be more specific. I want to connect the gathered meeting to Jesus the Christ.
The Gathered Meeting—The essential experience of the Quaker religion
April 26, 2013 § 2 Comments
Toward a “Theology” for Liberal Friends, Part 6
The importance of the gathered meeting
I’ve repeatedly said that I want to start with experience as the foundation for my “theology of Liberal Quakerism”, and I’ve talked about a lot of different kinds of experience, most of them personal. But it is the experience of the gathered meeting that is really my starting point. The rest has just been laying the groundwork.
I start from the gathered meeting because it is collective experience. It is experience that you and I can share. It is transcendental, in several ways. And it is real—it transforms the meeting when it happens and it transforms the people who experience it. This is most obvious when a meeting for business in worship is gathered, because everybody feels it psychically and transcendentally, both collectively and personally; and everybody sees the concrete result—the body has come to a decision, often veering toward a new truth from a morass of confusion.
I start from the gathered meeting because this is the experience that protects Quakerism from “ranterism”, from the dangers of individualism, from being the kind of “do it yourself religion” that means that anybody can do whatever they want. It protects us from the very strong trend in Liberal Quakerism toward this kind of individualism because it is by definition not individual experience. It brings with it the assurance of collective unity in the Spirit. It is the soul and the goal of our way of discernment.
I start with the gathered meeting also because it connects us to Friends of the past and it leads us into the future. It connects us to Scripture. And most importantly, it connects us to God*.
The gathered meeting is literally our source as a people of God. (Well, God was our source, but it was in the gathered meeting that God first came to us.) On Pendle Hill George Fox had a vision of a “great people to be gathered” and his vision was fulfilled when the Seekers to whom he preached at Firbank Fell became a gathered meeting and emerged as the seed of the Quaker movement.
Throughout our history ever since, new seekers have found their home with us in the gathered meeting. One thinks of Robert Barclay’s famous testimony in his Apology, in which he describes how he found his home among us in such a meeting:
For when I came into the silent assemblies of God’s people, I felt a secret power among them, which touched my heart. And as I gave way to it, I found the evil in me weakening, and the good lifted up. Thus it was that I was knit into them and united with them.
Barclay’s Apology in Modern English,
Dean Freiday editor, p. 254
And where does this idea that individuals gathered in worship can collectively experience the divine? Fox and the Seekers and other early Friends believed in the gathered meeting as their spiritual inheritance because of Jesus’ promise in Matthew 18:20 that, “wherever two or three are gathered in my name, there am I also,” and because of the description of the gathered “business” meeting in Acts 15, in which the early disciples of Jesus decided to sanction Paul’s mission to the Gentiles.
In the gathered meeting, Friends rediscover the truth of the unique claim and contribution of Quakerism, that God calls each individual to a direct, unmediated relationship with the divine, yes—but also that God calls the community—the gathered collective—to a direct, unmediated relationship, as well. Very few religious communities can truthfully claim to deliver direct collective experience of the holy spirit consistently throughout the ages. What an extraordinary gift it is!
And yet, my sense is that, at least among Liberal Friends, the experience of the gathered meeting has become rather uncommon, if not actually rare; that many of our members and attenders have never actually experienced it or, if they have, they do not recognize it for what it is. The gathered meeting is not a promise that we can expect to be fulfilled by simply gathering in the silence. The gathered meeting requires more than a passive faith. We must “work” to bring it about.
How we do that is a matter for a later blog entry. First I want to clarify what I mean when I say “the gathered meeting”, with a focus on the nature of the experience, especially the collective character of the experience. That will be my next post.
* Just to reiterate, because it’s been a while, I define “God” as the Mystery Reality behind our religious experience, whatever that experience is.
Liberal Quakerism, Part 5—Jesus and I, Part 4
April 23, 2013 § Leave a comment
What Jesus means to me
Taken together my experiences of Jesus have helped to transform my relationship with my chosen path, Quakerism. I said in the post in which I asked whether Quakerism is Christian that I take at face value the testimony of Friends from all periods in our history that Jesus the Christ is the Gatherer of this extraordinary people. My own experiences have made that faith personal.
My experiences have fused the content of my study of the gospels with the content of our Quaker tradition (the Presence in the Midst) and with my own inner life. The Jesus I have experienced inwardly conforms (more or less) to much of the testimony of Friends and with my conclusions from my study of the Bible. My experiences have fused in me the intellectual and the mystical, belying the artificial and false dichotomy between the two and bringing a wonderful sense of integrity to my religious life. By “integrity” I mean wholeness, oneness, rather than honesty.
As for honesty, I must admit that I could hardly expect anything else from my unconscious mind. Here I’m going to play the role of the devil’s advocate, of the cynic and skeptic, who could easily contend that my personal past, my chosen religious tradition, and my own studies could be conspiring behind the curtain to produce experiences of Jesus that would be emotionally fulfilling and comforting and even falsely exalting—especially since, on the surface, they are actually kind of cheesy. Certainly, they are stereotypical.
I agree. The content of my mystical experiences and the emotions they carry probably are projections of my imagination, my past, and my unconscious mind, at least in part. I said in the post on Definitions that we give shape and form and even meaning to our spiritual experiences from whatever person or tradition helps us put them in context. For me, that’s Quakerism. Religious experiences, I said in that post, are spiritual experiences that arise in the practice of or that receive meaning from a religious tradition. So it’s no wonder that my experiences have the form of Quakerism. For, while I am temperamentally something of a radical, a risk-taker, even sometimes a trouble maker, nevertheless I have a passion for tradition, especially the Quaker tradition.
But true spiritual/religious experiences are not just emotionally satisfying (in fact, they often are just the opposite); besides being “transcendental”, they are real. They bring real positive change. My experiences are deeper than just the shallow forms they have in my imagination. They have left me changed. One of the changes they have wrought is that I now take very seriously the experiences that other Friends of all generations have had of Christ. I now share some of their faith, because each of my three kinds of experience of Jesus supports an openness that the skeptic in me must entertain.
First, while some of the accounts in the gospels of Jesus’ charismatic power may be so loaded with symbolism as to be suspect as history, I know from personal experience that charismatic power is real and I believe there is a real foundation for the belief in the early church that Jesus was “divine”. What that means (what I think it means, anyway) is for a later post.
Second, the visitations of the Presence in the Midst prove that something extraordinary and transcendental can happen in meeting for worship. It does not prove that Christ is behind those experiences. But something is. What would you call it?
Third, I have received transforming pastoral ministry, not just from Friends who have been open to the Holy Spirit’s guidance, but by the Spirit itself, dressed in the image of Christ.
Nevertheless, notwithstanding this catalog of profound experiences of Jesus, I have not been “convinced”. I pray for Jesus’ presence in meeting for worship, I pray for his guidance when I write. I believe he abides among us and even within us as we sit in waiting silence, as the Power that has made us a people of God in the first place. And yet I do not count myself his disciple.
Why not? I can think of a number of reasons.
The first is that Jesus himself just may not care. He may have from me what he wants, more or less, and does not feel incensed that I do not give him more. He may feel that it is the turning toward the Light that matters, not the name we pin on it. My reading of the gospels leads me to believe that he did not claim to be God, that he would have found such an idea blasphemous, but that he did feel so attuned to his Father, so clear about his sending, so turned toward the Light himself, as it were, and perhaps something more, something deeper, more transforming and more mysterious—that he could say that he and the Father were one. In much the same way, George Fox claimed that he and Jesus Christ were one.
I will return eventually to this “something more” that made Jesus something more than just a Spirit-inspired human prophet, as many Liberal Friends believe him to have been. I have a theory about what it was that transfigured the historical Jesus into something that Paul’s post-pagan followers could easily understand as divine, and that Jesus’ own Jewish followers also recognized, in the terms of their own tradition, as more than merely mortal. But my ideas will be purely speculation, “notions” and “shadows”, as Fox would have said, since I have no direct experience of it and my ideas rest on rather thin evidence and some creative conjecture. My ideas are fun to entertain, at least for me, but not very important.
A second more likely reason I still am not a self-confessed Christian, which I suspect many of my readers are voicing in their heads, is that I am in denial. Something in me is resisting the truth behind my experience.
No doubt this is true. There’s lots of good reasons for such resistance. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” says Proverbs, and I know why: Let God in and your life will be destroyed. You will have to give stuff up, things you really care about and want to hold onto. You will be laid low and it will hurt.
Furthermore, I have personal reasons to resist, besides the desperate generic battle waged by any selfish unconscious mind to protect the spiritual status quo. For one thing, I would resist Jesus as my “Savior” from sin because I reject the sin-salvation paradigm of traditional Christianity with all of my heart and soul and strength, to turn a phrase on its head. This rejection is intellectual, moral, and visceral. One of these days, I’ll explain why. As I said in an earlier post, I still am looking for a way to express myself about this that is truthful and respectful.
I can think of other reasons for my resistance, too. My relationship with my evangelical father is one of them. But this kind of psychological speculation is just more “notions” and “shadows”. I don’t actually feel any urgency about it. Here I am. Trying to make sense of it all. Trying to be true to my leading to integrate my experience with that of my community and my tradition. Hoping to make connections in my written ministry that might serve other Friends, especially those who, like me, aren’t Christian but are Quaker.
So far, I have never experienced Jesus the Christ as a threat, but only as a friend, as a healer, a unifier, an inspirer. I do not fear him. I love him, in my way, and I am grateful for his gifts. That’s the personal side of the relationship.
Liberal Quakerism, Part 5—Jesus and I, Part 3
April 20, 2013 § 3 Comments
The third experience of Jesus followed my father’s death.
My father suffered from pretty severe dementia for the last couple of years of his life. Our relationship had been quite difficult at times, because of my opposition to the war in Vietnam and my extreme hippy lifestyle. At one point he told me that, if I refused military service and went to jail, as I had told him I would do if I had to, he would tell his friends I was dead. He disowned me, telling me never to contact him again. He opened up a little bit again when my older son was conceived.
One evening during a conference at Powell House, New York Yearly Meeting’s conference center, while talking about this with some Friends in the parlor, one Friend, Leanna Goerlich, said, “You know, he has only hurt you so much because he loves you so much.” On the surface, it was a cliche. But it was profound pastoral ministry. I suddenly understood:
My father was a pious if not very reflective evangelical Christian. He knew I was going to hell. And he knew, because of the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, I suspect, that he was going to rest in the bosom of Abraham, but he would be able to see me in my eternal suffering. This hurt him so much that he could hardly stand to be around me or, especially, to be reminded of my inevitable fate by my long hair, sloppy clothes, and the details of my lifestyle, so he cut me off.
That evening, I changed inside. No longer did I feel compelled to tell him about my life, or make him accept who I was, or strive for the intimacy with him that I so desperately wanted. I accepted his terms—small talk, nothing substantive or personal, not much time together. From then on, we got along pretty well. We actively enjoyed each other’s company.
When he got sick, I think he was quite surprised that I stepped up, and he was very grateful. And even when he could no longer remember what he was trying to say halfway through a sentence, he could still crack jokes and say, “Thank you,” and “I love you.” We became quite close, tough we could barely have a normal conversation.
Until the last day of his life. I realized afterwards that on that day, for the first time, he did not know who I was. His blank stares, his feeble attempts to escape, his terse, unwilling answers to my attempts at conversation—these were natural responses to a stranger hanging around and trying to engage him. And I suspect he knew that something else was going on, but couldn’t figure out what.
Finally, he broke free from me but he made a wrong turn in his wheelchair while going through the dining room and ended up in a blind alley against the wall, trapped between two tables. Back and forth, back and forth, he tried to find his way out, while my heart broke watching him and feeling abandoned all over again. After a while, he got turned around and, without looking at me, made his way out into the common room.
I talked to the head of the shift but she had not noticed anything new. Then a nurse pulled him over to give him his medication. Then he wheeled off a few feet and stared at the wall.
My grief overwhelmed me. I wanted to go over and try again to engage him, but I couldn’t. I decided to leave, but I couldn’t go over to him. I walked to the corridor and turned; he was still staring off. I didn’t say goodbye. He died that evening. I had not said goodbye.
Later that night, after the phone call, I drowned in grief, and regret, and guilt, and misery. I was brought so low.
Then suddenly, he came to me. He was the serious father I had known so well in life, but peaceful. And he thanked me. He blessed me. He forgave me. He released me from my regret and guilt. And I thanked him, and returned his love.
All this took a while, and it was overwhelming. My poor, wise wife let me be, though I was rocking and groaning and crying out; but I was smiling and even laughing. I was ecstatic, immeasurably sad and grateful.
Then Jesus came. He came with light. To take my dad home. As my dad had always wanted. (He had made my mom mad more than once when I was a kid saying that, like Paul, he was ready to go any time, to get out of this miserable world.) Well, now he was going, with his Savior.
That took a while, too. Maybe 10 minutes? 20? Slowly, stately, they receded into that light together. Jesus paid me some attention; mostly he was enfolding my dad in his love. I shook and shook and wept and cried out.
Thank you, Jesus.
Liberal Quakerism, Part 5—Jesus and I, Part 2
April 17, 2013 § 3 Comments
Jesus, the Presence in the Midst
Several times, I have sensed a presence in meeting for worship, quite distinctly in a particular place in the meeting room. Twice when I opened my eyes, I saw (was it in my mind’s eye only?) an “apparition” in the image of Jesus, a stereotypical image similar to a painting I know. He is always standing behind one of the worshippers. Each time, just as I become fully aware of this presence and the person with whom it is associated, that person rises and speaks.
This always has had an electrifying effect on me, convulsing my body—I was quaking, I suppose—and flooding me with a powerful set of emotions, basically the same as those I have felt in the gathered meeting: a fullness of spirit, a deep gratitude, and a great joy, Wonderful feelings.
These experiences all took place a long time ago, now. But they remain with me as confirmation of the promise that, “wherever two or three are gathered in my name, there am I also”. And ever since, I have imagined Jesus standing next to people when they rise to give vocal ministry in meeting for worship and I try to recover those feelings. It is how I now hold people “in the Light”.
Now we were not actually gathered in Jesus’ name in any of those meetings, and I suppose that the apparition presentation as a stereotypical image of Jesus could easily have been a projection of my unconscious. Fine. But the psychic prescience of knowing exactly who was going to speak and when cannot be explained away as just a projection of my imagination or unconscious desire for religious experience, or whatever.
Moreover, this kind of psychic experience has been, if not common among Friends, then at least not unknown throughout Quaker history. Something is going on.
It is this kind of experience upon which I want to build in this project to develop a “theology” of Liberal Quakerism. These experiences were real, they were transcendental, and they took place within the context of Quaker worship and Quaker tradition. Any attempt to express in new language what we believe, who we are, and how we practice must account for such experiences.
This is what I mean by insistence on “experience” as the starting point for this project. In an early comment, Micah Bales warned about Liberal Quakerism’s virtual deification of personal experience and the ranterism it has led to (I paraphrase). I want to honor personal experience, and yes, of course, my own experience in particular. But it is these truly transcendental, psychic, interpersonal experiences, like the ones I’ve described, and our collective experience in the gathered meeting that interests me most.
Individual transcendental experiences confirm us in our faith. But collective experiences, of both the interpersonal, psychic kind and the more inclusive gathered meeting, not only strengthen our faith as individuals but they also are what make us a gathered people of God. If we can articulate what these experiences mean to us in a way that builds upon our tradition and yet extends it or opens it, that makes it meaningful and attractive to Liberal Friends today, and—most important—true to the Spirit of Love and Truth that inspires them—that is my goal.
In my next post I will describe my experience of Jesus as the Comforter.
Liberal Quakerism, Part 5—Jesus and I, Part 1
April 16, 2013 § Leave a comment
Jesus and I
I said in my last post that I would turn next to the gathered meeting as the experience from which my exploration of Liberal Quaker theology begins in earnest. But I realized that I had at least one more important background entry, about my own relationship with Jesus. Because, while I have not had an experience of Jesus that would make me his disciple, I’m not exactly sure why, since the experiences I have had have been quite profound. There have been three kinds. It looks like I have so much to say about this subject that I’m going to have to dedicate a post to each one separately.
Jesus, the Christ of Christian Scripture
The most important of these experiences is my discovery of the Jesus of the gospels—the Synoptic gospels, Mark, Matthew, and Luke. The Jesus of John seems to me, if not a fabrication of John’s, at least such a radical reconstruction of what I consider to be the more historical Jesus of the Synoptics that I’m only interested his gospel as brilliant religious literature. There’s more to it than that, actually, because John reflects the Essene tradition even more than Luke and clearly there’s a mysterious but strong strain of Essene thought and practice in the early Jesus movement. So also with the wisdom thread in John; there’s something going on there. But, again, it feels to me like it has more to do with John, whoever he was, than it does with Jesus.
The Jesus of Paul—and especially, the Christ of Paul—is even more removed from the prophet and charismatic with whom I have fallen in love in my study of the gospels. In Paul, the proclaimer has become the proclaimed, and the kingdom Jesus proclaimed has been almost utterly lost, spiritualized and uprooted from its foundations in Torah. It’s the Synoptic proclaimer of the kingdom of God whom I find so compelling.
This started when I was writing a book on Christian earth stewardship and, after reading a score of books and articles, it became clear that that movement was almost wholly based on Hebrew Scripture, that Jesus had basically nothing to say about earthcare. I felt that, if a theology does not come out of the heart of the gospel of Jesus, Christians are very unlikely to embrace it. If Jesus doesn’t talk about it, why should we? So I determined to start my research over and focus on the gospel of Jesus on its own terms, and if there was nothing there that could inform our earthcare, then I would drop the project.
Then I discovered The Politics of Jesus by John Howard Yoder while taking a course on The Prophetic Tradition under the care of the School of the Spirit. In that book I discovered what I call the economics of redemption in the commonwealth of God, and it launched me on a decades-long study of biblical economics. Once you learn to recognize the economic language in Torah and the unique, pervasive, and innovative ways Jesus uses this language and these principles in his teachings, you realize that the gospel is all about economics. I alluded to this in my earlier post on definitions of “Christian”.
This covenantal economic language is everywhere in the Synoptics—in the stories, in the parables, in the sayings, and in Jesus’ actions, even his healings. In terms of earthcare, while Jesus has almost nothing to say about land use, he is all about land tenure—who gets to decide how the land will be used. This has completely reoriented my approach to ecological issues in general. As I said, I talked a little bit about this in my post on definitions of “Christian”.
Furthermore, this fascination with Jesus and the kingdom he proclaimed goes beyond interest in just his teachings—his role as the anointed (messiah/christ) prophet of “good news for the poor”. I am just as interested in him as a charismatic, as one who manifested divine power as a preacher, presence, and healer.
Yoga has a fully developed “theology” of the siddha, the guru whose very presence is enlightening and who can psychically transform her or his followers and, at times, manifest in other ways. I have been in the presence of siddha yogis. I have seen psychic healing. I have done psychic healing. I know that many of the “miracles” Jesus performed are possible, and that makes the tradition’s claims for his divinity something to take seriously.
My quest to understand Jesus’ charismatic power and the roots of the tradition’s claim of his divinity have been just as important to my approach to this project of Liberal Quaker theology as my love of his teachings. And I think it sets me apart from many Liberal Friends. I take the idea of Jesus’ divinity seriously. Still, it has not made me Christ’s disciple.
Well, there’s lots more to say. I have written a lot about the economics of redemption, much of which is available in my first blog, BibleMonster. That blog has been dormant for a while, since it’s hard enough to keep up with one blog and this one now has my attention. I’ve studied, thought, and written a lot about Jesus the charismatic, as well, but have not published most of it anywhere.
This work, this intense study of the new covenant Jesus inaugurated and the charismatic dimension of the kingdom he proclaimed, has evolved into a deep love of the Jesus whom I have thus come to know. Christian tradition has never honored the discipline of study and the path of the mind to the love of God the way that Judaism has. We have the Jesuits, but especially in the Protestant tradition, while Bible study has long been an aid to personal devotion, it rarely has been a path unto itself, the way it is in Judaism.
I feel especially akin to the Merkabah mystics, Jewish mystics of the early Middle Ages whose path was the study of Ezekiel chapter one, the prophet’s vision of Yahweh’s throne chariot. Paul is sometimes credited with being the first recorded proto-Merkabah mystic. I think he learned this from his teacher Ananias, but that is a series of posts for BibleMonster. Anyway, I think I understand those rabbis.
But Quakerism (at least Liberal Quakerism) is even worse in regard to the path of the mind. Many Friends, in my experience, are hostile and/or contemptuous of “theology”, of the intellect, and of intellectuals. They are clear in their own minds that the community, the “spiritual”, and the “emotional” paths are superior to the path of the mind, at best; often, they deny the mind as a legitimate path at all. “Words are limiting and inadequate . . . “ goes the usual anti-intellectual mantra.
Yes, they are. So is everything else. What I am saying here in this little diversion/diatribe is that there are many kinds of religious temperaments, each has its legitimate place in the life of the spirit, and each person tends to experience one or more of these temperaments as dominant in their own spiritual journey. By temperament, I am a student and a mystic.
(It could be worse. If I were a “somatic”, someone for whom the way of the body is the path to God, Quakerism would be a coffin to the spirit; I would have to become a ballet dancer, or a yogi. It’s almost as bad for musicians. Now we have our John Bloods and our Jon Watts, thank God, but it took a while. Meanwhile, we have had centuries of Bach, Handel, Shaw . . . )
As a student, I have come to know the Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels quite intimately. It feels like a kind of love affair. The more I learn, the more complete my understanding of Jesus becomes, the more I admire him. I have come to love him. I am in awe of the reach of his mind, the depth of his spirit, the mystical and personal power he manifested, the depth of his compassion for those who suffered, his gift as a poet and as a story-teller, whose stories had the power of zen koans. I am in awe of the heroic courage his anointing gave him, and the devotion he gave so utterly to his Father—and to his followers. I have fallen in love.
And yet I have not felt led to join his followers as his disciple. I don’t know why. But there it is.
In the next post I want to describe my experience of Jesus, the Presence in the Midst—my own “mystical” experience of the Christ in meeting for worship.
Through the Flaming Sword 