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.

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.

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.