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.