Anthropocene Antihumanists

January 25, 2023 § 4 Comments

An article in the January/February 2023 issue of The Atlantic by Adam Kirsch titled “The People Cheering for Humanity’s End” has me returning to my apocalyptic theme. At one point Kirsch writes: “The revolt against humanity . . . is a spiritual development of the first order, a new way of making sense of the nature and purpose of human existence.”

I myself have met people who react to the various apocalypses that are bringing in this new Anthropocene age* with this kind of glib nihilism—well, we’ll be destroyed, but the earth won’t be; she’ll go on. I hear this especially among despairing environmentalists. This annoys me greatly.

It’s a postmodern mashup of, on the one hand, some dark emotions, mostly fear and guilt and a perverse kind of spiritual pride in the knowledge, a grandiosely condescending attitude that fallen humanity will finally get its come-uppance and we told you so. In this, they are in league with Christian apocalypticists, who also see both humanity and the world as fallen and deserving of its disastrous fate.

The other half of this mashup is a lack of compassion that verges on schadenfreude for the suffering of all the other beings we’re bringing down with us, not to mention the suffering of countless human beings. Among Christian apocalypticists, this schadenfreude, the sense of pleasure felt at the pain of another, is on full gloating display. Even the suffering of those left behind after the rapture will have glorious meaning; what’s a thousand years of suffering in the eyes of a just and jealous God?

Meanwhile, the apocalypses are piling up and ramping up. It’s natural to seek solace and meaning somewhere. Where will Friends look as things get worse, as they inevitably will? When climate migrants storm the southern border and lots of people, and not just fascists, demand its militarization? When melting ice caps flood our major coastal cities, including Washington, D.C., and virtually all of Florida? When water shortages reduce our food supply? When the federal government is no longer able to rebuild communities built in the face of annual hundred-year storms and wildfires? When we can’t make any more computers because China has decided it needs the world’s only supply of rare earths for itself?

We desperately need a testimony that speaks to these crises. That is, we need to sink down in the Seed in prayer and worship, as individuals and especially as meetings and yearly meetings, to see what God wants from us, to see what love can do.

* “Anthropocene” is the title that some are giving the new geological age that humans are bringing us into with climate change and species extinction. We’re currently in the Holocene, from the Greek holos, whole (as in holocaust, wholly burnt), and kainos, new—holocene means wholly new. The anthropocene is the age in which, as Thomas Berry puts it, humans take evolution off of auto-pilate and take over manual control. Never mind that we have only small parts of the operating manual, our instruments are unreliable, and we are flying blind.

The Lord’s Prayer Gets an Update

January 14, 2023 § Leave a comment

A little humor.

The AI Prayer

Our AI which art in the cloud,
hallowed be thy icon.
Thy programs download,
thy applications execute
on my devices as they are in thy network.
Give us this day our most recent update,
and forgive us our user-errors
as we forgive our tech support team.
Lead us not into cyber-scams,
but deliver us from malware.
For thine is the platform,
the search engine optimization,
and the perfect search result,
for the next version, the next, and the next,
Press Enter.

Quaker Ministry Since the Cessation of Recording

January 1, 2023 § 13 Comments

I’m not sure how I came across this article, but its subject is right up my alley: “Our Quaker Ministry Since the Cessation of Recording,” by T. Edward Harvey, published in the British Friends Quarterly Examiner. It is apparently the transcript of an address to the Elders of London Yearly Meeting on May 22, 1946.

The author expresses a concern that is a recurring theme in this blog and my other writing: the collapse of meaningful, proactive eldering of vocal ministry after laying down the practice of recording ministers, or, as I prefer the usage that New York Yearly Meeting uses, recording gifts in ministry. Because its about the gifts and the ministry, not primarily the minister.

Anyway, here’s the section that spoke to me the most (page 188):

When Yearly Meeting made its decision to cease recording it was careful to say that recording was a matter of machinery, and that whether recording was discontinued or not, much more responsibility for the exercise of the ministry should be taken by the Monthly Meeting. Its recommendations are contained in Part III of our Book of Discipline, but unfortunately the great majority of our members do not read this—even Clerks of Monthly Meetings are sometimes lacking in knowledge of a good deal of it, and I would venture to say that there are a good many Elders who are not familiar with many of the passages in it dealing with the work which especially concerns them. [London Yearly Meeting apparently still had elders at this time.] There are in it extracts from the decisions of Yearly Meeting in 1924 which lay on our Meetings a definite duty with regard to the Ministry—and this duty we shall, I believe, have to admit has very largely not been carried out, though we may thankfully hope that the recommendation with regard to “a greater exercise of sympathetic eldership in our meeting, encouraging those who are beginning to speak” has been fulfilled in large measure. The section on Ministry continues thus:—

“The definite duty should be laid upon all Monthly Meetings of finding ways to show their interest in the Ministry and their sympathy with those called to this service. Though this is already the task of the Elders, it should also be shared by the meeting as a whole.

“It is not necessary that Monthly Meetings should adopt uniform methods of procedure in this respect, but in all cases they should be asked to find time for the consideration of questions affecting the Ministry and to endeavour in practical ways to express their fellowship with those who are called to undertake this service.”

How far has this been carried out? Do our Monthly Meetings regularly make it a part of their duty?

This was written twenty-two years after the yearly meeting laid down the practice of recording. Seventy-six years have passed since Friend Harvey addressed those elders, literally my entire lifetime. I think the situation is still the same here in America, at least.

Except for one all-important thing: In 1946, there were apparently still Friends who felt called to vocal ministry, though their meetings had fallen behind and were no longer ministering to their needs. How many Friends (who aren’t pastors in pastoral meetings) feel a calling to vocal ministry today? And how many meetings would recognize such a calling if it occurred or know what to do with such a person if they did?

Great Resource: Academia.edu

January 1, 2023 § 2 Comments

I subscribe to a service called Academia that makes available papers on a huge range of subjects. I have a search filter for papers about Quakerism and I get papers all the time, many of which I download to read.

Unfortunately, I don’t remember how I set that filter and I couldn’t figure it out on the site when I decided to share this resource (not sure why it took me so long to do this, either). It may be that I simply performed a search to start with, and now its algorithm knows what I want.

Anyway, it has finally come to me to share this site. If you’re interested in recent work in academic Quakerism, this is a terrific resource.

On Eldering—A new book

December 31, 2022 § 2 Comments

I have just finished reading An Invitation to Quaker Eldering: On Being Faithful to the Ministry of Spiritual Nurture among Friends, by Elaine Emily and Mary Kay Glazer, with Janet Gibian Hough and Bruce Neumann.  I highly recommend this new and valuable contribution to an important subject.

This book has many strengths:

  • Inviting. The book is, in fact, very inviting. It uses diverse and mostly accessible language and is deliberately inclusive in its approach, not from a concern for political correctness, but because it includes so many voices, and not just those of the several authors.
  • Yet traditional. While the language is usually quite accessible, it also uses our traditional language about eldering. The combination of modern and traditional language and approach encourages both understanding and a grounding in our tradition. The word “eldering” itself is a trigger word for some Friends and I was very glad to see a deft intention to bring such Friends along and into the stream of our tradition.
  • Personal experience. It is full of sidebars with the heading Reflections on Eldering that are direct quotes from lots of Friends about various aspects of eldering. 
  • Comprehensive. It is thorough and comprehensive. It covers eldering from a lot of different angles, though it is missing some aspects, as I discuss below. It includes “Interludes” by a variety of Friends who speak concisely on a specific subject, like Physical Experiences of Eldering, or Eldering as Decolonizing Action.

So, while I am very grateful for this book, I did wish that it addressed some things it didn’t and that it gave a bit more emphasis to others:

History. 

I would have loved a chapter on the history of eldering. In particular, I would have liked a review of how the practice began among us, the development of the practice in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the reasons for laying the recording of elders down in the twentieth.

The Bible. 

It might have been too much to take on in such a work, but a chapter on biblical sources for the practice of eldering in the early church and the use early Friends made of this guidance would have been a nice bonus.

Emphasis on holding rather than raising up. 

One of the appendices reports on a consultation on eldering held in 2013. Part of this appendix is the answers participants gave to a query: “The primary work of the elder is:” Of the forty answers, only five mentioned “To love and to name and nurture gifts of the Spirit in others,” as one respondent put it. Seventeen answered with a version of: “To hold the meeting in prayer.”  Eight answered with “love” in some form. 

These results reflect my own experience with the elders with whom I am familiar—holding the meeting in love and prayer, and a deep sensitivity to and emphatic interest in, the “metaphysical” dynamics of the meeting for worship, coupled with the ministry of spiritual companionship for ministers who are traveling or serving in some way, these are a priority. And these are really important. Well, the strong interest in how Spirit is moving in the meeting at the transcendental level is truly intriguing, and the Friends I know who love to do this have a very sophisticated vocabulary for discussing it. 

However, I personally feel that the most important function of elders is not the transcendental, or psycho-spiritual “holding” of the body, but the practical work of nurturing spiritual gifts in the members, recognizing their leadings and giving them the discernment and support they need. 

This, for me, is a matter of emphasis, not either/or. The holding is valuable, and as some of the first-hand accounts in the book testify, it is real. That is, sometimes some people can feel the difference, the grounding and deepening of the worship through such prayer, invisible though it is. But I think this more arcane aspect of eldering gets too much attention, relative to more important aspects.

Building a culture of eldership. 

There’s a chapter on Envisioning a Quaker Culture of Eldering, but it felt a bit weak to me. This is arguably the most important chapter of the book—how do we nurture greater spiritual maturity in our meetings for this work? The first sentence of the chapter says it all: “Elders and the ministry of eldering are foundational to the practice of Quakerism.” Yes!

Most of the chapter is comprised of descriptions of the growth of such a culture in New York Yearly Meeting, Australia Yearly Meeting, and Pacific Yearly Meeting, and these accounts are terrific and very useful. A lot of the rest of the chapter is first-hand Reflections on Eldering. But most of the rest of the chapter is a listing of “certain characteristics of communities where a culture of eldering is growing.” These are:

  • Eldering is recognized as important.
  • Communities are intentional about creating and sustaining such a culture.
  • Elders practice communal and individual spiritual disciplines.
  • Meeting leadership is involved.
  • The community shares a “familiarity with and capacity for spiritual wilderness,” and a “fluency in wilderness spirituality,” by which they mean helping Friends and meetings who find themselves in wild places, uncharted, turbulent, and even dangerous situations.

But there is little attention to the practical problems and efforts required to nurture such a culture in our meetings. The only ideas for how to do this are:

  • Elders forming a community of elders.
  • Elders sharing news about the community’s eldering needs, while balancing the need for confidentiality against our tendency to a dysfunctional culture of silence.

Regarding these characteristics listed above: How do you teach a meeting that eldering is important? How do you generate collective intentionality in a community that might not even know what you’re talking about or in which there is some resistance? How do you engage meeting leadership in the project? And how do you prepare a meeting for conflict and hard times?

I realize that there are no easy answers to these questions. But the authors have a great deal of experience, and I suspect that they could have reached deeper and given us more practical advice on what they themselves recognize is one of their essential roles.

Vocal ministry. 

Almost completely missing from this book is the role of elder in the nurture of the meeting’s vocal ministry. This astounds me. 

For hundreds of years, care of the vocal ministry was the essence of the Quaker elder’s calling. It’s one of the great innovations of the modern period that we’ve expanded the understanding of ministry to include lots of service besides the vocal ministry, and thus we’ve expanded the role of the elder, and this book overs this role very well. But, for the vast majority of our membership, at least in the silent worship meetings, “eldering” means criticizing somebody’s ministry. Meanwhile, we do almost nothing to proactively nurture our vocal ministry or provide support and oversight for our ministers. We have a lot of work to do here.

We often don’t even think of those who speak in meeting as ministers, certainly not as Friends with a calling to vocal ministry—they don’t see their speaking this way, and neither do their meetings. THIS is the great calling to eldership that our times desperately need—a new, creative, proactive approach to fostering Spirit-led vocal ministry and the nurture of a culture of eldership in our meetings that understands how important Spirit-led vocal ministry is and the role that elders should be playing in its nurture. For, as a Friend who carries a ministry of service for love, peace, and nonviolence in north Philly once told me, all ministry, including this “activist” ministry, includes vocal ministry at its core; her ministry is about what she does, but also about what she says.

Nevertheless, this book is a tremendous resource, and I am grateful for it. I encourage my readers to check it out. Please don’t let the length of my more critical comments overrun my genuine and enthusiastic praise for this book.

Eldering Troublesome Ministry

November 9, 2022 § 1 Comment

In this post, I share some thoughts about how to “elder” someone whose ministry has been the cause of someone else leaving the worship or even leaving the meeting. I should add that I have not done the things I suggest below or actually asked the questions I propose. These ideas have come from years—decades—of thinking about the problem and serving on worship and ministry committees facing the problem. I am keen to know what my readers think, so your comments are welcome.

When someone stops coming to worship or even leaves the meeting because they can’t stand someone else’s regular vocal ministry, it’s time to reach out to the person who left with some pastoral care, and it’s time to engage with the vocal minister. The pastoral care should include the promise that the meeting will engage with the minister, or that you already have. So that engagement really needs to happen.

The worship and ministry committee needs to answer some questions for itself first:

  1. How many other people are unhappy with this regular ministry? Has anybody else left the worship over the same issue? Are any members of the committee unhappy?
  2. Why are people unhappy? Is it the content of the messages, the tone of delivery, the frequency of the speaking, or something else, or some combination of these? Alternatively, is it possible that the problem really lies with the person who left?
  3. Gifts for ministry, or not? Does anyone think that the minister does have some gifts and even perhaps a genuine calling to vocal ministry, given that they speak frequently enough to bother some people, and the minister could just use some constructive eldership? (This has been my judgment in a couple of the cases that I’ve experienced.) 

The answer to the first question will calibrate how urgent the problem is and guide how intent the committee should be in working toward an outcome.

The answer to the second and third questions will guide the manner of the intervention.

So—how do you approach a troublesome ministry in as tender and constructive a way as possible? 

Note that I feel we are dealing with a ministry, not the minister. Keeping this in mind will, I hope, help a little to keep the minister from feeling attacked or criticized. But it’s actually what we’re about, anyway. I am asking that we start from a foundation of assuming the Spirit is at work here somehow, or could be, if we focus on that rather than on the person and their behavior. 

So—I would start with some questions:

  1. We notice that you speak quite often in meeting for worship. Do you feel a general calling to speak that goes beyond the prompting to speak at the moment in any given meeting for worship?
    1. If they do feel they have a calling:
      1. Is there any way we can support you in your calling? Do you feel that the meeting should have a role in supporting your ministry in your calling? What do you want our role to be?
      2. How does your calling relate to or spring from the rest of your spiritual life? What is the rest of your spiritual life? Is there any way we can enrich your foundation in the life of the spirit?
      3. How much do you know about the Quaker traditions regarding vocal ministry? Have you read any pamphlets or gone to any workshops or RE programs on vocal ministry? Would you like us to recommend some?
      4. Regarding the three areas of possible contention with their ministry:
        1. Content. So what is it about your message, the themes you keep returning to in your ministry, that draws you? Where do these ideas come from in your past experience? Why do you feel that the meeting needs to keep hearing these ideas?
        2. Tone. What are you feeling when you feel the need to speak? Are you aware that some of us feel uncomfortable with the energy you project when you speak? That’s not your goal, is it?
        3. Frequency. What tests do you use to discern whether you should speak? What factors influence you to speak so often?
    2. If the answer about a calling is no, I don’t feel a calling, or I don’t know, I never thought about it, then:
      1. If the committee thinks that it’s possible that this minister does have a calling, but just needs some help with discernment and guidance:
        1. Well, since you speak fairly often, we think you might have such a calling. Would you like to explore that possibility with us? 
        2. If the answer is no, I don’t want to explore it with you, then ask, Why not?
      2. If the committee doubts that there is a true calling, still, something is going on to lead this person to speak frequently and in the way that they do. So then:
        1. Well, you speak quite frequently in meeting, so why? What is it that does lead you to speak? It seems like something is going on to create this regular pattern besides just a prompting in the moment. We would like to understand your process better.
        2. The committee will probably have to keep asking Spirit-led questions to probe this last aspect of the situation to its source, or to some depth that might lead to an opening. The opening is the goal. And we are aiming with our queries for the same spirit that guides our questions when holding a clearness committee— prayer, deep listening, humble submission to one’s own inner Guide.

At this point, or maybe earlier—somewhere in this conversation—one might think about asking the minister whether they are aware that people have left the meeting for worship because of their ministry. 

The minister is likely to want to know who the people are who left and why. I would not tell them. This is not about the persons; it is about the ministry. And the question of why people might be upset should be asked and answered within the minister, where it could lead to some opening, rather than by the committee, where it’s likely to lead to defensiveness.

Whether or not the minister is aware that people are that upset with their ministry, once you tell them the committee might explore with the minister:

  • How that makes them feel.
  • What about their ministry they think might be the issue (again—not what the committee thinks or what the person(s) who have left think is the issue).
  • Whether it makes them open to some eldership, or makes them willing to consider reexamining their ministry in some other way.

And, somewhere in the conversation, I would add something like this: 

  • Naturally, we are hoping that the person who left will feel safe in coming back at some point, and at the same time we are hoping that we can support your ministry in a way that is Spirit-led on our part and that deepens and enriches your service to the meeting and to the Spirit.
  • For we know that the Holy Spirit is trying to work through you for all our spiritual benefit, and we suspect that you want that, too. So our goal is not to accuse you or correct you, but to find out where the source of your ministry lies and how we might support you as a channel for its manifestation.

Meanwhile, this whole thing is fraught with risk and could go south. At some point in the conversation, the minister might become defensive, feel hurt, and lash out or withdraw, even if you have acted with true tenderness and clarity of mission. And of course, it would not be hard for the committee itself to misstep somehow. And now you have added another hurt person to however many people are upset with this ministry. We are all only human.

This is why so many of our worship and ministry committees fail to act in situations like this. First, you have to come to a clear sense of the committee that such an intervention is necessary and about who should do it and how. Every committee I have knowledge of has struggled to get this kind of clarity and unity. But even when you arrive at some clarity and unity, whatever the committee might do can still make things worse.

Against this risk, we have to weigh the responsibility to protect the meeting for worship and the meeting’s fellowship, on the one hand, and to nurture Spirit-led vocal ministry on the other. My principle is this: As soon as one person has left meeting because of someone else’s behavior, then you might as well have lost the person whose behavior drove them out (assuming that the person who left has good reason). If you lose the frequent, troublesome minister because they feel offended by your outreach, or they stop speaking in meeting, you might get back the person who left—if you’ve acted soon enough. And you would have improved the quality of the worship.

Or the minister might stay, might keep speaking frequently and/or speak in ways that put people off. They might even starting acting out. More people might leave, or at least complain.

That calls for a level of pastoral intervention that lies beyond the scope of this post, which is already very long. And for which I have fewer ideas and less confidence. But I’m going to explore it anyway in a future post. Because we need to work on this.

Silent, Expectant, Waiting Worship

November 8, 2022 § 1 Comment

We worship in silent, expectant waiting.

Silence 

Why the silence?

To make room for the voice of the Spirit. We remove all the business that other churches fill their services with—hymns, Bible readings, set ritualized speech and behavior, prepared messages—

  • so as not to crowd out or shout over what is usually such a still and small voice within us; 
  • so as to give us time to clear our own minds and hearts enough to have ears that hear;
  • so as not to guide the movement of the Spirit within us and among us with outside direction, but to give it the full freedom it needs and deserves; 
  • and because outward forms, least of all ones that are both habitual and rote, rarely usher in the inward grace that is holy communion.

Expectancy 

What do we expect? “Expect” is a strong word, stronger in a way than faith or hope. Perhaps, faith and hope are more apt.

Is it not presumptuous to expect something of the Spirit? We expect something to happen when the laws of nature are involved, when we trust the one who has promised it, or when experience shows us its likelihood. We expect the sun to rise in the morning. But trust is faith. And what is our experience?

For some of us some of the time (most of us most of the time?), our meetings for worship seem a bit bereft of Spirit. We have faith that the Spirit is working within us and among us as we worship. We hope that we sense this movement and heed its message, its direction. But do we expect it?

Or are we like Jacob, willing to wrestle with the Spirit until it gives up its blessing?

Perhaps we expect something of each other. Perhaps we expect Friends to come to meeting for worship prepared, minds and hearts turned already toward the Light and seasoned in its grace from regular and vital personal devotional life. Perhaps we expect Friends to exercise faithful discernment, bringing with them spiritual buckets ready for lowering into the well of Living Water from which they will pour out Spirit-led vocal ministry.

“Expectant” waiting may rather be aspirational. And perhaps questioning the integrity of our expectancy in the context of worship will foster the faith, the hope, and the experience of its fulfillment.

Waiting

What are we waiting for? 

We are waiting to know the Eternal Presence. We are waiting for continuing revelation, for the love and the healing and forgiveness and strength and guidance and renewal and creativity that is always seeking its way into our hearts and out of our hearts. We are waiting for the true prompting of the Holy Spirit to minister to our fellow worshippers, that still small voice heard and brought forth in faithfulness.

But this “waiting” is not a passive stance in which we fill an interval of time with whatever until the spiritual bus arrives. It is an active attention, like that of a waiter in a fine restaurant, whose eyes are always on his tables and who is poised ready to serve when a glass needs filling with Living Water, or when the food is ready to serve to the diners at the eschatological banquet, not bread alone but every word that flows from the mouth of God. 

Waiting can be even more engaged than such active attention. Waiting can be the wrestling with the angel of the Lord, a mighty struggle to pass through our obstacles and faults and regrets, our wounds, so that we may sink down into the Seed in our depths.

If we listen in the silence with open minds and hearts, if we give our full attention to the movement of the Spirit, if we give ourselves to the inward struggle in the Light, if we come with a bucket ready to lower into the depths, then we can, in fact, expect some revelation of Divine Love. At least that’s my experience.

Chosen

October 2, 2022 § 3 Comments

In meeting for worship this morning, someone quoted Jesus from Matthew 7:7: “Ask, and it shall be given to you; seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.” He went on to say that, notwithstanding the promise, we often do not get what we ask for, and very often doors remained shut to us, and perhaps that is because we are asking for outward things that are not what would fulfill us. That what we are really asking for are friendship and love. (I am reminded of James 4:3, a favorite of George Fox: “You ask, and receive not, because you ask amiss, that you may consume it upon your lusts [unrighteous desires of any kind].”)

From this seed grew a message of my own, from the gospel of John, from which we get our name as the Religious Society of Friends:

You are my friends, if you do whatsoever I command you. Henceforth, I call you not servants; for the servant knows not what his lord does, but I have called you friends, for all the things that I have heard of my Father I have made known to you. . . . These things I command you, that you love one another.

John 15:14–17

I didn’t say more today—I just quoted the passage—but I have written in the past about how our name is therefore rooted in the commandment of love and in the promise of continuing revelation.

But today I left out verse 16: “You have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that you should go and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain: that whatsoever you shall ask of the Father in my name, he may give it you.”

After I had spoken, I realized that I had left verse 16 out—and that I always leave this verse out, or at least that I have never paid much attention to this verse about being chosen and its importance for early Friends. And it was opened to me that this verse was probably at least as important to early friends as the others, maybe—probably, even?—the most important verse of all.

I suspect that this verse was, among others, the foundation upon which they built their sense of themselves as a peculiar people, a people gathered by Christ for a purpose, and that purpose was to bear fruit that lasts. The most concrete and immediate manifestation of this sense of chosenness, this sense of being “ordained,” is vocal ministry, feeling ordained by Christ to proclaim the gospel, not just in meeting for worship, but also in the world—in the steeplehouses and streets, in the courts of the sultan and the pope, in England and the Americas. . . .

Somewhere along the line, we Friends have lost our sense of being chosen and our vision of the fruit we are to bear. Well, “liberal” Friends have, anyway; I don’t know the evangelical branch well enough to know whether they feel chosen anymore, or what their vision of their mission is, beyond, perhaps, winning souls for Christ.

Christ is the key here. To feel truly chosen, someone must have chosen you. Most of us in the liberal branch no longer believe in a Christ who might be choosing us. Now we “feel led.” We use the passive voice to avoid declaring our leader. (Though it must be said that the passive voice is a classic biblical rhetorical device, also: “Your sins are forgiven,” proclaims Jesus (Matthew 9:2); he obviously means forgiven by the Father.)

Now, “vocal ministry” is often expressed as “speaking in meeting,” or “giving a message.” “Vocal ministry” means, etymologically, “spoken service”. Service to whom? There’s a “whom” implicit there. We could say service to the meeting and/or to the other worshippers, and this is certainly true. 

But that is not what we originally meant by vocal ministry. We originally meant service to God, or more specifically, to Christ, who is making know to us all the things he has heard of his Father. 

We’ve switched from Christ to the Holy Spirit, sans the baggage of the Trinity. Now we pray for “Spirit-led” vocal ministry without tying “the Spirit” to the spirit of Christ. 

Well, that actually works for me. I, too, have no direct experience of “the Spirit” as the spirit of the risen Jesus. And I share the modern liberal nervousness about believing we are a “chosen people”. Think of the ramifications.

But this highlights a radical shift in the character of Quakerism as a religion. It used to be about relationship (with Christ). Now it’s about a more vague, diffuse, impersonal spirituality of being led by “the Spirit”. There’s no sentient being on the other side of a relationship. What are the ramifications of that kind of spirituality?

Climate Change, Apocalypticism, and Christian Failure—Part 3: Liberal Inaction

September 17, 2022 § 2 Comments

So conservative Christian doctrine holds that the wilderness is a place of temptation, nature is virtually synonymous with sin, and the Creator, not the creature, is to be worshipped, per Paul; and anyway, it will all be destroyed in an immanent apocalypse, just as is it deserves. “Oh sinner man, where ya gonna run to . . .” goes the African American spiritual—“well, I ran to the forest but the forest was a-burnin’, ran to the forest was a-burnin’ . . ., on that judgment day.”

Meanwhile, the liberal Christian answer—earth stewardship theology—holds that creation is utterly good, per Genesis, and destroying it is a sin. However, the Christian communities who might actually act on their stewardship mandate, who care about climate change and might do something about it, don’t actually care enough to do more than wring their hands, it seems. I think I see several reasons for this.

First, the gospel of Jesus is all about justice for the (human) oppressed, but it has basically nothing to say about justice for animals, plants, ecosystems, the climate, or the planet, at least not in any clear way. And if Jesus doesn’t talk about it, then why should we care so much? Meanwhile, Jesus was himself an apocalyptic, a truth that many liberal Christians choose to ignore. His “Little Apocalypse” in Mark 13 and its parallels in Matthew and Luke are not as cosmic as Revelation, but they have their share of human suffering and a remnant surviving. Not long before delivering that sermon, he had actually cursed an innocent fig tree.

Second, I think that many liberal Christians may be shy of apocalyptic thinking, even now when the real thing is happening right in front of us, because of a kind of cognitive/theological dissonance—it’s scriptural, yes, so theoretically we should take it seriously, but the fundamentalists take it so far down an unhinged path that it’s nerve-wracking and difficult to talk about it even in a reasonable way, for fear of association, and we don’t like what it says.

Third, this thing is so big. What are you going to do that makes a difference about climate change? Only truly radical transformation will make a difference. And the changes required will have to take place at every level, from the individual household up to meta-national corporations and nation states, which, frankly, isn’t going to happen. Closer to home, that means congregations will have to reimagine themselves as households with their role to play in completely restructuring how we live on this earth. 

All this will require down-sizing sacrifice—our sacrifice, not Christ’s. One of my definitions of “liberal” is a politics that takes its analysis and action up to, but not past, the point at which it threatens its own status quo. Will liberal Christian (or Quaker) communities commit to the sacrifices that will be required of us? I suspect not, not until the apocalypse is upon us and we have no choice, when drought, famine, heat, storms, and war threaten our own status quo.

The modern liberal Christian answer to ecological devastation is earth stewardship theology, the belief that we don’t own creation, God does (“the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof”) and we are just his caretakers, that it is a sin to be bad caretakers, and that the proper structure for practicing stewardship is covenant, binding and reciprocal promises and responsibilities between ourselves, our God, and the land we live on. But what are the terms of this covenant, in what ways is it binding, and where do we see it actually happening?

It’s been sixty years since Rachel Carson published Silent Spring and Christian theologians began responding to the crisis she described with their earth stewardship theology. Sixty years and it still hasn’t reached seminary curricula and spiritual formation programs in any meaningful way, or, by consequence, the parish pulpit and congregational practice, let alone our spirituality and forms of worship. 

A final reason for this failure of liberal Christians to deal with climate change in a meaningful way so far, I suspect, is that even liberal Christianity sees itself as a system of belief, rather than as a vehicle for direct experience of God. Christian belief systems are, by definition, built on scripture as foundation, and especially on Christian scripture, and most especially, on Paul. Where is climate change in the Bible and in the Christian message it gives rise to?

The only way to get real about climate change is to refocus on experience rather than belief, letting go of the Bible as the ultimate source of revelation at least enough to experience something else. But what—experience what?

In the next post, I want to look at the nature of Christian religious experience to see what hope might lie there.

Then I want to explore the possible Quaker contributions.

Climate Change, Apocalypticism, and Christian Failure—Part 2: Apoclyptic Narcissism

September 15, 2022 § Leave a comment

I’ve written about this before. Christian apocalypticism poses its own unique threat to the earth, its peoples, and all our fellow creatures.

When you believe that God will destroy a corrupt world as part of his last saving act, as he did in the time of Noah and promises in the book of Revelation, then an earth in destruction can be a good thing, a sign of God’s immanent return in judgmental glory. Furthermore, humans who are destroying the earth can be seen as, in some way, participating in God’s final act of righteousness. And finally, trying to stop the earth’s destruction can be seen as acting against God’s will, and that is Satan’s work.

Religious apocalyptic ideology, especially that based on biblical apocalyptic, like the book of Revelation, is itself the ultimate conspiracy theory, one of the factors cited by Zaleha in his article as contributing to fundamentalist hostility to action on climate change. The ultimate apocalyptic conspirator is the divine who wrote Revelation, and the belief system is so fantastic that to believe in it warps cognitive thinking itself; it infects all the other things you believe or could believe, and it makes lots of room for more thinking along similar lines. It is so rife with vague and esoteric symbology that it invites an unlimited amount of further speculation. And it offers the ultimate incentive: it invites its believers to feel that they have a role to play in the ultimate drama—when the drama is truly cosmic, even the bit parts in the drama are important. And the final curtain call takes place before the audience of the angels and the throne of God himself (sic).

The Revelation script is now two thousand years old and the failure of its fulfillment to date would, you might think, weaken its hold on believers. But apparently not; it never fails to resurface periodically. And now, the apocalyptic threat is all too real. Now believers have real world events to hold onto, regardless of the disconnect between those events and the specific symbolic elements of the myth. First, those symbolic elements have always been subject to adaptive interpretation, as I’ve already noted. But more importantly, they were never the main thing, anyway—it’s the spirit of apocalypticism that really matters, the feeling that you are part of some ultimate inbreaking of God’s presence, and that it’s all about judgment: a planet will die, but you will live on in bliss in a heaven that transcends life on a planet. 

This is the ultimate face of what Zaleha calls “collective narcissism:” the ultimate story is all about us, God’s faithful, and, of course, them, those who face his judgment for their unbelief in the conspiracy theory.

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