The Rise of Liberal Quakerism—A Short History
May 22, 2018 § 5 Comments
Introduction
The history of liberal Quakerism’s emergence is fascinating to me and consequential, I believe, for an understanding of Quakerism today. I’ve been reading books that touch on this history in one way or another, expecting that I would eventually start blogging about what I’ve found.
As part of my research for my book on Quakers and Capitalism, I have been reading Thomas C. Kennedy’s British Quakerism, 1860–1920: The Transformation of a Religious Community, an excellent book that I highly recommend. Having just finished Kennedy’s book, I feel I’m ready for this blog series.
1860–1920 (and more particularly, 1895–1920, beginning with the Manchester Conference and ending with the World Conference of All-Friends) is the period in which liberal Quakerism arose and it’s one of the theses of my book that it brought with it a new spirit of engagement with the social order, which had languished for two hundred years since the persecutions ended the Lamb’s War in the late 17th century. “Social order” is the term British Friends used around the turn of the twentieth century to indicate the economic order—capitalism—which was at the time changing very fast and very radically, and also, more broadly, the social institutions in the wider society that impinged on or related to the economic order.
Since Kennedy’s book is so hard to find (I found one copy for sale at $125; the copy I’m reading happened to be in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s library), I thought I would write a few posts encapsulating the book’s contents as a resource for my readers who might be interested but can’t get a copy. When I’m done, I will bring all the posts together into one pdf file.
So this is the introduction. In the next post, I’ll begin this “book report”.
Evil as spiritual
May 19, 2018 § 10 Comments
What do I mean when I say that for me, evil is “spiritual”?
By spiritual I mean transcendental. Real evil transcends individual consciousness. Psychopaths and sociopaths not evil, they are sick. Evil for me is social. Yet it even transcends normal social interaction. It has a power of its own, though it has no existence in itself.
Here, I am deeply influenced and inspired by Walter Wink’s series of books on the Powers. I’ve reworked some of his ideas for my own understanding, but I think his basic approach is right on—defining angels, demons, etc. as the spiritual dimension of “sociological” phenomena, the ways that humans embody collective impulses to power in human systems, institutions, and collective behavior more generally.
But how can an institution or a collective behavior have a spiritual dimension? The spiritual dimension of these collective human systems, institutions, and behaviors lies in their power to affect and even infect individual moral choice, very often against the will, or at least the natural inclination, of those involved.
Mobs are the most obvious example. “Good,” “Christian” men and women caught up in a spirit of rage or fear to do something or enable something that they would never do on their own—haul a wrongly accused black man from the county jail to string him up in a tree, cover up or stay silent about the fact that your pharmaceutical company’s drug causes heart attacks.
But here it gets tricky. I am saying that the forces that turn a society or a person toward harm, toward violence and oppression, are manifestations of evil. The evil is the momentum in collective human behavior that calls to the darkness that dwells within each of us, the shadow side of our consciousness, and that turns us away from the light, that animates harmful behavior.
That momentum has no existence apart from human experience and consciousness. It is not self-existent; it is not the devil. Or rather, the devil is not some independent, sentient spiritual embodiment of evil, but rather the force of evil as a phenomenon that emerges sometimes spontaneously in the interaction between individual humans through their fears, desires, and hatreds when they are gathered together in human collectives and someone or something lights the spark. The spirit of evil manifests in these collectives and takes on a life of its own.
These negative harmful impulses can manifest in a mob, or in the Third Reich, but they live in human interaction, in parking lot conversations, media content, Facebook posts, popular songs and stories. They are collective nightmares given mouths and hands and feet.
And some persons get energy from these manifestations, these impulses. For me, evil people are people who get energy from doing harm, very similar to the way we get energy from sharing love with each other, only turned back to the shadows, towards deep wounds, needs, fears, and negative impulses.
This is essentially a Jungian argument. We’re talking about the collective unconscious, which is the “consciousness” that dwells in a “body” or infrastructure comprised of human groups, institutions, and systems. We are talking about collective memory stored in stories, art and literature, in the news and the “media”, in religious liturgies and theologies, in political ideologies, Facebook trends, Oscar reception speeches, urban myths, and conspiracy theories.
When a human collective experiences trauma, the memories and the wounds evoke an impulse to repress the experience, to deny it or push it down.
But this does not work. Just as psychic wounds cause neuroses in individuals, collective trauma causes collective neuroses. Just as individuals store the impact of trauma in their psyches and even in their bodies, so human groups store their shared pain in their narratives and their institutions. This repression affects collective behavior. A generation traumatized by the Great War punishes a generation of Germans, who then lash out against their persecutors with another war and traumatize another generation.
The whole thing turns “evil” when it enters a down-spiraling feedback loop, a maelstrom into the shadows caused by holding the microphone up to the speaker, a group listening to its own angry and fearful voice and getting more and more worked up.
But the collective needs the voices—and the ears—of real people. The collective consciousness needs its tongues and hands and feet. Someone has to be Hitler. Someone has to propose the lynch mob. Someone has to say, we’re going to cover up this data about our drug or product. Someone has to get off on this cycle—or at least get something out of it.
For me, the momentum behind this kind of feedback loop is what I call evil.
Still, calling something or someone evil says more about the person doing the calling than about the thing they are calling evil. What am I saying when I call something or someone evil? What do I become? I want to explore this in the next post.
Evil
May 19, 2018 § 4 Comments
Back to sin and evil, the topic of my last post.
While according to Wilmer Cooper, Rufus Jones offered a viable new understanding of sin for liberal Friends, Cooper’s little article does not address Jones’s understanding of evil, and I don’t know Jones’s work well enough myself to fill in the gap. However, Jones’s “theology” of sin points in a direction that feels congruent with liberal Friends’ attitudes toward evil. Just as we are uncomfortable with the idea of sin, we are even more nervous about evil. Many of us just don’t want to think it really exists.
Here I suspect that Jones’s ground-breaking theological innovation of a divine-spark understanding of that of God in everyone is part of the reason. If there is something divine or at least quasi-divine about the human, then where does human evil fit in? How could the two coexist? I suspect that this cognitive dissonance explains part of our our unease with evil.
But there’s more to our unease with evil than believing that we all have a divine spark. I think we associate evil with theism and with the traditional Christian understanding of divine judgment and the war between good and evil that’s implicit in that worldview. And this links in with our cultural distaste for conflict in general.
Because “evil” calls for a much more radical response than mere human brokenness and mental disease, which are our usual alternatives. One feels called to a kind of spiritual warfare if you face a kind of spiritual darkness—a la the Lamb’s War. I suspect that modern liberal Quaker sensibilities and sensitivities are loathe to wade past the shallows of moderation into the deep waters of spiritual warfare. I myself can’t help but be repelled by the image of Bible-thumping evangelicals quoting Ephesians on the whole armor of God—while I am also weirdly attracted to it.
So taking evil seriously does cause problems. But so does denying its existence.
That’s why I’m headed out into those waters. Something important seems missing to me if you can’t recognize evil when you see it, some dangerous blindness. And that blindness inevitably leads to a dangerous moral reticence and confusion.
I “believe in” evil. I think it does exist. And I believe that people can be evil.
I think of the Third Reich as the touchstone for virtually any modern discussion of evil. An entire nation swept up in a vision of hate, torture, death, and domination, with it’s individual disciples, its Himmlers and its Mengeles—these realities take me past the moderate shallows of human frailty into something much deeper and essentially spiritual in nature, something beyond the social, political, psychological, and/or medical in the human experience.
I am defining evil as something spiritual. What do I mean by this? This post would be very long if I continue, so I’m going to break here and resume in a subsequent post.
Sin and Evil
April 27, 2018 § 11 Comments
Ever since Dick Cheney was our torturer-in-chief, I have been thinking about the place of sin and, especially, of evil in modern liberal Quakerism and I’ve had some trouble sorting my own thoughts out. But I recently returned to my research for my book on Quakers and Capitalism and focusing on the rise of liberal Quakerism at the turn of the century, I started reading Thomas C. Kennedy’s British Quakerism, 1860–1920: The Transformation of a Religious Community (a terrific and very thorough book). In it I ran across a bibliographical citation that I hunted down: “The Influence of Rufus Jones on the Quaker view of sin and evil,” by Wilmer A. Cooper (Quaker Religious Thought, Volume 66, Article 4; available here).
Cooper claims that no one has had more influence on modern faith and practice than Jones and I found his little article very compelling. It has inspired me to finally start a series on sin and evil, starting with this historical piece. So here are some excerpts and some thoughts about about Jones’s take on sin.
Origin of sin. Cooper claims that Jones believed the source of sin to be “inherited ‘relics’ of fears, of appetites, of impulses, of instincts, and of desires” that arise from our biological nature, not as ‘original sin’ but as “raw material which is to be reshaped and molded into character”. (quotes are from Jones) At some point in our evolution, instinct and moral insight “collided” to give us a conscience, knowledge of good and evil.
This evolutionary approach actually makes some sense to me, in contrast to the utterly impossible and historically catastrophic myth of a first couple who were tempted by Satan, gave in, and infected the whole human race with original sin.
Transformation, not forgiveness. Coming from this view, Jones did not see sin as a debt to be paid or a condition to be forgiven, but a condition that required a transformation of “personality”. (“Personality” is a term much used by Friends around the turn of the century and does not mean what we usually mean today—our style as a person; but rather it denotes our personhood, the full expression of who we are as persons.) So sin comes, not from some human breaking of our relationship with God, but rather from a surrender of our will to lower instinctive impulses.
To Jones’s evolutionary approach I would add psychology, impulses that come from the unconscious, from our woundedness and our conditioning, especially as children. And then there’s mental illness. I want to treat these things separately in subsequent posts.
Thus, according to Jones, “there is nothing fundamentally wrong or bad about persons as such. There is no essential perversity of will.” (Cooper) Therefore what we need in Jones’s view is “spiritual illumination and moral re-enforcement. Christ is the source of both of these.” (Jones) What we need is not repentance but enlightenment coupled with renewed effort in the spirit of Christ.
Sin and liberal Quakers. This seems to me an elegant modern refreshment of the original Quaker focus on “perfection”, overcoming sin over and again, day in and day out, temptation by temptation, by turning toward the light of Christ within us, rather than through a one-time conversion based on faith in the atonement of Christ on the cross.
And, except for the Christ part, it does jive with how many Friends of my acquaintance seem to view sin, not as some inherent corruption in human nature, but essentially as a mistake. I’ve heard many Friends, for instance, claim that the biblical word for sin actually means “to miss the mark”, as though a sin was someone trying to do the right thing and failing.
To me, that seems like a liberal, make-nice idea designed to back us away decisively from the old theology of blood atonement and cuddle up to the idea of that of God in everyone. Hogwash. I do “believe” in sin and it’s choosing to do the wrong thing, not missing some aim at the ideal.
Atonement. As for atonement, Jones “did not reject the need for Atonement but took the view that the atoning role of Christ was exemplary. . . . This view holds that Christ atones for our sin by providing an example, a model, which draws us toward God and excites us to emulate the life of Jesus and the way of the cross.” (Cooper)
I don’t think an “example” really qualifies as “atonement”; I would quibble with the semantics here. But I am clear that atonement through a propitiatory blood sacrifice required of his (sic) son by a judging deity is not only repellant to me as a moral person (talk of bad example!), but unthinkable in the the mind of Jesus himself, and thus a heretical, and dangerous, pagan belief. Such blood sacrifices were required by Baal, God’s arch-rival in Hebrew scripture (Baal was a sacrificed dying-and-rising god himself). Thus such human sacrifice was the ultimate abomination in the eyes of the Hebrew prophets. This rejection of filial sacrifice in the Jewish tradition goes all the way back to Abraham and Isaac. Or for that matter, in the negative example, to Cain and Abel, which was not a murder, but a human sacrifice on the model of Romulus and Remus and other brother sacrifices at the founding of a people.
What about evil? But this is all about sin, not evil. Cooper has really wrongly titled his article when he includes evil. So—next time, about the origins, and even the very existence, of evil.
William Taber on Vocal Ministry
February 24, 2018 § 1 Comment
I recently discovered in my papers a lecture on vocal ministry that William Taber delivered on October 28, 1996 as part of Pendle Hill’s Monday Night Lecture series. It spoke so powerfully to my condition that I want to share parts of it here. I do not feel comfortable sharing the whole thing because a note appears at the top saying, “(please do not copy for publication without the author’s permission)”. Bill Taber is no long with us, so I can’t ask his permission. I’m a little nervous about sharing any of it, but have decided to do so because it was, after all, a public lecture, and because it is so good, and because I would like to think that, as the most nurturing elder of my own ministry that I’ve ever had, he would be okay with it.
In this post, I want to focus on the call to vocal ministry. Here’s Bill:
“. . . ministry among Friends has traditionally been understood to be evoked by a “call” from God, so that ministry becomes a “calling” or, to use the Latin form, a “vocation.” . . . Hopefully, this immediate sense of calling takes place each time a person speaks in meeting.
But there is a deeper and more persistent sense of calling to the ministry which has occurred to some Friends throughout Quaker history—and it is still occurring today. . . . Modern unprogrammed Friends who experience this traditional calling and longing to be about the work of God often experience great frustration because there seems to be little or no place for ministry as a vocation in the modern Society of Friends. . . .
Part of their frustration lies in the fact that we modern Friends value expertise and genius in virtually every field except the spiritual, so that we don’t know how to recognize and encourage a person who is spiritually gifted and called to this work. Every generation of Friends, including this one, has had its quota of people who in other cultures might be called budding shamans or seers or medicine men or medicine women. In earlier Quaker eras these budding Quaker shamans were watched over and nurtured and in subtle ways encouraged so that many of them were able to respond to the ever beaconing Call to become a sanctified instrument of the Divine Will.
. . .
Hopefully members of Worship and Ministry committees will be attentive to those who speak in meeting, and be quick to sense such people’s yearning for more fellowship and accountability in relation to spoken ministry. Since most contemporary unprogrammed meetings no longer follow the old Quaker practice of recognizing and “recording” the gift of ministry, those who speak in our meetings are much more on their own, in an individualistic sense, than was true in classic Quakerism. Thus, it could be possible that a contemporary Friend could be a frequent speaker in Friends meetings for many years without ever experiencing any of the continuing education and accountability which was once the case when every recorded minister was expected to meet with the local meeting of ministers at least four times a year, as well as with the quarterly and yearly meeting sessions of ministers and elders. It may be neither appropriate nor wise to go back to the old system, but perhaps way might be found so that our contemporary “public Friends”—that is, those who speak frequently in our meetings—can be given occasional opportunities to meet with their peers, so that they can explore the difficulties of the art or the technology or the craft of following the inward motion while walking the razor’s edge*. It might also be helpful, at such occasional gatherings, to read and ponder together the old advices and queries for ministers and elders (or some modern equivalent).
- I think “The Razor’s Edge” may have been the title of this lecture. The document I have does not have a title. By the razor’s edge, Bill is referring to the delicate balance between speaking with authority and yet with humility, between waiting and boldness, between being self-led and Spirit-led.
Six Essentials of the Quaker Way
February 11, 2018 § 2 Comments
An answer to the question, What do Quakers believe?
I have been thinking and writing about this opening ever since the original experience that I describe below happened in 1991. It keeps inspiring me and keeps bearing new fruit. Fairly recently, a new “architectural” metaphor for presenting these six essentials came to me. With slight editing, this little essay also appeared in my meeting’s newsletter in February 2018.
Have you ever been asked what Quakers believe and yearned for an answer that faithfully represents the considerable diversity among Friends? I feel like I was given such an answer at a consultation held at Quaker Hill Conference Center in 1991 on “What do we all hold in common as Quaker treasure?”
We were an extremely diverse group theologically and socially, and there was a lot of tension and even conflict. But we ended up coming to unity on four essential elements of the Quaker way in what was for me the most gathered meeting for worship I’ve ever experienced . . . except maybe for the meeting held the following morning, in which we added a fifth. So the answer I offer below has for me the authority of the Holy Spirit.
About forty Friends attended the Consultation and each of us had come with written answers to some queries we’d been given on the central question. We then labored for several days in small groups to come to unity on answers for each group. Then we gathered for a plenary session on Saturday evening in which we tried to arrive at a sense of the meeting on answers that spoke for all of us—and we succeeded.
That original discernment on Saturday night identified four essentials of Quaker faith that we all held in common. The consultation’s clerk Jan Wood gave us a fifth in her sermon on the Sunday morning following that climactic Saturday night session. A sixth element came to me later while writing of my experience, but this is my own idea and doesn’t come out of those gathered meetings.
Here then are what I see as the “Foundations of the Quaker Way”.
The Quaker way is built on a foundation of four essentials of faith that we know experientially, four walls, if you will, that hold up the larger edifice of Quaker tradition.
The Light. The first wall, which holds the cornerstone, is the Light—direct, personal communion with God*. There is a principle in every person (often called the Light, the Seed, ‘that of God’) that enables the human to commune directly with the divine, without any mediating persons, rituals, or sacramental materials.
The gathered meeting. The second wall is like unto the first: Just as every individual can commune directly with God, so also the worshipping community can be led by and gathered into unity in the Holy Spirit as a community. We call this the gathered meeting when it happens in meeting for worship.
Continuing revelation. The third wall is continuing revelation. God is continually revealing God’s self to us, through God’s ongoing presence within and among us. God’s revelation did not cease with the writing of scripture, but continues for and in those who heed the Light, always offering to heal and forgive us, renew and strengthen us, inspire and guide us, and awaken us to truth and love.
Life as sacrament and testimony. The fourth wall is that we are called to live our faith in practice, to find in all our walkings that communion with God that is our spiritual birthright, regardless of time, place, or activity; and we are called to live our outward lives as testimony to the Truth that has been awakened inwardly within us. As a movement we have so consistently experienced some of these truths that we have settled upon them as collective “testimonies”, which we hold not as outward rules to live by, but as a witness to the world of our Truth and as a reminder to ourselves of our experience of God’s love.
The bedrock—direct experience. These four “walls” comprise the foundations of Quaker faith. They hold up the rest of the Quaker way—you can unpack them to talk about virtually all the rest of the Quaker ‘distinctives’, the elements of Quaker faith and practice that make us unique. These four walls rest upon bedrock. That bedrock is our own experience. We hold these truths, not as a blind leap of faith, but rather in confidence as things known directly in our own religious and spiritual lives. (This is the element that has come to me separately since the openings at the Consultation.)
The mortar—love. In her sermon in the one programmed meeting for worship we had during the Consultation, our clerk Jan Wood pointed out that, while not all the groups had named it, we had lived into a fifth essential in our discernment. That fifth element was love. She moved from one Bible passage on love to another, showing how divine love had manifested among us as we labored together. I think of love as the mortar that holds the whole edifice of our tradition together. Divine love gathers everyone into the bosom of the Spirit. Divine love gathered us together as a people of God in the 1650s. And that same love binds us one to another in fellowship today. It’s not always natural to us as struggling human beings, but we cling to it as a commandment—to love one another as we have been loved.
So the “elevator speech”, the short, confident, faithful answer to the question, What do Quakers believe? is this: the Light—each of us is called into direct communion with the Spirit; the gathered meeting—the community is also called into direct communion with God; continuing revelation; life lived as sacrament and as testimony; and the commandment of love.
* By “God” I mean the Mystery Reality behind our religious experience—whatever that experience happens to be.
Religious Witness? AFSC’s recent statement on Israel-Palestine
February 7, 2018 § 3 Comments
In its February 2018 issue, Friends Journal published a statement from the American Friends Service Committee on being banned from work in Israel because of its support for the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement. (You can read the statement here.) The statement is completely secular in its tone, its arguments, and its language. You can tell that AFSC is a Quaker organization because the statement invokes some Quaker history, but you wouldn’t know that Quakers were a religious communion or that AFSC is a religious organization. But I guess it isn’t.
The statement is presented as just that, an “organizational statement”, and it was published as a story on its website, essentially as a press release. It is not, apparently, a minute of conscience resulting from collective spiritual discernment on the part of its board, its executive staff, or of any worshipping community.
Its arguments are those of a liberal political social change nonprofit. It focuses on “rights and privileges” and human rights violations. It supports “proven nonviolent social change tactics.” It mentions Quaker support for a “Free Produce Movement” boycott in the 1800s and John Woolman, though it places Woolman in the seventeenth century. But otherwise, it leans on AFSC’s own history for its authority, inevitably mentioning its Nobel Peace Prize.
It has no biblical references, although that would admittedly open a can of worms. Torah’s instructions regarding resident aliens in ancient Israel were enlightened for the time, but non-Israelites were still second class members of their communities. And talking about resident alien instruction in Torah assumes a correspondence between the Palestinians and resident aliens; the correspondence might be closer between Israel and Abraham as a resident alien in ancient Canaan and between the Palestinians and the Israelites in the period of the Judges before David’s conquest, when the Israelites were hemmed in to the Highlands of Palestine by the Philistines and the Canaanite city-states on the central plain.
Jesus, however, is another story. Love thy neighbor as thyself (from Leviticus). Love thine enemy. Etc. But no Jesus either.
But it’s been a very long time since Rufus Jones and the overtly Christian impulse behind service in the early days of AFSC.
In fact, the statement doesn’t use anything close to non-biblical religious moral argument, either. Not even a direct invocation of the hallowed phrase “that of God in everyone”, which tha AFSC itself helped to establish as the modern foundation for our testimonies. It does start thus: “Motivated by Quaker belief in the worth and dignity of all people . . . “ What is distinctively Quaker about a belief in human dignity? That isn’t even a “belief”; it’s part of a humanistic value set shared with people of good will across the board.
Don’t get me wrong. AFSC does good work. I support the BDS movement myself. I support AFSC’s stand in this conflict.
But I wish AFSC would stop presenting itself as Quaker in these ways. It isn’t. With this statement, the organization misrepresents our religious movement, seeking to leverage Quaker cred for its own purposes. There’s something off here vis a vis the testimony of integrity.
Or does it misrepresent our faith? In my experience, witness committees in our meetings at all levels of meeting organization are very likely to write a statement just like this one, utterly bereft of biblical, Christian, religious, or even moral message, and our meetings are very likely to approve such statements as minutes of conscience without realizing how we endorse the trend toward secularism in our own religious movement.
Silent waiting worship, the Seed, and vocal ministry
January 29, 2018 § 3 Comments
Based on my own vocal ministry last Sunday, January 28.
Friends practice what we call silent waiting worship. Why do we worship in silence and what are we waiting for?
We worship in silence in order to make room for the Spirit, in order that we may hear the Divine Voice, which often is quite faint and easy to drown out. And we are waiting, first, for a sense of the Presence in our midst, and also, for the truth, for Spirit-led vocal ministry.
With the silence, we strip away the outward accoutrements that characterize conventional worship services so that we may hear the “still, small voice.” But we also seek something deeper than this lack of liturgical busy-ness; we seek what early Friends called the silence of all flesh, seeking to let go of the surface thoughts and concerns that we bring with us into the meeting room, so that we may sink down in the Seed that has been planted in each one of us, and there, to water that Seed with worship, with our attention.
It is as though, with this silence, we have raked away the stones that lie on the surface of our garden soil/soul, so that when the Seed sprouts and reaches for the Light, no obstacles stand in its way.
And when it finds the Light, then it flowers, and our nostrils are filled with the sweet scent of God’s presence, within us and among us.
And sometimes the Seed bears fruit and the Presence raises one of us up with vocal ministry that carries the truth and power of its Source.
Discerning Vocal Ministry—Another Test
January 28, 2018 § 7 Comments
An awful lot of messages in the meetings for worship I attend (I won’t call them vocal ministry, for reasons I’m about to get into) start with the pronoun “I”, often combined with a statement that pegs the time. There then inevitably follows one of two things, either an announcement and/or an anecdote. “I read in the New York Times this morning . . .” A few days ago, I heard . . .” “I’ve been thinking lately . . .”
These introductory announcements and vignettes sometimes are quite charming in themselves, but they almost always lead up to a point, so they are in essence, secondary to the message. Often the route to the point is rather slow, oblique, or peppered with side-trips, but eventually we get to a point. The point is the message the speaker wants to bring to us.
I must confess that every time I hear such an opening, I cringe. Very rarely, I think, does a truly spirit-led message start with “I” and an announcement or vignette. Or at least, I usually feel that we would have been better off with just hearing the point.
When I find myself thinking along these lines, I stop myself and force myself to go deeper. In my mind, I strip away the introduction and listen to the point on its own. If it stands on its own, then maybe I have some ministry to share. Time, then, to go deeper yet and sit with the point some more to see how it feels. Is the point something valuable I have learned for myself from that moment or experience? Or do I also feel led to go public with it? If so, why? Do I get something out of it, or does it truly feel like service? Does it still point back to me, or am I seeking to answer that of God in others?
The problem with these self-centered introductions is that, first of all, they pull the speaker toward his or her self, toward ego, rather than toward service and one’s center. In the process of telling the story your mind runs through the details and these details tempt you to share them, too. You start making connections with other things, and now you’re tempted to run off on a tangent.
Meanwhile, you’re pulling the listeners up to the surface, also. Now they are imagining the scene along with you. Their minds are activated, pulling them up from the alpha brain wave meditative state that they may have descended to in their deepening process toward the beta wave region of active, conscious, everyday thought. Then the point comes like a fly landing on the surface of the lake, and like a bass surfacing to catch the fly, we break the water line and swallow. Now the point has been made, but everybody has to start deepening all over again. Two or three (or more) such messages, and one is just treading water at the surface catching flies.
Introductory personal pronouns, announcements, and anecdotes disturb the dynamics of meeting for worship and tend to waste the point on an audience lured to the surface, away from the depths—even if the point was one worth sharing in the first place. But the point, delivered as prophetic utterance, might have pulled us all deeper into the cool still water of true worship.
Religion and Spirituality
January 4, 2018 § 9 Comments
I want to make a case for Quakerism as a religion.
I suspect that many Friends prefer to think of their Quakerism as a spirituality rather than as a religion. For one thing, “religion” implies belief in God and beliefs in general, and for many of us, “belief in God” isn’t as straightforward as it was a generation or two ago.
Also, “religion” implies tradition, a legacy of beliefs and practices that one has had no part in shaping, leaving you to either accept or rebel against them; religion implies an authority in the community that in some ways supersedes one’s own individual preferences. By contrast, “spirituality” implies individualism—personal sovereignty over one’s own ideas, beliefs, and practices.
For many Friends (in the liberal tradition, at least), one of the most appealing aspects of Quakerism is this freedom to believe and practice what you wish. You can escape the constraints of religion, and for many of us those constraints have been enforced with abuse. Thus, for many Friends, joining a Quaker meeting means joining a group of like-minded people who accept that each of us is practicing our own form of spirituality. In this view, meeting for worship becomes, in essence, a form of group meditation.
For me, however, Quakerism is both a religion and a spirituality. Let me explain by trying to define spirituality and religion as integrally related.
For me, spirituality is the ideas, attitudes, emotions, and practices one embraces in order to align one’s inner life toward personal transformation and toward the transcendental and to align one’s outer life toward right living.
For me, religion is the collective spirituality practiced by a community. Religion is the ideas, attitudes, feelings, and practices the community embraces in order to align its inner life toward collective transformation and toward the transcendental (God—more about this in a moment), and to align the community’s outer life toward justice, peace, equality, earthcare, and service in the world.
For religious communities have a collective inner life, just as individuals have a personal inner life. (Some Friends, especially in the 18th century, called this collective inner spiritual life of the meeting the angel of the meeting, after Revelations, chapters two and three, which are letters written by Christ to the angels of the meetings of seven churches in Asia Minor.)
Actually, all communities have an inner life. Clubs, professional associations, businesses, municipalities—all these communities have some kind of inner life. But these communities are rarely self-conscious enough, self-reflective enough, small enough, or organized in such a way as to manifest a collective consciousness coherent enough to work with in a deliberate and meaningful way. These communities can still experience transformation. On very rare occasions, they can even experience the transcendental. And they can bend toward justice (or toward oppression) in their presence in the world.
But the thing about a religious community is that it’s designed to work with its collective consciousness. It’s designed to provide shape and context for the spirituality of the individuals who comprise its collective consciousness; but it also works directly at the collective level with ideas, attitudes, emotions, and practices that only the community as such can embrace.
For most religions, this direct attempt at collective faith and practice is limited to the worship service. Friends enjoy a number of other “venues” for collective spirituality in addition to worship: worship sharing groups, clearness committees, even committee work itself—we conduct all of our gatherings and discernment as meetings for worship, at least in theory, as shared tools for aligning our collective inner and outer lives.
What really makes Quakerism a religion, in my view, though, is that our practice of collective spirituality sometimes manifests in collective transcendental experience. We call this direct experience of God the gathered meeting. By “God” I mean here the Mystery Reality behind our experience of the gathered meeting. We may not be able to collectively articulate what that presence is very well—it’s a mystery. But we share the knowledge of its reality.
The direct experience and knowledge of that reality puts “belief in God” in a new light. We don’t believe in God as a matter of faith in a legacy or tradition of ideas. Rather, we know God collectively through direct experience. As individuals, we may elaborate in various ways on that immediate apperception of the divine which we’ve experienced in the gathered meeting for worship—we may have certain beliefs about what’s happened.
The community may do the same thing with its collective experience and develop a “theology”, as early Friends did, as a way of sharing the experience—with each other, with our children, with potential converts. But, for early Friends, such evangelizing did not aim at converting people to a set of beliefs, but at bringing them into that experience, bringing them into direct relationship with God. So also today, our theology, our ideas about what’s happening in our collective spiritual life as a meeting and as a movement, are only tools for pointing toward the Presence we experience in the gathered meeting and/or in our own hearts.
Thus Quakerism does have a tradition, it does have a legacy, and that legacy does include ideas, attitudes, feelings, and practices for the individual to practice as the Quaker way. But these are not as fully developed as in some other religions. This is mostly because we are so inwardly focused and have abandoned outward forms to such a thorough degree. We don’t light votive candles, pray rosaries, have stock hymns or a religious calendar lectionary. Technically speaking, we don’t even have a religious calendar at all. We don’t have a Benedictine Rule. We don’t have the formal elements of the Eightfold Path, breathing exercises and asanas, like yoga does.
Even to “turn toward the light” or to “sink down in the Seed”, favorite phrases of George Fox representing spiritual “practices”, are very ambiguous as actual practices; it’s taken Rex Ambler to “systematize” the former to some degree as a spiritual practice, and to my knowledge, no one has done this for sinking down into the Seed. And even Ambler’s Experiment with Light is a collective practice, as well as an individual one.
This leaves us as individuals free to hold onto any more fully developed spiritual practices we may have picked up from other traditions, as I have done myself. And we can take some of these with us into our collective Quaker practice; I use some of the same deepening techniques I use in my personal practice to deepen when I attend Quaker meeting for worship. These don’t just help me as an individual to experience worship more deeply; I think they deepen the collective worship, as well.
But the collective practices of the Quaker way are what make it a religion, because, through them, we come to know God in ways that are not possible for us as individuals, in ways that transform the community as community. These practices and these experiences are what make us a peculiar people of God—that is, a religion.
This post is getting pretty long. In the next one, I want to explore how the collective spiritual practice of a religious community is shaped by its founding collective, transcendental, spiritual experience; how the focus of the practice evolves as the community moves away from this foundational experience in time, through the generations; how this kind of evolution has shaped the legacy we have inherited as liberal Quakerism today; and what all this means for us.
Through the Flaming Sword 