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.
The Spirit-led Life
January 1, 2018 § 7 Comments
I have a close friend who feels that seeking to live a “Spirit-led life” is inviting delusion. That certainly there is no “Spirit” who might lead us, that there are many such “spirits” who might lead one astray, and that what we’re dealing with here—Spirit, or spirits—are only impulses that come from within ourselves. Some of these impulses can be trusted; some cannot.
I’m reading an article in The Atlantic about Vice President Mike Pence in which a former aid wondered to the author whether Pence’s religiosity might be a rationalization for what he wants to do anyway. I wondered the same thing about George W. Bush. I wonder the same thing about myself.
Friends have a fairly robust framework for “discerning spirits”, as Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians 12, for winnowing the true leading from the delusional. At least we do in theory. In the reality of many of our meetings, we are barely holding on to the mindset and the tools we’ve developed for discernment over the centuries. This mindset and these tools serve both personal discernment and corporate discernment.
Regarding personal discernment, the first of these, I think, is regular spiritual practice. It takes regularly setting aside time for turning inward and listening for that voice. Over time, one maps one’s inner landscape, one learns how the spirit moves through that landscape. Deepening techniques help with this a lot.
Then, the “voice” itself. Rarely does one hear an actual voice. I have only done so twice, and one of those times, it was a kind of “language” I could not decipher; the message was the messaging itself, not its content, the establishment of a relationship between myself and that which was offering to lead.
But from then on, for decades now, the “voice” has been “silent”, utterly subjective, internal, devoid of “content”. It feels more like a magnetized needle swinging inside me toward a certain direction for thought, feeling, or action than like a clear command or prompting. It’s perfectly capable of deluding me.
In the everyday surrender of self to the leadership of the Holy Spirit (whatever that is, however it works), one has to discern the truth of such inner directing on one’s own, basically moment to moment. In the day to day life, the range for delusion is rather small and the consequences rarely very important. The needle flutters lightly on its pivot and one is hardly conscious of its working.
But often enough the needle gains enough mass to break through everyday consciousness and we find ourselves consciously deciding what to do about something. Here is where a regular devotional life pays off. Here the practice in meeting for worship of discerning whether one has some vocal ministry for the meeting—whether your message is spirit-led—pays off.
My problem is that, in these moments, I almost always forget to employ this discipline. I forget to stop for a moment and go inward before I go forward. I forget to check where I am in my inner landscape, to check my belly (as Bill Taber often recommended) and other physiological signs, and to listen for the voice, to seek the light in my conscience. I let the momentum of my current direction, the forces at work on me from the environment and the people around me, and my fears and desires guide my steps instead. I follow the surface “spirits” of my conscious and unconscious mind.
Most of the time, that’s okay. I get away with it. I make an okay decision, nothing terrible happens. But I’ve lost the opportunity to go deeper first, to be more fully spirit-led.
That’s everyday life. But sometimes a leading takes on more weight than that. Sometimes one feels led out of the everyday into an uncharted landscape. Sometimes one feels called to new action. Now the possibility of delusion really matters. With these stronger leadings of the Spirit, corporate discernment really matters.
I have had several such leadings and these have evolved into sustained ministries. Very rarely in the evolution or conduct of these ministries have I enjoyed meaningful corporate discernment or support. Well, to be honest, I have allowed my initial disappointments to deter me from seeking further support. Once I was settled in my discernment and after finding that these ministries were not just sustaining themselves but getting deeper and expanding, I felt I was on my way and haven’t sought further support since. But I should have.
One of these ministries is to recover and renew with experimentation the faith and practice of Quaker ministry itself. It’s one of the reasons for this blog and one of this blog’s recurring themes. Many meetings are not well equipped to nurture our members’ leadings and ministries. We have deliberately laid down the traditional culture of eldership that nurtured Quaker ministry for centuries and many meetings have not replaced it with anything else.
Well, we have worship and ministry committees, and we have clearness committees. But in my experience, worship and ministry committees do not necessarily have unity about even the existence of divine leadings, let alone solid knowledge of how to “discern spirits” or how to handle a member’s leading. And many meetings are not clear about how to conduct clearness committees for discernment, either.
We use clearness committees for four different kinds of discernment, and they each are constituted and conducted in different ways. Many Friends are not clear about these differences and many meetings have too little experience with discernment committees to feel confident in their use. (See my post “Gospel Order—Four Types of Clearness Committees” for more about the four ways we use clearness committees.)
So some of our meetings need to do a better job of supporting the spirit-led life of their members. Our worship and ministry committees need to gain both clarity and unity about how to support leadings and how to conduct clearness committees for discernment. And I think we need an ongoing conversation in our meetings about what the Spirit-led life is for us and how we might nurture it.
This includes, at the very least, the one thing we all have in common—vocal ministry. What does “Spirit-led vocal ministry” mean? How do we discern whether a message is spirit-led? Or is “Spirit-led” vocal ministry what we’re hoping and aiming for in the first place?
“That of God” as divine spark—the source
December 21, 2017 § 8 Comments
After years—decades even—of searching for the passage in the writings of Rufus Jones in which he first reinterprets Fox’s phrase “that of God” as a divine spark, which now distorts and dominates Quaker “theology” (such as it is) in the liberal tradition, I think I have finally found it. It begins on page 167 in Social Law in the Spiritual World: Studies in Human and Divine Inter-relationship, published in 1904, in a chapter titled The Inner Light:
We shall now pass from accounts of personal experience to statements of theory, or the doctrine of the Inner Light. One might say that every early Quaker writing is like a palimpsest. Beneath every word which was written this idea of the Inner Light also lies written. It is the key to every peculiarity in Quakerism. What was the Inner Light? * The simplest answer is: The Inner Light is the doctrine that there is something Divine, “something of God,” in the human soul.
Five words are used indiscriminately to name this Divine something: “The Light,” “The Seed,” “Christ within,” The Spirit,” “That of God in you.” This Divine Seed is in every person good or bad. Here is Barclay’s way of saying it: “As the capacity of a man or woman is not only in this child, but even in the very embryo, even so Jesus Christ himself, Christ within, is in every man’s and woman’s heart, as a little incorruptible seed.” (Apology, 1831, p. 177)
Again: “We understand this seed to be a real spiritual substance.” [emphasis is Jones’] It is “a holy substantial seed which many times lies in man’s heart as a naked grain in the stony ground.” (Apology, 1831, 139)
Barclay is very particular to have it understood that this “seed” is not something which man has as man, but that it is a gratuitous importation from God—it is a gift of free Grace to every man. The child, however, does bring this with him, and so does actually “trail clouds of glory;” he does bring with him from God a Divine soul-centre. But this “seed” may lie hidden and unregarded, like a jewel in the dust.
It follows secondly as a corollary of this principle that direct communications are possible from God to man. In other words, the Inner Light is a principle of revelation—it becomes possible for man to have “openings of truth.” . . .
Quaker ministry is supposed to be the utterance of communications that are given by the Spirit. This Light within is also held to be an illumination which makes the path of duty plain through the conscience.
There is still a third aspect to the doctrine of the Inner Light. It is used, perhaps most frequently, to indicate the truth that whatever is spiritual must be within the realm of personal experience, that is to say, the ground of religion is in the individual’s own heart and not somewhere outside him.
* It should be said that the early Friends did not minimize the importance of the Scriptures, or of the historical Christ and His work for human redemption. The Christ who enlightened their souls was, they believed, the risen and ever-living Christ—the same Person who healed the sick in Galilee and preached the gospel to the poor under the Syrian sky, and who died for our sakes outside the gate of Jerusalem. One of the great fruits of the Incarnation and Passion, according to their view, was the permanent presence of Christ among men in an inward and spiritual manner, brining to effect within what His outward life had made possible.
The phrase “Inner Light” is itself part of the paradigm shift that is taking place here. If I understand correctly, for two hundred years before Rufus Jones and the liberal Quaker innovations that began around 1900, the Light was an inward Light—it beamed into the human heart, as it were, from Christ, across the gulf between the human and the Divine. I think Jones is working at a corrective here, reestablishing the Light as indwelling.
That being said, even the Inner Light is not quite, for Jones, inherent in the human species, in human nature as such. Per Barclay, he seems to think of it as somehow embedded in each individual human child. This seems like a very subtle differentiation between the human as an animal descended from animal predecessors through evolution—an idea that was in his time still relatively new and provocative, as he discusses in the introduction to this book—that is, a distinction between the human animal and the human as a spiritual being with a soul.
The Inner Light is a gift conferred on humans by God, but it is still permanent and indwelling. Most importantly, it brings with it the very substance of the Spirit. The Inner Light, that of God within us, is a divine spark, however it gets there. And it is this substantial correspondence between the Inner Light and the Light who was Christ that makes communication with the Divine possible—like speaks to like.
Social Law in the Spiritual World was Jones’s third book. His goal with the book was to do for the new science of psychology what previous authors had done for biology, especially the theory of evolution—to build a bridge between science and religion, to show that the scientific discoveries that were transforming the modern worldview could deepen the religious experience rather than threaten it.
Five years later, in 1909, he would publish Studies in Mystical Religion. I think he was already deep into the scholarship for this later book when he wrote Social Law. I have recently finished reading Studies in Mystical Religion and you can see him realizing that very many of these mystical movements in the history of Christianity had in common the belief in some version of the divine spark. I think he came to feel that the neoplatonic idea of a universal divine spark explained these commonalities, explained how mystical experience worked, and therefore explained the mystical experiences of Fox and other early Friends. And he found enough evidence in their writings to feel that Quakers stood in this long tradition of mystical religion grounded in the resonance between the divine spark in the individual and the Divine Spirit from which that spark had been struck.
Vocal Ministry — Goals for Nurture Programs
December 18, 2017 § 3 Comments
A small ad hoc group of Friends in my meeting recently met to consider what kinds of programs and efforts we might sponsor that would nurture the meeting’s vocal ministry. We had representatives from three committees: Worship and Ministry, Religious Education, and Attenders. In preparation for the meeting, I tried to identify what the goals might be for these programs. The notes below represent an expanded version of my notes.
Primary goal
To nurture deeper, more Spirit-led ministry.
I deliberately capitalize Spirit. I think we all know intuitively what deeper means, but I wonder whether we know what Spirit means in this context. Are we able to articulate where Spirit-led vocal ministry comes from, to newcomers, to our children, to each other? This should be one of our secondary goals, I think, to be able to do so with confidence as a meeting.
History, faith, and practice
Knowledge of the history of the faith and practice of vocal ministry in our tradition.
Knowledge of the practices that have over time proven effective at fostering deep worship and ministry—giving time after someone’s message before speaking ourselves, not addressing another person’s ministry, etc.
Programs in this area might fall to either Adult Religious Education or Ministry & Worship Committees. Since such programs will never reach a certain considerable percentage of the meeting members and attenders, especially those new to the meeting, I think some short handout should be distributed on the benches periodically that lays out the conventions governing our practice of worship and vocal ministry. My meeting just produced such a handout and I think it’s quite good. You can download it here.
Centering
Knowledge of and experience with various centering methods to nurture the vocal ministry’s roots in the Spirit.
Programs in this area might fall to an ad hoc group of Friends with experience in meditation, centering prayer, breath work, Experiment with Light, etc. This gets to the “deeper” part of the over-arching goal. There are lots of Quaker-friendly techniques for centering, by which I mean they are inward, simple, and effective. I believe that a deeper state of consciousness does foster religious experience. Simply turning inwardly and consciously “toward the Light” within, however one does that, seems to me a uniquely Quaker form of centering.
Calling to ministry
Support for those who feel called to the ministry.
Discernment and support for those who speak often in meeting, to the degree that they welcome such attention: Do they think of their speaking as a calling? Do they feel a need for support?
Programs in this area might fall to Worship & Ministry Committee or, if the meeting has one, as mine does, to a Gifts and Leadings Committee, or some such. Ever since we laid down the centuries-old culture of eldership with which we used to nurture vocal ministry, we have left ourselves without any way to support those who feel called to what used to be called gospel ministry. I suspect that many meetings no longer even think that such a calling exists among us anymore, or that it should. But here and there, it does. Such Friends should not be left bereft of our meetings’ support in what is for them a divine calling.
And some of our frequent speakers may have such a calling but not think of it that way. Thinking of it that way could deepen their ministry. And just bringing the possibility up could deepen both the meeting’s worship and the Friend’s own life in the Spirit.
At the very least, meetings should be more attentive and proactive regarding vocal ministry, starting with those Friends who speak often.
Sharing
To know each other better with regard to our ministry—opportunities to share our feelings about our own vocal ministry, the tests and processes we use for discerning whether to speak, our feelings and concerns about the quality of the meeting’s ministry in general.
Programs in this area might fall to Ministry & Worship Committee.
Sharing of this kind deepens the bonds between us and gives us deeper respect for one another’s messages.
Unity on the issues
Knowledge about what the members and attenders feel about the current state of our vocal ministry. A sense of the meeting regarding vocal ministry as a calling, whether we consider such callings real and legitimate and deserving of corporate support and oversight. Knowledge of who considers themselves so called and whether they want support and/or oversight. I have created a blind survey that tries to elicit this kind of information. If we find that many Friends are unhappy with some aspect of our worship, then we are more likely to do something about it. Here is a link to a Word document version of such a survey.
Meeting-wide agreement about our goals vis a vis vocal ministry, and specifically about whether the meeting wants to address whatever comes up in the discovery process mentioned above.
Trust on the part of the meeting in Worship & Ministry Committee’s authority and judgment regarding vocal ministry, especially in terms of its eldering role. Unity within the committee itself about its authority and roles—are the Committee’s members clear and in unity about how proactive they should be in nurturing vocal ministry, about when, how, and why the Committee should speak to someone about their ministry, either in support or with gentle eldering, and about who should do it?
The committee that has the care of the meeting’s worship and ministry should be confident in its charge and have the support of the meeting, it should be unified in its approach, and proactive, not just reactive.
Quaker Ministry
November 21, 2017 § 3 Comments
Brian Drayton’s blog Amor Vincat is one of the best Quaker blogs I know of. I find it consistently thoughtful, edifying, and most important, Spirit-led. His latest post offers a wonderful resource and raises important questions about our meetings’ nurture of vocal ministry. The post is Library: Harvey “Our Quaker ministry since the cessation of recording”.
Harvey’s little essay was written in the mid-1940s, some twenty years after London Yearly Meeting had laid down the practice of recording ministers. Harvey had approved of the laying down, even though he himself had been recorded. In this article he looks back to consider what had been lost and gained in the intervening decades.
Harvey’s main concern is my own, as well. Though the yearly meeting’s book of discipline had strongly encouraged meetings to support vocal ministry and especially newly rising ministers, both within the meeting and through minutes of travel and service outside the meeting, very few meetings knew this injunction even existed, let alone taken responsibility for such nurture. That is, just because the practice of recording had been discontinued, the need for nurturing Quaker ministry remained, and most meetings were not meeting that need.
New York Yearly Meeting still does record gifts in ministry, though many Friends and many meetings in the yearly meeting don’t like it. I have written an “apology” for the practice (On Recording Gifts in Ministry) and feel very strongly that, even if a meeting would never record the gifts of someone in their meeting, they should be paying attention to those who speak in meeting often. Worship and ministry committees should offer their ministers support and yes, oversight. They should nurture the meeting’s vocal ministry with programs that discuss the conventions governing our practice of ministry and its history. Meetings should provide opportunities for its regular speakers to consider whether they have a calling to ministry and be prepared to offer support, if only through continued meetings for mutual sharing. And meetings should provide opportunities for all members and attenders to share their own experience and practice regarding vocal ministry.
Vocal ministry is one of the most important aspects of the Quaker way and a key element in our outreach. Newcomers to our meetings have only the quality of our silence, the quality of our vocal ministry, and the quality of our fellowship by which to feel inspired to make us their religious home. Weak vocal ministry, which is all too common in our meetings I fear, not only fails to inspire the deeply yearning souls who come to us, but sets a low bar for expectations of everyone, newcomers and oldtimers alike.
Scripture—Picking and Choosing
November 8, 2017 § 13 Comments
In a comment on a recent post, Patricia Dallmann pointed out that, in quoting Matthew 18:20—“Wherever two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them”—I left out what she felt was the most important part: “in my name”. So I did.
I have for decades now been trying to chart a way for myself (and for liberal Quakerism) that honors our tradition while selectively letting go of it. I’ve been picking and choosing in the way I read the Bible.
One of the things I’m letting go of is the traditional Christian “name theology”. Name theology—the power of the name of God—has a long and deep history in the Jewish tradition and it made a stark and decisive turn in the dark years between the Babylonian captivity (roughly 587–525 BCE) and the Maccabean revolt in 165 BCE. It became increasingly magico-religious, the kind of thinking that believes that the bread and wine actually turn into Christ’s body and blood when the bell rings.
Of course, name theology is also about confession. By invoking Jesus’ name, Matthew is saying, unless you believe in Jesus, you can’t expect him to show up. I suspect that this is Patricia’s point.
But is it true? Is Matthew right? Or are we even reading the real words of Jesus here, or something Matthew wrote? Or maybe some piece of tradition that Matthew inherited, but who knows where that came from? How would we know any of this? Where’s the benchmark, the test for biblical authority, in this case, or in any case?
I am choosing to leave the name thing out in this case. The name theology feels to me like the tradition speaking, and not Jesus himself. But who knows?
We are all of us always picking and choosing when it comes to the Bible. This is one of the things that makes the biblical argument against homosexuality so twisted. Those folks are just picking and choosing, only they won’t admit it.
For instance: Jesus commanded his disciples to call no one father, to wash each other’s feet, and to go out and buy some swords. The Roman church calls its priests father; only the Brethren wash feet; and we Quakers don’t buy swords. In the South, of course, lots of Christians buy their Glocks.
Now fundamentalists will insist that they take the Bible literally. But it is literally impossible to take the Bible literally. For one thing, one third of it is poetry and taking poetry literally is ludicrous by definition.
For another thing, we’re all reading somebody’s translation. Whose translation are you taking literally? The NIV and the modern, reader-friendly translations favored by evangelicals are the very worst at getting things right.
For a third thing, the manuscript traditions vary quite a lot, especially in some cases. For Acts, the differences amount to hundreds of words. Mark is famously missing its original ending and the tradition took three different tries at finishing it. The version used in our Bibles usually includes all three endings. We have no idea what Mark originally wrote.
Then there’s lacunae—holes in the manuscripts we do have. The word or phrase just isn’t there. Translators do the best they can to make up something that makes sense.
Or unique words that have no known cognates . . . we have no idea what these words mean. Again, translators try to use context to fill in the gap.
We are all always picking and choosing, even when we don’t know it. The best we can do is be honest about that and try to justify the decisions we make.
The problem with that is that then you have to study the Bible. Deeply. I have. But most Friends don’t read Bible commentaries for fun like I do. But why should they if they don’t want to?
And that doesn’t really do you much good in the end, anyway. You still end up picking and choosing. For the deeper you go, the more you realize you don’t know. And the deeper you go, the more complex things get; the Bible is the most self-referential library on earth—1500 years of writers and editors and redactors looking at what went before and then adding to it. Virtually every passage has hidden resonances and echoes.
My point is that the Bible is an unreliable foundation for religious life. At least until something in it has been confirmed by our own experience, until the Holy Spirit opens it up to us. Which the Spirit can do, and has always done. For the Bible has also repeatedly demonstrated its value as an aid to faithful religious life, its weirdness, opaqueness, vagueness, contradictions, confusions, resonances, and echoes notwithstanding.
Its a paradox.
I can see that I have more to say about the role of the Bible in our religious lives. I started in two other directions before ending up in this one. Had to stop somewhere.
