Bioregional Quakerism—Sacred Spaces, Holy Places

December 10, 2015 § 4 Comments

We all have a sense of sacred space. Many of our meetinghouses hold an aura, even when they are empty, a sense of presence that draws us toward stillness and toward our center. A meetinghouse doesn’t even have to be old or historic to do this. It just needs deep worship. The Quaker space that has radiated the strongest sense of the sacred to me is the meeting room at Pendle Hill, which isn’t that old, I don’t think, though the barn it’s in might be.

This aura, this palpable, sensible sacredness of a space is invested. We invest a space with the sense of the sacred through worship. We draw up living water of the spirit from the well at the center of our worship, it infuses us with G*d’s presence, and we radiate that out to the rest of the worshipers—and out into the room. When the drawing and the radiating reaches critical mass, the Presence in our midst becomes sensible in the gathered meeting.

Perhaps our auras are the medium for this communion. Perhaps the room retains a memory of it. Perhaps it becomes a vessel to contain the collective aura of communion as a kind of standing wave.

Whatever the metaphysical mechanisms, we know something is really happening when the meeting is gathered in worship, and we know that some meeting rooms communicate something of this depth of spirit.

But some places are holy in themselves. Some places have been invested by G*d G*d’s self, if you will.

The Black Hills are holy

The Lakota people have considered the Black Hills to be holy for centuries. They have sent their young people to vision quest there. In their traditional days, they wintered in its skirts in small camps, but otherwise left Paha Sapa mostly alone. And they defended it with their lives against the European-American invaders when, first, gold was discovered there, and later, uranium.

I am not clear how they came to feel this way about the Black Hills. Based on their other sacred stories, however, some spirit of the land probably told them so. I suspect they explained it to themselves with a story of “divine” revelation.

This kind of divine revelation takes place in a process completely different than when the Bible tells you so. Such a revelation takes place shamanistically. That is, it emerges from direct, unmediated experience of the divine manifesting in creation, manifesting to the human through vision and narrative. Someone had a vision and the story entered their tradition.

But the holiness of the Black Hills is not just a story from a revelation. The Black Hills are the source of recharge for the Lakota aquifer, the primary underground storage facility for water in the northern Great Plains. Poison the Black Hills with mining waste and you poison the water for a vast region of the continent. Poison the Black Hills with uranium and you destroy a vast source of water for untold generations, not just seven. An earth-keeping people with a sacred relation to the land would protect such a place against desecration—against de-sacral-ization.

The Black Hills are holy, not just because some medicine person says so, but because G*d the Creator—or the creative processes of planetary geophysical evolution, if you will—invested the Black Hills with an all-important earth-keeping role. And that same Creator invested the Lakota people with the same earth-keeping role through direct divine revelation.

This is spiritual ecology. This is a sacred relationship between a community and its landbase. This is what I yearn for in my own religious community, that we Quakers are so in tune with our place, with its creatures and its features, with its processes and its ecosystems, that we receive revelation about our earth-keeping role.

How do we as Friends develop this kind of relationship with the places we inhabit? Next, I want to compare the indigenous path of the shaman with the European way of earth science.

Bioregional Quakerism & Spiritual Ecology

December 8, 2015 § 5 Comments

In a moment, another story that illustrates what I call spiritual ecology.

Human ecology is the study of the dynamic relationship between human communities and the places where they live. According to Wikipedia, “spiritual ecology” “joins ecology and environmentalism with the awareness of the sacred within creation. It calls for responses to environmental issues that include spiritual awareness and/or practice.” Specifically, in my writing, spiritual ecology denotes the relationship between religious communities and their landbases.

Now here’s that story, one that almost all of us know very well—or think we do:

Now it came to pass in those days that Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee, and was baptized of John in Jordan. And straightaway coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens opened, and the Spirit like a dove descending upon him: And there came a voice from heaven, saying, “Thou art my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.
And immediately the Spirit driveth him into the wilderness. And he was there in the wilderness forty days, tempted of Satan; and was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered unto him.

Jesus’ baptism—the full story

Let’s picture the scene in detail:

Jesus has waded out into the Jordan River with John, while behind them on the bank stand other penitents (Mark 1:4) waiting their turn. With his hand on Jesus’ head, John speaks some words as Jesus ducks or perhaps kneels in the shallow river. (Perhaps this is the very place where Jesus’ people had crossed into the promised land under the leadership of Joshua, Jesus’ namesake. Perhaps right here they had marched on dry land while the power of the Lord held back and heaped up the waters (Joshua 3:15-17). Perhaps this is why John has chosen this forsaken spot. Or is it forsaken . . . ?)

As Jesus stands up, a thunderhead comes barreling in over the bluffs to the west, low and fast and flickering with lightning. And before the two men can reach the shore, the heavens open and rain pelts down in sheets. And just then a bolt of lightning blazes from the roiling mass above and the echo of the thunder bounces back and forth between the cliffs on either side of the river. And then, across the violent tableau wings a dove.

All who were there knew they had witnessed a sign; they had been visited by God himself and he had spoken. For this was the wilderness, a desert where the rains never came. And had not God always visited his prophets in the storm (Exodus 16:20)? And was not rain one of God’s most precious personal gifts to his people (Numbers 28:12)? Did not God send a dove as a promise of land after the catastrophe of the Deluge? Surely this man was favored among men.

The man himself was visibly shaken. They all had heard the voice of Yahweh. And though only Jesus had seemed to have heard the words that were spoken, all who were there understood the message: God had revealed God’s self just as Jesus had been baptized; he was chosen.

Jesus returned to the bank, put on his sandals, donned his robe, spoke some words with John, and then, like a man driven, as a man possessed by some spirit, he set out for the deeper desert—where, it was later said, he was with the wild animals and the angels.

Spiritual ecology

Jesus’ baptism happened during a thunderstorm. How do we know this?

Palestine is built like California. To the west, a sea; on the coast a range of hills, a “coastal range”. Then a central agricultural valley. On the eastern border of the land rise the highlands of Palestine, not as high as the Sierra range, but high enough. For beyond the highlands, a Palestinian Nevada—a desert wilderness.

Storm cells form over the Mediterranean Sea in the winter, as they do in California over the Pacific. They tend to be small, low in altitude, fast, and violent. They ride the prevailing easterly winds toward land and hit the hills along the coast. If they are low enough, they dump some water. But usually they continue inland until they hit the highlands. There, they dump their load in torrential downpours and often, lots of lightning. The water gushes down the hills, gouging steep-sided gullies, and flows west into the central valley. Rarely do these storms get past the hills, so only desert stretches beyond them to the east.

In the Hebrew of the Bible, the term for a rainstorm is, “The heavens were opened”. The heavens, the firmament, was conceived to be a kind of invisible bowl arching over the world, holding out the cosmic sea from which God had separated the land on the second day of creation (Genesis 1:6). God personally oversaw rain over the promised land and he did this by opening a kind of window in the firmament, so that the sea that surrounded the world could pour in. God “opened the heavens”.

In the Hebrew of the Bible, the word for thunder is, therefore, the word for “voice”; for thunderstorms were the manifestation of God, thunder was his voice, and lightning was his face, his “glory”. The white beard, the white robe by which God is often described in Hebrew scripture represent the lightning of his glorious face.

Jesus’ father, Yahweh, was a rain god.

In Jesus’ time, and for roughly 1,400 years before his time, the Israelites knew their god as a rain god. And his close association with rain, with thunderstorms and lightning, continued deep into even Christian literature, though some of its Hellenized, Greek-speaking authors seem not to have fully understood it.

So, also, in rabbinical literature. From the Tosefta (I think; I can’t find my notes on this, so I paraphrase from memory), we have this saying:

Three things has the Lord our God kept unto himself [that is, not given to his angels to perform]: the keys to the womb, the grave, and the clouds; that is, the creation of souls, the resurrection of the dead—and the rain over Israel. 

That’s how important the rain in ancient Israel was.

The story of Jesus’ baptism is spiritual ecology straight from the heart of the Jewish and Christian traditions, and its roots go back at least to the lawgiving on Sinai.

There is so much more to say about this, about how Jesus used the landscape of Palestine in his own spiritual practice in other ways—where he went, to do what, and why. And about the very origins of the tradition itself: the roles that ecology and technology played in shaping the western religious religion.

For the highlands of Palestine had been uninhabited for 500 years when the ancient Israelites “conquered” them. Why so long? Because rain was so scarce, so erratic and unpredictable in its distribution, that the highlands couldn’t support agriculture for any sizable settlements.

The ancient Israelites overcame this obstacle with five technologies they got from Moses—a waterproof formula for plaster to line their cisterns, rain catchment engineering to fill the cisterns, terrace agriculture to hold onto the soil and the moisture, iron tools to gouge the rock and till the rocky soil—and a knowledge of the land’s spiritual ecology. Plus a covenant designed to guarantee radical dependence on God and social systems for mutual aid when the rains failed.

Unpacking all the claims I’m making here is a book’s worth of writing, which I’m working on, so it will have to wait.

But here’s what I’m getting at with this story of Jesus’ baptism: This kind of spiritual ecology has been lost to us. Christian churches and Quaker meetings have no such sacred relationship with their landbases and their ecosystems, as Jesus did. His relationship with his landbase was central and it was intimate. He could have been a wilderness guide for the secret places of Galilee and the Judean desert.

I would like to reclaim this kind of relationship. I would like to see Friends explore a land-based spirituality. I would like us to develop a Quaker religious culture of place over time.

Jesus had a thousand or more years of tradition behind him. European and European-American genocide against this continent’s indigenous peoples has nearly obliterated religious culture of place in America. But we can start to reinhabit a sacred landscape.

I have some ideas about how to do that.

Bioregional Quakerism—The spiritual face of Lake George

December 4, 2015 § 2 Comments

I seem to be starting a new thread on what I will call bioregional Quakerism. I started a first essay, as is usual for me, with some dense theological exploration of where the revelation of Quaker earthcare witness comes from. But I would rather start with a story instead, something that happened to me that illustrates part of where I want to go with this thread.

The annual sessions of New York Yearly Meeting take place in a YMCA resort on Lake George in the Adirondack Mountains. One of the most popular and spiritually enlivening features of NYYM’s summer sessions is the daily worship sharing groups, many of which take place outdoors in tents or in pavilions with 360-degree window views of the lake and the mountains. During one of these worship sharing sessions sometime in the early 1990s, I had a vision.

I saw—and felt—a female human face lying supine, gazing up at the firmament. The face was female, mature, maybe in her late 40s, but in fact timeless in her presence. She was transcendentally beautiful in her features, which were deeply expressive of her character, beyond what words could utter. I wish I could express how drawn to her I was, how profoundly moved I was by the sense of her presence and her wisdom and her beauty. She was Lake George.

Her eyes were open. Her eyes were always open  She was always in regard of the sky above, with eyes she could not close.

It was nighttime and it was raining, in my vision. And the rain fell with the force and the sound of tiny steel pellets plummeting into the water, an awful and awefull sound. And overlaying this hideous thundering hiss I heard a scream, a sustained soul-shaking keening that was both high in pitch and rich in timbre. Lake George was screaming.

Because the rain was acid rain, and it was falling into her eyes, which she could not close. And she was going blind, losing sight of the firmament she had gazed upon for untold millennia.

I found I was shaking—I was quaking. I was overwhelmed with sorrow and grief, with anger and despair.  I think I may have moaned out loud.

Against my expectation, the vision continued even after I had become aware of it. In spite of my self-consciousness, the pain just deepened. I became more and more in unity with her suffering, for a while. In time, though, probably not very long, the vision faded. I was released from most of the emotional immediacy in the experience. But not all of it. Not ever. Writing now, even, some of that grief comes back.

This experience was shamanistic Quakerism—the riding of revelation on a Quaker spiritual practice to deliver, not so much a prophetic message as a prophetic relationship. I felt transcendentally united with a natural feature of creation in its capacity for communion with the human. There was a message, too: stop acid rain from killing the lakes of the Adirondacks. But it was the relationship that felt transformative; it was the communion that had reforged my soul; it was the Lake’s capacity for communion with a human that had blown my mind.

In subsequent posts, I want to explore this capacity for communion with nature—on the part of nature, on the part of the human individual, and on the part of the human—the Quaker—community. I want to explore the possibility of what I will call shamanistic bioregional Quakerism.

Some of the things I know I want to touch on:

  • collective, communal communion with creation;
  • spiritual ecology and land-based spirituality;
  • sacred places, and holy places;
  • earth science, earthcare witness, and shamanism;
  • bioegional reinhabitation; and
  • the “nature” of religious experience.

Quaker-pocalypse—Nominations and Meeting Renewal

October 11, 2015 § 8 Comments

The goal

On the surface, it looks like the goal regarding nominations and meeting service—too few people doing too much work—is to increase the number of Friends willing to serve on meeting committees. But I think the goal is to help Friends discover and develop their gifts in the context of a new kind of relationship with their meetings, in which Friends are serving each other in their spiritual lives with the extraordinary tools that we have inherited from our tradition, in a structure that better serves the spiritual lives of the members, without leaving the meetings any more under-served than they already are.

Some of those gifts will be useful to the meeting. Some of those Friends will feel led to use them in service to the meeting. There will almost certainly still be gaps. A handful of dedicated Friends will still probably shoulder more than their share of the meeting’s work and financial support. That’s just the way things are in an all-volunteer organization in our time. But the meeting’s energies—by which we mean the energies of its members—will be pointed in the right direction: toward the members.

The goal is to channel divine energy from the members through the meeting organization back toward the members. This energy is, essentially, love, in the form of service to each other in our spiritual lives—and, for that matter, in all aspects of our lives—work, family, and the emotional and even the material aspects of our lives—to the degree that is appropriate and we are able. The meeting’s role is to facilitate this channeling, not to gather unto itself all the members’ energy.

The challenge

The challenge is that we are talking about a radical change in Quaker meeting culture. We are talking about structural changes that Friends are likely to resist, when they can understand them at all. More importantly, we are talking about a change in consciousness—a much greater clarity about what the religious life could be, a significant shift in our understanding of the purpose of the meeting and the meaning of meeting membership.

This means doing a lot of different things at the same time with strategic purpose, a kind of full court press, sustained over a considerable period of time. Multi-dimensional strategic efforts are hard to conceive, hard to communicate, and hard to grasp, even when communicated well., hard to implement, and very hard to sustain. A “full court press” will involve a lot of the members, when the problem we are trying to solve is the fact that our members are already at the limit of their resources, and we have trouble getting a lot of them involved in anything. Furthermore, energy tends to wane over time, even when the community is behind a significant collective effort, but this level of transformation just can’t be done quickly with a magic tantric spell.

So this effort has to start small and progress in stages and it needs to work on several fronts at once. And it needs to live on the energy of Friends who feel led to the work. As soon as this transformative effort begins to feel like an obligation or duty, we might as well have stayed with the original, now ‘traditional’ committee structure.

Solutions?

In the short to medium term, we could try the following:

Clerking. Improve the effectiveness of our committees with some training and/or resources for their clerks. See these resources on the New York Yearly Meeting website.

Committee oversight—in a new way. See whether any Friend or group of Friends feel led to serve as elders in a particular way: as a kind of ad hoc working group on meeting life whose charge is to pay attention to the life of the meeting overall, to watch for emerging problems, trends, and patterns, and to serve as ombudspersons, people everyone knows they can go to with a difficulty. This could be the assistant clerk, or even the meeting’s clerk. And they should feel free to co-opt other Friends to help address a particular situation. I know, this sounds like another committee, another nomination. But I think this person or group should truly feel led to do this work. This should not be an appointment for a specified term, and if the meeting cannot find such a person, then so be it. This should not be a new standing committee, but rather a locus of concern for the overall life of the meeting. I suspect that this approach would be most appropriate for medium-sized and large meetings.

Trim the organizational tree. Take a look at your committees and see which ones could be laid down or combined.

Working groups instead of committees. We might try getting rid of committees altogether, except for those with fiduciary responsibility, and form working groups instead. Standing committees are hard shells with defined tasks occupied by nominated Friends for specified terms. What I am groping for here is rather a locus of activity around a meeting need or concern with a specified time and place to meet and with very permeable boundaries—whoever shows up does the work. Someone would have to manage a calendar to make sure groups meet in a timely way (planning in the summer for First Day School’s opening in the fall, for instance) and to arrange for the spaces needed. In this scenario, nominating committee might only have to present to the meeting names for meeting officers and a couple of Meeting Life Coordinators to manage the logistics.

In the long term:

Meaning, Quaker identity, and membership. In the end (or rather, in the beginning), it all comes down to membership—what do we think membership means and what do we ask of those who join us? The answers to these questions rest on a higher-order question: What is the Quaker meeting for? What is the Religious Society of Friends for? Who are we and what are we doing? Specifically, do we understand the meeting as a covenantal community in which the members and the meeting share promises of mutual service and enrichment? The ways in which members serve the community have long been defined, but in terms of committee service; and the ways the community serves the members usually have not been defined at all, beyond hosting of meeting for worship and some level of reactive (rather than proactive) pastoral care. Do we want the meeting—that is, our fellow Quakers—to be actively, proactively, engaged in our spiritual lives? Do we understand the life of the spirit to include active mutual engagement with our religious community, beyond simply sharing meeting for worship and working together to run the meeting? Do we understand the life of the spirit as something we cannot do well alone, that collective discernment and support and even oversight are essential to individual spiritual thriving? Can we offer attenders something more than committee service when they become members, a level of engagement that would be serious enough that you would have to ask for it—by applying for membership.

I expect that it would take a meeting quite a long time to answer these questions, and the answer might well be no—we like things the way they are. We don’t want to scare people away, and it’s okay if there’s really no difference between being an attender and being a member. We want to be able to keep our inner lives to ourselves. My spiritual life is none of your business.

Membership jubilee. If a meeting decides to try a radical approach to renewal, however, we might try declaring a jubilee on membership altogether, once we’re clear as a meeting about who we are. Wipe the slate clean and hold new membership clearness committees for everybody, so that everybody has a chance to re-up, as it were. This would take a long while, especially in a big meeting. We might experiment with a more collective approach: hold small groups led by a facilitator in which Friends would discuss their spiritual lives and their hopes and needs regarding meeting life and membership—and then hold an “altar call” at the end. Those who decide not to apply for membership then would, of course, be free to apply later.

I’m just throwing out ideas here. I really do think this problem is very difficult to grasp and to solve. I’ve been thinking about it for decades and my ideas just keep changing, and I still don’t feel very confident about any of them. So I would love to hear what others think and what others are doing.

I know of a couple of meetings that have laid down their committee structure and turned to working groups, including Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. I would love to hear how those experiments are going.

On a final note: I am going on vacation for two weeks, so it will probably be at least three before I post again.

Quaker-pocalypse—and Personal -pocalypse

September 19, 2015 § 8 Comments

In the next post in this series on reforming committee service in the service of Quaker renewal, I had planned to start laying out my plan. But I found myself reviewing the challenges we face, and when I was done, I had talked myself into a funk. I rolled back from my desk and looked out the window, overcome with grief and depression. My plan was just so much beaver pucky, because no meting was going to embrace it. Only a relative handful of Friends even read this blog, and I imagined that most would just shake their heads and say to themselves, some interesting ideas in there, Steve, but it will never fly in my meeting.

Now I believe in the dialectic of community evolution. It’s of some value to present the antithesis to a community’s thesis, a radical alternative to its current condition and direction. Even an unachievable vision, even a ridiculous proposal, will pull a community farther along the curve that it would have progressed otherwise. It will make only moderately radical (is there such a thing?) alternatives seem acceptable by contrast.

More to the point, though, this blog is for me a form of written ministry. I have to feel that it’s spirit-led before I can publish it. Reviewing my plan and the obstacles in its path left me wondering about my plan’s source. I questioned the balance between my head and my Muse.

It doesn’t help that I am now reading Neil Stephenson’s latest novel Seveneves, an apocalyptic science fiction thriller in which the moon has for reasons unknown broken up and planet Earth has roughly two years before the moon’s pieces start falling in a Hard Rain that will destroy most life on the planet.

Also, I have made a very in-depth study of biblical apocalyptic. I’ve read Jared Diamond’s Collapse. I am myself an apocalyptic by intellectual temperament. I’ve been thinking and talking (mostly with my brother) about the collapse of corporate capitalism and of civilization as we know it, since the mid-1970s.

My observation, born of my biblical study and from watching contemporary Christian apocalyptic movements—David Koresh and the Branch Davidians, in particular—is that apocalyptics usually do get the nature of the problem, the causes of the collapse, and of course, the prophecy of collapse itself, mostly right. But they always get the timeline wrong. It’s always going to be day after tomorrow, and it never is.

I think the book of Revelation was written during the first Jewish War, sometime between 65 and 73 CE. But even if it was written in the second century, as many scholars think, it’s been roughly two thousand years and we are still waiting—and still believing that our time is the Endtime.

The apocalyptic impulse arises (say its scholars, and I agree) when a fervent religious minority believes in its community’s rampant and deeply-rooted corruption, a corruption so endemic that human efforts at reform cannot suffice and only God can bring true renewal; that therefore God’s judgment is inevitably going to fall, and only the faithful remnant will remain.

The first paradigm for this pattern was the one the priests of captive Judah recrafted from Babylonian material during the Babylonian Exile to explain why this disaster had befallen God’s people—the story of Noah and the ark.

Six hundred years later, Jesus was praying for God’s manifestation on the slopes of the Mount of Olives with his disciples when the police showed up and his vision of God’s return had apparently been forsaken. His Little Apoclypse (Mark 13 and parallels in Matthew and Luke) lacks Revelation’s cosmic and iconic imagery, but it’s a pretty horrifying picture—one that did not come true until 35 years later when the Zealots could not take it any more and Rome muddled around for several years because they could not take these peasants very seriously. Jesus saw it coming, but he got the timeline wrong. And, of course, the wrong side won.

George Fox had the same experience. Empire usually wins the outward war. But the Lamb and the persecuted minority sometimes win the inward war.

I think we are going to lose the outward war. Liberal Quakerism is—outwardly—withering away. I suspect that our institutions will either collapse for lack of time, talent, and treasure, or accommodate themselves, the way our schools have, and AFSC has, getting time, talent, and treasure from other sources while trying, with varying degrees of success, to hold on to a distinctive Quaker character.

Two questions remain for me. First, how do we deal with the death of Quakerism as we know it? And, more importantly, where is God in all of this?

These questions mirror the questions I have regarding our global ecological collapse. Not how do we stop sea level rise from taking down New York City, but what ministries will arise in Fifteenth Street Meeting, and Brooklyn Meeting, and Morningside and Flushing Meetings, to deal with the suffering that will inevitably result when that drowning finally takes place. Because it’s going to.

God has somewhere between zero and maybe fifty years to raise those ministers up. The history of apocalyptic suggests that the prophets will not appear until the water is at the door. That was Hurricane Sandy. I’m eagerly waiting, looking, praying.

So we can stick our fingers in the committee service dike and hold back the tide for a while, struggling along with too few Friends doing too much work with too little monty until we can’t anymore—which is already happening in some meetings. But no grand scheme like mine will prevent the inevitable.
Only God can do that.

So the real question is, how do we build a culture that knows God, that offers fertile soil for divine seed? This work will probably fall to a tiny remnant. And mostly to young people.

At least that’s been the pattern of Quaker renewal in the past. The original prophetic spark in the 1650s was largely a youth movement. Joseph Stephenson Rountree was in his early twenties when his essay Quakerism Past and Present won the £100 prize for the best description of the causes of London Yearly Meeting’s decline and the best solution; within two years, the Yearly Meeting had revised its book of discipline to correct the issues he described. So, too, with the renewal movement in midwestern Quakerism that gave rise to the programmed, pastoral tradition—mostly youth. And again with the emergence around the turn of the twentieth century of liberal Quakerism under the leadership of the young Rufus Jones and John Wilhelm Rountree.

We have been in decline before. And the Holy Spirit has never failed to raise up ministries of renewal. Our task is to be midwives to that renewal. To recognize the divine seeds when they fall on good soil and begin to sprout, and to water and feed those plants without standing in the way of the sun.

Quaker-pocalypse: Nominations, Committee Service, and Spiritual Renewal, Part Three

September 12, 2015 § 1 Comment

Some solutions to the problems of committee service—a preview

I said at the outset of this series that, if there are solutions to the problems of committee service, they will have to be sustained and long-term, far-reaching and multi-dimensional, structural and radical.

In subsequent posts, I want to unpack these approaches to a solution. Here, let me outline them in preview. We might consider pursuing the following alternatives:

  1. Redefine the purpose of the meeting committee. Make the committee a laboratory for helping its members discern and explore their leadings in the committee’s area of concern, and an incubator for helping to bring its members’ leadings to fruition.
    This is in contrast to the committee’s usual role as a workshop for handling the meeting’s tasks. However, we would probably have to add this role to the committee’s existing roles or the meeting’s business would collapse—not a very realistic proposition, since the committees and their members are already overworked. So this is a case, I think, in which the half-way measure just won’t do. We need a more radical solution . . .
  2. Virtually eliminate standing committees altogether, except in the case of those necessary for the good operation and fiduciary responsibility of the meeting as a corporation—trustees, financial services, property, etc. And . . .
  3. Replace these standing committees with something else, a combination of ad hoc working groups, support committees for ministers who feel led to work in various areas of meeting life, and something like Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s Threads, open gatherings of Friends interested in various areas of meeting life.
    Philadelphia Yearly Meeting has undertaken numbers two and three, and I will be very interested to see how this unfolds. This approach might be easier for a yearly meeting than for a monthly meeting. More about this in a subsequent post.
  4. Redefine membership, so that, in the covenant between meeting and member, the meeting offers its members energetic, reliable, and focused spiritual nurture and pastoral care, not just an invitation to serve on committees, and then sees how the members reciprocate with service to the meeting. This reverses the usual pattern, in which we ask the members to contribute to the meeting, without thinking about how the meeting will contribute to their lives, assuming, I guess, that meeting for worship and committee service are enough, and then we wait to see whether worship and meeting service are enough to keep them active.
    Once the meeting is clear about its identity, its role in its members’ lives, and about what membership means (see #5 below), we might consider a membership jubilee, in which all members are asked to reapply for membership in a round of clearness committees stretched out over a few years that focus on learning how the meeting can serve the member.
  5. Consciousness raising. In general, we need a sustained, long-term program of consciousness raising, not about the value of committees, but about the purpose of the monthly meeting, the nature of the life of the spirit, and the role of the meeting in the members’ spiritual lives. We need open discussion, threshing sessions, and spirit-led discernment about who we think we are as a monthly meeting and about the meaning of meeting membership. We need spiritual formation programs that implement the offering of spiritual nurture that I suggest in bullet #4 above as the meeting’s commitment to new members—assuming that we are willing to reconceive the meeting as a two-way street, a covenant in which both the meeting and the members are actively contributing to each others’ lives.

In the next few posts, I want to unpack some of these ideas in greater detail.

Quaker-pocalypse: Nominations, Committee Service, and Spiritual Renewal, Part Two

September 11, 2015 § 3 Comments

Part Two: The Problem(s) with Committees

In this entry, I want to focus just on the purpose of the committee and its dynamics and how they tend to turn off our members.

The Problem(s) with Committees

Committees are oriented toward the meeting and its needs, not the needs of those who serve on them. Each committee’s charge is a set of tasks that meet a set of needs in the meeting. In this system, the committee member’s role is to contribute to these tasks. Committees are the commit-ees—they are the thing to which we are committed, rather than the Spirit or the expression of our own spiritual gifts. This orientation toward the meeting is mostly an unconscious and structurally imposed dynamic that we do not even recognize is at work most of the time.

Committees have a life of their own. They exist whether or not anyone on the committee has a true spirit-led call to be there. Most members of the committee have been suggested by Nominating committee because someone knows they do have some gifts or a concern for the aspect of meeting life served by the committee. But that does not mean that the appointees are clear about what the committee should do. And if they are clear, then God help them! Furthermore, committees can be extremely hard to lay down. Even the most moribund committee will often have one member who thinks it’s unthinkable that the meeting does not have a peace committee, or whatever.

Committees quench the spirit. If a member of committee has a real leading in the committee’s area of concern, the committee inevitably tries to fit that leading into its own work—rather than turn its full attention to the Friend and her leading, providing the discernment the leading probably needs in order to reach full maturity, and providing whatever support the Friend called to this ministry might need to be faithful to the call. I am serving on a committee right now in which this has just happened. Furthermore, the Holy Spirit is a wild, unpredictable, untamable force; who knows where the discernment process for a new leading will lead? This emerging ministry might fit in the committee—or it might not; it might not fit in any committee at all. Then it’s really in trouble.

Committees are the way of the world, not the way of the Spirit. The way of the Spirit employs worship and collective discernment, and looks to the Light within individuals as the source and ground for direction and action. The Quaker way of structuring spirit-led action is the faith and practice of Quaker ministry. Committees, on the other hand, often employ only a perfunctory period of silence, usually daring, nevertheless, to call this worship. They do practice corporate discernment, sometimes reverting to real worship when it’s clear that the group is either stuck or close to something that needs some Light to get through. However, when a committee is not riding a clear wave of movement in the Spirit, when it is bereft of ideas, it often employs brainstorming  or “visioning exercises” to get over the hump. This happens either informally, with members just throwing out ideas, or in a more structured format, with newsprint pasted on the walls with scotch tape, etc. Brainstorming and “visioning” are (in my opinion) insidious incursions into the Quaker way by the ways of the world. A committee that doesn’t know where it’s going or what it’s doing should commit itself to real worship until it is clear about its way forward or that its work is done.

Committee meetings often are tedious. Committees often spend a lot of time doing business that is only about the mechanics and administration of the committee structure. Developing a budget is one aspect of this. Much of this business is regular or cyclical and routine, business that must be attended to. This often gets in the way of doing new things or exploring new directions, and of thinking about the big picture or the long term. Committees sometimes have weak clerks who have trouble keeping the committee focused. Committees sometimes have appointees who don’t know what they’re doing, don’t understand Quaker process or respect it, who have an axe to grind, who are long-winded, or  who are otherwise ungovernable.

Committee service often is onerous. We lead busy lives. Time is precious. Work and family life is demanding. This can be especially troublesome for Friends who have non-Friend partners who might wish that you were doing something with your time that included them. Serving on more than one committee multiplies all these problems. Then there’s possible service on a quarterly meeting or yearly meeting committee. Uff da, as the Norwegians say.

Membership. The only thing that we offer prospective members as a benefit of membership is service on a committee. We virtually define membership as the willingness to serve on a committee. By presenting membership and committees in this way, we virtually define Quakerism as committee service.

The upshot

It’s a miracle that any Friends choose to serve on a meeting committee. What’s in it for them? In what ways are their spiritual lives served by serving on a committee?

Okay, service is a gift of the spirit. I myself actually like serving on committees, and that is because serving the meeting is fulfilling for me. And it is for a lot of Friends. Good thing, too. And other gifts of the spirit can find expression in a committee, though, as I’ve said, committees tend to interfere with the traditional practice of Quaker ministry.

The solution(s)—a preview

I said at the outset that, if there are solutions to the problems of committee service, they will have to be sustained and long-term, far-reaching and multi-dimensional, structural and radical.

In the next post, I want to offer some approaches to a solution., then in subsequent posts, I will unpack some of these ideas with more detail.

Quaker-pocalypse: Nominations, Committee Service, and Spiritual Renewal, Part One

September 11, 2015 § 4 Comments

Part One: Quaker “Decline” and the Committee System

Introduction

One of the signs of Quaker “decline” is the trouble nominating committees have finding enough Friends to serve on committees. All the work of the meeting tends to get done by the same small, dedicated, and overworked group of Friends.

In my experience, nominating committees often have very dedicated, seasoned Friends who are doing their best to match the interests and gifts of the members to the work that needs to be done. However, the “slots” that have to be filled loom over their work, and they have to do it over and over again, with a deadline. Meanwhile, nominating committees themselves are often among the hardest committees to fill, partly because so few Friends want to shoulder this burden. Agreeing to serve on Nominating committee is signing up for a kind of failure, or at least for hard work and frustration.

This problem is universal and persistent. In my thirty-some years as a Friend, I have never known a meeting that did not struggle with too few people doing too much work, with committees that are under-appointed and sometimes not very effective. I have come to the conclusion that the problem cannot be solved, at least with the solutions we have been trying all these decades. We should ditch them—ditch the solutions that are failing us, and maybe ditch committees themselves, as well, at least in a lot of cases.

Past solutions

As they say, doing the same things over and over again to solve a problem while expecting a different outcome is a definition of insanity. I would call it deep neurosis, myself; “insanity” is a little strong. Let’s stop doing the things that have not worked after all this time, and try something new.

In the past, meetings have tried the following:

  • We have tried to improve communications, assuming that, if only Friends knew what the committees did and how important that work was, they would agree to serve. —Not. The product we are trying to sell with better “advertising” is flawed and needs a recall.
  • We have formed ad hoc committees to study the problem and propose solutions—of course; what else would Quakers do? This often leads to the creation of at least one new committee. A truly dysfunctional approach, except . . . what else can you do?
  • Because—in general, we have been taking the system for granted, a system in which the business of the meeting is done by standing committees with a discreet set of tasks that define their charges, staffed by Friends appointed for set terms by nominating committees. Maybe the system itself is the problem.

Sometimes, meetings go a little deeper in their search for solutions than exploratory committees and renewed efforts at communication. Are we losing people because the committees are dysfunctional? Are the committee meetings tedious because of ineffective clerking? Would an orientation for new members and training for clerks help? Do we have too many committees? Do we have the right committees? Could some restructuring solve the problem?

These questions get closer to the heart of the matter. I think the problem is structural and it does call for structural solutions—but not for a shuffling of the meeting’s committee chart. If there are solutions, they will have to be sustained and long-term, far-reaching and multi-dimensional, structural and radical.

The real problem(s)

I think the basic problem is that we define the problem in terms of the meeting’s needs instead of the members’ needs. We have been looking for ways to get more Friends to serve on committees. I think we should be looking instead for ways to serve our members in their spiritual lives and see where that leads.

This orientation toward the meeting rather than the members is natural and mostly unconscious. It has a lot of dimensions, too many to address in one blog entry, even one as long as mine usually are. So—

  • In the next entry, I want to focus just on the purpose of the committee and its dynamics and how they tend to turn off our members.
  • Then, in a subsequent post, I want to sketch out some possible solutions.
  • Then I’ll unpack some of these solutions in greater detail.

The overall thrust will be to turn the vector of service around so that it flows from the meeting toward the member, rather than the other other way around.

Spirit, Authority, and Northwest Yearly Meeting

August 15, 2015 § 10 Comments

Another yearly meeting has convulsed because one of its constituent monthly meetings has decided to welcome LGBT Friends fully into their communion; that is, they have decided to start marrying same sex couples. Some time ago, a number of meetings left Indiana Yearly Meeting because one of their number, West Richmond Friends Church, chose to open its arms in this way and the eldership structure of the Yearly Meeting chose to exercise discipline over the matter. Eventually, West Richmond Meeting and a number of other meetings left Indiana Yearly Meeting and formed a new Association of Friends.

Now Northwest Yearly Meeting has expelled West Hills Meeting of Portland, Oregon, for doing the same thing.

Actually, it was not, apparently, the gathered body of the yearly meeting, but the Board of Elders of Northwest Yearly Meeting who expelled West Hills. On the yearly meeting’s website, the Board of Elders is described as “a wise, discerning, and spiritually mature group of Friends who help encourage the overall, spiritual welfare of NWYM.” One of their responsibilities is to “Oversee matters of church discipline and doctrinal dispute.”

I can recommend this blog by the church’s youth minister for some information about what’s happened.

Somewhere in the confusing flurry of blog posts and Facebook posts around this event, I think I read that some meetings threatened to leave the yearly meeting if it did not dissociate itself from West Hills.

This is one of the signature forms of passive aggression among Friends, to hold a meeting hostage to your opinions or feelings. “If you do [x], then I’ll do [y].” Or, “If you don’t do [x] . . . “

When a Friend or a meeting acts this way, they are essentially pitching over the side their submission to the work of the Holy Spirit in the meeting, believing that they already know what God wants the meeting to do.

I feel that clerks faced with this kind of extortion should urge the aggressors to rethink their aggression, and if the aggressors do not reconsider their actions, the meeting should move on to some other business, hoping that the aggressors will rediscover their discipleship, their surrender to the living movement of the Holy Spirit among them, rather than submit to their fears.

For I suspect that the Friends who wanted to expel West Hills feared something. What? What was there to fear in remaining in communion with a meeting that marries same sex couples?

Because this is an evangelical Christian community, they almost certainly feared—ultimately—God’s judgment.

I suspect they also feared, in the medium term, a collective moral “slippery slope”, a gradual slide toward full communion with LGBT Friends in other meetings, a kind of infection of the impure that might ultimately spread to the yearly meeting itself. More on “purity” in a moment.

Perhaps they feared the breakdown of authority and discipline, since their Faith and Practice condemns homosexuality (see the excerpts below), and not to enforce the testimony of the book of discipline is—well, to let discipline lapse.

It’s worth noting, however, that the yearly meeting was in a process of discernment on the human sexuality section of its book of discipline when it “released” West Hills Friends Church, so the letter of the law was in place when they expelled the church, but the spirit was in question.

Ultimately, this is all about authority—the authority of scripture—or rather, of your own interpretation of scripture; the authority of yearly meetings over monthly meetings; the authority of elders over the moral lives of members; and the authority of the legacy of discernment passed down to us by past believers, especially those who wrote, edited, redacted, and compiled the scriptural canon (and the book of discipline), over the present knowledge of God’s will by a gathered body of Friends worshipping under the leadership of the spirit of Christ.

Against this latter, some Friends will argue that God’s will does not change, and so the testimony of scripture carries ultimate authority unto the present day. This raises a whole bunch of interesting questions.

For one, as I said in an earlier post, God’s will actually has changed when it comes to the definition of marriage. At least, that’s the apparent message one gets from tracking the changes evident in the Bible. So, also, with the status of slaves and of women in the Bible. And the impulse to collective violence and war. And the nature and destiny of the human soul. And the description and location of heaven and hell. And . . . well, you get the idea.

But more importantly, the Quaker experience of continuing revelation, of new light being revealed by Christ as to how to walk in this world (or continuing illumination, if you like, the experience that new light will reliably rest in biblical testimony if you read scripture in the Light in which it was written, even when it seems on the surface not to)—new light, I say, has historically opened the Quaker movement to new ways that seem contrary to Scripture on a surface reading.

The signature example for me is the outward practice of the sacraments of baptism and the eucharist. According to a surface reading of the Bible, Jesus commanded his followers to do both. Friends have followed the spiritual logic of Jesus’ teaching to its core: You must be baptized in the water and the spirit. For God is spirit and we worship in spirit and in truth. True conviction and true communion take place within the human heart. And Jesus repeatedly demonstrated a preference for truthful inward experience over empty outward forms. He even predicted the utter destruction of the ultimate outward form of his people and his time, the temple in Jerusalem.

Thus, in a meeting for marriage we practice almost no outward forms. We meet in silent, expectant waiting for the Holy Spirit. We testify in our vocal ministry to the working of the Spirit in the lives of the couple and in the life-union into which they are entering. Based upon our experience of the Presence, in the room and in the people being married, we record the work that God has already done to unite them in sacred love and sign a certificate as witnesses.

Marriage is an inward working of the Holy Spirit. Can we not testify to the bonding of sacred love between Friends of the same sex? Can we not feel the presence of the Holy Spirit in a meeting for marriage when such a love is manifest?

Or do we turn to the ultimate outward religious form of our own time—the Bible—to deny this as a possibility? I am not talking about the Bible as revealed to us in the Spirit in which it was written. I am talking about a surface reading of a handful of prooftexts. I am talking about our interpretation of these texts. I am talking about carrying forward into our time from a time two and three thousand years ago of a notion of purity that Jesus expressly rejected and that Paul, conflicted as he was, rejected when it was convenient for him to do so. Christianity would not be a Gentile movement today if Paul had not jettisoned the ancient Jewish attitudes towards purity law.

So I believe that the question of authority raised by West Hills’ expulsion from Northwest Yearly Meeting comes down to a question of whether the living, revealing spirit of Christ is really our governor, the Holy Spirit that is manifest when we are gathered in the Spirit in meeting for worship, when we are following Jesus’ commandment to love one another, and when we do not let outward forms obstruct the Light of revelation.

Excerpts form Northwest Yearly Meeting’s Faith and Practice

Faith Expressed through Witness

18. Christian Witness to Human Sexuality

We hold that only marriage is conducive to godly fulfillment in sexual relationships for the purposes of reproduction and enrichment of life. We consider sexual intimacy outside marriage as sinful because it distorts God’s purposes for human sexuality. We denounce, as contrary to the moral laws of God, acts of homosexuality, sexual abuse, and any other form of sexual perversion (see “Human Sexuality,” p. 80). The church, however, as a community of forgiven persons, remains loving and sensitive to those we consider in error. Because God’s grace can deliver from sins of any kind, we are called to forgive those who have repented and to free them for participation in the church. [page 11]

Human Sexuality

[Added in 1982] Friends believe that the divine intent of marriage is to fulfill the emotional, spiritual, and physical needs of humankind and that only within the bonds of marriage divinely ordained can there be a beautiful sexual relationship for the purposes of reproduction and life enrichment. Adultery and fornication are sinful because they distort the purposes of God for the right ordering of human sexuality.

Friends believe that the practice of sexual perversion in any form is sinful and contrary to the God-ordained purposes in sexual relationships. These perversions include sexual violence, homosexual acts, transvestism, incest, and sex acts with animals. The sin nature is capable of vile affections when humankind rejects the moral laws of God.

Scriptures relating to these distorted and perverse forms of sexuality include Genesis 19:1-13; Deuteronomy 22:5; Leviticus 18:20, 22, 23; Romans 1:24-28; 1 Corinthians 5:1, 2 and 6:9-20. Neither in the Scriptures nor in church history have these practices been regarded as consistent with righteous living.

Friends do not accept as members those involved in these perverse practices; neither do they permit them to hold positions of responsibility or leadership in the church. However, Friends believe that the grace of God is adequate to cleanse and deliver from all sin (1 John 19; 2 Corinthians 5:17), and they desire to be tender and sensitive to all people, ready to express kindness, love, and forgiveness. See also Jude 7, 8; Colossians 3:5-7; and Revelation 2:18, 27. When the erring one has been repentant, the past should not be remembered. As Christ called and blessed those whom He forgave, so must His followers. Friends must not hinder the forgiven person from holding membership or having responsibility in the church.

Friends churches should exercise concern for their members on matters of sexuality and should discipline offenders in love and truth (see “Rules of Discipline” p. 46). [page 80]

Quaker-pocalypse—Advancement: What Can We Say?

July 17, 2015 § 1 Comment

What can we say?

. . . when seekers ask what Quakers believe? Here is one version of the answers I’ve been working on.

An “elevator speech”:

We believe that there is in everyone a Light—

  • a light in the conscience that can guide and strengthen us to do the right, that can awaken us to the wrong we have done and are about to do;
  • a light that can heal us, that can strengthen us to live better lives, that can release us from our demons, make us more whole, relieve us of suffering, and lead us to redemption;
  • a light that can inspire us to acts of kindness and to creativity;
  • a light that can lead us to the deepest fulfillment and the “peace that passes all understanding” and into acts of kindness, service, and witness;
  • a light that can help transform us into the people we were meant to be;
  • a light that can open to us direct communion with God (however you experience God), both as individuals and as a community.

We Quakers have experienced this light as the Light of Christ, as Jesus Christ himself, as the Spirit of Love and Truth, as a Presence in our midst, as that which has gathered us as a people of God and continues to guide our meetings and the Quaker movement into the future.

In this Light, through this Light, God is always trying to reveal to us the way of love and peace and truth. In this Christ-spirit we are sometimes gathered in our worship into a joy-filled ttanscendental communion with God and with each other.

That’s my “elevator speech,” a quick answer to a deep question. But of course, we can say a lot more than this. So here is a more fully developed presentation of Quaker “beliefs”.

Six Quaker essentials

The Light. We believe that there is a principle in every person (often called the Light, the Seed, “that of God”) that can know God directly and that yearns for this intimate communion.

  •     Because we experience the Light inwardly, we do not practice many of the outward forms that other religious communities practice; we do not rely on outward sacraments for God’s grace.
  •     Because the Light is universal, we believe that all people are equal in God’s sight and this informs how we treat them.
  •     Because we all have access to the Light, we have no professional clergy that are thought of as intermediaries between God and the individual worshiper. But we have not laid down the clergy itself; rather, we have no laypeople, for all of us are potential ministers. We believe that God can and does call each one of us into service or ministry directly and in various ways, most commonly, to speak from the Spirit in our meetings for worship. And for this, we need no special education or ceremonial ordination, but only attention to the promptings of the Spirit and a willingness to be faithful to the call.
  •     This, in fact, is the essence of Quaker spirituality: to be open always to God’s guidance and to listen always for God’s call into service, and to answer the call faithfully when it comes.

The gathered meeting. Ever since the 1650s when Quakers were first gathered as a dedicated people of God, we have felt that the same Light and Spirit that dwells within each individual also loves and guides us as a community.

  •     Just as we believe that each individual can enjoy a direct relationship with God, so also we believe that the same Holy Spirit leads the worshipping community.
  •     Thus many of our meetings hold our worship in waiting, expectant silence, turning our full attention toward God and leaving off any outward liturgical forms like the Bible readings, collective prayer, hymn singing, and prepared sermons that are featured in most religious services. We worship in utter simplicity in order not to crowd out God’s direct voice or drown out the still, small voice within each of us.
  •     However, many Quaker meetings hold “programmed” worship that is more like other protestant churches, with hymn singing, Bible readings, prepared collective prayer,s and sermons. These meetings feel that these outward forms help the meeting commune with God.
  •     We also conduct the business of the meeting in meetings for worship under the direct leadership of the Holly Spirit, having no professional human leadership or hierarchies. We have a number of distinctive community tools to discern God’s wish for us.

Continuing revelation. We believe that direct communion with God means that God is still teaching God’s people.

  •     God’s revelation did not end with the Bible; rather God is always trying to reveal to us the way of love and peace and truth.
  •     Thus, in answer to God’s continuing revelation over the centuries, we have laid down the outward practice of the sacraments, we have always recognized God’s prophetic inspiration of women ministers, we have struggled against slavery, and, in some yearly meetings, we fully welcome lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people into our fellowship, even though the Bible seems to some on the surface to condemn homosexuality, condone slavery, deny women’s role in ministry, and require outward sacramental practice.
  •     And we remain open to new light, expecting that God will intend further changes for us in the future.

“Let your lives speak.” We believe that God calls us to live our inner faith in outward practice, to live our lives as testimony to the Truth that has been awakened within us, leading us to alleviate suffering, injustice, and oppression, and to amend their causes. As a movement, we have come to unity on a number of stands of conscience, which we call our “testimonies,” and we seek to be open to new truth as to how we should live, as individuals, as a faith community, and as a society.

Love. We believe that “love is the first motion,” as we say, the commandment by which we should live our lives—that we should love God, love our fellow human beings, and love the creation we share with all other living things.

Direct experience. While “What do you believe?” is an important question, one that deserves a clear and straightforward answer, Friends often focus on a rather different question, one posed by George Fox in the 1600s and from which I derive the title for this little series on Quaker beliefs:

  • “You will say, ‘Christ saith this, and the apostles say this;’ but what canst thou say? Art thou a child of the Light, and hast thou walked in the Light, and what thou speakest, is it inwardly from God?”
  •     In other words, even though we do have a distinctive set of beliefs, Friends try to focus more on experience than on doctrine. For us, the essential question is: what is your experience of God? And we seek to ground our religious lives on what we have ourselves experienced, rather than on the inherited experience of others, however valuable that tradition might be.

 

Each of these core beliefs can be unpacked further to get into all of the other beliefs and practices that distinguish Friends, which I have only just touched upon here. That’s for a subsequent post.

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