Bioregional Quakerism: Bioregionalism—A Primer
December 19, 2015 § Leave a comment
Bioregionalism is—was—a social change movement that flourished in the early to 1970s and 1980s built around the idea that humans should live as though the places they lived in mattered. It put deep ecology at the center of everything. It held that human systems should not just respect the systems of the earth and its organisms, they should model itself on them, they should grow organically out of them, or at least integrate themselves with the ecosystems of their bioregion rather than the other way around.
I was involved with the group in New York City. That group’s leading intellectual voice was Kirkpatrick Sale, who has written what I think is the only book on bioregionalism. Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision. Our spiritual godfather was Thomas Berry. At the time, the Roman Catholic church had prohibited him from publishing, but his graduate students at Fordham, where he taught comparative religion, were publishing his monographs using the bindings used for dissertations, so we were reading the beta versions of the essays that became The Dream of the Earth, watching the New Cosmology be born in our midst. In the group also were a biologist and an architect who were building one of the first green roofs in New York on a building that was part of the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine complex. And there were artists, poets, and other folks in an extremely dynamic and creative revolutionary cell.
There were groups in other parts of the country, too. In San Francisco, Peter Drum was publishing Planet Drum, which is still around. A performance artist from that group did a piece on the life cycle of salmon that I saw in New York and was a revelation about how powerful the arts can be as reinhabitationist tools (more about reinhabitation in a moment). And there were several back-to-the-land groups that bought land and became bioregional homesteaders, especially in the Missouri Ozarks.
The bioregion. The organizing principle behind bioregional thinking is the bioregion. “The main features [of a bioregion] are generally found throughout a continuous geographic terrain and include a particular climate, local aspects of seasons, landforms, watersheds, soils, and native plants and animals.” (Peter Berg, Bioregionalism: An Introduction) For practical purposes, this often means either a watershed or a mountain range.
A bioregion “is a geographic terrain and a terrain of consciousness.” (Berg) Bioregionalists seek to “1) restore and maintain local natural systems; 2) practice sustainable ways to satisfy basic human needs such as food, water, energy, housing, and materials; and 3) support the work of reinhabitation.” (Berg)
This idea of reinhabitation is what I’m trying to get at with this thread on Bioregional Quakerism. In a bioregional Quakerism, meetings would seek to “reinhabit” their bioregions, transforming the way the meeting as a household lives to conform to the limits and gifts of its local ecosystems.
Other key principles of bioregionalism include the following.
First, carrying capacity—no bioregion should exceed its carrying capacity, its capacity to support its human population sustainably in terms of both resources and waste management, unless it offsets its burden on its ecosystems by importing the resources its needs to keep from drawing down the resource base of its own bioregion—but always seeking to hold the overall net burden across the macro-region to zero. So a system of ecological inventory accounting would always be in place to govern local human system design.
Second, upstream-downstream—everything and everybody is related in the dynamics of an ecosystem, and humans have a responsibility to all the other people and systems and organisms in their bioregion, and to the future inhabitants of your bioregion, and to the other bioregions your actions could affect. The key metaphor for the interdependencies we’re talking about was how important it was for communities that are upstream in a watershed from other communities to be mindful of downstream’s needs when meeting their own.
Bioregional Quakerism. I started unpacking what bioregional Quakerism would look like and it’s going to be at least two, maybe three more posts. So I will end this one here.
Bioregional Quakerism—Spiritual Ecology and the Collective Gifts of the Spirit
December 17, 2015 § Leave a comment
Just as individuals have certain spiritual gifts, so do religious communities. The Quaker movement has been endowed with quite a few, and some of them equip us uniquely to practice spiritual ecology, to engage as individuals and as local meetings with our local landscapes and ecosystems as channels of divine revelation.
Direct experience of the divine
The most important of our collective spiritual gifts equipping us for a religious culture of place is the very core of our faith and practice: our experience of direct communion with G*d, our experience of the Light and of the gathered meeting. Quakerism is already shamanistic.
We already know how to seek and find what we call continuing revelation. We already ground our social witness in this experience of G*d’s leading. We already expect that leadings can come to anyone, not just the officially ordained, and that leadings can draw one into a very broad range of ministries, not just preaching and pastoral care. We already understand earthcare as a religious ministry, as a testimony to divine truth revealed inwardly and collectively about our earth-keeping responsibilities.
Many religious communities do not have this gift for direct revelation available to all in the community.
We also have a tested spiritual infrastructure for testing and supporting earthcare leadings—the faith and practice of Quaker ministry . . . in theory. In fact, most Friends only know committees as the way to structure witness activities; they are used to using visioning exercises, brainstorming, and open discussion within a committee to seek for revelation. A shamanistic Quakerism will rely on prayer, meditation, and worship for revelation . . .
. . . and time spent in the land that is our meeting’s landbase. We will want to join the annual Audubon bird count around Christmas. Find, join, support local nature centers, preserves, and so on.
Science
And we will need to study. We will need to learn our earth science and the place we call home. Even if we live in a city, we will want to know where our water comes from, where our waste goes, what natural features have survived development, which ones haven’t, where the fault lines are, where underground rivers and streams are, where they have been buried by development, where the wetlands are and where they have been filled in, where the holy places are, the places that play indispensable roles in the overall ecosystem.
This is our second strength. We tend to be well educated and we have always embraced science as a tool for human betterment.
This should include political science. We will want to start tracking the local ecological commissions, planning and zoning boards, and other local governmental bodies that have jurisdiction over our landbase. A meeting that has a consistent, respectful, and well-informed presence at the local government level can have a really meaningful impact on its decisions.
We tend to think bigger than that. We call this testimony earthcare and we seem to naturally focus on the big issues and the planet as a whole. And that’s important. But our chance for the most significant impact is at the local level, where many of the decisions that directly affect people you can talk to and work with actually happen.
Theology
Finally, liberal Friends at least have a unique religious worldview that opens us to new forms and channels and messages of revelation.
Our theological diversity is mostly a weakness, I think—diluting your tradition with foreign and even contradictory elements confuses people and leaves them wondering who they are as a community. The only real value in having so many members with different religious and even non-religious worldviews is that it makes you open and flexible; it opens you to revelation—as long as you still rely on deepening, prayer, and worship.
Some Friends have been extending the tenet that there is that of God in everyone to saying there is that of God in all creation. Some Friends actually turn to this belief as the foundation of their witness.
As many of my long-time readers will know, I have a lot of problems with this trend of basing our testimonies on “that of God” thinking, and I think the thinking itself is usually so sloppy, shallow, and unconsidered, and so ignorant of our real tradition, that it strains the testimony of integrity.
Nevertheless, this phrase, this thinking about “that of God”, does work for a lot of Friends. The neo-Platonic “divine spark” idea behind the modern liberal Quaker interpretation of Fox’s phrase has a very strong appeal and it applies nicely to earthcare witness, as long as you are willing to uproot it from Quaker tradition, or at least, from its context in the writing and thinking of George Fox. “There is that of God in all creation” sounds great, as far as it goes.
However, let’s be clear: we are led into earthcare witness, not because we believe that there is that of God in all creation, but because that of God in ourselves—the Light—has revealed to us the truth of earthcare as a witness concern and has given us a passion for it. This passion is a religious leading.
We also need to be clear about what we mean when we say that there is that of God in all creation. My own experience is that there is, in fact, that of God in creation. But I don’t mean by that that nature is to be worshipped, only that in nature we can encounter the Divine. As Jesus did at his baptism, as Moses did at the “burning bush”, as Ezekiel did by the River Chebar, as Peter, James, and John did at the transfiguration. As I have many, many times, though less spectacularly than these biblical figures.
So I think we need to really work out what we mean by “that of God in all creation” more than we have. Many Friends just don’t like or trust theology. They are happy just to use a phrase that works for them and leave the religious ideology alone. This is especially true, in my experience, with “witness Friends”.
But without a religious understanding of your language and your work, you will end up—as our witness committees so often do—relying instead on just the language and thinking and tools of science, politics, and the secular social change nonprofit world. But that aspect of earthcare has already been covered by the secular environmental movement. Our strength, our unique contribution, is the moral and religious argument.
Which is why we can’t afford to just jettison the Bible—but still must know our science. That’s why I keep combining the two in this thread. We need a shamanistic science and a scientific shamanism for a bioregional Quakerism.
Next—what is “bioregionalism”? What is a bioregional Quakerism?
Bioregional Quakerism—The Shaman and the Scientist
December 11, 2015 § 2 Comments
On both counts—as a place sacred to the People, and as a place essential to a healthy water culture in the northern Plains—I learned of Paha Sapa, the Black Hills, as a holy place from some Lakota person. I don’t remember if it was Vine Deloria, Jr, Lame Deer, Black Elk, Rolling Thunder, or some other writer.
But I could also have learned it from the physiography textbook in my personal library. We may not have many medicine people who can commune directly with our landbase, but we do have earth science.
Until last year, I lived in the Sourlands of central New Jersey. This ancient igneous intrusion forms a ridge that curves eastward and northward in a long arc from Lambertville, New Jersey, to the Palisades across the Hudson River from the Bronx. It starts as the Sourland Mountains in the southwest, dives below ground and resurfaces as the Watchung Mountains, dives down again and resurfaces as Snake Hill in the Meadowlands, dives a final time and resurfaces as the Palisades. It has some outlier ridges, as well, including one that surfaces in Rocky Hill and Princeton.
Like the Black Hills, the Sourlands are the source of recharge for an aquifer—the Hopewell aquifer below Hopewell valley, which stretches south toward Trenton from the Sourlands. Like the Black Hills, the Sourlands have been invested by the Creator, by the creative process of geophysical evolution, with a sacred earth-keeping role.
I’m betting that the Lenni Lenape, the Delaware Indians, who were the original inhabitants of New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania, treated the Sourlands in a fashion similar to the way the Lakota treat the Black Hills. It’s a mountain range—if you are willing to call hills that are only a few hundred feet tall “mountains”. (The Black Hills aren’t very “mountainous” either.) The Sourlands have great rock outcroppings, like the Black Hills, and some “caves”, hollows between huge rocks tumbled on each other. These would have made decent vision questing sites for the Lenape. It’s too rocky to farm in most places, so they probably only used the region for hunting camps.
But the Lenni Lenape are long gone from New Jersey. They no longer have a living tradition of shamanic relation to this landbase. But you go hiking there, go to Roaring Rocks and the rock formations nearby, and tell me the place is not holy. Or browse through my Geography of New Jersey textbook. Either way, you will find good reason to protect the Sourlands from over-development.
There’s a Quaker meeting in Princeton. Their meetinghouse is a sacred space. I can testify—I was married there. Nearby is this holy place, the Sourlands, a place that needs protecting. I can testify—I have hiked there a lot. That place plays an important earth-keeping role in the region. I can testify—I served on the board of a nonprofit that commissioned an ecological survey of the Sourlands as part of their (successful) efforts to get the five towns and three counties with jurisdiction over the Sourlands to revise their zoning and land-use ordinances.
So here are my queries: What does your meeting know about your landbase? Could you identify the holy place(s) in your region? Are there still indigenous people in your region whose stories and relation to the land might guide you? Do you have hikers in your meeting? Do you know where your drinking water comes from? Does your local library have a geology or physiography textbook you can consult?
If we wanted to explore the possibility of a “shamanistic” earth-keeping Quakerism, a bioregional Quakerism, a religious culture of place in which the place we lived in mattered religiously, we have several things going for us. First, we love education and respect science. Second, we already believe—because we have experienced it ourselves—in direct, unmediated experience of the Divine. And third, among liberal Friends, anyway, we already are probing in this direction, we are open to new sources of revelation, new understandings of what “the Divine” means to us—we are unfettered by the traditional conservative Christian knee-jerk opposition to “nature worship”.
But anyway, I am not proposing “nature worship”. I am proposing using our landscape in our personal and our collective religious practice the way Jesus used his. I am proposing following in the footsteps of that spirit-possessed prophet who, after being called by his Father, was “with the wild animals” in the wilderness (Mark 1:13).
More about these advantages in the next post.
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:
- 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 . . . - 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 . . .
- 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. - 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. - 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.
Through the Flaming Sword 