Jesus, the Presence in the Midst

Several times, I have sensed a presence in meeting for worship, quite distinctly in a particular place in the meeting room. Twice when I opened my eyes, I saw (was it in my mind’s eye only?) an “apparition” in the image of Jesus, a stereotypical image similar to a painting I know. He is always standing behind one of the worshippers. Each time, just as I become fully aware of this presence and the person with whom it is associated, that person rises and speaks.

This always has had an electrifying effect on me, convulsing my body—I was quaking, I suppose—and flooding me with a powerful set of emotions, basically the same as those I have felt in the gathered meeting: a fullness of spirit, a deep gratitude, and a great joy, Wonderful feelings.

These experiences all took place a long time ago, now. But they remain with me as confirmation of the promise that, “wherever two or three are gathered in my name, there am I also”. And ever since, I have imagined Jesus standing next to people when they rise to give vocal ministry in meeting for worship and I try to recover those feelings. It is how I now hold people “in the Light”.

Now we were not actually gathered in Jesus’ name in any of those meetings, and I suppose that the apparition presentation as a stereotypical image of Jesus could easily have been a projection of my unconscious. Fine. But the psychic prescience of knowing exactly who was going to speak and when cannot be explained away as just a projection of my imagination or unconscious desire for religious experience, or whatever.

Moreover, this kind of psychic experience has been, if not common among Friends, then at least not unknown throughout Quaker history. Something is going on.

It is this kind of experience upon which I want to build in this project to develop a “theology” of Liberal Quakerism. These experiences were real, they were transcendental, and they took place within the context of Quaker worship and Quaker tradition. Any attempt to express in new language what we believe, who we are, and how we practice must account for such experiences.

This is what I mean by insistence on “experience” as the starting point for this project. In an early comment, Micah Bales warned about Liberal Quakerism’s virtual deification of personal experience and the ranterism it has led to (I paraphrase). I want to honor personal experience, and yes, of course, my own experience in particular. But it is these truly transcendental, psychic, interpersonal experiences, like the ones I’ve described, and our collective experience in the gathered meeting that interests me most.

Individual transcendental experiences confirm us in our faith. But collective experiences, of both the interpersonal, psychic kind and the more inclusive gathered meeting, not only strengthen our faith as individuals but they also are what make us a gathered people of God. If we can articulate what these experiences mean to us in a way that builds upon our tradition and yet extends it or opens it, that makes it meaningful and attractive to Liberal Friends today, and—most important—true to the Spirit of Love and Truth that inspires them—that is my goal.

In my next post I will describe my experience of Jesus as the Comforter.

Jesus and I

I said in my last post that I would turn next to the gathered meeting as the experience from which my exploration of Liberal Quaker theology begins in earnest. But I realized that I had at least one more important background entry, about my own relationship with Jesus. Because, while I have not had an experience of Jesus that would make me his disciple, I’m not exactly sure why, since the experiences I have had have been quite profound. There have been three kinds. It looks like I have so much to say about this subject that I’m going to have to dedicate a post to each one separately.

Jesus, the Christ of Christian Scripture

The most important of these experiences is my discovery of the Jesus of the gospels—the Synoptic gospels, Mark, Matthew, and Luke. The Jesus of John seems to me, if not a fabrication of John’s, at least such a radical reconstruction of what I consider to be the more historical Jesus of the Synoptics that I’m only interested his gospel as brilliant religious literature. There’s more to it than that, actually, because John reflects the Essene tradition even more than Luke and clearly there’s a mysterious but strong strain of Essene thought and practice in the early Jesus movement. So also with the wisdom thread in John; there’s something going on there. But, again, it feels to me like it has more to do with John, whoever he was, than it does with Jesus.

The Jesus of Paul—and especially, the Christ of Paul—is even more removed from the prophet and charismatic with whom I have fallen in love in my study of the gospels. In Paul, the proclaimer has become the proclaimed, and the kingdom Jesus proclaimed has been almost utterly lost, spiritualized and uprooted from its foundations in Torah. It’s the Synoptic proclaimer of the kingdom of God whom I find so compelling.

This started when I was writing a book on Christian earth stewardship and, after reading a score of books and articles, it became clear that that movement was almost wholly based on Hebrew Scripture, that Jesus had basically nothing to say about earthcare. I felt that, if a theology does not come out of the heart of the gospel of Jesus, Christians are very unlikely to embrace it. If Jesus doesn’t talk about it, why should we? So I determined to start my research over and focus on the gospel of Jesus on its own terms, and if there was nothing there that could inform our earthcare, then I would drop the project.

Then I discovered The Politics of Jesus by John Howard Yoder while taking a course on The Prophetic Tradition under the care of the School of the Spirit. In that book I discovered what I call the economics of redemption in the commonwealth of God, and it launched me on a decades-long study of biblical economics. Once you learn to recognize the economic language in Torah and the unique, pervasive, and innovative ways Jesus uses this language and these principles in his teachings, you realize that the gospel is all about economics. I alluded to this in my earlier post on definitions of “Christian”.

This covenantal economic language is everywhere in the Synoptics—in the stories, in the parables, in the sayings, and in Jesus’ actions, even his healings. In terms of earthcare, while Jesus has almost nothing to say about land use, he is all about land tenure—who gets to decide how the land will be used. This has completely reoriented my approach to ecological issues in general. As I said, I talked a little bit about this in my post on definitions of “Christian”.

Furthermore, this fascination with Jesus and the kingdom he proclaimed goes beyond interest in just his teachings—his role as the anointed (messiah/christ) prophet of “good news for the poor”. I am just as interested in him as a charismatic, as one who manifested divine power as a preacher, presence, and healer.

Yoga has a fully developed “theology” of the siddha, the guru whose very presence is enlightening and who can psychically transform her or his followers and, at times, manifest in other ways. I have been in the presence of siddha yogis. I have seen psychic healing. I have done psychic healing. I know that many of the “miracles” Jesus performed are possible, and that makes the tradition’s claims for his divinity something to take seriously.

My quest to understand Jesus’ charismatic power and the roots of the tradition’s claim of his divinity have been just as important to my approach to this project of Liberal Quaker theology as my love of his teachings. And I think it sets me apart from many Liberal Friends. I take the idea of Jesus’ divinity seriously. Still, it has not made me Christ’s disciple.

Well, there’s lots more to say. I have written a lot about the economics of redemption, much of which is available in my first blog, BibleMonster. That blog has been dormant for a while, since it’s hard enough to keep up with one blog and this one now has my attention. I’ve studied, thought, and written a lot about Jesus the charismatic, as well, but have not published most of it anywhere.

This work, this intense study of the new covenant Jesus inaugurated and the charismatic dimension of the kingdom he proclaimed, has evolved into a deep love of the Jesus whom I have thus come to know. Christian tradition has never honored the discipline of study and the path of the mind to the love of God the way that Judaism has. We have the Jesuits, but especially in the Protestant tradition, while Bible study has long been an aid to personal devotion, it rarely has been a path unto itself, the way it is in Judaism.

I feel especially akin to the Merkabah mystics, Jewish mystics of the early Middle Ages whose path was the study of Ezekiel chapter one, the prophet’s vision of Yahweh’s throne chariot. Paul is sometimes credited with being the first recorded proto-Merkabah mystic. I think he learned this from his teacher Ananias, but that is a series of posts for BibleMonster. Anyway, I think I understand those rabbis.

But Quakerism (at least Liberal Quakerism) is even worse in regard to the path of the mind. Many Friends, in my experience, are hostile and/or contemptuous of “theology”, of the intellect, and of intellectuals. They are clear in their own minds that the community, the “spiritual”, and the “emotional” paths are superior to the path of the mind, at best; often, they deny the mind as a legitimate path at all. “Words are limiting and inadequate . . . “ goes the usual anti-intellectual mantra.

Yes, they are. So is everything else. What I am saying here in this little diversion/diatribe is that there are many kinds of religious temperaments, each has its legitimate place in the life of the spirit, and each person tends to experience one or more of these temperaments as dominant in their own spiritual journey. By temperament, I am a student and a mystic.

(It could be worse. If I were a “somatic”, someone for whom the way of the body is the path to God, Quakerism would be a coffin to the spirit; I would have to become a ballet dancer, or a yogi. It’s almost as bad for musicians. Now we have our John Bloods and our Jon Watts, thank God, but it took a while. Meanwhile, we have had centuries of Bach, Handel, Shaw . . . )

As a student, I have come to know the Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels quite intimately. It feels like a kind of love affair. The more I learn, the more complete my understanding of Jesus becomes, the more I admire him. I have come to love him. I am in awe of the reach of his mind, the depth of his spirit, the mystical and personal power he manifested, the depth of his compassion for those who suffered, his gift as a poet and as a story-teller, whose stories had the power of zen koans. I am in awe of the heroic courage his anointing gave him, and the devotion he gave so utterly to his Father—and to his followers. I have fallen in love.

And yet I have not felt led to join his followers as his disciple. I don’t know why. But there it is.

In the next post I want to describe my experience of Jesus, the Presence in the Midst—my own “mystical” experience of the Christ in meeting for worship.

I said before that this whole discussion of the Christian character of Quakerism begs the question of just what do we mean by the word “Christian”? i said that I felt compelled by the testimony of integrity to answer the question for myself, as part of my quest to put my own experience in the Quaker context in a way that does not do violence to either the tradition or my own experience. And I said that eventually I had come up with five definitions of “Christian” and that none of them seemed to apply to me. Here they are.

Cultural Christian. Some people simply self-identify as Christian without thinking too much about it. They go to church, maybe not very often, but when asked, they would say, yes, I’m a Christian. They take for granted the divinity of Christ and probably have some vague idea of Jesus as savior. Doesn’t work for me. I think too much.

Believing Christian. Some people have thought about their Christian identity. They can say the Nicene Creed or the Apostle’s Creed and testify that they believe the words. For them, being a Christian is a matter of belief, of mental acceptance of a religious ideology and usually some kind of commitment to the moral teachings that go along with it and to worship in whatever Christian tradition they follow. Not me. Those ideas don’t work for me, and anyway, I define myself in terms of my experience, not in terms of my beliefs.

Experience Christian. Some people have personal experience of Jesus Christ. They are born again, or have had some other transforming encounter with Christ and now conduct their religious life as a relationship with him. Beliefs are really secondary, in a sense, though usually the ideology fits hand in glove with the experience. This, I think, describes in a general way many evangelical Christians.

Now I do have inner experience of Jesus of several kinds, so we’ll have to get into that. But none of them match the usual evangelical experience of salvation in Christ. More importantly, though, none of them have led me to realign my spiritual life around Christ as its center and none of them have convinced me to conduct my religious life as a relationship with Jesus.

Jesus’ own definition of discipleship. Here we touch on one of the relationships with Jesus that I actually do have, as an avid student of the gospels who has come to a clear and for me compelling understanding of how Jesus himself defined his messiahship—his role as the Christ—and what he required of those who would follow him. So this is a purely biblical definition, but according to my own unorthodox reading of the gospels.

I believe that the most important passage in Christian scripture is Luke 4:16-30 because in it Jesus declares what his mission as the messiah is in clear terms: to proclaim good news to the poor and the year that Yahweh favors, meaning the Jubilee of Leviticus 25.

Jesus has been anointed by the Holy Spirit to minister to the suffering and oppression of the poor and those who would follow him must live in a community (like that of Acts 2 and 4) that is organized specifically to do this, including the expectation that his followers must make their surplus wealth available to the community for poor relief, as Barnabas did (Luke’s positive case study) in Acts 4:32–37.

I believe that the heart of the real gospel—the gospel of Jesus, not of Paul—is an economic message of redemption (an economic term) for the poor. I have not realigned my life as ministry to the poor, which I believe would be almost impossible without the kind of community you see at work in Acts, anyway, and I don’t belong to a Quaker meeting that has this as its mission either. In fact, I believe that there are almost no Christians at all in the world according to the definition Jesus himself gave us and I know of only a couple of churches that try. So I’m not a Christian according to the one definition that I consider truly authoritative biblically.

The Quaker definition of Christian. Well, maybe I’m a Christian according to the universalist definition that Friends have given to the world, the great gift of our tradition. This definition, I believe, is that a Christian is one who has turned toward the Light. Early Friends, of course, equated the Light with Christ—the Light is the light of Christ. Originally, traditionally, this turning followed a convincement by the Light, in which one’s sins were revealed, and then one repented and turned toward the grace that Christ offered.

So the traditional Quaker definition is really a mutation of the traditional evangelical definition, in that it focuses on sin and salvation. But even from the beginning, it had this universalist twist, that all people possessed the Light and that the turning was what mattered, not the rest of the content that adheres to it in our tradition. Even Native Americans who had no knowledge of the gospel felt the light of the conscience guiding them and could turn toward it in obedience, according to George Fox in his journal. But Fox felt differently about those of us who have heard the word of the gospel: for us, confessing Christ matters.

Now I feel the work of the Light within me, like that Indian in the Journal did, and I try to obey the leadings of the spirit that it gives me. But it has yet to come to me with a name tag saying, “Jesus Christ”. Is the name tag required? Since I do know the gospel of salvation in Christ (though I don’t think it’s the true gospel), must I then confess Jesus as my savior, or—or what? Roast in hell?

See, that’s the thing—I reject the whole sin-salvation paradigm, as I call it. And so do a lot of other Liberal Friends, and with good reason, I believe. But that’s another blog entry. In any event, I could embrace the universalist mutation of the traditional doctrine of the Light that now prevails in Liberal Quakerism, in which the Light is fully decoupled from Christ and is its own spiritual—something. But that does too much violence to the tradition. I don’t feel particularly responsible to the Quaker tradition, but I do feel very responsible for it, and I won’t manhandle it that way. Ergo, I am not a Christian by the traditional Quaker definition, either. But by a more universalist Quaker definition? Maybe.

So we’re back where we started. We’ve reviewed several definitions of Christian and I’m not any of them. And I do believe that Quakerism is a form of Christianity. So where do I fit in? Can I articulate a Liberal Quaker theology that provides an honest home for my experience and yet keeps Jesus Christ in the master bedroom?

I think so. I doubt that it will appeal to my more traditional Christian Friends because it does not revolve around sin and salvation in Christ. I might have to get into why I reject what I call the sin-salvation paradigm at some point. I’ve already written quite a lot on this. But when I go to publish it in this blog, I feel a stop. I just have not found a way to say what I believe without feeling that I’m being insulting, and I love and respect my Christian Friends too much to do that. So I’m going to have to sit with it more.

So, again, I don’t expect to please Friends with a traditional understanding of the gospel. Maybe I won’t please anybody. But I do feel led to try.

So in the next post, I will return to experience as the foundation for this attempt. We’ll start with the experience that all of us have had—the gathered meeting. Well, a lot of us. One of the strongest indicators of our decline as a religion, at least in the Liberal branch with which I’m familiar, is that the gathered meeting has become so uncommon that now many of our members and attenders don’t really know what we’re talking about.

Definitions

I want to begin this exploration of a Liberal Quaker theology with some definitions. As I said in my introduction to this series, I want to start with experience rather than with the legacy ideas of our tradition. I start with experience partly because Liberal Quakers tend to value experience more than ideas, sharing more than theological discourse, feeling more than thinking. The Quaker tradition itself values “what canst thou say” more than what early Friends called “notions” and “shadows”, and it rejects “forms without power”. But most important, I am looking to identify the common experience that keeps us a “people gathered” and to find a way to talk about that experience.

Ultimately, we will have to define “God”, but let’s work up to that by starting with personal spiritual experience.

Spiritual experience. I define “spiritual experience” as experience that is transcendental and yet real. It transcends usual experience, and it transforms you in positive ways. It transcends one’s understanding, one’s ability to describe or explain it. It often transcends one’s senses and one can only make full sense of it intuitively, emotionally, not rationally. It is not completely inarticulate or indescribable or mysterious, but language and normal consciousness only take you so far. In the end, something about spiritual experience remains mysterious; it goes deeper than one’s usual consciousness.

Just as important, spiritual experience is nevertheless real. You know it is real because you are not the same afterwords. You are somehow healed or more whole, more wholly yourself, awake to things you were not aware of before, stronger, deeper, better, less inclined to sin, more alive to opening. Sometimes, only you feel the difference. But often, others can see the difference, also.

Along these lines, spiritual practice is whatever you do to prepare for spiritual experience, to nurture it, and to follow through on it in faithfulness.

Religion. I define “religion” as the spiritual practice of a community—whatever the community does to prepare itself for real transcendent experience, to nurture it, and to follow through on it. For communities can have collective spiritual experience just as individuals do, spiritual experience that the members of the community share, experience that transcends the usual experience and the full understanding of the community, but that is nevertheless real and transformative, after which the community and its members are no longer the same.

The classic example of collective spiritual experience for Friends is the gathered meeting for worship. Historical examples include the Exodus for the emerging Israelites, Pentecost for the emerging Christian movement, and the convincement of the Seekers by George Fox at Firbank Fell for the emerging Quaker movement.

As a religious tradition develops around this kind of transformative initiation of the Spirit, the community eventually agrees upon practices that seem to build upon the experience and reconnect the community with the Spirit that initiated it. This communal spiritual practice I define as religion. True religion is collective practice that still connects the community and its members with its initiating Spirit. Most religion, however, has lost that connection and practices forms without real transcendental power.

Religious experience. Religious experience in this manner of thinking, is spiritual experience that takes place in the context of a religious tradition. Religious experience could arise from the practice of one’s religion; one thinks of John Woolman’s openings, or the mysticism of Thomas Kelly. Or one might come to understand one’s own spiritual experience, even if it has not resulted from your practice of your given or chosen religion, in the terms that your chosen religious tradition has given you.

Arguably, this is what happened to Paul when he was converted on the road to Damascus: he had been practicing a Hellenized version of first-century Judaism; then he has a visitation from the risen Christ and wham! Now a Christian named Ananias has to help him understand what happened to him. A spiritual experience that took place outside of his own religious tradition transformed his life; to integrate that experience and make sense of it, Paul needed someone versed in the new tradition to teach him what it meant and to help him integrate it with his life and his psyche.

This process of integrating previous or foreign spiritual experience with one’s adopted religion is really important for my project of exploring a Liberal Quaker theology. Many of us come to Friends with experiences—often formative ones—that we had before we became Friends. Some of us are still practicing some non-Quaker spiritual discipline while we also attend meeting for worship and share in the Quaker way.

My own formative spiritual experiences came mainly from my intensive use of psychedelic drugs, from my deep immersion in yoga as spiritual practice, from my partial immersion in Native American spiritways, and most importantly, from one truly overwhelming and transformative experience in a sweat lodge. That experience showed me who I am and what I am doing in this world. But it didn’t give me two essential elements for continuing toward fulfillment: a community and a tradition within which to understand, explore, and develop the original opening. Quakerism gave me both.

In my next entry, I want to begin looking at the legacy tradition of Quakerism and start answering some questions related to this aspect of integrating non-Quaker experience in our Quaker faith and practice. Because there’s one big problem with my situation and that of very many post-Christian liberal Friends:

Quakerism is a Christian religion and my experiences are not Christian. So how do I fit in?

This, I believe, is the essential Liberal Quaker dilemma. Many Liberal Friends balk a bit at calling their brand of Quakerism Christian. In my next post, I want to explain why I think Quakerism—even Liberal Quakerism—is Christian and why I think this matters.

Introduction

For years, I have been complaining, in this blog and in my other writing, about the strong trend in Liberal Quakerism toward a post-Christian, post-traditional condition in which we have hollowed out our ancient and venerable heritage by ejecting much of its distinctive and extraordinary content. And not just the specific tenets of our “faith,” but “theology” and “beliefs” in general. Instead, we have defined ourselves in terms of experience and values and by our distinctive practice. Along the way, we also have abandoned not just Christian and biblical language in particular but what is often called “God language” more generally.

That’s the negative side of my complaint. The positive side is negative, as well. For we have not just abandoned; we have also failed to replace all this valuable tradition with anything substantive. We’ve allowed ourselves to be satisfied with just one remnant to stand in for the whole, and we have flipped the meaning of that remnant a hundred and eighty degrees from George Fox’s original intention. The single disfigured fragment upon which we now perch our entire 350 year-old tradition is the idea that there is that of God in everyone.

This is not just a language problem. It is a consciousness problem. We have moved away from a way of speaking, yes, and thus, away from a way of thinking. But more important, we have moved away from a way of being. Ultimately, this is a problem of experience.

Many of us simply have no experience of the things that the language we’ve inherited from our Quaker ancestors denotes and still implies. To speak for myself, at least, I just have not had any transformative experience that corresponds to that of early Friends, which was centered in Jesus Christ and all about sin and its conviction. I do have experience of what I am prepared to call the Light, but faithful traditionalists could challenge that call (rightly, I think) because my experience of the Light does not draw me back to Jesus as my savior.

This sort of disconnect between our experience and the language we use complicates talking about our Quakerism, to say the least. Some of us deal with the complications by blithely using the language of our heritage to say things that our ancestors never intended. Our elevation of the phrase “that of God” to the status of essential tenet of Quaker faith is a case in point. Some of us find it easier to simply avoid talking about our Quakerism and sometimes cover our tracks by lashing out at theologizing itself, making a creed of our non-credalism. Some of us (myself included) grope for a new way to talk that honors our tradition and yet makes room for the wide variety of religious and spiritual experience that Friends in the liberal tradition bring to our meeting life.

We have another related problem: many Liberal Friends are more comfortable thinking of their Quakerism as a spirituality than as a religion. Many Liberal Friends, I suspect, feel that a “religion” has a “God” and they just don’t have a relationship with “God” as God is usually understood—a a supreme being who created the universe, knows and cares about every one of us and about human history in general, and is the “Father” of Jesus Christ, his “Son”. Instead, without a common language that is based in shared religious experience, or at least on the shared text of the Bible, Liberal Friends have fallen back upon their own individual experience; they practice a personal spirituality and they call this arrangement Quakerism.

To accommodate this realignment away from religion and toward spirituality, we have recast the Religious Society of Friends as an open-source environment in which everyone is free to pursue her or his own individual spirituality. From a Religious Society of Friends defined originally in terms given us by the Bible (in which, for instance, we got the meaning of “Friends” from the gospel of John—chapters 14-15), we have become a Society of f/Friends without reference to religion and in which “Friends” carries a social meaning that is devoid of reference to obedience to Christ, as once was the case.

Well, I’ve spent more time than I wanted to outlining the problem, and many of my readers have heard this from me before. For years I’ve been complaining in this way. But for a while now, I have been feeling that it’s time I tried to solve the problem instead of just complain about it. So I’ve been seeking a solution.

I have been seeking a way to talk about Quakerism that honors this impulse to personal spirituality and our diverse experience on the one hand, while on the other hand expressing our shared spirituality and our common experience. I have been groping toward a new theology for Liberal Quakers, one that honors my own personal experience and the vast range of experience of other Liberal Friends and yet is faithful to the roots of our tradition in Christian experience and biblical language. I have been groping for a unified field theory of Quakerism that could speak with integrity to both my Christian Friends and my “universalist” Friends.

I think I am not likely to succeed. But I do feel led. And now, after years of meditating on the problem, my leading seems to be bearing some fruit. I am still groping, still experimenting with ways to express what I’m experiencing, but now I feel impelled to write.

The “methodology” came first: that I should work outward from experience, not downward from ideas, that I should start with my own experience, which is quite varied, but also with the experiences that I have shared with other Friends. Here, I am speaking specifically of the gathered meeting for worship, the one shared religious experience that transcends all labels and boundaries. I have tried to keep the meaning of the “religious words” I’m using concrete rather than abstract, and accessible and universal without being vague or all-inclusive. I have tried to test them against my own experience, and to use them in my writing and in my conversations with people to see whether they work in practice.

It’s a big, long-term project, so I’m going to have to break it up into sections that will fit in a blog. And I’m not even close to done exploring, so this blog approach will be piecemeal and a bit helter skelter rather than cleanly systematic. I fully expect to change my mind, to change course more than once along the way, and to be corrected by my readers. I expect to step through the traces now and again. But I have to start somewhere, so I’m going to see how this goes. In the next entry, I will start with some definitions—for:

• spiritual experience,
• spiritual practice,
• religion, and
• religious experience.