Quakers and Theology
June 10, 2025 § 1 Comment
I’ve been editing a submission to Pendle Hill Pamphlets on the faith behind the gathered meeting. It would be sequel to my earlier pamphlet The Gathered Meeting, which focused more on the experience, the history, and the practice of the gathered meeting, and on what might foster the gathered meeting. This new essay is more about the faith side of the faith and practice duo regarding the gathered meeting.
It’s about what’s going on when we are gathered in the Spirit, and how we talk about what’s going on. It’s a theology of the gathered meeting.
Theology—yikes. Let’s not talk about that. I suspect that many Friends in the “liberal” branch of the movement will react negatively to this topic, perhaps quite viscerally. Haven’t we fought each other enough over theology? But I’m here to make a case for theology, for doctrine, for what we have to say.
Not dogma! Not something you have to believe to save your soul or to be one of “us” on the inside of an exclusionary religious community. I’m talking about what we think and how we think about our Quaker history, practice, and experience. I’m talking about what we have to say, to seekers, to those folks checking us out to see if we’re their spiritual home, what we have say to our kids, to each other—to ourselves.
So I am an unapologetic Quaker theologian. But what do I mean by that? What is a Quaker theologian?
For me, it’s trying to think of the best questions I can ask about my religion’s faith and practice, its history and experience. About my own Quaker religious experience, the spiritual experiences I’ve had in the context of meeting for worship and as I practice the Quaker way understood more broadly. Being a Quaker theologian is trying to ask the best questions about my community, its history and tradition and future prospects. And then I try to answer them, with integrity and creativity, while trying to remain grounded in experience.
Why? Why ask these questions; why pursue such answers?
Because what we think and how we think about these things do affect our religious experience. What we think and how we think about our practice, our history and traditions affect the course of our religious movement. Mindset, worldview, frameworks of thought—these do matter. They’re not the most important thing; no, actual experience remains paramount—“What canst thou say?”
But experience takes place in context, and part of that context is mindset, worldview, frameworks for understanding. They help to shape our experience, and experience helps to shape our understanding. It’s a feedback system: faith and practice, in dynamic relationship with each other over time, evolving and emerging in real time, sometimes, right before our eyes, as the promise of continuing revelation continues to be fulfilled. For revelation has content.
One more pushback against a certain kind of resistance to “theology”. I have been eldered for being in my head, which is a condition presumed to be at the expense of my heart and my spirit. Isn’t that just like a man, that person said, in so many words. And ain’t I a man, to coopt Sojourner Truth.
As if the very many transcendental experiences I’ve had in this blessed life could not have happened to someone who’s too much in his head, like me. As if the life of the mind and the life of the heart and soul could ever be separated. As if a spiritual path, let alone a religious path, with its history and traditions and testimonies and distinctive practices, could not be one holistic, holy whole in someone’s life. And as if gender necessarily defined one’s spiritual and religious potential.
But to be fair, one can get out of balance. I do get out of balance. We all do. But the heart is arguably better than the mind at unbalancing a person. Or perhaps I should say the unconscious mind, which often has the heart in its secret capture.
That’s where Quaker discernment comes in. With her or his mind, someone asks some questions and then offers some possible answers. Continuing revelation is now on the table. Time for the community to test these ideas and see if they stand in truth and beauty and usefulness. Is it from the Light, or not?
That’s the role of the Quaker theologian: to be a servant of continuing revelation, at the prompting of and accountable to, the Holy Spirit in discernment.
Britain Yearly Meeting Minute on Gaza
June 3, 2025 § 2 Comments
At their annual gathering recently, Quakers in Britain became the first British church to state their belief that the Israeli government is committing genocide in Gaza. (Download a pdf of the minute here.) I happen to agree with their discernment and pray that their minute was approved in a truly gathered meeting.
However, I really don’t like the minute itself. Like almost all of the minutes of conscience I’ve seen approved by meetings in the “liberal” branch of Quakerism, most of this minute reads as though it were written by a secular social change nonprofit. (But at least these minutes are being drafted and approved; we almost never hear from the evangelicals.)
Here’s a synopsis: The minute mentions previous action by their Meeting for Sufferings (without explaining to non-Quaker readers what that is). It describes collective horror at the actions of the Israeli government in Gaza. It reviews the problems with a declaration of genocide. It offers two tenets of Quakerism as rationale for their stand. And it makes some appeals to action.
Here are those statements of Quaker faith given as rationale:
Central to Quakerism is the experience that there is that of God in everyone. From this belief – that all people are unique, precious, children of God – all others follow. We therefore abhor racism, including antisemitism, in all its forms.
. . .
It is also a tenet of Quakerism that violence can never be the answer. That the means are just as important as the ends. This is our peace testimony that has led us for more than 350 years to eschew all war and all violence at all times.
That’s 87 “religious” words out of a total of 944, less than ten percent of the minute.
I have problems not with its message, but with how it represents the Religious Society of Friends and our testimonies and with the weakness of its moral argument.
Integrity and misrepresentation
Central to Quakerism
The minute presents “the experience that there is that of God in everyone” as the foundation from which all our other beliefs follow. This simply is not true. it is not central to Quakerism. It might be central to a lot of Quakers in the so-called liberal branch of the movement, but it certainly is not central to the much larger evangelical branches, or to Conservative Friends. We shouldn’t be speaking of “Quakerism” with such a broad brush.
Nor is it central even to “liberal” Quakerism, except as a kind of unreflective doctrinal drift. We’ve been saying this kind of thing for decades now without any meaningful corporate discernment. It’s been slipping into our books of faith and practice and getting approved, much like a sly amendment to a massive legislative bill that most representatives haven’t noticed. Meanwhile, no meeting has actually carefully unpacked and considered the meaning or standing of this phrase “that of God in everyone” on its own. We think George Fox said it so now we can say it, too; meanwhile, George Fox never actually did say it.
Moreover, there are still quite a few of us “liberal” Friends who do know that Fox never said it that way and wouldn’t have ever said it, and we would never say that it’s the foundation of our religious faith and experience as stated. We might be in the minority in a lot of meetings, but if a meaningful discernment process actually took place in our yearly meeting’s revision of their faith and practice, we would stand in the way. Well, I would, anyway.
That of God in everyone
And anyway, what does “that of God in everyone” mean? The minute does not explain. What do we mean by “that of”? What or who do we mean by “God”? And what does “that of God” mean? And how do we experience it, or say we do, in “everyone”? We can say we believe it’s in everyone, but can we experience it in everyone? I can’t.
I suppose this statement tries to express what I agree is perhaps the central experience of Friends, that we humans can commune directly with God (however we experience the Divine), personally, inwardly, immediately. But why and how would this experience lead us to “abhor racism”? Because, in that experience, God’s anointing Spirit, the spirit of the christ, awakens and guides us to love and compassion, to truth and service. That’s the real message here: we are led into love and compassion by the Spirit, whatever each of us might mean by that, not by the “experience” of some abstract notion about our nature as humans.
What’s missing
This is what’s missing in this minute—religious and moral appeal, especially to love and compassion. I suppose it’s worth something to be the first church in Britain to call Israeli action in Gaza genocide; it will get attention. But I’m not sure it’s the most powerful thing we can say. The unique and powerful thing we as Quakers have to offer is our religious and moral message and appeal and our guidance from the Spirit. The secular activists are not going to talk like that, or appeal to the people for whom religious and moral appeal might be appealing.
That means speaking from our religious tradition. Specifically, we should use the prophetic voice of Hebrew and Christian scripture, because it’s a powerful voice and a powerful message, and it might appeal to the hearts and souls of people who are inured to political polemic, especially those who at least claim to be people of faith. And I would use queries, not declarations.
For instance: With their horrific actions and policies, are you the Israeli government and your military loving God with all your hearts and souls and strength, as God demanded in Deuteronomy? Are you loving your neighbors as yourselves, as God demanded in Leviticus?
Or: You want to be a “Christian nation”, you American Christian conservatives in government and other institutions of power who support and supply these atrocities? What about Jesus’ commandment of love? Is American military support loving one another even as we have been loved? Is helping to slaughter and starve children, who are “the least of these”, not re-crucifying Christ all over again? Is killing them inviting these “little children” to come unto him?
Well, now I’ve slipped into an American focus. This minute comes from Britain Yearly Meeting. I’m not sure whether Britain has a comparable Christian nationalist element, like we do here. But Britain does still have a national church. If I were a British Friend, I would be in challenging dialogue with the Church of England about this situation—unless they are already in unity with a Prince of Peace message. Then I would join with our religious fellow travelers.
I would be moral and religious, prophetic and traditional, in both voice and message.
Theism, Nontheism, and Quaker Identity
November 1, 2024 § 3 Comments
This is a long post—lots of ground to cover. So here’s a brief outline:
Introduction
I subscribe to an email newsletter of Academia, a site that aggregates academic articles, and I’ve set a filter for Quaker articles. I get stuff I want to read regularly—can’t keep up with it.
Today, I got “Quakers and Non/Theism: Questions and Prospects,” by Jeffrey Dudiak, an article that appeared in Quaker Religious Thought, volume 118, from 2012. The issue features essays on theism, nontheism, and Quaker identity by Howard Macy as editor, Paul Anderson, Jeffrey Dudiak, David Boulton, Shannon Craigo-Snell, and Patrick J. Nugent. The latter two articles are responses primarily to Dudiak and Boulton, the theist and nontheist apologists.
I wanted to share this resource on what I believe is a very important subject, whose salience has not diminished since 2012, though maybe the heat’s been turned down a bit since then. But I also want to offer my own position on these questions. I don’t imagine that my convictions settle anything, but I hope that they do speak to some Friends.
Not in the traditional sense, as in believing in a supreme being who is omnipotent, omniscient, completely good; “personal” in the sense of keen to engage in relationship with me; “historical,” not just in the sense of paying attention to human history, both writ large and personal, but also having a plan for the fulfillment and redemption of humanity writ large and for individual humans, too, like me—a supreme deity who knows me, cares about me, and whom I could know in return.
I do not know such a deity—I have no experience to base such a belief on. Intellectually, such an idea even offends me a bit: where was some history-caring and engaged deity during the Holocaust, for instance? Furthermore, experience of a supreme being by a being as finite as myself would, it seems, shatter my consciousness. And even if I did experience [him] without exploding, what good would it do me? My yoga teachers taught a similar Vedanta endgame of pure consciousness as the goal of my practice, and it just seemed irrelevant to my lived life.
On the other hand, I have experienced—what shall I call them? Angels? Spirits? Devas? I am some kind of polytheist, having had direct transcendental experience of spiritual beings, and I subsequently have enjoyed relationships with them as central to my spiritual life. So I call myself a para-theist. My experience is that there are deities out there, just with a small “d”.
And I take at face value the testimony of my Christian f/Friends, and the testimony of the first Friends, and of thousands of Friends since the 17th century—the testimony of their encounter and relationship with Jesus Christ. Therefore, I believe in Jesus Christ, even though I have not (yet) been called by him into his discipleship.
I am not willing to disrespect the experiences of those Friends who have been blessed by his presence in their lives by telling them that their experience is just a projection of their unconscious, or not real in some other way, or whatever, just because I don’t share their experience; and also because I wouldn’t want anybody to disrespect my own such experiences. Don’t mess with with my experience and I won’t mess with yours; though I do invite inquiry, and even respectful challenge.
Quakerism is a Christian religion
For this reason, and for several other reasons, I consider Quakerism a Christian religion, and I feel that I am a guest in the house that Christ built. I am grateful that my meetings have accepted me without my Christian confession (though they never even considered such a matter, being to that degree non-Christian or post-Christian). And I think other non-Christians should share my gratitude and act accordingly. By act accordingly, I mean, not just tolerate, but invite and celebrate Christian and Biblical vocal ministry, and actively contribute to a Quaker culture in which Christian Friends feel invited to talk from their own experience and religious sensibilities without fear or censure. Or even to pray, as I do, that Christ will join us, gather us, in our worship.
In other words, a theism built on relationship with Christ seems not just reasonable to me; it parallels my own experience. Hence my para-theism.
It is natural for us to venture out of our experience into theology. I can’t keep from doing this, myself. Well, actually, I love doing it, I do it all the time, in my head and in my writing. And, while a lot of the legacy theology of the Christian tradition does not work for me, it obviously works for a lot of Friends, at least up to a point. From the beginning, starting with Fox himself, some Quakers have always been a bit heterodox.
So we are theists
So, for me, the bottom line is that Quakers are theists in our core identity, because we are Christian; that is, we were gathered as a people of God by Christ, most of us have been invited into personal f/Friendship with Christ, and that’s that. We are a Christian faith historically. We are a Christian faith demographically still today. And the lack of such experience by a small minority of the movement does not change the identity of the movement as a whole.
That we non-Christians, and nontheists, and para-theists in the minority have been given a bed in the spare room of the house that Christ built is a blessing to be grateful for. Trying to kick Christ out of the master bedroom onto the living room couch is deeply disrespectful of our tradition, and of him.
About “God”
One more thing, though. I just used the word God. So what do I mean by “God”, capital “G”? In my public discourse, I use the word God as a placeholder for the Mystery Reality behind my listener’s or my reader’s own spiritual and religious experience is. Your experience is real; I honor that with belief and respect.
I do have my own personal understanding of God, but it’s mine and I will not press it upon you as some greater truth. But I will share it as mine.
For me, God is the spiritual dimension of evolution. In this, I am something of a student of Teilhard de Chardin and of Thomas Berry. The universe is unfolding. There is a wisdom, an intelligence, and an apparent direction to this unfolding—a Logos, as the writer of the prologue to the gospel of John put it, and as the ancient Stoics understood it, and Philo of Alexandria and the writer of the apocryphal Book of Wisdom. There is a Mystery Reality behind creation, within creation, a spiritual dynamic in evolution that we can sometimes sense somehow, in some small but intimate way—when I’m free-climbing the cliffs of the Shawangunks, for instance, or hearing a V of geese pass overhead above the fog.
That communion is the deepest of all communions for me, with the possible exception of a gathered Quaker meeting for worship. So God is real for me in this way, yes.
American Transcendentalism – Forms and Doctrines
October 31, 2024 § Leave a comment
This is Theodore Parker, taken from an essay titled “A Discourse of the Transient and Permanent in Christianity,” dated 1841. Parker was another Unitarian minister, a second-generation Transcendentalist. Like Emerson, he’s pushing back on mainstream Unitarianism and got pushback in return. But in the mid-1840s, in spite of this establishment resistance, he moved to Boston and built one of the largest congregations in New England.
It must be confessed, though with sorrow, that transient things form a great part of what is commonly taught as Religion. And undue place has often been assigned to forms and doctrines, while too little stress has been laid on the divine life of the soul, love to God, and love to man. Religious forms may be useful, and beautiful. They are so, whenever they speak to the soul, and answer a want thereof. In our present state some forms are perhaps necessary. But they are only the accident of Christianity; not its substance. They are the robe, no th angel, who may take another robe, quite as becoming and useful. One sect has many forms; another none. Yet both may be equally Christian, in spite of the redundance or the deficiency. They are a part of the language in which religion speaks, and exist, with few exceptions, wherever man is found. In our calculating nation, in our rationalizing sect, we have retained but two of the rites so numerous in the early Christian church, and even these we have attenuated to the last degree, leaving them little more than a spectre of the ancient form. Another age may continue or forsake both; may revive old forms, or invent new ones to suit the altered circumstances of the times, and yet be Christians quite as good as we, or our fathers of the dark ages. Whether the Apostles designed these rites to be perpetual, seems a question which belongs to scholars and antiquarians, not to us, as Christian men and women. So long as they satisfy or help the pious heart, so long they are good. Looking behind, or around us, we see that the forms and rites of the Christians are quite as fluctuating as those of the heathens; from whom some of them have been, not unwisely, adopted by the earlier church.
Again, the doctrines that have been connected with Christianity, and taught in its name, are quite as changeable as the form. This also takes place unavoidably. . . . Now there can be but one Religion which is absolutely true, existing in the facts of human nature, and the ideas of Infinite God. . . . Now it has often happened that men took their theology thus at second hand, distorted the history of he world and man’s nature besides, to make Religion conform to their notions. Their theology stood between them and God. Those obstinate philosophers have disciples in no small number.
As Emerson does, Parker speaks of Nature in parallel terms, seeing correspondences between natural law and divine law, and, to a degree, science and religion. In the middle of this excerpt, where I have inserted ellipses, he discusses how different observers and philosophers will come to different theories about Nature, just as the divines do about Religion; yet:
“the true system of Nature which exists in the outward facts, whether discovered or not, is always the same thing, though the philosophy of Nature, which men invent, change every month, and be one thing as London and the opposite at Berlin. Thus there is but one system of Nature as it exists in fact, though many theories of Nature, which exist in our imperfect notions of that system, and bu which we may approximate and at length reach it.”
These Transcendentalists are never very far from their consideration of Nature, no matter how deep they get into the theological weeds.
American Transcendentalism and Quakerism—Likeness to God
October 17, 2024 § 4 Comments
I have been reading The American Transcendentalists: Essential Writings, edited by Lawrence Buell. It’s a collection of essays by the main figures in the American Transcendentalist movement, of whom the most famous are Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.
I keep coming across passages that so align with our Quaker thinking that I want to pass some of them along. I’m going to do them one by one in subsequent posts.
“Humanity’s Likeness to God,” by William Ellery Channing (Buell, p. 12)
“It is only in proportion to this likeness that we can enjoy either God, or the universe. That God can be known and enjoyed only through sympathy or kindred attributes, is a doctrine which even Gentile philosophy discerned. That the pure of heart can alone see and commune with the pure Divinity, was the sublime instruction of ancient sages [thinking of Plotinus, here, and the neo-Platonists, I suspect] as well as of inspired prophets. It is indeed the lesson of daily experience. To understand a great and good being, we must have the seeds of the same excellence. How quickly, by what an instinct, do accordant minds recognize one another! No attraction is so powerful as that which subsists between the truly wise, and good; whilst the brightest excellence is lost on those who have nothing congenial in their own breasts. God becomes a real being to us, in proportion as his own nature is unfolded within us. To a man who is growing in the likeness of God, faith begins even here to change into vision. He carries within himself a proof of a Deity, which can only be understood by experience. He more than believes, he feels the divine presence; and gradually rises to an intercourse with his Maker, to which it is not irreverent to apply the name of friendship and intimacy. The apostle John intended to express this truth, when he tells us that he, in whom a principle of divine charity or benevolence has become a habit and life, “dwells in God and God in him.”
“It is plain, too, that likeness to god is the true and only preparation for the enjoyment of the universe. . . . I think, however, that every reflecting man will feel, that the likeness to God must be a principle of sympathy or accordance with his creation; for the creation is a birth and shining forth of the Divine Mind, a work through which his spirit breathes. In proportion as we receive this spirit, we possess within ourselves the explanation of what we see. We discern more and more of God in everything, from the frail flower to the everlasting stars.”
Some thoughts
The first paragraph reminds me of Rufus Jones, who was influenced I believe by neo-Platonism himself, and talked of “that of God’ in similar terms. In his books on mysticism, Jones makes a similar case, that mystical experience is made possible by some aspect of the Divine that dwells in the human. It is through the affinity of this divine principle in the human with its divine source that enables and indeed conducts the mystic into the Divine Presence.
This second paragraph reminds me of Fox’s recounting of one of his first visions: “Now I was come up in spirit through the flaming sword into the paradise of God. All things were new, and all the creation gave another smell unto me than before, beyond what words can utter. . . . The creation was opened to me, and it was showed me how all things had their names given them according to their nature and virtue. . . . in which the admirable works of the creation, and the virtues thereof, may be known, through the openings of that divine Word of wisdom and power by which they were made.”
Teufelvolksbefolgengeist, Part 1
June 4, 2024 § 1 Comment
Spirit-possession in America
America has become like the town of Gerasa in the gospel of Mark (5:1–20 and parallels in Matthew 8 and Luke 8): we have a man with an evil spirit who roams the dead places in our society crying out blasphemies and repeatedly escaping from those who would bind him.
Now it would be easy to conclude that I’m talking about Donald Trump, and yes, he fits the description. But, like the Gerasene demoniac, this spirit possesses not just one person; it is legion. Mark tells us the demoniac kept cutting himself with stones. Stoning was the prescribed punishment for blasphemy, among other crimes. This story is a metaphor for a society insanely attacking itself.
In the story, Jesus does not address himself to the man, but rather to the spirit. He asks: “What is your name?” “Legion,” answers the spirit, referring obviously, to the Roman military occupation/possession of Gerasa, of Palestine, of the known world, an unclean presence of violence and oppression in society. This explains why Gerasene society is attacking itself: some folks are okay with the occupation; some want to fight against it. Insurrections were so persistent and frequent in this region of the Near East that Rome posted a legion there to put them down.
When Jesus drives the unclean spirit Legion into the sea (an obvious reference to Roman expulsion), it/they enter a herd of pigs. “Legion” is a collective spiritual entity who, when seen through prophetic eyes, manifests through individuals.
The quasi-fascist takeover of the Republican party and other once-conservative institutions in America is our modern-day Legion. And like the story in the gospels, our Legion is a spiritual problem. The fear that animates the movement, the hate that darkens it, the crudeness, cravenness, and cruelty that characterizes the movement, all are spiritual conditions that reflect a corruption of character in the individuals who comprise it.
But like Legion, the movement is not just personal and individual in its characters, but also social, inter-personal, and trans-personal in its collective character. The individuals are in personal moral and spiritual crisis, especially in the the root meaning of that word in Greek—krisis means judgment in Greek. But the body politic is sick, also, and not just the body politic, but also the body civic, and even the body of Christ.
There is in the collective, in our contemporary white Christian nationalist movement, a momentum. Momentum is defined in physics as mass times velocity; velocity is defined as speed with direction. A movement in its spiritual dimension has mass, it has its people and their words and actions. It also has speed, it is on the move. And it has direction, it is moving toward something; the people that are its mass are trying to achieve something with their words and their actions.
This momentum is spiritual in character. It is greater than the sum of its parts. It is trans-personal. That is, it is transcendental, it transcends the wills of its constituent members; it has a mob psychology. It can induce people to do things they would not otherwise do, as it did in Nazi Germany.
Its power is fear. It’s lever is loss and resentment. Its weight is the promise of release from fear and the hope of recovering what has been lost.
But what to do? In my next post, I name this spirit and offer some ways to cast it out from us.
What is the Religious Society of Friends for? — Spirituality vs Religion
December 13, 2013 § 9 Comments
Religion as Corporate Spirituality
My one-line answer to the question, What is Quakerism for? is: bringing people to G*d and bringing G*d into the world. “Bringing people to G*d” has two parts: personal spirituality and communal spirituality.
The last post’s discussion of worship provides a segue from personal spirituality to communal spirituality—that is, to religion.
Several years ago I was a Friendly Adult Presence in a youth conference sponsored by Philadelphia Yearly Meeting and in one of the exercises, the young people were asked to sort themselves out by whether they had a spiritual life or not and whether they practiced a religion. The vast majority said yes to spirituality and no to religion. This made me feel bad.
I suspect that quite a few adult Friends have similar feelings. They are much more comfortable talking about spirituality and not so comfortable talking about their “religion”. For many Friends, I suspect, “religion” conjures traditional belief in a “God”, a supreme being, maybe even the trinity of Christianity, whom the community worships, and aspects of this traditional definition of religion just don’t work for them. Many, like me, I suspect, have no direct experience of such a God. Many may have had negative experiences of traditional worship of such a God. And thus many may be uncomfortable with “worship” when defined as adoration, praise, and supplication of such a God.
And then there’s Jesus and the intensely Christ-centered legacy of our own Quaker tradition. For many Friends, “religion” is relationship with him, placing him at the center of our individual lives and at the center of our life as a community. And again, for many Friends, this just is not their experience.
I’ve written about my own struggles with this question quite a lot—how confounding I usually find it to belong to what I believe is a Christian religious community and not be a Christian myself. As is happening right this second, every time I get to a certain depth in exploring Quakerism, in this blog and in my other writing, I find myself trying to identify who Jesus Christ is for me, and what Quakerism means without experience of him. And I mean experience of him, not belief in him; I have the belief, but not the experience. It is one of the central questions of my religious life. I believe it is perhaps the central question for modern Liberal Quakerism in general. I’m still working on it.
In the meantime, I keep beavering away at other questions while skirting this elephant in the room. Why? Because I feel led to, is the basic answer. But also in the hope that circling this central question will eventually lead to some answers. And finally, because I know I am not alone. I feel that I am exploring the issues I write about alongside many other nonChristian Friends, and I hope to be useful to others in their search.
So I do have a nonChristian definition of “religion” and “worship”. And I have a concern to bridge the gap between “spirituality” and “religion”, which I see as a misperception. I do not want a religion that is little more than a society for practicing individual spiritualities together. I have done that and it is not enough for me. The reason it’s not enough is that I have had collective spiritual experience, experience shared with others of something deep and profound. I have had religious experience. So my definition of religion starts with a definition of spirituality.
By “spirituality” I mean the faith and the practices through which we as individuals seek to open ourselves to the Light within us—to the presence, motion, guidance, teaching, healing, strengthening, inspiration, and redemption of the ChristSpirit acting in us—and the ways in which we try to follow its guidance in our lives.
“Religion” I define as the faith and the practices through which the community seeks to commune with the Mystery Reality that lies behind and beyond the Light within each of us as individuals, that lies between us or among us as a community, and that becomes real for us in the mystery of the gathered meeting for worship.
For the Light, the kingdom of heaven, is not only within us; it is also among us, as Jesus put it. It is the presence in the midst. It is the motion of love between us. It is the guidance, teaching, healing, strengthening, inspiration, and reconciliation of the Spirit acting through us as individuals and among us at the center of our worship and our fellowship. The presence within us and the presence in our midst—these are the same. This is our faith, born of our experience in the gathered meeting for worship.
Thus I define “religion” as the spiritual life, the faith and spiritual practices, of a community, the things a religious community does to renew its communion with the Divine.
This begs the question (again) of just what we mean by “the Divine”, which is one of Liberal Quakerism’s placeholders for whatever it is we are experiencing, when we don’t think it’s the traditional triune Christian God. I have dealt with this problem by using “G*d”, letting the asterisk stand in for whatever your experience is. Speaking this way, however—speaking around a more explicit naming of God—just throws us back into individualism, casting ourselves again as a society of individuals practicing our own spiritualities, rather than defining ourselves as an integral community with a clear focus for our worship.
The only thing that belies this individualist reality, the only hope in all this mess, it seems to me, is to be found in the gathered meeting. As I have written earlier, the gathered meeting seems not to care about name tags. I have felt a meeting become gathered in spite of its theological confusion and diversity. I once felt a meeting gathered because of its diversity, reaching exquisitely joyous unity as the result of deep wrestling with the plurality of our experience.
Anyway, I hope that thinking of religion as the shared spiritual practice of a community encourages some Friends to warm up to the idea of Quakerism as a religion. And I, at least, find great encouragement in the fact that this practice now and again delivers genuine fulfillment—both spiritual fulfillment; that is, individual fulfillment, joy, healing, and inspiration; and religious fulfillment, a corporate experience of the presence in our midst, of love and the healing of conflict, of inspiration and prompting to corporate witness, and of unity and joy in the knowing of each other in that place where words come from.
If only it happened more often.
Through the Flaming Sword 