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.
Holding in the Light – Meetings for Healing
January 9, 2025 § 1 Comment
Usually, when we’re asked to hold someone in the light, it’s in the midst of some other situation, very often just after meeting for worship, and we devote no real time or attention to the practice. This is why I feel it’s mostly an outward form whose only value is the shared sympathy it evokes in the gathering. This is no small thing, but it’s not a serious attempt at healing or even comforting the person held. For real attempts at healing, we need a dedicated meeting for healing.
I know that Friends with deeper commitment to the gift of healing than mine, and with broader and more current study and experience, hold meetings for healing among Friends. I’ve never attended one, so I don’t know what these other models are. But I’m sure that other approaches could be at least as effective as the one I describe below. But this is what I know can work—not often, to be honest, but sometimes.
I mentioned my training in Silva Mind Control in previous posts in this series. As a teacher, I used to lead programs for graduates of the course in which healing circles figured regularly and prominently. That practice might offer a model for our own meetings for healing.
The Mind Control practice was an energy circle. We sat in a tight circle holding hands. If we were working on someone in the group, they sat in the middle. The leader would guide a meditation in which we used the deepening technique Mind Control taught and then visualized energy—light—moving from us out of our right hands into the person next to us, and on around the circle, and back into us through our left hand from the person on our left. It was like a spiritual cyclotron, which is a physics particle accelerator that uses two “D”-shaped magnets to spin electrons around in a circle.
At some point, the leader would ask us to all visualize the energy curving up to an apex above the center of the circle and then either funneling down on the person in the middle or out to whomever we were working on at a distance. If the latter, then we called up whatever visual images of the recipient we have, either in memory or in imagination.
It was that simple, all of it easily adapted to Quaker faith and practice. First, deepening, however you do that. Then calling up the Light within. Then cycling the energy—the Light—in the circle until a “clerk” senses that the circle and the energy/light are ready. Then focusing the “beam” on the recipient and holding it there until the “clerk” feels the work is done.
Whatever the “therapeutic” results for the recipient, the practice builds strong bonds between the participants. The energy is often palpable, beautiful, even thrilling, with compassion and desire for healing rising within in wonderful waves. This emotional energy is perhaps where the healing actually draws its power, rather than the exercise of imagination.
Holding in the Light – Healing Energy
January 7, 2025 § 1 Comment
In my last post, I questioned whether holding someone in the light does more than jusst make the people who do it feel better. But I do think it could do more; I think it could sometimes actually project healing energy to the recipient. I have seen this work. But it needs more shaping than we give it when we simply ask the meeting to hold someone in the light. In my experience, it needs two things: a shared method and focus.
I get these recommendations from my experience as a teacher of Silva Mind Control in the 1970s. Mind Control is a sinister-sounding name for a rather benign and potentially beneficial self-help program that teaches some deepening exercises and a number of techniques for improving everyday life. But to our point, the course also provides extensive training in spiritual healing. I should rather say Mind Control “taught” me these things, since that was fifty years ago and I’m not sure what the program is like these days.
The course offered a coherent mindset and a set of psycho-spiritual tools for healing that I have seen perform near miracles. Rarely, but really. I believe in its basic approach, which I’ve adapted in the recommendations below.
Shared method
Unless you have someone among you truly possesses the gift of spiritual healing, healing at a distance seems to need everybody doing the same thing, and that thing needs effective discipline behind it. The discipline involves two things: deepening, and a mindform. And they both benefit from practice.
Deepening
I believe it is nearly impossible for most of us to heal someone effectively at a distance without working from an altered state of consciousness. Thus one would be tempted to ask for holding someone in the light during meeting for worship, since then we are all already in the depths, and when a group enters a deeper consciousness together, then things can really happen. But that’s not our way of worship. However, usually we have just finished worshipping when this request comes up, so a little time to sink back down into some meaningful silence would help.
Mindforms
Mindforms are mental images given a formal shape and powered by emotional energy. Here’s an adaptation of how Mind Control does this:
You imagine yourself in a place that empowers you for healing, an environment that both energizes you and has in it the “tools” you use to heal. In this case, we’re talking about light, so presumably you need some light source. You also imagine some way to send that light out toward the recipient. And you can also imagine some spiritual ally or allies, helpers in the work. Or not.
The idea is to dedicate a meditation to discovering what this environment is, what your “tools” are, and what “allies” you might have. You just sit and wait until images come to the fore in your mind that are vivid enough to feel like they have some sustaining value. A little like your discernment of vocal ministry.
Then you enter this environment, take up your tools, greet any allies, and get to work. You could enter this spiritual space while the person who closed meeting for worship is asking for any joys and concerns, or however your meeting does this.
So this exercise could be a dance floor on which you dance with Christ, whose hands are full of light. It might be the Pool of Bethsaida in the fifth chapter of the gospel of John, a pool of light into which you “baptize” the recipient. It could be a garden with a gardener and fruit that is full of light. It could be a laboratory with a laser and animated charts of the human anatomy. It will be whatever has been revealed to you.
My ally—don’t laugh, he’s done some amazing things—is Santa Claus; not the roly-poly commercial figure, but a robust man in his late forties modeled on the character in L. Frank Baum’s book The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus (yes, the L. Frank Baum of Wizard of Oz fame). Santa gives me a wrapped gift and inside is whatever I need to do the healing.
As you repeatedly return to the environment that has been revealed to you, it gets more comfortable, you sink more quickly, it reveals to you more options. It becomes a place of energy and joy.
Focus
This work needs more than the bare information we usually get in meeting. A full name and a specific location—city and state—are the bare minimum required, according to Mind Control. More information is better, like the recipient’s relationship to the petitioner and some distinctive personal traits, maybe whatever ails them.
And the petitioner can serve as a channel. She or he is often our only real connection to the recipient. I imagine pouring energy through the petitioner to the recipient, or storing it inside the petitioner like a battery waiting to discharge on their next contact.
And if you know the recipient yourself, then you can really focus. You picture them in their environment or in a place that you often share, trying to bring their person, their face, their clothing, the way they move and talk, all the details you can, into bright focus. Then, zap! Do whatever has been revealed to you.
Holding in the Light—Ritual magic and an empty form?
January 6, 2025 § 2 Comments
In the largely post-Christian liberal Quaker milieu that is my religious home, the most common form of “prayer” is “holding someone in the light.” In this practice, we are not asking God or Christ or some other spirit to do something. We are projecting a grace-conferring energy.
Does it confer any blessing on the recipient—does it work? And does it even confer any blessing on those who do the holding?
Until recently, I have felt that this practice is a form without any real power, because it is rote. It is a ritualistic formula that almost always lacks enough focus to carry even the meager energy that ritual magic pretends to. For we are using it like ritual magic.
Honest ritual magic, like the Catholic mass, needs lots of elements to be effective. It should engage all the senses: incense, the taste of the host, the genuflections, the singing and ritual language in communication, the light of stained glass windows and the shape of magical symbols. And it needs a focus, a place to put the attention. And it needs an ideology, a theology that gives meaning, shapes the focus, and holds all the elements together in ritually semantic coherence.
And even then, ritual magic almost never delivers. How can we expect any more from just asking the meeting to hold someone in the light?
Well, at the very least, it brings the meeting into some form of communion. It binds the meeting to the petitioner and it binds us all together, if only for the moment, and if only rather weakly.
A while ago, some vocal ministry about this came to me in worship, and I posted it in this blog. I have since converted that message into a poem:
There is within us each a Light,
a Light that comforts us and heals.
It can drive away the shadows and
illuminate our way.
When we hold someone in that Light,
we act from the Light within us
and we give answer to their cries:
we stand beside them
in solidarity with their suffering;
we say, “You are not alone.
The Holy Spirit is here with you,
and so in Spirit are we.
With our spirits we offer hope and faith;
with tender hearts we offer love;
with our words we render audible
prayers that fly to their home.”
Quaker Justifications for “Plain Speech”
January 6, 2025 § 1 Comment
I’ve just finished reading “Aspects of 17th Century Quaker Rhetoric,” by Richard Bauman, published in The Quarterly Journal of Speech*, and learned some great stuff about early Quaker rhetoric. By “rhetoric,” Bauman means “the art of persuasion,” in in Quaker terms, the art of convincement.
Bauman lays out four explanations and justifications early Friends gave for rejecting “the use of “you” in the second person singular, insisting instead upon ‘thou’ and ‘thee.’” I was only aware of two. Here’s his list in brief:
- “You” ungrammatical. The use of “you” was ungrammatical, and thus not true. “You” was properly used for the second person plural.
- “You” unbiblical. In the Bible, “the equivalents of ‘thou’ and ‘thee’ were employed by Christ and by the primitive Christians as well as in parts of the Old Testament.” The generalization of “you” was a later corruption.
- Spiritual egalitarianism. They rejected the honorific “you” “in order to bring their behavior into line with their principle that the spirit of God was accessible within every [person] and that the unity of this shared bond was of primary importance in interpersonal relations.”
- Social rank and etiquette. “The use of ‘you’ to a single individual communicated deference, honor, courtesy, while ‘thou’ imparted intimacy or condescension when used to a close equal or subordinate, but contempt when addressed to a more distant equal or a superior—either that or boorishness. . . . By refusing to conform their usage to these conventions the Quakers violated very strongly established social norms.”
Bauman goes on to point out that this “active aggressive” approach “was not meant to be merely provocative or exemplary, but to bring people to spiritual self-knowledge—‘to see where they were’—and thus from the world’s honor to a higher state.” Plain speech was a rhetorical tool for convincement. With the practice of plain speech, they sought to “arouse the Spirit of God in those who witnessed it, provided they were ready to receive the Light . . . “ “Any behavior whatsoever that was actuated by the spirit of Truth could lead other [men] to that Truth by evoking the spirit of God within them.”
“. . . the rhetoric of the early Quakers was not simply a rhetoric of words, but a unified rhetoric of symbolic action for which Fox’s words might stand as the keynote: ‘Let your lives speak.’”
* Sorry I failed to capture the date and issue of this journal when I downloaded it.
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 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.”
Deepening Techniques, Part 1—Introduction
July 30, 2024 § 1 Comment
Download the series
I have created a page aggregates the posts in which I describe various techniques for centering down or deepening, shared from my own practice and experience. Here’s the link:
Deepening Techniques for Friends
When the series is finished, I will publish a pdf file for downloading on that page with all of the posts in one document.
Deepening techniques and spiritual formation
I think that spiritual formation is one of the more important roles that a Quaker meeting should play in the spiritual lives of those members and attenders who want it. By spiritual formation I mean, as Sandra Cronk put it in her School of the Spirit pamphlet Spiritual Nurture Ministry Among Friends, helping people
“grow in relationship with God and become more receptive to the work of the Inward Guide.” In practical terms, I see spiritual formation as efforts to help members to clarify their faith, to identify and mature their spiritual practice, and to integrate both their faith and practice into the Quaker way.
Our meetings don’t do a good enough job of spiritual formation. We don’t usually mentor newcomers. We don’t usually provide programs that expose our members to the various spiritual disciplines that might serve their formation, let alone teach these disciplines. We leave this process of self-discovery and maturation to osmosis, to chance, and to personal initiative.
And when we do focus on spiritual formation, we very rarely pass on techniques for deepening consciousness. The Christian tradition is in general very weak in its understanding of consciousness and the role it could play in spiritual development; Quakerism is only marginally better.
So I want to try to fill this deepening technique gap a little bit. I have a lot of experience with meditation in several disciplines, and I have a settled devotional practice that really works well for me. I want to share it here in a series of posts.
Much of what I will be passing on comes from yoga, which offers a several-thousand-year-old science of consciousness. Most of the rest comes from my time as a teacher of Silva Mind Control, which has a sinister sounding name but is a quite effective self-help and psychic healing toolbox with a quasi-scientific approach centered around brain wave science. Mind Control teaches some deepening techniques and their theory.
These techniques are just what I’ve come to for myself and they won’t work for everyone. We each have our own spiritual temperaments and the whole point of a Quaker spiritual formation program is not to inculcate but to invite, not to indoctrinate but to share, to explore together options that we might find fosters and deepens our spiritual and religious experience.
I feel this is especially important for the quality of our worship. I believe that deepening one’s consciousness is one of the most important things we can do as Friends to foster Spirit-led vocal ministry and the gathered meeting. The more people who have entered a deeper consciousness, the more likely the meeting is to be gathered, and techniques make a difference.
A personal outline of practice
So let me start in this post with just an outline of the routine I use when I meditate, which I’ll unpack in some detail in subsequent posts. My practice progresses through three phases or clusters of technique:
- relaxation with focus,
- starting with the eyes looking up,
- then breathing deeply,
- then focusing and consciously relaxing discreet sections of your body, working from the face down to the toes in concert with your breath; then
- prayer, broadly defined,
- affirmations in concert with with breathing and relaxation,
- inviting in the Presence, however, you define that, and
- projecting out your “mind forms” of healing and blessing; and finally
- meditation proper, that is, sustained inward attention on something that serves your deepening.
In the next post, I will start with the eyes.
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 