Antietam, September 17th

(Midweek Meditation September 2024)

Fingers of mist hang in the hollows. The orange orb of the sun is edging above South Mountain. Sam, Chico, and I head off across the wildflower meadow, a riot of color a month ago, now a buffet of seed heads. The only sound crickets signaling the approach of fall.

Suddenly, cannon fire, commemorating the opening salvo of the bloodiest day in American history. A flock of tree swallows leap from the power line in alarm. Sam and Chico stop midstride, alert to danger. Was it a morning just like this 162 years ago when thousands of young men awoke to their last dawn?
 
Peace returns. The swallows settle. The dogs step forward warily. I send up a prayer of gratitude for this beautiful place and remind myself that even in these fields that once ran with blood, evil did not have the last word.
 
We walk past the cemetery where the Mumma family rest. On that terrible day, Samuel Mumma Sr., his wife, and eight children, members of the “Dunker” peace church, fled the mayhem only to return to find their farm destroyed, home and barn burned to the ground. But their story didn’t end there. They received no compensation for their loss because it was the Confederates who did the damage, but they rebuilt with hard work and the help of their neighbors. Forty-four years later, James F. Clark, formerly of the 3rd North Carolina Infantry, wrote to the Mummas to beg forgiveness for his role in the devastation. Samuel Jr. forgave him wholeheartedly. “As to your burning our house, we know that in doing so, you were carrying out orders,” he wrote. Evil did not have the last word.
 
We head towards the Roulette Farm. On one side a field of peacefully grazing cattle, on the other a bank of brilliantly yellow goldenrod. I think of Nancy Camel who sheltered with the Roulette family during the battle. Born into slavery in 1817, she was freed in 1859, by her enslaver, Andrew Miller, and went to work for Miller’s neighbor, William Roulette. After the battle, she returned to the farm with the Roulettes and spent the rest of her days with them. When she died in 1895, she left the bulk of her estate -- $867.04 and her own home -- to the children of her enslaver and her employer. One account said these families “treated her as kin, not as a possession.” Evil did not have the last word.
 
The mist has dissipated and the sun is above the horizon when we drive home through Sharpsburg. We pass campaign signs and I feel rising beneath the surface calm of this small town angry echoes of that day in 1862. I realize there is no “last word.” There is just the next word, and the next, and the next. I ask myself, what can I do in the “next” of my time, to help ensure that evil does not have the next word for the generations to come?
 
I told [the Commonwealth Commissioners] I lived in the virtue of that life and power that took away the occasion of all wars… I told them I was come into the covenant of peace which was before wars and strife were.  – George Fox, 1651

Committing to the Path

Thirty years ago this month I first crossed the threshold of Goose Creek and began my journey with Quakerism. I was a young mother of two little ones, unsure of which parts of the Christian story I believed but wanting to give my children some sort of spiritual grounding. I have always been a spiritual seeker. Over the years my search had taken me through some strange and interesting places, but nothing had stuck. As a young adult I left all of that behind and for a decade or so devoted myself to having fun and getting ahead. Then I had children.

I first tried the local Methodist church and it was everything you could want in a church – lovely people who were my neighbors, a big jolly Sunday School, and within walking distance of my home. But I just couldn’t bring myself to unquestioningly pass on what I thought of as “boilerplate Christianity” to the tender minds of my children. However, while I was no longer a practicing anything, I still took religion very seriously. Curious about Quakerism, I asked my dear friend, Catherine, to take me to Goose Creek.
 
My first Meeting for Worship was completely silent. Friends sitting quietly, the clock ticking, the fire crackling. I loved the simplicity of the meeting house, the beautiful surroundings, and the friendly people. In spite of the long distance from my home, I came back the next week with my children, and the next and the next. A year or two later, I became a member.
 
Now, 30 years have passed, my children have grown up, and I am still driving 55 minutes each way to worship at Goose Creek. What keeps me coming back? If I was hoping for peace and serenity (as I think I was), I have been sadly disappointed.
 
To be a member of a faith tradition that values spiritual integrity above all is very challenging. In the silence and in the absence of imposed doctrine, there is no place to hide. To be a Quaker, I discovered, is to be permanently experiencing metanoia, usually translated as “repentance,” but more accurately described as the process of undergoing a "change of mind" so as to have a wholly new perspective on the world, life, and humanity. This is slow, difficult work, but I will always be grateful for the Quaker crucible through which God leads me in this lifelong process.
 
Becoming a member was an important part of my journey. It was like a marriage. Once the shine of Quakerism had worn off and inevitable disappointments and frustrations came along, I remained faithful to the commitment I had made. The fruits have been of infinite value: membership in a loving and imperfect faith community that continues to love me in spite of my imperfections, a school of life among deeply wise teachers past and present, and, above all, an awareness within the spaciousness of Quaker practice of the Spirit guiding me.
 
Will I always be a member of Goose Creek? I cannot say. One thing I have learned on my Quaker journey is that the label doesn’t matter – being faithful to the leadings of the Spirit does. Lead me onwards, Holy One, lead me onwards.
 

Here. Now. This. In Zimbabwe.

I recently came across a story about a good man deeply embedded in his Here (my birth country of Zimbabwe) and the particular Now of that land – a time of deep and chronic economic troubles and political instability. In a short GoFundMe video his son, Cian, tells how his dad, Charles, lives in a little house in the Eastern Highlands in Zimbabwe with no internet and just enough solar electricity to power his lights and charge his phone. He doesn't have much money, but he lives a rich life.

 

Charles builds beehives and gives them to any of his neighbors who wants them. Then he teaches them how to keep bees ethically and sustainably, without spraying pesticides on the plants they pollinate. To complete the virtuous cycle, he buys the honey from the beekeepers at a "more than fair" price, processes and bottles it, and sells it in the capital, Harare. According to Cian, he barely makes a dollar for each jar because he believes in keeping the honey affordable in a country where many people live in deep poverty.

If you have Facebook, you can watch the video here. 

 

While the primary purpose of the venture is to provide the local people with a steady income in a country where 80% of adults are employed in the "informal" sector (code for "jobs are few and far between"), the benefits go well beyond the pecuniary. The beekeepers gain valuable practical and business skills, of course, but more fundamentally they develop deep reciprocal relationships with each other. These are relationships built on trust and extend far beyond the episodic and transactional. Here is a local community working together to solve a compelling problem and in working together their lives are enriched and their community is strengthened.

 

Wendell Berry described it thus: "A good community insures itself by trust, by good faith and goodwill, by mutual help. A good community, in other words, is a good local economy."(1)

 

On a more personal level, I am interested in what motivated Charles to choose this life. I don't know his background, but I suspect he could easily have settled into a comfortable middleclass life somewhere other than in Zimbabwe. (After all, most educated Zimbabweans have done so.) His son credits the upbringing his grandparents gave his father, but there are plenty of people brought up by seriously good people who regress to the mean of "good enough" in their own lives.

 

I think it must go deeper than that. At some time Charles made a choice not only to stay in a country on the brink of collapse but to live in a remote corner of that land and embed himself deeply in his local community where he uses his gifts -- his knowledge and skills -- to build that community. I am sure he must have his share of problems and disappointments, but I believe he receives as much as he gives and is a happy man.

 

As I was watching the video, the story in the Gospel of Matthew about the rich young man came to mind. The young man comes to Jesus and says that he has done all the usual things – obeyed all the commandments including the one enjoining him to love his neighbors as himself - but somehow, he senses that it is not enough. "What do I lack?" he asks Jesus. "If you wish to be perfect," Jesus replies, "sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me."

 

The next words are haunting: "When the young man heard this, he went away sad, because he had great wealth."

 

Usually when I read this story, I get stuck (guiltily) on "sell your possessions and give to the poor" but what strikes me upon reading it this time is the sadness and loneliness of the young man as he turns away from Jesus. For one brief, shining moment, he was offered a life that promised community and purpose – a "wholeness" not tied to material possessions -- but he was too attached to his privilege and lifestyle to embrace what was being offered. Somewhere in his heart, he knew he had made the wrong choice.

 

How often have I turned away from the prospect of a deeper, richer life because I am afraid to let go of my privileged, familiar life deeply embedded in Empire?

(1) Wendell Berry (2010). "What Matters?: Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth", p.144, Counterpoint Press

Here. Now. This.

I come from a family that for generations has been on the move. My great grandfather, Benjamin Cheney, a shoemaker by trade, migrated in the mid-1860s from Northamptonshire to South Africa with his wife, Eliza, and son Walter. Almost exactly nine months after the World War I armistice, Walter accidentally sired my father. I say accidentally because he and my grandmother, Alice Elma, married only five months before my dad was born and shortly thereafter Alice decamped with baby Jack to shack up with another man in what was then the British colony of Southern Rhodesia. (My husband, Simon, and I agree that Dad was probably a “celebration” baby.) Dad stayed put in Southern Rhodesia then Rhodesia then Zimbabwe for 61 years but eventually migrated back to South Africa and ended up cold (in both senses of the word) in Canada which is where my sister and her family had migrated. 

True to type, at the very first opportunity (and with a lot of luck), when I was 21 I migrated to the United States where I lived in various localities in and around Washington, DC, before moving with Simon in 1986 to Washington County, Maryland. We’ve been here ever since, and we agree that we will make our stand right here on our 3 1/3 acres along the Potomac River. They’ll have to carry us out feet first. 

Yet, in spite of having spent almost 40 years in Washington County, I still feel like little more than a sojourner in my Here. I know only the surface details of this place. Somehow, I have continued to inhabit my wayfaring stranger identity – observing the local folk a bit like an anthropologist, dabbling in its history, gaining a passing knowledge of its ecology, participating not at all in its politics and very little in its cultural life. To me, news is what I read in the New York Times (although, given the near death of the local newspaper it is hard to know what is going on around here). Even my Quaker meeting is not only in another county, it’s in another state, necessitating a 55-minute drive every Sunday. 

What about the Now? Quite frankly, Now requires a sort of internal stamina I don’t always feel I have. It is obvious that we are at a critical turning point in our planet’s existence and the history of humanity. We are wandering deep in the woods of tectonic change and can barely find the path let alone see where we are going. Climate change, environmental degradation, species extinction, massive income inequality, scary mind-sucking technology, and toxic politics all contribute to widespread angst and the feeling that we are all doomed. This is not limited to those of us who live in the US. No matter where you are in the world, the struggle is real. For want of an alternative (and not even our technological geniuses can help us), we are Here. Now. 

Which brings me to This. New England Friend, Noah Merrill, attributes our widespread anxiety to a loss of “a sense of the sacredness of our journey here on this planet.”(1) He points to Quakerism as a faith tradition that provides the tools for “sacramental living” – “for recognizing that in every moment there’s the possibility for the in-breaking of something beyond us.” Quakerism, he says, is a prophetic path that takes “the condition of the world and all of the suffering and all of the injustice and all of the joy and all of the possibility, and all of the reality of global climate disruption and the massive inequality that we experience as human beings, and also says, ‘but this is not all that’s possible. Something could be different’.” 

What does sacramental living mean for me in the Here and Now that I inhabit? I agree with Wendell Berry who wrote: “If you want to do good and preserving acts, you must think and act locally,” because thinking and acting “globally” is impossible. He adds, “This calls for local knowledge, local skills, and local love that virtually none of us has, and that none of us can get, by thinking globally. We can get it only by a local fidelity that we would have to maintain through several lifetimes…”(2) 

I don’t have several lifetimes. I don’t even have very much left of this lifetime. But I can, at least, in whatever time I have, be faithful Here and Now to This. What can I do Now to help open the door to an in-breaking of something new in the Here I have grown to love? What is my This? 

(1) Noah Merrill: "How Quakers can transform the world." QuakerSpeak video, 2014, Friends Publishing Corporation.

(2) Wendell Berry: "Out of Your Car Off Your Horse: 27 propositions about global thinking and sustainable cities." The Atlantic, February 1991

The Simple Truth

Pinned above my desk are these words: 

“To be simple is to fix one’s eye solely on the simple truth of God at a time when all concepts are being confused, distorted and turned upside down.” – Dietrich Bonhoeffer
 
“The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.” – Matthew 6:22 (KJV)
 
Today, in our troubled times, I find these words both a comfort and a challenge. Bonhoeffer was writing in Nazi Germany more than 80 years ago. The writer of the Gospel of Matthew laid down his words close to 2,000 years ago. Yet, the message is as true today as across the millennia. Simplicity comes from faithfulness to the Light Within.
 
It was the testimony of simplicity that most spoke to me when I first came to Quakerism. With two small children, living on a tight budget in a crumbling Victorian heap, my life was anything but simple. Both internally and externally I lived in chaos. The simple life beckoned but remained elusive. I got rid of possessions, winnowed down my wardrobe, shopped in bulk, attempted to impose some sort of discipline on family life, and longed to live in a tiny house that wasn’t such a drain on my energy and our resources. At some future date, I promised myself, I would achieve simplicity.
 
Fast forward 25 years. My children have left the nest, I am retired, and the crumbling heap is no longer my problem. My husband and I live in a little house with few needs. I have “achieved” my goal: in the world’s terms, my life is simple. So why doesn’t it feel that way?
 
Each morning, I wake up to news of death and destruction around the world. I am exposed to hate-filled speech across the political spectrum. Neighbors subscribe to completely different “truths.” I struggle to withstand psychological manipulation at every turn. I witness with horror the rising tide of violence and desperation. No amount of frantically responding to multiple calls to service can quell an overriding sense of helplessness in the face of approaching apocalypse.
 
In his day, Bonhoeffer faced all of this and more. But he kept his eye and mind on the simple truth of God all the way to his execution at the hands of the Nazis. We will probably not have to pay such a high price for faithfulness, but that path of inward simplicity, of singleness of eye, is available to us if we will but take it. In true simplicity, we enter the deep silences of the heart. Here’s how the Quaker Thomas R. Kelly put it:
 
“Deep within us all there is an amazing inner sanctuary of the soul, a holy place, a Divine Center, a speaking Voice, to which we may continuously return. Eternity is at our hearts, pressing upon our time-torn lives, warming us with intimations of an astounding destiny, calling us home unto Itself. Yielding to these persuasions, gladly committing ourselves in body and soul, utterly and completely, to the Light Within, is the beginning of true life. It is a Light Within which illumines the face of God and casts news shadows and new glories upon the face of men. It is a seed stirring to life if we do not choke it.” 

Liberal Friends - the Lake Wobegon of Quakerism

I have just returned from a retreat at Pendle Hill where we spent a lot of time identifying our own and each other’s gifts with a view to living lives more faithful to the leadings of the Spirit. There was much deep listening and reflection, and I think that most of us left with the wind under our tails, filled with good resolutions to put our gifts to work in our meetings and our world.

Predictably, Reality was awaiting my return, eager to disabuse me of any elevated notions I may have acquired in the rarefied atmosphere of Pendle Hill. It wasn’t only reality in the form of laundry and bills and the annoying persistence of my own bad habits; it was also the ubiquitous nature of the Lake Wobegon effect that is part of liberal Quakerism, where everyone is “above average” and where gifts are routinely allowed to gather dust on the shelf. To be more explicit, in our rejection of the hierarchies that developed in the Religious Society of Friends around recorded ministers and appointed elders and overseers, we’ve rather thrown the baby out with the bath water. Any naming or nurturing of gifts has become occasional and incidental rather than an intentional part of the spiritual life of the meeting community.

Which is not to say that liberal Quakers do not have good reason to balk at anything that might set an individual apart. The shadow of the Great Separation still looms over us, even though it happened almost 200 years ago. Within a decade or so of the founding of Quakerism, George Fox and other early leaders found it necessary to “herd the cats” by creating structures to impose some sort of orthodoxy. And just as well they did, because it is highly doubtful that Quakerism would have survived without some grownups in charge. But, with organization comes hierarchy, and with hierarchy comes exclusivity. The next thing you know, the elders are at the door looking for red petticoats and spinets. When the Great Separation finally erupted in the late 1820s, it was in large part a revolt against the authority of the wealthy and prestigious elders of Philadelphia.

So where are we, the spiritual descendents of the Hicksite rebels, today? Are liberal Friends co-existing happily in Lake Wobegon where all are equal and “above average”? Not really. Wherever humans gather, hierarchies develop, even if they are implicit rather than explicit. All the way from the monthly meeting level up to yearly meetings, there are folks in liberal Friends organizations who are clearly in charge, whose word carries more weight, who control much of what happens in the community, who are, in some cases, members of an entrenched elite. The vast majority of these folks are committed and Spirit-filled Friends with no ulterior agendas, who have reached their positions of authority by virtue of their commitment and, yes, their gifts. But in making the process implicit rather than explicit we have also lost the accountability that accompanies the kind of formal naming of gifts that is still practiced today by conservative Friends.

I have had numerous conversations with our conservative brethren about the appointment of elders and the naming of ministers and, in theory at least, it sounds very good. There is a stated understanding that the gifts of eldering and vocal ministry belong to the meeting, rather than to the individual, and should be used for the spiritual edification of all. As such, the meeting is responsible both for nurturing the gift and for ensuring that the individual who is the steward of the gift exercises it under the guidance of the Spirit, rather than their own egos. Having never been a member of a Conservative meeting, I have no idea how this works in practice. I suspect imperfectly, since it still involves members of the human race.

While there has been a wary revisiting of the idea of recording ministers in recent years among liberal Friends, I don’t see any real momentum towards it happening and, all things considered, I’m not sure it would be the best thing for us. Unless we can also resurrect the structures and culture of accountability that must accompany such a practice, the perils are legion. Rather than trying to resurrect the past, perhaps liberal Friends should build on what is best about the tradition that we have established. Our openness to diversity in how each of us expresses our relationship to the Divine is easily translatable to an openness to the many gifts with which we are endowed and which should be placed equally at the disposal of the Spirit for the building up of our faith communities and the world.

Traditionally, Friends have identified vocal ministry and eldership as the primary corporate gifts, but I believe that any true gift of the Spirit, be it ”public”, such as vocal ministry, or more private, such as the ability to be a loving presence, can and should be identified and acknowledged in some way. The benefit of bringing the gift to the attention of the meeting and to the bearer of the gift is that it places a responsibility to nurture the gift on both the meeting and the bearer. Sometimes, too, people are unaware of their own gifts and it takes someone else to point them out. And once the gift has been acknowledged, it can be held in trust by the meeting community.

The closest we have come to naming gifts in liberal Quakerism is through our Nominating Committees. The ideal is that the committee recognizes the gifts of each person and then, after much prayer and discernment, places them in the position or committee where their gifts can be most usefully deployed. This hardly ever happens. People usually end up on the committees in which they are most interested or where they have been since dinosaurs roamed the earth. Nominating conversations are often little more than hasty phone exchanges. We struggle over the issue of term limits versus acceding to a person’s “call” to be on a committee indefinitely, even if “call” could be more accurately described as “habit” or “comfort”.

Somewhere in all of this, the Spirit is lost and gifts play no role in the conversation. It also presupposes that almost all gifts can only be nurtured and recognized in a committee setting. This essentially leaves those not able or willing to do committee work on the outside, relegated to Quaker limbo, the Undead or at least the unacknowledged.

The questions I am left asking are: How can we do this better? How can we develop the close relationships that allow us to discern each other’s gifts, to nurture them and exercise them, and to enjoy their fruits in community? How can we all come to that deep place where we truly understand, in the words of the apostle Paul, “there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of service, but the same Lord; and it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good” ? (1 Cor 12:4-8)

Why I Keep Coming Back

My husband, the senior warden at the local Episcopal church, enjoys twitting me on certain aspects of Quakerism. Why, he asks, drive an hour and a half round trip to sit in silence for one hour? Surely, if Quakers care so much for the planet and value simplicity, they should foreswear the consumption of fossil fuels to get to meeting, and instead hold virtual Meetings for Worship where each of us stay home and quietly meditate in front of our computers, using Skype if we feel moved by the Spirit to share. In my ongoing effort at pretending to be a good Quaker, I take this in good part and refrain from suggesting that Episcopalians could just as easily stay home, read the service from the Book of Common Prayer, and listen to the sermon and sing along with the hymns on YouTube. They wouldn't even need Skype since spontaneous sharing is not a noticeable feature of the Episcopal Mass. No, such a thought has never crossed my mind.

Yet, on a perfect Spring day such as we had this past First Day, with God obviously and extravagantly present right here in my garden, the temptation to conduct my own private "Meeting for Worship with a Concern for Plants in Dire Need of Transplanting" was very strong. But, as usual, I found myself in my car (a VW Jetta TDI, 40 miles to the gallon) making the 45-minute drive to meeting where I sat with the good Friends of Goose Creek for the requisite hour, and once more drank deeply from the living waters that flow through Meeting for Worship.

Inside the meetinghouse, the deep silence of the adults was accompanied by the sound of the birds singing and the laughter and voices of the children playing outside. I could feel us being lifted and embraced by the Spirit, and I marveled at how we were all gathered in the great wheel of life where our own individual boundaries have no meaning and where life and death merge seamlessly. The silence was broken just once by an older Friend who spoke quietly and simply about how, even as we struggle to make sense of our individual lives, God is there to guide us in green pastures and beside still waters. Surely goodness and mercy will follow us all the days of our lives.

After the close of Meeting for Worship, I was moved to share a little of what I had experienced in that hour. Goose Creek is an old meeting and I spoke about how Friends have sat in silent worship there for more than 200 years, each generation listening to the laughter of its children. I mentioned some of the dear old Friends who were gone from our midst, but who were once the children laughing outside, bringing energy and joy to our little community. Then, in one of those moments that occur with such amazing frequency at Quaker meeting that I can not doubt that the Spirit is present among us, I was passed a card to read that came from a beautiful arrangement of peonies on the fireplace mantel. The flowers had been placed there in memory of a member of our meeting who would have celebrated her 100th birthday this week. Emily the child once laughed and played, she grew to become an integral part of the meeting, and when she passed away at the age of 97, she was buried in the burial ground across the road from our meetinghouse. The tangible presence of all the generations of Friends old and young, living and dead, pressed in upon us.

As we moved on to sharing joys and concerns, a much-loved Friend stood and revealed that he had been diagnosed with a life-threatening illness. Just as we were about to hold him in the Light, the children - about 20 strong - burst through the door, filled with energy and health and high spirits. We paused as they joined their parents and then, sensing the presence of the Spirit, they, too, entered into that sacred space where we are palpably in the presence of the Divine, their gloriously bright flames of Life and Love turbocharging the healing power of our prayers. Together, the young and the old, the sick and the healthy, the living and the dead, became One.

As I drove the 45 minutes back from meeting, I carried with me that which I had experienced in the silence and after. My husband returned from his Mass, uplifted by the words of his priest and enriched by the power and beauty of the liturgy. In the cool of my garden, I weeded and dug and transplanted with God. To myself, I sang the words of the great medieval mystic Juliana of Norwich: "All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well."

In the Land of Saturday

For the past month or so I have been stranded in a foreign country, one which I have visited before but which nevertheless remains disorienting and peculiarly impermeable to my best efforts at achieving ease and familiarity. It is the country of loss, where I, exiled among the living, struggle ineffectually to mentally and emotionally process the death of a beloved member of my most intimate circle. This time it is the death of my American mom, the person who more than 30 years ago gave me my life in this country and who continued to both bless my life and that of my family, and profoundly influence who I have become as an adult. She was 91, so it could hardly be said that her passing was unexpected, yet it has left me floundering in the unfamiliar terrain of a world suddenly without her. That "withoutness" is what loss is all about, made all the more poignant by the fact that I took the life "with" so much for granted. Ironically, only Death has the power to make most of us see how much of ourselves was validated by the presence of the one we are now without.

At this point, if I were following the formula of so much spiritual "grief" writing, I would begin to recount how during this dark period I have felt lifted and buoyed by God and how grateful I am that I am a person of faith and how awful it would be to go through this without the Great Comforter, yada yada yada. But the truth is that not in a good long time have I felt the essentially theoretical nature of God so acutely. During the time that I sat by Virginia's side and following her death, my occasional attempts at prayer have felt as dry as dust. Seeing her treasured possessions being dispersed and offloaded on an estate warehouse have reminded me of the briefness of our tenure on this earth, and throwing out old photos of her long dead relatives, now nameless and forgotten, made me feel the fruitlessness and pathos of our own individual strivings. Vanity, vanity, vanity, all is vanity.

It seems apposite that I am writing this on Easter Saturday. It was Cornel West, I think, who referred to himself as a "Saturday Christian" - one who has embraced the life and death of Christ, but who has yet to experience the joy and certainty of the Resurrection. To lose someone close is to be thrust into the land of Saturday. The easy platitudes and feel good emollients of our day-to-day spiritual lives and practices are revealed exactly for what they are - superficial, all-too-human ways to give our lives meaning and convince ourselves of our own importance. One day in the future someone will have the task of erasing us from the temporal world (we'll go out in boxes for resale and garbage bags for incineration), and as we sit here in Saturday we wonder if "eternal" refers to life or oblivion.

Interestingly, Jesus talked a lot about loss as a necessary prerequisite to gaining life:

"Anyone who wants to save his life, must lose it. Anyone who loses her life will find it. What gain is there if you win the whole world and lose your very self? What can you offer in exchange for your one life?" - Matthew 16:25-26.

What, indeed? In the land of Saturday, these are the sorts of questions that try a woman's soul. One has to live out the awful truth that suffering and loss are not only inevitable but also necessary. Even as I grope around in the darkness of my grief, I am aware that without the certainty of loss, the sure knowledge of life's finite nature, I could never experience love so acutely. I could never savor so intensely sitting outside on a sunny spring day, as I did today, drinking coffee with a good friend watching my human and canine neighbors living in the now of Easter Saturday. For the land of Saturday is not without its consolations. It's the place where we are necessarily naked, stripped temporarily of the illusions that make "normal" life possible and even palatable. We are held suspended in the universal, between our own parochial pasts and our utterly unknowable futures. For a brief time, we live viscerally in the knowledge that the only life we have is what we are living now, and now, and now.

Living always in the land of Saturday is only for the most evolved souls, I think. Personally, I look forward to tomorrow, to the Resurrection, when I can gather my individual self together again and continue on the journey with my ruck sack packed with my own personal "stuff" - the illusions, the good intentions, the failings, the gifts - that make me, me. Fortunately, even from the lonely, prayerless perspective of Saturday, I have enough faith to believe that when I get to tomorrow I won't have to carry that ruck sack alone.

Will the Real Quakers Stand Up? Not All at Once, Please.

I was visiting a conservative meeting recently and fell into conversation with a young man who is a member there. He told me that in his opinion liberal Quakerism is, in fact, a new religion started in the 1960s. He being young and me being older (the sun is past the yardarm if not entirely sinking below the horizon), I merely smiled politely and let it go. It was not that I felt rather condescendingly that I could privately disagree but use my correspondingly larger quotient of wisdom to allow him to continue in his folly. Neither was it that I was just too ancient to pick up the gauntlet. The truth is, I could see his point of view, even as I disagreed with it.

Because, from where I'm sitting, it seems as if we can all claim to be the "true" heirs of George Fox and the early Friends - liberal Quakers, conservative Quakers, evangelical Quakers, programmed Quakers, unprogrammed Quakers, even nontheist Quakers and those who feel greater kinship with crystals than with crosses. We've all held fast to different pieces of the Truth as articulated by Fox et al, and added bits that align with our times, our family histories, our personal preferences, our educational backgrounds, our previous religious experiences and, yes, our prejudices. The bits that make us uncomfortable, we've deleted from our personal journey. After all, as someone once said about the Bible, that's why God invented highlighters. And that's what happens when you practice a living religion. Even as I write this I can anticipate the howls from various quarters of the Quaker universe. Am I saying that "anything goes"? Actually I'm not. I draw the line at goat sacrifice (just kidding...)

For almost 200 years, we've been squabbling about who the real Quakers are. We've all headed off in high dudgeon to our various fortresses, currently named FGC, FUM, EFI and (Conservative), from which we occasionally sally forth to mingle with Them. Shell-shocked liberal Friends return from programmed evangelical meetings, aghast at the lack of silence, the distinct odor of doctrine and the presence of the "hireling priest." Christian pastoral Friends swim out of the fug of a liberal Quaker meeting determined never ever again to hug a tree or at least not talk about it in public. Conservative Friends stay home in the quiet certainty that they, remnant though they may be, are the only ones that George and Margaret and James and Isaac would recognize if they were suddenly reincarnated into the 21st century. Such is the state of brotherly love in the Religious Society of Friends and Embarrassing Acquaintances.

In 14 or so years, we will be entering our third century of disagreement. Perhaps it would be better if we all agreed to lay down the terms "Quaker" and "Friend," and renamed our various branches to make the split irrevocable. No? I thought not. Can it be that we're not quite ready to vote ourselves or our dissenting brethren off the island? Can it be that there is a fragile "enough" to keep us at least working towards some sort of unity? It has only been in recent years that I have ventured out of my own meeting let alone into the larger non-liberal Friends universe, but my experiences have given me real hope that we can all co-exist under the very large canopy of the Quaker tree. We are never going to agree on everything and we will probably continue to disagree quite emphatically on some things, but I think we can all identify with the sincere seeking that was at the heart of the experience of many early Friends and continues to define Quakers across the spectrum. Every single one of us is flawed and comes to the journey with a lot of man-made "stuff." We should be, in Jesus's words, "as little children," and, as such, we should not presume to "know better" on other people's behalf.

I identify myself as a Christian who rejoices in the strong Christian testimony of the majority of the Friends universe. But I also rejoice in the liberal Quaker tradition that is great-hearted enough to allow entry into Quaker practice for those to whom the traditional Christian message is inaccessible or who are led to express their journey in non-traditional ways. It has also been within the freedom of the liberal tradition that my understanding of Christ's life and witness has grown and deepened in ways that might not have been possible in a more doctrinaire setting. I have shared deeply spiritual experiences with nontheist Friends and find my soul expanding with joy and gratitude in my liberal meeting peopled with tree huggers and peaceniks, Democrats and Republicans (yes, we have a few!) and Libertarians, Christians and New Agers. When I spend time with Conservative Friends I love their adherence to traditional Friends structures and ways and their quiet determination to keep the Bible as a central part of their journey. I haven't spent much time with pastoral or evangelical Friends (a lack resulting from geography rather than preference), but I admire the joy and fervor of their desire to share their faith, and I recognize the very real benefits of pastoral meetings (because, after all, sometimes we unprogrammed Friends get the ministry we pay for).

If George Fox came back today, I doubt he would recognize any of us as Quakers. It would be very odd if he did because the genius of what he and the seekers of the 17th century discovered was that humanity's search for God is not something carved in stone, unchangeable and frozen in time. The Divine, Fox discovered, "did not dwell in temples which men had commanded and set up, but in people's hearts." Those temples are not only ones made of bricks and mortar, but also ones made of our mental constructs. By squeezing our faith into our own particular Quaker "temples" we take something that is as large as God and make it as small as ourselves. Is that really what we want?

This Life or the Afterlife

A good friend of mine posted a blog a couple of days ago in which he floated the idea that to achieve an afterlife you have to "nurture and exercise your potential immortal soul to enable it to survive the death of your body," in much the same way that you have to make the effort to learn algebra in order to solve quadratic equations. (http://blog.american.com/2012/01/a-policy-free-post-on-life-after-death/) In short, an afterlife doesn't just happen, you have to work at it. The souls of atheists would become extinct at death (epic fail on the final exam), and so, presumably, would those erstwhile slackers who undergo deathbed conversions (only to realize at the last minute that they really should have attended class). Neither, according to my friend's theory, would people who have merely lived good lives - but never actively exercised their "God muscle" - get a free pass when they shuffled off their mortal coils. Folks, however, who had done the necessary "soul work" would "graduate" to Whatever Comes Next.

It's an intriguing idea that pretty much trashes some of Christianity's most fiercely-held doctrines, from the predestination of the Calvinists to the John 3:16 formulic approach of evangelicals and fundamentalists to the Extreme Unction-get-out-of-jail-free pass of the Catholics. For Quakers, however, it's not an entirely unreasonable theory. For starters, unlike most other religious traditions, Christian or otherwise, we spend very little time either imagining or worrying about the afterlife. We're much more concerned with what is happening in the here and now and tend to work very earnestly towards achieving the peaceable kingdom in this life. We're reluctant to define "God" but strive very hard to be in His/Her/Its presence. Most Quakers of my acquaintance cheerfully acknowledge that they just don't know what happens next. No seventy-seven virgins for us or Pearly Gates, or, for that matter, hellfire and brimstone. Personally, the furthest I am prepared to go is to claim that whatever the afterlife consists of is utterly beyond the very limited comprehension of our earthbound selves, but that there is a "rightness" about it that totally transcends the picayune worries and concerns and preoccupations of our individual pre-death selves. In fact, I would be deeply disappointed if in my current very limited human state I could imagine anything close to whatever it is.

Interestingly, I believe this seemingly feckless disregard as to the final landing place of one's soul is not a modern outcome of the secularization of liberal Quakerism, but has its roots, ironically, in the apocalyptic beliefs of early Friends. When George Fox had his revelation that "Christ has come to teach his people himself," it meant much more than that people could dispense with priests and doctrine, because humanity now had the ability to interface directly and unmediated with the Divine. Fox and the early Quakers believed they were experiencing the unfolding of the Second Coming and the thousand year reign of Christ was at hand, with themselves as the vanguard. With enviable fervor, they set about establishing, quite literally, "the Kingdom of Heaven on earth," and it was in this extremely fertile growing medium that Quaker testimonies began to take root. Practice - living the "Kingdom life" - superseded what they saw as the now redundant doctrine and ritual, much of which was done "in remembrance" of Christ, because Christ was now with them.

Of course, as time passed, early Friends had to readjust their expectations regarding the end times, but the essential idea that we are called to help establish the Kingdom of Heaven on earth remains to this day. While our language and descriptors may have changed, and while some modern Quakers may be uncomfortable with the Biblical language implied by "the Kingdom of Heaven," the concept runs like a golden thread throughout the 350 years of Quaker history. Even after Friends embraced a more mystical interpretation of "Christ among us," they sought (admittedly in their flawed human way) to make Quaker meetings and communities templates for the Kingdom of Heaven. The most ambitious of these projects was William Penn's Holy Experiment - the founding of Pennsylvania - in which Friends succeeded to a remarkable degree (at least in Penn's lifetime) in establishing a peaceable kingdom. Yes, it was far from the ideal Kingdom of Heaven on earth, but it was a brave attempt.

I think this visceral belief in the presence of Christ in the here and now, whether an individual Friend uses traditional Christian language or not, remains at the very heart of the Quaker experience. We do not live in a state of anticipation of either reward or punishment. We do not imagine some eventual day of reckoning. We accept the mystery that is our existence and our relationship with the Divine, and are content to know that living the faithful life while we are on this earth brings its own reward. Perhaps, as my friend surmises, our efforts in the here and now will qualify us for the afterlife, but isn't it a relief to simply greet each day as a new opportunity to live a with God life? Whatever happens after death is as it should be.

On Stilling the Howler Monkeys

For my first 15 1/2 years at Quaker meeting, I endeavored mightily in silent worship to suck the incessant internal chatter out of my head in order to create that perfect "vacuum" that God, presumably, was eagerly waiting to fill. I tried all the usual techniques - mantras, short prayers, visualizations (candles, light, waterfalls), stern imprecations ("Shut up, brain!"), pep talks, etc etc etc. Needless to say, very little of this was particularly effective. The howler monkeys in my head continued to swing from tree to tree, cackling rudely at my efforts. Occasionally, I would crack an eyelid to see how everyone else was doing (hard to tell from the poker faces arranged in the pews) and also to sneak a peek at the clock tick-tocking on the meetinghouse wall. If no one offered any vocal ministry, I would feel anxious on behalf of visitors, and would begin in unQuakerly fashion to anticipate with irritation the person who at rise of meeting would feel moved to share how much he or she "loved the silence." Because, chances are, I hadn't loved the silence. Over the years, I've been bored by it, oppressed by it, longed for someone to break it and felt envious of those souls who were clearly snoring through it.

Fortunately, in the midst of all this internal struggle, God saw fit on occasion to shove me and my ego aside to let me know that He/She hadn't given up on me yet. And, fortunately, such is the nature of God that a very little bit goes a very long way. Every now and then I would receive intimations of the extraordinary power for transformation - indeed, "resurrection" - that is both the challenge and promise of a life of faith. Everything that happens in church or temple or mosque or synagogue or Quaker meeting - or any other venue where we humans conduct our spiritual lives - is either explicitly or implicitly aimed at achieving that transformation. To get there, we need to learn to see the world and ourselves anew: "If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks in his cavern." (William Blake)

It has only been in the past year that it has truly dawned on me that silent worship should not be a passive weekly process, but one fed by active daily engagement with the Divine. This requires not an emptying of the mind to allow God in, but a focusing towards that which is already there. Over the years, like all good Quakers, I have talked about "the Christ Within" and "that of God in everyone," but in my silent worship I have subconsciously worked on the assumption that God is "out there" somewhere, fighting for an opportunity to squeeze into my cluttered and overactive brain. During the week, I kept God on the boundaries of my "real" life and I would arrive at Quaker meeting on Sunday hoping that I could perhaps conjure the Divine promptly between 9:45 a.m. and 10:45 a.m. Is it any wonder the howler monkeys were laughing?

Earlier generations of Quakers understood better than we modern Friends the need to totally integrate the spiritual life with the rest of life. "Profession of truth, without the life and power, is but a slippery place, which men may easily slide from," was Isaac Penington's rather pointed observation. Meeting for Worship was firmly rooted in the daily lives of Friends; what happened in worship on First Day was a direct outcome of faithfulness the rest of the week. It was not merely a nice quiet weekly break from the busy-ness of daily life, neither was it just a place for the family to go on Sunday that enabled parents to check the mental "spiritual life" box located somewhere after "academic achievement" and "healthy eating habits." I think one reason why modern unprogrammed Friends meetings have struggled to grow is that silent worship demands so much more of people than programmed church services that provide an external focus. In times past, to become a Quaker meant a radical reordering of one's whole life and adherence to an explicit Discipline that was designed to create the conditions earlier Quakers felt were necessary to nurture a deep, life-changing relationship with the Divine. Inevitably, official Disciplines fell out of favor as they became more a means of control than a structure to support spiritual growth. And as Quakers ceased to maintain their "peculiar" identity and adopted the habits and mores of "the world," the compartmentalization of "spiritual life" and "daily life" became complete.

Modern Quakers take great pride in being "doers." If we are not careful, Meeting for Worship can became the space between committee meetings. In the words of Thomas Merton: "...if prayer, meditation and contemplation were once taken for granted as central realities in human life everywhere, they are so no longer. They are regarded, even by believers, as somehow marginal and secondary: what counts is getting things done." There is nothing wrong with 'getting things done," but if the doing crowds out the deep prayer and meditation that lies at the heart of any spiritual path, we soon find ourselves and our egos back in the driving seat with God once more pushed to the boundaries.

In today's Religious Society of Friends we no longer need fear a visit from grim-faced Elders come to point out the error of our ways, and to that I think we can all shout, "Hallejulah!" However, we are called to impose our own Discipline on ourselves and our lives. Over the years, I have been deeply privileged to meet great souls - both within Quakerism and without - who have truly integrated the Spirit into all aspects of their lives. They are not exempt from the troubles of life, but they are able to perceive the daily through the eyes of the eternal. They may not be "doing" the most, but they bring a peculiar grace to everything they do. This is what integrity means - not just speaking the truth but living the Truth, acquiring the daily habits and practices that create the necessary space for the Divine to be present and visible in us.

Since trying to live more faithfully by incorporating prayer, meditation and certain habits of thought into my daily life - in the words of George Fox, to keep close to that which is pure within me, which leads me up to God - my experience at Meeting for Worship has been qualitatively different. The howler monkeys are still there, of course - they are not easily dismissed - but they are now usually just squatting on the branches of my peripheral consciousness, rather than demanding center stage. By turning my mind and heart daily to that Divine Center, God is able to show me the parts of my life - those habits, resentments, prejudices and ego-centered ambitions - that are acting as "stops" to my ability to experience that abundant and Spirit-filled life that is the reward of faithfulness. Progress is slow, but I am increasingly aware that I live what Ben Pink Dandelion describes as "an accompanied life," and that when I sit in Meeting for Worship I don't have to go looking for God.

As Thomas Kelly so beautifully expressed it, "Eternity is at our hearts, pressing upon our time-torn lives, warming us with intimations of an astounding destiny, calling us home unto Itself. Yielding to these persuasions, gladly committing ourselves in body and soul, utterly and completely, to the Light Within, is the beginning of true life. It is a dynamic center, a creative Life that presses to birth within us. It is a Light Within which illumines the face of God and casts new shadows and new glories upon the face of men. It is a seed stirring to life if we do not choke it...Here is the Slumbering Christ, stirring to be awakened, to become the soul we clothe in earthly form and action. And He is within us all."

Primitive Christianity Revived - But Not By Us.

I think it's safe to say that if George Fox or William Penn came to my house looking to see how their vision of Quakerism as primitive Christianity revived was progressing, they would be pretty disappointed. They would find a well-intentioned, averagely good person who is completely committed to recreating the Kingdom of God on earth, as long as it doesn't impinge too much on her comfortable life style, status in the community or retirement plans. She believes fervently that the world's resources should be shared more equitably and is happy to give a few bucks here and there to show that she is willing, if not 100% committed. And she loves the idea of offering hospitality to strangers, as long as it doesn't mean actually putting them up in her own home unless they meet certain standards of cleanliness, sanity and general all-round acceptability.

If George and William accompanied me to meeting on First Day, they would find a meetinghouse full of Quakers pretty much like me: earnest, sincere seekers, engaged in lots of good works, but, nevertheless, rather modest in our aspirations for the establishment of the Kingdom and privately fearful that God may ask us to step out of our comfort zone. I suspect this would be the case regardless of the flavor of Friends meeting in question. Certainly there are individual Quakers here and there who have stepped out more radically in the direction of replacing the established order with what early Friends described as Gospel Order, but as a body have we settled for something less? Community is supposedly one of the traditional Quaker testimonies, but, if we are honest, most of us are really talking about a community of People Like Us. Sure, we engage in sorties that bring us into contact with non-PLUs - to juvenile detention centers, soup kitchens, food banks, even trips to minister to the distant poor - but then we retreat to our comfortable Quaker silos where we send up fervent prayers of gratitude that our lives are not like theirs. Even our meetings (and I speak as a liberal Friend here) are remarkably homogeneous - overwhelmingly white, college-educated and with above average incomes.

In working together to reestablish Gospel Order, early Friends had a shared community focus that has been fundamentally lost as we have each settled into following our individual "leadings." Essentially, they understood Gospel Order as the way God intended the world to be, in which every part of creation existed in right relationship with every other part. Friends believed that the role of Jesus Christ and the gospel that he preached was to restore that relationship. His teachings provided the blueprint. In seeking to restore primitive Christianity, early Friends were attempting, through the direct intercession of and empowerment by the Christ Within, to literally upend the status quo and reestablish Gospel Order on earth by a radical adherence to those teachings. This meant a total reordering of their lives and relationships with each other and with all those in the prevailing social structure, regardless of who they might be, king or servant. They sought a revolution in the world by first undergoing a revolution within themselves.

Today, Friends, like the majority of Christians, tend to perceive Jesus's teachings as more of an ideal than a serious challenge. By placing not just primary, but, in many cases, total reliance on the inner Light, we liberal Quakers, in particular, give ourselves implicit permission to follow only leadings with which we are comfortable. If I am 100% honest, I have to admit that I have a lot of trouble distinguishing a true leading from a really good idea or a personal enthusiasm. And I am adept at consigning what could easily be a call to greater faithfulness (for example, by embracing a difficult and isolated neighbor with a drinking problem) to that convenient box at the back of my head labeled "Leadings That Need More Seasoning" (and which probably will never be seasoned enough). Early Quakers, by balancing the inward Light (rather than the more modern and more easily-digestible inner Light) with Scripture and stronger group discernment, were not only challenged much more rigorously that we modern Friends are, but worked together much more effectively towards achieving that shared vision of Gospel Order. Granted, over time group discernment in the Society of Friends degenerated into an authoritarianism that had more to do with established power structures than a gathered people working together to establish God's Kingdom on earth, but I can't help wondering if we haven't thrown the baby out with the bath water by placing total authority in the inner Light and not taking seriously the challenges of the gospel.

The good news is that should Fox and Penn find themselves transported to 21st century America, they would find people sincerely committed to reviving primitive Christianity, but they would have to look outside the Religious Society of Friends. Across the country there is a grassroots revolution taking place within Christianity, driven in large part by young Christians who are throwing off their denominational shackles (be they Catholic, Protestant, evangelical or mainstream) to form intentional communities based on radical discipleship of the gospel of Jesus. Dubbed "the new monasticism" and "the emergent church," these ecumenical communities are frequently located in some of our country's poorest neighborhoods and rural areas. Members of these communities are not "missionaries" parachuting in to "do good works" or "save souls," but are believers who are working towards, in Quaker terms, Gospel Order, with a view to creating a society built on love and genuine care, rather than power and division. Tired of the cultural and political wars of their parents, these young people are putting aside theological disputes over issues such as abortion and homosexuality, and are following the example not just of Jesus and early Christians, but also of more modern communities such as the Catholic Workers movement, the Church of the Savior in Washington, DC, and Koinonia Farm in Georgia. Rather than writing checks and volunteering a couple of times a month (or a year), they are, instead, practicing radical hospitality and a reordering of relationships, in which all, rich and poor, gay and straight, stable and mentally ill, addicted and clean, share together equally in God's bounty.

Put in the context of 17th century England, this description of the new monasticism by Jonathan R. Wilson, a professor of theology from Acadia Divinity College in Nova Scotia, could be about the early Quaker movement: "Today in North America and the larger sphere of Western European culture, faithfulness to the gospel is in danger. As our culture's project desperately works to maintain control despite its looming death, the 'living arrangement' worked out by the church and the culture is collapsing. Many parts of the church are sinking with the culture and doing so without any resistance. The call for a new monasticism is the work of God's Spirit calling us to renewed understanding of the gospel and faithful witness to it..."

As Shane Claiborne, a founder of The Simple Way community in Philadelphia, put it, "The great tragedy is not that rich Christians do not care about the poor, but that rich Christians do not know the poor...Layers of insulation separate the rich and poor from truly encountering one another. There are the obvious ones like picket fences and SUVs, and there are the more subtle ones like charity. Tithes, tax-exempt donations and short-term mission trips, while they accomplish some good, can also function as outlets that allow us to appease our consciences and still retain a safe distance from the poor. It is much more comfortable to de-personalize the poor so that we do not feel responsible for the catastrophic human failure that someone is on the street while people have spare bedrooms in their homes...Jesus is not seeking distant acts of charity. He is seeking concrete actions of love: 'you fed me...you visited me...you welcomed me in...you clothed me...' When the church becomes a place of brokerage rather than an organic community, she ceases to be alive. Brokerage turns the church into an organization rather than a new family of rebirth...She becomes a distribution center, a place where the poor come to get stuff and the rich come to dump stuff. Both go away satisfied (the rich feel good, the poor get fed), but no one leaves transformed - no new community is formed."

I think most of us can agree, whether we are Occupiers or Tea Party-ers or a member of the unaligned but no less anxious millions, that something is fundamentally broken in our social, economic and political structures. The need to restore Gospel Order - to bring humanity into right relationship with each other, with God and with all of creation - is no less urgent today than it was in the 17th century; indeed it could be argued that we have never been more in need of it. As individuals, are we prepared, in Gandhi's words, "to be the change we want to see in the world"? And as a faith community, can we Friends leave behind some of our hang ups about Christians and other religious groups to work with them towards a shared vision of a more just and loving society?

"Convincement" or "Uncertainment" - a Liberal Friend's dilemma

While I could never be mistaken for a fundamentalist, I have a childish yearning for a completely literal burning bush-type experience, or perhaps one day, while driving to New York, (Damascus not being handy), I suddenly find myself being yanked from my car and cast down upon the side of the interstate and a voice tells me in no uncertain terms that this is Jesus speaking and you, Patricia, had better take heed! Now that's the sort of experience that leaves no room for doubt. Why is it that we live in an age when God seems to favor the "still small voice" over the Cecil B. DeMille announcement? Quakers are particularly fond of this method of revelation and even eschew the word "conversion" in favor of  "convincement," as if conversion is way too melodramatic for a peculiar people who appear to be too pig-headed to be anything other than talked into belief once all the pros and cons have been carefully weighed. Of course, this is a very 21st century definition of the verb "to convince." Even a cursory study of the convincement accounts of early Friends offers ample evidence that it was an entirely dramatic experience. Here's a sample from Francis Howgill:

My eyes were opened, and all the things that I had ever done were brought to remembrance and the ark of the testament was opened, and there was thunder and lightning and great hail. And then the trumpet of the Lord was sounded, and then nothing but war and rumor of war, and the dreadful power of the Lord fell on me: plague, and pestilence, and famine, and earthquake, and fear and terror, for the sights I saw with my eyes: and that which I heard with my ears, sorrow and pain...And all that ever I had done was judged and condemned, all things were accursed...And as I bore the indignation of the Lord, something rejoiced, the serpent's head began to be bruised...And as I did give up all to judgement, the captive came forth out of prison and rejoiced, and my heart was filled with joy...Then I saw the cross of Christ, and stood in it, and the enmity slain on it. And the new man was made...the holy law of God was revealed unto me and written on my heart.

Now, here's the kind of experience that made things happen! By 1662, a decade after George Fox and the early Seekers were "gathered" as a people, about 80,000 had been "convinced" - close to 1% of the population of Britain at that time. Three hundred and forty-nine years later, that number has dwindled to about 12,000 Friends in the UK, with around 180,000 in the Americas and 380,000 worldwide. For purposes of comparison, I offer the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints which has been around for 200 years less. In 1862, there were about 69,000 Mormons. Today, there are more than 14 million. Are they more convinced than we are? Looking at the numbers, they certainly seem to be.

Actually, going out and telling people that you have found something spectacularly wonderful seems to work for Quakers, too. Of the 380,000 Friends worldwide, a whopping 84% are affiliated with or reflect more evangelical branches of Quakerism. A paltry 15.7% make up the liberal, unprogrammed universe, with Conservative Friends flickering away valiantly at 0.4%. As one liberal Friend once said, "We don't just hide our light under a bushel basket. We hide the bushel basket under another bushel basket!" This is, after all, our little secret.

Which brings me to the question: what is it that we in the liberal branch of Quakerism are "convinced" of? And if we are so "convinced," why are we so shy about telling other people about it? Perhaps in the spirit of "let your yay be yay and your nay be nay," we should more truthfully call it "uncertainment" rather than "convincement." Recently, in my meeting the Friend on facing bench invited visitors to sign the guest book, adding impulsively and with the best of intentions, "And, don't worry, we won't try to contact you." I guess to "silent worship" we need to add "silent outreach." Mention the word "proselytize" to a liberal Friend and you get about the same reaction as "Beelzebub" or "Harry Potter" elicits in some other faith traditions. Yet I can't help feeling that we have perhaps retreated a little too far in the direction of modesty when expressing our liberal Quaker beliefs. We love the phrase "let your life speak" partly because it lets us off the hook in terms of verbally sharing something that many of us consider central to our lives. If we practice our faith in our daily lives, we don't actually need to share what motivates us because we'll "convince" people by some vague process of osmosis. Or maybe not. And do we care? Quaker Quest was started in Britain in large part because of the realization that unless something was done and done soon, the Religious Society of Friends was on the road to extinction in the country of its birth (some predictions have it at about 2037). Surely if we are convinced of something we should practice articulating it so that we can share it with others. For many liberal meetings outreach is done almost by default; if you happen to cross our threshold we'll do our best not to scare you off. Perhaps we need to have a small sign on each pew: Only the most determined need apply. I know from experience that many liberal Friends are people who are thoroughly "convinced," although frequently we transmit uncertainty. Surely in this troubled world we need to find a way to joyfully articulate what we are convinced about, what inspires us about the Quaker way and what excites us about the journey.

The Odd Man at the Dinner Party Part III

Teaching First Day School in a liberal unprogrammed Friends meeting is a strange and wonderful business. Somehow you have to transmit whatever it is that is going on mostly in silence among the adults in the next room, without any hint of indoctrination and ever aware that what might be your Truth may very well not be Truth as experienced by the parents of the tender minds under your care. Teaching the Bible is this experience on steriods. You soon find yourself navigating between Scylla and Charybdis, your sails flapping ineffectually before the feeble winds of your own insecurity. This has led to some of my most distressing episodes as an FDS teacher and some of the funniest.

On one never to be forgotten Sunday at a time when I was the Religious Education clerk, I was waylaid by an irate mother who accused a teacher (not me, thank heavens) of brainwashing her children with a fundamentalist version of a Bible story. Further investigation revealed that all the hapless teacher had done was read the story of Moses leading the children of Israel out of Egypt, leaving the kids to decided for themselves on the story's "truthiness," as Stephen Colbert would say. No amount of pouring oil on troubled waters would calm the mother and, as a result, we lost that family and the FDS teacher refused to ever teach again (not an insignificant loss, as any RE clerk will tell you).

On a more amusing note, I was (nervously) reading a Bible story to the children one First Day when I came across the word "sinner." Aware that most of my charges had probably never heard of a "sinner" before or even "sin" (such an uncomfortable concept for us post-Modern Quakers), I felt obliged to pause to ask the children, "Does anyone know what a sinner is?" There followed an impressive silence. Eventually, one brave fellow decided to hazard a guess. "Is it someone who goes to a synagogue?" he asked. Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings! We FDS teachers have to take our teachable moments where we can find them. "Indeed!" I replied. "They can also be found in churches and temples and mosques, and even (dramatic pause) at Quaker meetings!"

Given the terror of parental wrath and the glorious tabula rasa that is most of our liberal Quaker youth with regard to the Bible, the subject of Jesus is usually approached occasionally, selectively, and with great delicacy. To stay on the safe side, we tend to avoid the miracles, the crucifixion, the resurrection and the virgin birth (except at Christmas where it occupies a special place next to Santa, elves and other seasonal magic). What that leaves us with are the parables. Blessed relief, since they can be presented rather like queries and are wonderfully open to interpretation. Perfect for avoiding trouble. It is entirely possible for a child to go through all of FDS in a liberal Friends meeting - from kindergarten through high school - with only a nodding acquaintance with Jesus. Or - even worse - what they do know is invariably heavily colored by negative perceptions gleaned from the shriller quarters of the fundamentalist universe. I should know. While I was wrestling with what I could "safely" tell my children about Jesus (and my husband, an Episcopalian, was having his own struggles on this question), they had the temerity to grow up Jesus-less. Oh, the irony! I had decided not to raise them in the nice, local Methodist church because I couldn't bring myself to present the Christian doctrine as the unvarnished truth, and now 16 years later I am regretting that I managed to leave them almost totally in the dark on a subject that has come to occupy the central place in my spiritual life. Dear Lord, can we please do a make-up?

Because here's the amazing thing. I have (finally) met Jesus again, not as a TV dinner precooked and semi-digested by someone else (please see The Odd Man at the Dinner Party Part II), and not as some intellectual exercise, sanitized for college grads who don't want to look like idiots or be associated with "them." But, in the words of George Fox, as "the Christ Within." As the living Teacher who opened up the  minds and hearts of the first Quakers, as well as many others before and after Fox, including non-Quakers. And this Christ Within continues to do so, bringing transformation and a new way of experiencing life and experiencing it more abundantly. This Christ is not a metaphor or just some super-charged ethical teacher or (to me, at least) an unintelligible cosmic sacrifice necessary for my entry into heaven, or any of the other definitions that include some and exclude many. No, the Christ Within that I have come to know is not separate from Jesus of Nazareth, neither is this Christ Within exclusive to Jesus of Nazareth. This Christ Within is available to all. But I do not believe I could have come to know the Christ Within without the historical Jesus. And I would not have come to know and love this Christ Within, this Jesus, without stopping to drink from the living waters that flow through many Christian traditions - Catholic, Protestant, Quaker. I cannot comment on non-Christian paths because they are outside my experience, but I do know that I have met people of faith from outside Christianity who live lives of godliness and who are clearly powered by the same Spirit of love and transformation that was epitomized in the life and teachings of a man who lived 2,000 years ago in Galilee. As John Woolman discovered in the mid-18th century in his contacts with Native Americans: "I believed some of them were measurably acquainted with that divine Power which subjects the rough and forward Will of the Creature." Jesus, the Christ Within, God, the Divine, is bigger than our definitions, far larger than our self-imposed fortresses, beyond the limits of our human minds, yet miraculously accessible to us all, a promise of a rich life beyond our wildest imaginings.

The Odd Man at the Dinner Party Part II

While walking the dog today I came up with my theory of belief as a TV dinner. Just about every religious faith has one and, certainly, every Christian denomination. The Catholics have a very sumptuous, multi-compartment meal, with a good hunk of meat and lots of really delicious sides, beautifully presented. There are some difficult-to-eat veggies there, too, but the cook in Rome is willing to turn a blind eye if you want to shove some of them under the mashed potatoes. The Baptists' TV dinner is a lot simpler. You definitely know what you're getting and there's no hiding the stuff that might be less than palatable. You have to eat it all. Various other denominations all have their versions of this meal; some have more meat, some more veggies. One denomination favors the carrots over the peas. Another presents it all as dessert, teeth-achingly sweet and fluffy. And before anyone gets on my case for dissing other faith communities, I'm not. For many, many people the TV dinner of their choice really works for them and gives them the sustenance they need to hear God, which is really what it's all about. The odd thing is that in Christianity all of these meals are called the same thing: Jesus. How he is consumed pretty much determines where you go to eat on Sunday.

Most of us grew up with one TV dinner or another, so it's not surprising that when we first turned up at Quaker meeting (assuming it was a liberal unprogrammed one) we soon began to look for the Quaker brand TV dinner. Our tummies were rumbling and we wanted to eat!  But instead of being served a nice tidy container of Quaker Jesus, we were cheerfully told that there was no TV dinner. Instead we had to go to the kitchen and forage for ourselves - pull the ingredients we liked out of the pantry and fridge and cook up our own dinner. If we didn't like veggies, then we didn't have to eat them! Not only that, the cupboards were filled with all sorts of exotic ingredients we never got in our old TV dinners. If you wanted a pinch of Buddhism, then mix it on in. Some Pagan granola? Don't hold back! And if you didn't want any Jesus (maybe he looked a little stale to you), well, you could just leave him on the shelf. You quickly discovered that, in fact, the Quaker meal was not called Jesus at all. You'd cooked up something completely different, customized to your diet preferences. Best of all, as time went on you could drop some ingredients and mix in others so that you could keep it palatable and sustaining as your tastes changed. I'm not knocking this, either. For some of us, it was the only way we could hang in there at all. Our old TV dinners had given us severe indigestion and we'd even perhaps developed some severe allergies, so being able to customize our own individual meals was the only way we could stop ourselves from starving.

While I had come to Quakerism only mildly dyspeptic (rather than covered with hives), I did realize that I would have to fast for a while. One day, early in my Quaker career, I was discussing my on-again, off-again relationship with Jesus with a wise old matriarch at my meeting. Although she had spent the last 60 or so years as a Quaker, she had been born a Baptist and she totally understood my confusion. "You have to go through a period of unlearning," she advised, nodding sagely. At first I wasn't sure what she meant, but the truth of her words slowly dawned on me. Never underestimate the power of those gentle Sunday School teachers from yesteryear to engrave certain images and ideas about Jesus on your young psyches. As a young child I would put myself to sleep by describing in my head the sheer perfection of Jesus, starting with his hair (as shiny as the sun, as soft as lamb's fleece, as golden as, well, gold) and moving downwards towards his toes (although thankfully I was always asleep before I got that far because Lord knows what superlatives my feverish brain would have conjured about the divine end points.) It's no wonder I had to scrub the old hard drive clean. Turns out there was a lot to unload: the blue-eyed Caucasian glowing ethereally from church hall pictures worldwide (even in places where the congregation wasn't Caucasian); the Jesus who wept every time I took his name in vain; bipolar Jesus who one minute represented all that was loving and kind and the next was threatening hell and damnation; Jesus the nitpicker, constantly pointing out where I could do better; Jesus the Jewish mother, finding ever new ways to make me feel guilty. And on and on and on. I was amazed at how much Jesus freight I had. But I kept diligently sloughing it off because I could not quell my desire to, in the words of Marcus Borg, "meet Jesus again for the first time." Turns out, a liberal unprogrammed Quaker meeting is a fabulous place to do this because there is no one trying to replace your old version of Jesus with their new one. There's no Quaker Bill Gates with Jesus 2.0 pushing you to update. It's just you and Jesus working away together in complete obscurity, free from interference or even curiosity.

The Odd Man at the Dinner Party

When I first began attending Quaker meeting 16 years ago, I quickly noticed a notable absence. Sunday after Sunday would pass (or First Day after First Day, as the Quakers insisted on calling it) without a mention of Jesus. I mean, Quakers were Christians, weren't they? It was as if he had dropped down a rabbit hole somewhere in the Quaker past to be replaced by - well, nothing. There was no central figure, no icon, no rallying point. I brought the subject up with the folks that I figured were the "weighty Friends" and received a set of thoroughly unsatisfactory answers, all equally vague and non-committal: "teacher," "model," "significant religious figure," or (my favorite) "metaphor." No matter how hard I tried I couldn't flush out anyone who would give the stock answer: "Divine Son of God who was born to a virgin and died on the cross to atone for my sins and then was resurrected from the dead to sit on the right hand of God until such time as he returns to judge the quick and the dead." I mean, that's the right answer, isn't it? The one that, at the very least, would get you a gold star from the sweet Sunday School teacher - or, more to the point, save you from a miserable fiery eternity if you would just sign on to this version of the Christ story. Eternal damnation, fire and brimstone, or its alternative, wafting around forever on a cloud sporting a pair of wings and plucking a harp didn't appear to be part of the Quaker way.

Frankly, this was a big relief, but I remained disconcerted by the generally Quakerly discomfort with Jesus to whom I took to referring as "the odd man at the Quaker dinner party." He was there if you looked for him, sitting at the far end of the table, sort of awkwardly squeezed in. Most of the other guests were happy to make small talk with him, but no one really wanted to engage with him in any serious way, particularly since some of the guests were determined to ignore him altogether. Poor Jesus. "I'll talk to you," I would squeak inwardly. "I still care."

Of course, I came to Quakerism fairly unmolested spiritually. Unlike many people who cross the Meetinghouse threshold, I was not a member of the walking wounded who had been chewed up and spat out by their previous faith communities (or at least by those brethren in charge of their previous faith communities). Born with a fairly big "God gene," I had thus far enjoyed a fairly riveting walk through a number of religious venues - transcendentalism as expressed in "Little Women," born-again-ism (more than once), transcendental meditation, Mormonism, a brief dabble in Buddhism-lite. All of this my resolutely non-religious family bore with fairly good grace even though I think they found me a little odd and occasionally a real pain in the butt. ("No, I won't give Grandpa his Scotch at 6 because it goes against my religious principles.") I enjoyed all of these sortees and came away pretty positive about all of it even if I couldn't permanently swallow the whole tamale.

By the time I came to Quakerism, I had been off the path for about a decade, getting married, having children, and, shall we say, worshiping at the shrine of Bacchus. But children have a bad habit of getting one thinking about stuff other than the next good time. For reentry into the religious life, I took them to the local Methodist church. Everything a family could want - good people, nice minister who didn't look as if he was going to demand anything scary, terrific youth program. Except I just couldn't do it. I couldn't serve up the usual Christian boilerplate to my children and look them in the eye and say, "It's all true." So I asked my Quaker friend Catherine to take me to Meeting with her. I loved the idea of Quakers. Peaceful, serene, emanating, no doubt, a faintly ethereal glow powered by all of that brotherly love. Also, unusual and vaguely exotic, which I considered a plus. And if I wanted a spiritual path devoid of Christian boilerplate this was definitely it. So why did I feel so bereft at the absence of Jesus?