Growing Together in the Light

The Bible is not the Word of God

2011-11-16T21:04:00.001-05:00

The title of this post might seemshocking to some, but it is standard Quaker theology. Onetraditional formulation of this is that Christ is the Word of God andthe Bible is the words of God. The Bible provides a history of God'sworking with people in the past and so is instructive to us as we tryto make sense of how God is working with us today. Barclay discussesthis issue at length in his 3'rd Proposition. I have alreadydiscussed this here and here. The Barclays full text on the subject can be found here:

Today I would like to focus on 2Timothy 3:16-17:

All scripture is inspired byGod and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, fortraining in righteousness, in order that the person of God may becompetent, equipped for every good work.

I would like topoint out what this passage doesn't say. It does not say thatScripture was written by God. It does not say that it is infallibleor inerrant. It says that it was inspired by God, which means thatit was written by humans who were inspired. From which one canconclude, in fact, that there is also a human element in scripture aswell. Quakers, at least unprogrammed Quakers, have experience withthe differing degrees of the divine and the human elements in theinspired messages they receive each Sunday. We need to listen to theBible with the same discerning ear we use in Meeting for Worship.

Secondly, it isimportant to understand what Paul meant by Scripture. He was notreferring to what we now call the Bible, since it had not all beenwritten at the time. Those parts of the Christian Testament that had been written would notbe assembled until several hundred years later. Scripture, for Pauland other early Christians, would have meant what we call the HebrewTestament. This is significant because this contains the Law ofMoses. Paul elsewhere says that following the law does not lead tosalvation. So Paul is not saying that Scripture is a rule to liveby. He certainly is not saying that what he writes in his lettersshould be used to create a new set of rules to govern Christianbehavior. All he is saying is that study of scripture is useful forpreparing a Christian to be competent and equipped for the work towhich they are called.

There are manyChristian writers and teachers who quote Paul extensively to crate arule of morality for people to follow. This seems to be applied inparticular to areas of sexual morality and the role of women in thechurch and society. For example in Ephesians 5:21-33, Paul says:

Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives, submityourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For thehusband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church,his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits toChrist, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gavehimself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washingwith water through the word, and to present her to himself as aradiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, butholy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love theirwives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and carefor their body, just as Christ does the church— for we are membersof his body. “For this reason a man will leave his father andmother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.”This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and thechurch. However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loveshimself, and the wife must respect her husband.

This is often used to justify the position that wives should besubmissive their husbands. But that was not what I think Paul wasreally about here. I think that he was trying to paint a visionof what the Kingdom of God would look like. He is presenting aradical and revolutionary vision of marriage as a relationship oflove and respect and saying that this is the model for living in theKingdom of God. This applies both to the family and to the churchand its relationship with God. Paul is saying that our personalrelationships need to mirror our relationship with God. This remainsa radical and counter-cultural vision. To turn it into a set ofrules that limit the role of women is in fact to turn the meaning ofthis passage on its head.

The Bible provides us with stories of how God has worked in thelives of people and peoples in the past. It provides us with avision of what is possible if we have faith in the voice of God as weexperience it. It provides us with reason to trust in the love ofGod for us and for all humanity. There are times in our spiritualdevelopment where having a clear set of directions as to how to liveour lives is important, but this is not what God is calling us to. In 2 Timothy 3:5, Paul warns about those who are “holding to theoutward form of godliness but denying its power.” We are calledto follow the law of God that is written on our hearts, and not inbooks. We are called to be friends of God and not servants. We arecalled to be sons and daughters and not slaves. We are called tolive in the transforming power of God's love. We need to have faithin God and trust the freedom that is being offered to us.

Blessings,

Will T

This I know experimentally

2011-10-11T20:53:00.000-04:00

And when all myhopes in them and in all men were gone, so that I had nothingoutwardly to help me, nor could tell what to do, then, Oh then, Iheard a voice which said, 'There is one, even Christ Jesus, that canspeak to thy condition,' and when I heard it my heart did leap forjoy. Then the Lord did let me see why there was none upon the earththat could speak to my condition, namely, that I might give him allthe glory; for all are concluded under sin, and shut up in unbeliefas I had been, that Jesus Christ might have the preeminence, whoenlightens, and gives grace, and faith, and power. Thus, when Goddoth work who shall prevent it? And this I knew experimentally.

George Fox,1647

This is George Fox's description of thegreat opening he had turned him from a seeker to a finder and anitinerant preacher and so led to the Quaker movement. But I want tofocus today on the last sentence, “And this I knew experimentally.” If we were to paraphrase this into modern English, it would probablybe rendered, “And this I knew experientially.” I think thoughthat the older word carries with it some useful associations. Inmodern English, to know something experimentally implies some kind ofscientific rigor. We know something because we have conductedexperiments and have demonstrated it. But scientific experiments arereally a formalized method of trial and error. One proposes an ideaand then conducts some experiments to see if the idea is true or not. This is the heart of the scientific method and seems to us farremoved from spirituality.

I think that for Fox, and anyone whoproposes an experiential theology, as Friends do, the element ofexperiment is important. Fox came to his opening only after he hadtraveled around seeking out the leading lights of his day. He foundthat none of the people who he met could answer the questions in hissoul. He found the answers in an inner voice. He heard this voice,he identified it as the Inner Christ, and he found confirmation inthat his “soul did leap for joy.”

It does not take a lot of introspectionor experience with people to realize that there are a number ofvoices speaking in us at any time. Some Christians will quoteJeremiah 17:9, “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyondcure. Who can understand it?” to support their idea that we shouldtrust only in Scripture, because our own hearts are too unreliable. There is a useful caution here because there appears to be no limitto human powers of self-deception. But this is not the end of thestory. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 2:13 “And we speak of thesethings in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit.”

How are we to know which is the correctvoice to listen to. In John 10:4-5, Jesus says “the sheep followhim because they know his voice. They will not follow a stranger,but they will run from him because do not know the voice ofstrangers.” How do we come to know this voice. The short answeris that we conduct experiments. In Galatians 5:22-23, Paulidentifies the fruits of the Spirit. “By contrast, the fruit ofthe Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity,faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.” In Matthew 7:15-17Jesus instructs his followers to judge people by their fruits. “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing butinwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thorns, or figs from thistles? In the sameway, every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears badfruit.” This is actually very sound practical advice and itapplies to both inward and outward prophets. If we hear a voice thatwe think might be God's, listen and follow it. Then look at theresults. Does it bring forth, in however small a way, any of thefruits of the spirit, or does it have the opposite effect? Thisprovides guidance as to the nature of the voice. So by listening andobserving carefully, one can learn to distinguish the Shepherd'svoice from all others.

Likewise, the journals of Quakerministers have many stories of their difficulties in learning when tospeak in meeting. Some, like David Ferris, recount the long periodsof their resistance to the voice prompting them to speak. He reportsthat it was the fervent prayers of a traveling minister that enabledhim to break through his resistance. John Woolman, on the other hadrecounts a story of when he spoke more than he should have and feltan inward correction. After anguish and prayer, some weeks later hewas led to speak some words in meeting that gave him peace. “As Iwas thus humbled and disciplined under the cross, my understandingbecame more strengthened to distinguish the language of the pureSpirit that inwardly moves upon the heart.” In both cases, therewas an inward prompting or correction. Both people also hadencouragement from their community to pursue greater faithfulness. This is an experimental approach to religion.

For many people, religion has beentaught as something that they have to accept on authority. Sometimesit is the authority of a book, be it the Bible, the Koran, or theTorah. Sometimes it is the authority of a person, be it the Pope, anevangelist, or a pastor. Sometimes the authority is tradition. Anyone who teaches that ultimate authority rests with any outwardauthority and not with the Spirit as heard in the heart is teachingsomething less than the full Christian message. Quakers say that youcan hear God yourself . As Robert Barclay says, “It is theprivilege of the Christian to know the Shepherds voice.” Learning to know this voice is a process and, as in any learning,there are bound to be mistakes. Knowing that we are all learning,we need to be gentle with ourselves and each other when mistakes aremade. But as we progress in our discernment we are able to say, asGeorge Fox did, “And this I know experimentally.”

Blessings,

Will T

Bringing in the sheaves

2011-10-03T20:40:00.000-04:00

May those who sow in tears

reap with shouts of joy.

Those who go out weeping,

bearing the seed forsowing,

shall come home withshouts of joy,

Carrying their sheaves.

Psalm 126:5-6

I attended a wedding at ourmeeting last week and it was a joyful celebration and at meeting thenext morning there were also many messages about joy. This broughtto mind the lines above from Psalm 126 and of course the gospel song that it inspired. There are many links between joy and sorrow and itseems that the two emotions are often experienced in some mixture. Ihave tears of joy because I remember the times of pain. Likewise, atmy times of deepest pain, I often feel closest to God, so there isjoy in that as well.

But what came to me todaywas the realization that it is only when we have been plowed up andbroken open inwardly that the soil of our soul is ready to receivethe Seed of God. At other times, the soil of our soul may be toohard or rocky or dry to receive the Seed. But when we are brokenopen, the Seed can fall in deep, and it can continue to grow, evenwhen the soil above it has been beaten down again and may be hard anddry on the surface. As the seed grows, it brings forth it's fruit oflove, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness,gentleness, and self-control. (Galatians 5:22-23)

By remembering the timeswhen we were broken and hurting, we are able to respondcompassionately and lovingly to those we encounter who are broken andhurting. By receiving, we are enabled to be generous. By being madetender, we are taught how to be gentle with ourselves and each other.

So as Yamen's andBernadette's families spoke of how much they felt welcomed by themeeting, and how the meeting felt joy at being welcomed into their celebration, I realized how much the meeting learnedabout opening itself and surrounding people with love when weaccompanied our Friend Bill and his family on the journey from hisdiagnosis with brain cancer to his death 6 months later. Out of thattime of weeping, we have brought forth fruits of community andopenness and welcoming and we rejoice bringing in those sheaves.

The world is filled withbrokenness and pain. But in all of that brokenness are the placeswhere the world is broken open to receive the Seed of God. In thetime of weeping we must also be sowing. We do not know how long theseeds will take to germinate and grow. I remember reading that theground in the desert in the Southwest United States is filled withseeds. There are something like 10,000 seeds per cubic inch of soil. Because of the dry conditions, these seeds can last for hundreds andthousands of years, each waiting for just the right conditions ofrain and temperature for it to germinate. Some require a short butintense rain. Others, moisture over a longer period. The rightconditions might only happen once every hundred years, but when theycome, the seeds are ready. And when the time comes, we can rejoicein the harvest and the increase, knowing that in that increase is theKingdom of God; knowing that in the increase the seeds are being madeready for the next sowing.

Blessings to all,

Will T

A benevolent God

2011-09-16T21:45:00.000-04:00

I found this picture and accompanying articleon the web on Sept 12. I found it disturbing on many levels. Thispicture is of a man who jumped from the World Trade Center onSeptember 11, 2001, and it appeared in many newspapers the next day. Thestatement struck me as obviously true, but I know that this is nottrue for all people. In fact, it was important for at least onefamily to know that the person in the photo was not their loved oneprecisely because they felt that anyone who jumped from the WorldTrade Center was committing suicide and would be damned to hell.

Jesus, of course, did not condemnsinners. He ate with them and associated with them and healed them,much to the dismay of people with a much more rigid view of whatproper behavior was. Jesus accompanies us in our brokenness. He invites us to see our own brokenness and sinfulness and start ourjourney to God from that point, and not from the place of judgmentand self-righteousness. It is in our acknowledgment of our ownshortcomings that we are able to have compassion for others who havealso fallen short. This is the compassion of God and the compassionof Jesus who welcomed into heaven the thief being crucified next tohim.

But as I read the article I felt howimportant this exercise in Christian education that I have undertaken is. There are people who have been taught a version of Christianitythat is very un-Christian. It is important to present an alternativeview for the sake of those who are in pain because of an inaccurateunderstanding of God. From reading the comments to the originalstory, it is also appears that many people reject God andChristianity because they are rejecting exactly suchnarrow-mindedness and to them Christianity and narrow mindedness andsuperstition are synonymous. Those of us who believe in anexperiential and compassionate Christianity have a responsibility tosee that this vision is presented to the world as a viable andattractive alternative.

We must also remember that while thismay look like a doctrinal issue, it is mostly a matter of attitude. It is possible to believe that committing suicide would send you tohell but to also recognize that jumping out of a window to escape afire hot enough to cause metal beams to sag is not suicide. Theproblem is not the doctrine, it is the rigid application of thedoctrine without compassion or understanding. The problem is takingones own views and attitudes and making it a rule by which you judgeeveryone else whatever their beliefs. I have seen this play outamong Friends on both sides of the disputes over acceptance of gaymen and lesbian women into full fellowship with Friends. I haveheard reports of Quaker parents disowning their children for beinggay. I also know of liberal Friends who would withhold contributionsto their own meetings if so much of a dollar of that money would endup in the hands of Friends United Meeting. If you look across thetheological and political spectrum of Friends, you will findcompassionate, caring and open minded people. You will also findjudgmental, self-righteous and rigid people. Sometimes they will bethe same people.

I don't know how to open hearts andminds, but God does. We need to make our meetings communities wherewe can feel safe enough to admit to their own brokenness and hold inlove and compassion the brokenness of others. They need to be placeswhere we can look at our fears and to put down our swords andshields; where we can look at the people around us with compassionand love, and in doing so, find compassion and grace for ourselves. We need to make our meetings places where the Commonwealth of God ismade visible to all.

Blessings,

Will T

Faith is a Relationship

2011-09-05T14:55:00.000-04:00

If you ask someone about their faith,they may describe it in terms of a creed or a document. In manychurch services there is a part in which a statement of faith isrecited, be it the Apostle's Creed or the Nicene Creed, or somethingelse. Orthodox Friends might reference The Richmond Declarationof Faith. If you ask me, I amlikely to go into a discussion of Barclay's Apology. We tend to view our faith as if it were the same as our beliefs. Iam as likely to fall into this trap as anyone. But I don't thinkthat God is particularly interested in theology.

Jesus is alwaysasking his followers whether they believe, whether they have faith. But it is always, do you believe in me, do you have faith in me? When Peter saw Jesus walking on the water, (Matt 14:22-33), Petersaid, “Lord, if it is you command me to come to you on the water.” Jesus said come and Peter boldly stepped out of the boat and startedwalking on the water. But when he noticed the strong wind, he becamefearful and began to sink and called out to Jesus, who reached outand saved him. Then Jesus asked, “You of little faith, why did youdoubt?” This was not the faith of intellectual belief that he wasasking about, this was a question Peter's faith in the power of Godto hold him up.

When Jesus healedpeople, he was clear that it was a matter of faith. Not faith indogma or scripture but faith in Jesus' ability to heal. When thecenturion came and asked Jesus to heal his servant, (Matt 8:5-13) thecenturion says, “Don't bother coming to my house, I am not worthy. Just give the order and he will be healed.” Jesus said, “Truly Itell you, in no one in Israel have i found such faith.... Let it bedone to you according to your faith.”

But how does thistranslate to our lives today since Jesus lived and died some 2,000years ago? This was the key insight of George Fox that Christ canstill speak to us. “There is even one Christ Jesus who can speakto your condition.” “Christ has come to teach his peoplehimself.” This was the wondrous news that made Fox's heart jumpfor joy. Christ can be known inwardly and we are invited to live inrelationship with this inward Christ, just as the disciples lived inrelationship to the outward Jesus in Galilee. They saw this as afulfillment of the prophesy of Jeremiah 31:33-34, “ But this is thecovenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days,says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it ontheir hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Knowthe Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them tothe greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, andremember their sin no more.” This is a call to know God and to bein relationship with God.

EvangelicalChristians are right on the mark with their question “Have youaccepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior?” if theymean by that, “Do you trust the voice of Christ within you to leadyou to healing and greater love and understanding?” But for me,this question carries with it a sense that there is only onerelationship to have with Jesus and our experience of the Divinetakes a single form. If you haven't had a particular experience orif your relationship with God is different, then you are, at best, asecond-class Christian. The Biblical record contradicts this. Godappears to people throughout the Bible and each event is unique. Godwalks with Adam in the cool of the morning. God appeared to Abrahamin the form of 3 strangers walking down the road. Moses encounteredGod in a burning bush. Jacob wrestled with God through an entirenight. God answered Job out of a whirlwind. God appeared to Elijahas a still small voice after the whirlwind, the earthquake and thefire had all passed by. The miracle of Pentecost was not that theapostles spoke in tongues. The miracle was that the apostles spokeand every listener heard them in their own language. God is alwaysspeaking to us in our own language and in the context of our ownknowledge and experience. If we have a personal relationship withGod, than each relationship will be unique, just as each of us areunique. And each of is is being called into relationship with God.

Blessings,

Will T

Christian Education

2011-09-02T21:01:00.000-04:00

During the discussion at NEYM Sessionson renaming the Christian Education committee, I startedthinking about other meanings of Christian education, and thosethoughts have been percolating ever since. My first thoughts wereabout the need to educate Christians. Although early Friends thoughtthat they were on a mission to spread their gospel to the entireworld, it turned out that it was mostly a matter of educatingChristians. When they spoke in the steeple-houses, or in the yardsoutside when they were not allowed to speak inside, they were tryingto educate Christians about the true nature of Christianity. Christianity as they experienced it and understood it, bore littlerelationship to what was being preached in many of the churches. They did not pull any punches about this, either. Barclay called thedoctrine of predestination “a horrid blasphemy against the love ofGod.” It appears to me that a large portion of the ChristianChurch in America has become captive to the kingdoms of this world. Early Friends saw themselves as primitive Christianity revived. Weneed to educate ourselves and others about how revived Christianityis different from what we see around us.

The second area of Christian educationthat came to mind is based on who it is that comes to our meetings. Many people come to Friends suffering some sort of spiritual traumafrom whatever tradition they came from. Many of these people havedifficulty hearing Christian language. At some point we need to beclear, as Quakers, that our view of Christianity is different fromwhat it was where they came from. We need to be able toarticulate a non-traumatic and healing vision of Christianity. Andwe need to embody this vision in our lives and in our meetings.

With this in mind I am planning tostart a series of posts on Christian education. I will be discussingvarious aspects of Christian theology and what the Quaker take on itis. Much of what I will have to say will not be unique to Quakerism,but I will try to identify how the Quaker tradition embodies thesethings. Some Friends are not comfortable with theologicaldiscussions, but ultimately any faith tradition is an embodiment of aparticular theology. It is difficult to understand the puzzling orunique aspects of any faith tradition without understanding thetheology that underlies it. For instance, it is strange to find outthat some Catholic and Episcopal churches have special sinks that arenot connected to the regular plumbing . But if you know that thesesinks are used for washing the dishes used during the Eucharist andif you understand the concept of transubstantiation, it is easier tounderstand that people would not want any drops of wine or crumbs ofwafer that have become the physical body and blood of Christ, to bewashed out into the common sewer. Quakerism has its own quirks andoddities. I do not intend to discuss our peculiarities ofarchitecture, but I do expect to discuss some of our uniquereligious, organizational and cultural structures.

This is all matter that I am stillworking on myself, so I hope that what I write can be a startingpoint for discussion.

Blessings,

Will T

NEYM Part 6 – In which I mention briefly what I have ommitted and we take our leave of each other.

2011-08-25T21:42:00.000-04:00

I have not reported on allthat occurred during this years sessions of New England YearlyMeeting. There is, of course, no way that one person could do thatanyway. There are two major omissions that I would like toacknowledge. The first was a performance on Tuesday evening of acontemporary oratorio, The Fire and the Hammer. This was the firstperformance of this work in North America. I found the performancevery moving. The words are taken in large part from Fox's Journaland Letters, as well as some letters by Margaret Fell. The piececovers the time from Fox's youth to his vision of a great people tobe gathered. I got a sense of how difficult a period this was forGeorge Fox and the strength he must have possessed to do what he didwhile the Quaker movement was just beginning to take shape. I wasalso impressed by how well the chorus and the soloists came togethersince they had less than a week to rehearse together before theirperformance.

The second was the Bible Half Hours byMaggie Edmundson, pastor of Winthrop Center Friends Church, in Maine. The presentations were informative, entertaining and nourishing. She explored Scriptures and found in it the voice of the Earth, andthe voice of God calling us to live in unity with the earth. I amnot going to try to provide a digest of the talks. I understand thatrecordings of the talks have been made and will be available from theYearly Meeting office. I encourage Friends who are interested totake advantage of the recordings.

When we met on Thursday morning, we hadcompleted most of our business. We approved our epistle. We heard reports from thevisitors to the various youth and young adult yearly meetings. Weheard the report on sessions and our numbers. The youths joined usand read their epistles to us. Then we adjourned and had lunch andtook our leave of each other.

During sessions, and as I reflect onthe experience afterwards, Psalm 133 keeps coming back to me.

1 How goodand pleasant it is
when God’s people livetogether in unity!

2 It is like precious oil poured on the head,
   runningdown on the beard,
running down on Aaron’s beard,
   downon the collar of his robe.
3 It is as if the dew of Hermon
   were falling on Mount Zion.
For there theLORD bestows his blessing,
   even lifeforevermore.

This was the theme for NEYM Sessionssome years ago, but it is so fitting. The image of the oil on thehead is the annointing of Aaron to be priest. The unity and love weexperienced at these sessions felt like an annointing. It showed uswhat is possible and why it is important to keep working thedifficult issues and to pray about them. It showed us that we canstay in the place of brokenness and not fear it, because healing willcome. It showed us that we can trust in the Lord because the Lordcan work miracles. This blessing and annointing that we received isnot just a reward for work already done. It is a preparation and acommission for the work we have yet to do.

Blessings

Will T

NEYM Part 5 - In which we work together in the Light.

2011-08-23T22:18:00.001-04:00

The first significant issue that cameforward on Wednesday morning was the preliminary approval to thechapter of Faith and Practice on Corporate Discernment. The sticking point was the recommendation that if a Friend standsaside from a decision of the meeting, that person's name should notbe recorded in the minutes. Some friends were concerned that thiswould make the work of future historians more difficult. ChristopherMcCandless, a former clerk of NEYM, shared with us that he felt thatthe biggest mistake that he made while he was clerk, was in recordingthe names of people who were standing aside from the decisions madeabout our relationship with FUM. Once he did that, he had some 20people wanting to be recorded, and he doubted that any futurehistorian would be able to figure out all of their differentmotivations. Another friend spoke about another elephant in theroom, and in fact it might be the mother of all the other elephants, andthat is pride. It appears that some people want to be recorded asstanding aside so that they can be shown later to have been on theright side of history. Such an attitude is not conducive to the kindof unity that we seek. The chapter was approved with one friendstanding aside because he could not be in unity with the section onstanding aside.

I wish that I had participated in sucha discussion and discernment about our business practice before I hadattended the FUM General Board Meeting in Kenya 5 years ago. It is tooeasy for us to see the mechanisms of Quaker process as a quaintvariation of Robert's Rules of Order and think of them as techniquesfor political advantage. We do not sufficiently appreciate that theQuaker practice of business is radically different than the world's. From time to time we may get business done, but the deeper purpose is tobuild up our discernment, faithfulness and unity as a body.

The other major issue on Wednesdaymorning was our relationship with FUM. Two years ago the YearlyMeeting had agreed to a mechanism that if a meeting minuted that itwanted to withhold funds from FUM that they could contact thetreasurer, reduce their contribution to the Yearly Meeting by thatamount and that amount would be deducted from the contribution thatNEYM sends to FUM. But because there are Friends in New England thatwant to hold FUM harmless, there was also a fund set up to receivecontributions from Friends specifically to replace these withheldfunds. As a result, Friends who were concerned that they not besupporting an organization that they felt was discriminatory couldcontribute to their monthly meetings and through them the YearlyMeeting without violating their conscience. But Friends who feltthat it was important that NEYM continue to support FUM fully couldcontribute additional amounts with love and respect for theconsciences of these other Friends. It was clearly not a long termsolution but it was being recommended that this be extended foranother two years.

The clerk of Wellesley Meeting spokeabout how the discussion in their meeting had been very painful andthat several years ago they had brought that pain to the YearlyMeeting. She wished that some of those same people could have beenhere this year. The current mechanism had been important in allowingdiscussion and discernment to continue while removing the pressurethat had surrounded the issue of contributions. Other speakers notedthat it takes time for Monthly Meetings to find out about thedecisions of the Yearly Meeting and then to proceed based on that. As a result, a number of meetings are only beginning to consider theissues raised.

I spoke that, while it was significantthat the FUM General Board had acknowledged that it was unable tofind unity on the sexual ethics portion of the FUM Personnel Policy,and that while we had already seen evidence of God to performmiracles in a body, it was highly unlikely that FUM was going tochange its Personnel Policy in the next two years. Part of the workthat we need to do is to deal with the whole issue of how do webalance the call of individual conscience with what we as a body arewilling to do. This is work that we need to do primarily in our ownmonthly meetings. Delay will not make the problem go away. Anotherfriend noted that we also have to deal with the homophobia andheterosexism in our own meetings.

The proposal was approved. The senseof unity was not as strong as the day before, but I think that isbecause we still have a lot of work to do. What we had was the unityof committing to continue difficult work together, rather than thejoyful unity that comes when the labor is completed. But it wasstill a gathered and favored meeting. Our sessions this year weretruly blessed.

Blessings to all,

Will T

NEYM Part 4 – In which two miracles occur.

2011-08-22T20:11:00.000-04:00

On Tuesday morning, the yearly meetingbudget came up for approval. The treasurer and the Finance Committeemade their presentation. After a number of difficult years, theirmain news was that we were in the black for the first time in severalyears. There may have been a clarifying question or two but then thebudget was approved with no further discussion. Elapsed time, about10 minutes. To me, this certainly qualifies as a miracle.

The other major item on our agenda thatmorning was a proposal for changing the name of the ChristianEducation committee to the Quaker Youth Education Committee. Thischange was being proposed because the committee found that it wasdoing a lot more than helping with First-Day Schools and they wantedtheir name to reflect that. Their new purpose statement starts:

The goal of theQuaker Youth Education Committee is to help the Yearly Meeting'schildren and youth: build personal foundations of Quaker history,practice, and belief, Christan education, and comparative religion;find effective ways to witness to their beliefs in the world; andbecome spiritually resilient in a complex and changing society.

As understandable as this desire was,it was also clear that this change could become a flash point for allof the tensions in the Yearly Meeting between Christian andnon-Christian Friends. What happened was truly remarkable andanother miracle. The first speaker was a well-known Christian andspoke about her first reaction to this proposal was fear that thiswas going to be a first step in turning Quakerism into anon-Christian religion. Butshe was not going to be governed by her fear. She trusted in the goodfaith of the committee and the care that it had taken already. Afriend who has often had reservations about Christian language spokeabout how much she valued hearing the Christians in the yearlymeeting. Another well-known Christian Friend spoke about howimportant it was to her that she was accepted into membership whenshe was not a Christian. There was a palpable sense of unity in theroom. The change was approved. There was a bit of difficulty inpreparing the minute but it was resolved when we finally realizedthat the discomfort was because the proposed minute did not go farenough in recognizing the value the body was putting on the Christianvoices in the Yearly Meeting.

Blessings,

Will T

NEYM Part 3 - In Which We Listen Deeply and Are Broken Open

2011-08-20T19:41:00.002-04:00

Our Monday morning session was givenover to listening deeply. This session arose from a concern raisedby Hannah Zwirner, a young adult Friend who has grown up in NewEngland Yearly Meeting. As she has said:

This program cameout of my frustration with the way the Yearly meeting collectivelyhas talked in the last few years about our relationship with FUM. Prior meetings about FUM on the YM floor have left me veryun-centered, and I don't think that there has been enough deeplistening to each other's experiences. Instead, I think our meetingshave involved many quick reactions to others' statements withoutfirst holding those messages in our hearts. It is my feeling thatmany people feel that the wider community has not fully or properlyreceived their stories and the truths that they live. I think thatthere are a lot of people who simply feel unready to act until theyhave been heard.

The form the session took was to have apanel of four people share their experiences while asking the largercommunity to sit deeply with them. The people were chosen to have adiversity of experience but not to be representative of the entireyearly meeting. After the last speaker finished we were asked to gointo worship with the discipline that we were to listen and let themessages to sink in and we were to have no vocal ministry.

The first person to speak was EdenGrace. She introduced herself simply as being from Beacon HillFriends Meeting but she is also FUM Field Staff at the FUM Africaoffice in Kisumu, Kenya and has also served as a representative tothe World Council of Churches where she taught them how to use theQuaker decision making process. She spoke how she identifies as anEvangelical Christian. She also spoke of the healing value ofconfession. Then for the rest of her time, she confessed to the sinsof Christianity.

In the name of me and my people, Iconfess that we have been proud and arrogant....

In the name of me and my people, Iconfess that we have excluded people and their gifts because they arenot like us.....

In the name of me and my people Iconfess that we have valued power above the love of neighbor...

In the name of me and my people Iconfess....

The list just kept going on and on andby the time she finished, she was crying, other panelists werecrying, I was crying, and many people in the body were crying. Itwas an incredibly powerful moment. I think it broke open the entirebody.

In the silence that followed her talk,someone in the body started to sing. The microphone spacers (Thosepeople appointed by Ministry and Counsel to carry portablemicrophones to people wishing to address the body.) quickly rose andindicated with hand gestures to quiet down and stop. A number of thepeople on the stage who were holding the body in prayer also rose atthis time, as did some people in the body. The singing quicklysubsided. This was another indication of the increased discipline ofthe body and our increased ability to sit in a difficult place andstay there.

Brian Drayton spoke about Spirit andcommunity. What are we about as the Society of Friends? At themost basic level, we are called to holiness. We are to live ourlives at the disposal of the divine life whose being is both truthand love. Entering a spiritual community means joining yourspiritual life to the other members of the community. Our religioussociety and the larger Quaker institutions we have created are onlytools created to meet certain needs. Quoting Erasmus, “I must staywith this church until I find a better one, and the church must putup with me until I am a better person.” Is our worship bringing usto a place where our impurities are named and burned away, orcertainties transformed, and everything reassembled by the action oflove? If so we are renewed little by little. If not, we have notcome to true worship. We have more work to do.

Anne- Marie Witzburg spoke about howshe was raised a Quaker and taught that God has no hands but ours. She has tried to do the work she is called to do and to live hervalues. At age 4 she learned that all life is sacred so since thenshe has been a vegetarian because animals are sacred too. She grewup boycotting grapes in solidarity with the United Farm Workers andboycotting Coca-Cola because of their business in South Africa. Shegrew up thinking that all Quakers loved everyone because that waswhat Jesus would do. It was a shock to her and to her family todiscover that there were Quaker organizations with homophobicpersonnel policies. It was a shock to realize that she and hersister were not equal in the eyes of all Friends because one waspartnered with a man and the other a woman.

She feels the spiritual grounding ofpeople working with FUM and the FUM missions and the spiritualgrounding of people resisting membership in that organization. If weare all truly listening to our leadings and to what we must do, thenwe are all doing the right thing. She worries about where the lineis between loving others who are at different points in theirjourneys and betraying her own values. She is concerned aboutbelonging to a yearly meeting that rejects membership in racistorganizations but within which, racism is still present. She isconcerned that NEYM insists on membership in a homophobicorganization but denies that homophobia exists among us still. Sheworries about questioning her own still small voice instead oflistening fully and following faithfully what she know to be true andright. She worries about homophobia and internalized homophobia andquestions of white privilege and guilt and how those struggles get inthe way of listening to the Light and her leadings. And she wondersif other people have those struggles as well.

Lisa Graustein presented a spectrum ofacceptance for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgendered and Queerpeople. There is homophobia, there is heterosexism, which mightaccept gay men and lesbians but which considers heterosexualorientation as normative, there is tolerance, there is beingwelcoming and affirming, and there is being an ally. She sharedabout the stories she heard from gay men, lesbian women and theirfamilies when she was traveling in Kenya for the FUM Triennial in2002. She also recounted her experiences with homophobia andheterosexism within New England Yearly Meeting.

The meeting ended with about 25 minutesof deep and silent worship.

I spoke with a number of peopleafterwards and many of them talked about how powerful the experiencewas. The relationship if NEYM with FUM was on our agenda for laterin the week and for the first time I found myself looking forward tothat session with anticipation and not apprehension. It seemed to methat something had changed and I was looking forward to seeing how itwould play out.

Clearly, God was at work.

Blessings,

Will T

NEYM Sessions - Part 2 In which our first miracle occurs

2011-08-17T21:02:00.001-04:00

The tradition of New England YearlyMeeting is to have intergenerational worship on Sunday morning, perhaps a speaker, and atime of open worship. The intergenerational worship is usually ledby one of the groups within the Yearly Meeting or a particular monthly meeting and it is often programmed in some way or another. This yearthe intergenerational worship was led by the Young Friends (HighSchool age Friends). They introduced us to what they referred to as“loud worship.” They projected a power point slide with a queryon it. They then displayed in a somewhat random order, the names ofmonths. When the month of your birthday was called, you were tostand and give your response to the query. You were to totallyignore the usual etiquette of speaking in meeting. You should speakwhether or not you felt moved, you should rise and speak, even ifsomeone else was already speaking, and so on. For the second query,the selection was by day of the month when your birthday was. Theresult was a cacophony of voices, although it was interesting howmany messages you could actually hear. Friends followed directionsabout as well as they usually do, with several speaking, even whenthe prompt was for “Nobody.” During the the second query, thatprompt got someone to recite the first lines of the Emily Dickinsonpoem, “I'm Nobody.” Someone else picked it up and said a few more lines and we ended upwith an antiphonal recitation of the entire poem.

Following this we had a messagedelivered by Dikson Santiesteban pastor of Puerto Padre FriendsChurch, Cuba Yearly Meeting. He spoke about how theCuban people have been able to survive through their difficulties andhis answer was “Solidarity.” He described how, during HurricaneIke, many people from the town crowded into the church in Deliciasfor shelter, and how everyone, even the Communist Party members,prayed. He called for solidarity among Friends.

The open worship that followed thismessage was the first miracle of the week. It was the mostdisciplined Sunday morning Meeting for Worship I have experienced atNEYM sessions. The messages were well spaced, there were not largenumbers of people standing at once to get the microphone to give amessage, and none of the messages were markedly inappropriate. Idon't know if it was because we have had more experience after lastyear's Meetings to Hear God's Call, if it was because everyone hadalready had a chance to talk, or if it was the counter example ofhaving just experienced the loud worship, but it felt like a miracle.

During worship one person spoke abouthow she visited Friends in Cuba for the first time when the SovietUnion had just collapsed the the Russian subsidies to Cuba hadstopped. People were very thin, and she spoke how she saw peoplegive away their last half cup of rice, because someone else needed itmore. She felt herself convicted by this because she was so oftenreluctant to give, even from her surplus. Another Friend spoke aboutthe need to listen carefully to each other. What was exceptional wasthat it came through a person who is very opinionated and oftenoutspoken. The power of the message came from God speaking through anunexpected voice.

The official theme of this year'ssessions was 350 Years of New England Friends: Called to Heal aBroken Earth. The number 350 was doubly significant. Not only wasit the number of years the Yearly Meeting has met. It is also theparts per million of carbon dioxide in the air that is sustainablefor life as we used to know it on this planet. After lunch, SteveChase from Putney, Vt., Meeting gave a plenary presentation on peakoil, climate change and the transition movement. This topic could have left us immobilized with despair andfrustration but instead left us with a sense that we were notpowerless and alone in the face of the changes that we are alreadyencountering.

When we regathered for business in theevening we approved, through the unity agenda, receiving most of thecommittee and staff reports that had been published in the advancedocuments, as well as most of our housekeeping minutes. This freedup time so that we could give greater attention to a few, more majorsubjects. The Faith and Practice Revision Committee read to us muchof their proposed chapter on Corporate Discernment. They solicitedcomments then and through the week and would bring the chapter backlater for preliminary approval. I will go into more detail about thediscussion in a later post. I will just say that I think it may havehelped us during our later meetings to have heard much of thismaterial read to us and to be thinking about how we do business.

The first full day and we were beginning to see God moving amongst us.

Blessings,

Will T

NEYM Sessions -- Part 1 In which it appears that we have picked up right where we left off

2011-08-16T22:08:00.001-04:00

New England Yearly Meeting Sessionsofficially began Saturday evening August 6. But because of theevent on Friday at the Great Meeting House, manypeople had actually arrived on Friday evening. Some of these peoplehad committee meetings to attend, but I was pretty free. I used themorning to take a badly needed nap. I generally try to come toYearly Meeting rested because it can be physically taxing. Not thatsitting most of the day is so difficult, but because I tend to stayup late socializing and then have to get up early for breakfast. Itis easy for the 6 days to become an exercise in sleep deprivation.

This year I was physically tired, butemotionally refreshed when I got to sessions. During the last twoweeks of July, my wife and I went to Hawaii in celebration of our30^th wedding anniversary. We had a totally excellent timeand we ended with 3 days of doing little but lying on the beach inMaui and swimming and snorkeling. By the end we were totally restedand refreshed.

Then we had a 12 hour overnight planeflight back to Boston. And as tiring as that was, we had troublesleeping because of the 6 hour time difference. I went back to workfor four days. I had some deadlines to meet that would occur while Iwas at NEYM. So I was working late and not sleeping well. At leastI had worked through the jet lag by the time sessions started.

Because of the early start, Saturdaywas not a rush of packing up the car and getting to sessions tounpack. It also meant that we had two additional meals to visit withpeople over. As a result I felt a greater sense of relaxation andspaciousness when we gathered on Saturday night. As usual, there wasnot much actual business to be conducted. It was mostly the usualintroductions and our traditional calling the roll of meetings andgeneral description of the week ahead. But when the time came toapprove the minutes there was an objection raised to the phrase thatsomething was “our cross to bear.” because of the Christianovertones of that phrase. This seemed to pick up right where weleft off from our approval of the Minute of Sending Forth at last sessions where some Friends had difficulty with the explicitChristian language. The minute was finally approved with only minorchanges, if I recall correctly, to make it clearer that this wasreporting on what someone said and was not meant to speak for theentire Yearly Meeting. There had been considerable discussion overthe intervening year about language and inclusivity and exclusivitybut it seemed we were right back in the middle of it with ourdivisions staring us in the face.

But God had other plans

Blessings,

Will T.

NEYM Sessions: Prologue, The Great Meeting House

2011-08-14T15:16:00.007-04:00

Last year at sessions we began ourcelebration of New England Yearly Meetings 350'th year with a Jubileein which we set aside most of our business and spent much of our timetogether in Meetings to Hear God's Call. This year, to cap off theyear, we had a gathering at the Great Meeting House in Newport, RIthe day before the official start of sessions.

The Great Meeting House was built in1699 and hosted the sessions or New England Yearly Meeting from thenuntil 1905 except for a few years during the American RevolutionaryWar when the British blockade prevented people from the mainlandreaching Newport. It is a large building and when it was used forsessions sat several thousand people. The major beams visibleoverhead in the original section are at least 2 feet square and runthe full width of the building and are each cut from a single tree. There are boards on the interior walls that are three feet wide. Wejust do not have trees like that anymore. At the time the buildingwas built, the forest of similar trees extended from the east coastto beyond the Mississippi River.

The first part of the afternoon wasspent in doing a number of service projects at the Martin Luther KingCommunity Center, next door. At one time the Community Center washoused in the Great Meeting House. Friends gathered litter from thegrounds, painted exterior trim, and helped move shelves and organizematerials in the center.

We then held a silent Peace Vigil onthe front corner of the grounds. It was a hot day but just as thevigil started a breeze came up and a number of people reported thatthey felt a sense of blessing when that happened. ( I was stillcleaning paint brushes and re-hydrating myself at the start of thevigil.) There was steady traffic through the intersection where westood and many passers-by were supportive, waving the peace sign,honking or waving. One man called out from a passing car, “Loveyour oatmeal.”

The original plan had been for peopleto bring their own dinners and perhaps something to share but thatseemed to morph into an impromptu potluck. Inside the Meeting Housewas an historical exhibit that highlighted some of the history ofFriends in New England. After dinner, we heard a brief talk on thehistory of the building. There was a musical presentation with achorus of Friends presenting a few numbers from “The Fire and theHammer” which was going to be presented in full later on during theYearly Meeting Sessions. We then had a meeting for worship. I wastired from a very busy week with insufficient sleep. I had workedoutside in the sun most of the afternoon, had just eaten, and themeeting house was warm. I found myself nodding off and wondering howmany of my forbears had also dozed in these rooms. I take somecomfort from reading in Elias Hick's Journal of times when he reportsthat he was beset by a “drowsy sleepy spirit” during the forepartof meeting. Of course, most of the time, he goes on to say that heovercame that and was later opened to give testimony in the latterportion of the meeting. Such was not my case that evening. Nevertheless, it was a favored meeting.

It was reported at the end of theevening that there were about 250 people in attendance, far in excessof the 140 or so who had registered in advance. I found the day tobe very satisfying. It seems that it might be a generally usefulidea to seek ways to incorporate acts of concrete service into ourtimes together. It not only helps us break up our sometimes intensefocus on the internal workings of the Society of Friends, but it isalso a gentle form of outreach and letting the world know thatFriends are not just an historical curiosity or makers of oatmeal.

More to come.

Blessings,

Will T

The man born blind

2011-04-10T20:31:00.000-04:00

Jesus was walking with the disciples and the encountered a man who had been blind from birth. Jesus spit on the ground and made mud from the dust and saliva and spread the mud on the man's eyes. Jesus told the man to wash in the pool of Siloam. When the man did so, his sight was restored. When Jesus found the man next, he asked him, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” The man answered, “And who is he, sir? Tell me so that I may believe in him.” Jesus said, “You have seen him, and the one speaking to you is he.” The man said, “Lord, I believe.” And he worshiped him. (From John 9:1-38)

When Jesus asked people if they believed, it was never belief in doctrine. He was always asking if they believed in Him. He was inviting them into relationship. He is still asking. He is asking us if we believe in Him. He is not asking us if we believe in the Nicene Creed or the Apostle's Creed. He is not asking us if believe in the Virgin Birth or the existence of heaven or hell. He is not even asking us if we believe in the divinity of Jesus. He is asking us if we believe in the Risen Christ.

It is quite proper, at this point for us to ask, who is this Risen Christ. “Who is he, sir? Tell me so that I may believe.” And the answer still is, "The one speaking to you is he.” We are asked to believe that we can hear the voice of God and that the voice we hear is from God. We are asked to believe that we can know God and have a relationship with God. And we are asked to believe, not because someone has told us that this is so, but because we have experienced God and know it to be true.

God does not care what name we use. All we are being asked is to recognize the voice. We are being asked to believe in that inward sense of God, just as we believe in our spouses and our friends. We know them, trust them and love them and we know that they know, trust and love us as well. We are asked to trust and be faithful to the voice of God within, even when it is asking us to do things that frighten us to the core. God will show us things about ourselves that we are afraid to look at. God will ask us to do things that we may be afraid to do. Every fiber of our being may be trembling in fear and saying, “No.” And we are being called to the place and trust where we can say “Yes.” We are being asked to believe that this is a voice of power, that we will be held and protected. We are being asked to believe that even when there appears to be no way forward, a way will open. We are being asked to believe that we will be healed, that our eyes will be opened. We are being called into faithfulness in all things because we can trust this voice. We are being asked to follow this voice and no other because it is the voice that leads us to wholeness.

Blessings,

Will T

FUM General Board, February 2011

2011-03-14T20:43:00.000-04:00

What follows is a lightly edited version of the report I submitted to New England Yearly Meeting about the February meeting of the FUM General Board. Since I originally wrote this, one of the things that keeps coming back to my mind is the point Robert Barclay makes to the effect that we are required to follow our conscience, even if our conscience is mistaken. In other words, we are required to be faithful to the Light we have been given. It is a help to remember this whenever there is profound disagreement. It reminds us to respect the integrity of those we disagree with and to always consider that we may be the ones with the mistaken conscience. It is only the bonds of love that can hold us together

General Board Report

February 2011

This was the final FUM General Board Meeting that I will attend in my current term of service. I have served as the NEYM representative for five years. It has been a challenging, difficult and also rewarding experience. I have learned a lot about FUM and about myself. I have been able to build relationships with people I would not have otherwise met.

FUM finances seem to be improving somewhat but current operations are still spreading the current staff too thin. It is not clear how much longer this can continue. The Board approved the appointment of Colin Saxton to be the new General Secretary beginning in January. We also made arrangements for Sylvia Graves to carry over on an interim basis until Colin can start. I was impressed by Colin and everyone I spoke to seemed to be excited that he was led to this position. He brings new energy to the position and I think he will be able to speak with and listen to a wide range of the membership of FUM.

The Executive Committee had received the minute that the FUM committee of New England Yearly Meeting had sent to the General Board in respone to the murder of David Kato in Uganda, asking it to reaffirm it's minute condemning violence against gays. They expanded the scope of the minute to include other incidents of violence but left in the specific reference to violence against gay men and lesbian women. The General Board approved this minute and it will be sent to the meetings of FUM.

The other major issue on the agenda was consideration of the Personnel Manual. Sylvia Graves had undertaken a major revision of this to bring it into line with Indiana labor law. Most of the changes were fairly straightforward and did not draw forth any discussion. The sticking point was the policy on sexual ethics. It was clear that the General Board would not be able to find unity on this section and, in the course of consideration it was clear that there was little interest in even discussing the substance of the issue. Instead the discussion focused almost entirely on how to approve the policy manual and still respect the conscience of those who could not approve the sexual ethics portion. We ended up approving all of the rest of the manual and noting that we could not find unity on the section on sexual ethics. Neither was there unity is removing it. Because the sexual ethics policy had been approved by the General Board in 1988 it remains in effect and the new manual will indicate that approval and that the current board cannot find unity on it.

In our worship on Saturday morning Doug Shoemaker from Indiana Yearly Meeting led the devotions speaking from Matthew 21 which includes the account of Jesus driving the money changers from the temple, his cursing the fig tree and the parable of the evil tenants and the vineyard. In it he said that he is sometimes challenged by this because much of this teaching is aimed at those who are protectors of the religious status quo. During the open worship that followed I gave a message asking who are we keeping away in our desire to maintain our understanding of purity. What gifts are we refusing? In some ways this seemed like a bookend because I gave a similar message at the Friends Church at Ngong Road in Nairobi on our arrival for the first combined General Board Meeting in Kenya in 2007

I am sometimes a slow learner. It has taken me five years but I am starting to really understand that I have no words that will change hearts on the matter of acceptance of gay men and lesbian women in the orthodox yearly meetings. I don't know that there is anything anyone from New England YM can say that will help with this. The changing of hearts is God's work and not ours. But we can remain in fellowship with these yearly meetings. We can be true to the truth that we have been led to. We can learn to listen in humility to Friends we disagree with in the faith that the power and the love of the Lord is over all.

Blessings to all,

Will T

The Love of God

2011-03-10T21:09:00.002-05:00

I have heard it said that the longest journey is the journey from the head to the heart. It can take an amazingly long time for something we know in our heads to sink down into our hearts and become alive there, known in our emotions and our inner being. When the finally happens, it seems like a door is opened and we feel like we are seeing something for the first time. At the same time we marvel that we could not see this before, it was right there in front of us all this time.

George Fox, in his journal makes reference to Scripture being opened to him. Certainly Fox had an incredible head knowledge of Scripture. It was said that if the Bible were to be lost, Fox could recreate it from memory. But he make note of those times when his understanding became something more than just knowing the words, but of seeing how they impacted him or those around him. He came to a new understanding of what he already knew.

I had such an experience recently with Romans 8:38-39

For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

I came to see that even having imperfect parents and an imperfect childhood and living in imperfect communities could not keep me from the love of God. The sense that I had internalized that I was unloved and unlovable is not the truth. I have experienced the love of God in a number of ways and a number of times. When those old messages about my being unloved and unlovable start playing in me, I can remember that they are false and that there is a different and better truth.

As Friends we believe that God lives in us. This means that God's love also lives in us because God is love. Our challenge is to experience that love and then to express it in our lives and to those around us. The challenge facing our meetings and other Friends communities is to express that love so that anyone coming into that community can feel it. This is an act of devotion because in it we seek to embody God in ourselves and in our lives. It is also an act of service because, by learning to express our love more fully, we heal the scars in ourselves and each other that come from living in imperfect families, imperfect communities and an imperfect world.

Blessings,

Will T

Abraham and Sarah

2011-01-06T21:29:00.000-05:00

When Abraham was 99 and his wife Sarah had passed menopause, God came to Abraham and promised him that Sarah would bear him a son. When Sarah heard this she laughed saying, “After I have grown old, and my husband is old, shall I have pleasure?” Then God asked Abraham why Sarah had laughed. God asked, “Is anything too wonderful for the Lord?” And within the year, Sarah bore a son Isaac, to Abraham.

This story is told in Genesis 18 and 21 (It wraps around the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah providing fertile ground for a meditation about choosing life or death.). It came to mind on New Year's Day. I will have my 60'th birthday this spring. This coming birthday has caused me to reflect in ways that I have never done before. Maybe it is because at 60 I am becoming more aware of the things I am unlikely to do in this life.

When I was a teen-ager I remember having an argument with my parents. Their response was essentially, “This is the way we are. We are too old to change. Take it or leave it.” I was hurt by that response. In my youthful arrogance, I thought it was a cop-out. Now that I am older, I understand how hard it is to change the habits of a lifetime. But I still think that their response was a cop-out because they never sought to even admit or address the issues underlying my anger. When I am shown an area in which I need to grow or heal I am sometimes tempted to say, “I am too old to change that.” Then I remember how I felt about that response from my parents and realize that too old is not going to cut it as an excuse for me.

So when the story of Abraham and Sarah and Isaac came to my mind, it seemed particularly fitting. With God, we are never too old for new life, new growth, new blessing. God can bring forth life at any time. This is true for us as individuals and it is true for our institutions. We need to be unwilling to accept that the way things are is the way things have to be. We have to be willing to pray and be willing to do the immediate steps that are laid before us. Sometimes this might be to return to something that we stopped doing because it didn't seem to work any more. Sarah's question comes to mind here, “Shall I have pleasure?” One can imagine that after menopause, Abraham and Sarah had given up in taking physical pleasure in each other. But they found a way, even though they were old and dry and out of it came new life and a great people.

What are the areas where we are being called to new life, even though it seems a futile effort because we appear to be dry and barren?

Blessings,

Will T

That of God in Everyone

2010-12-30T17:48:00.000-05:00

The phrase “that of God in everyone” has become commonplace among Friends but it is not always clear what it is referring to. In fact, it has become one of those phrases that seems to hide as much as it reveals. I am never sure what people mean when they use it. Do they think that there is some sort of spiritual organ inside us like the islands of Langerhans? Is it something fully formed in all of us, or just a potential? Is it one of those phrases that we use that has lost all meaning? I tend to think of it as a phrase used by modern Friends as shorthand for some nebulous concept that they would prefer not to examine too carefully, either for fear of fracturing our unity or just because they have never thought about it much.

This fall I have been reading Volume IV of the Works of James Nayler from the Quaker Heritage Press. This volume contains his writings roughly from his trial for blasphemy until his death. One of the things that I noticed was his use of the phrase “that of God in every man.” I don't recall seeing it in his earlier works but it kept showing up in his later writings. In his tract A Door Opened to the Imprisoned Seed in the World I found a section headed Grace received, and Grace rejected which seemed to describe what he meant by that phrase. I want to examine this in the hope that this might be useful to Friends.

The grace of God is that which brings salvation to man, all men being natural darkness, as they are in the world without God, so the grace of God is tendered to all without respect of persons. And that's it in every man which gives him a sight of truth in himself, which truth God by his grace accepts in every man, who would have all men to come to the knowledge thereof that they might be saved. Now this grace in itself is one in every man and is of God in every man...

Here Nayler is equating, that of God in everyone with the grace of God and that this is what brings all people to salvation. One of the things that I think is important to note is that the grace is the same in all people. This is the basis of Quaker Universalism. This grace is available to all and the same grace is available regardless of the words that they use to formulate their understanding of God or the spiritual life. But note also, that it says that there is only one grace. It is not that we each have our own grace, that somehow they are different but of equal value. There is no relativism here. There is one grace here and it is the same grace in every person. This is not cheap grace and it is not anything goes. It is not everyone can believe what they want. There is one grace, one voice, that is present in everyone. This voice, if listened to and followed will lead us to God. We may have different words or understandings about this voice. These are not important. What is important is the obedience. This does mean that our communities are required to do the careful listening and discerning with each other to see when we are using different words to refer to the same thing and when we are using the same words to refer to different things. This is not easy to do and requires a lot of humility, listening and trust to achieve.

The second thing to notice is that this grace is from God. It is not something that we can lay claim to. It does not, by itself give us any claim to being better than anyone else. It is not something peculiar to Quakers. In fact, the natural state of all is to be in darkness and without God. This initial state of darkness does not need to imply some state of Original Sin or that we are somehow guilty or sinful. (I do realize that there are Christians who do believe in Original Sin and in the fundamental guilt of mankind. I also know that there are many people who have been wounded by that theology. Robert Barclay was clear about denying an inherent sinfulness of mankind, but that we all became sinful as we united with sin in our actions.) It does recognize that we all begin our spiritual journeys by looking for God. If we are looking for God and the Light, we must be in darkness and without God. We would not be looking otherwise. There does not have to be condemnation here. It is just the way it is and we are. Babies are born helpless and unable to move about. There is no blame in this, this is just the starting point of their physical development. Likewise, our sense of the separation from God is the starting point for our spiritual development. It is only by the grace that God has placed in us that we can see the truth in ourselves. God would have us all accept this grace and see that truth in ourselves but it is our choice. It is this grace that comes from God that is “that of God within us.” It is important for us to remain clear that this voice of God within us is not of ourselves in any way. There is always the temptation of pride to claim this voice for ourselves, as if we can control it or posses it. This is setting ourselves in the place of God and we must always be vigilant against this.

So that is the grace of God which is of God in man, ministering in Spirit light to the soul in the midst of darkness, ministering life to that which is dead in sin, leading that through the vale of death up to God from whom the grace hath appeared, and of whom it is; and the light thereof is judgment and discerning in everyone that receives it to be led with it in judgment, and condemnation to such as turn it into lasciviousness, denying the life thereof and the truth that leads thereto, and so cannot be saved through it, but he that receives it and joins to it in Spirit becomes one with it, and by his daily sinking into it in counsel it grows in him and he in it, until it becomes a habitation and cover for him against all evil, and so he becomes gracious in words and works, daily receiving grace for grace, of his fullness.

That of God is that which will guide us if we receive it and join with it but becomes our condemnation if we reject it or use it as a cover for following our own wills and if we deny within ourselves the life and truth given to us by grace. Understood this way, “that of God within everyone” is not a safe and soothing concept. It is great strength hidden within meekness and humility and it drives everyone to make a choice as to whether to unite with it and come to transformation and the life of the Spirit or to reject it and with that rejection a rejection of the fullness of life.

This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live and that you may love the LORD your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him.

Deuteronomy 30:19-20

Blessings to all

Will T

Orthoakoe

2010-12-02T21:32:00.000-05:00

There seems to be a common distinction made by Friends between orthodoxy, right belief, and orthopraxis, right action. It is postulated that liberal Quakers are more interested in orthopraxis and the Orthodox and Evangelical Friends are more interested in orthodoxy. One such example is from C. Wess Daniels' article in Quaker Life on Convergent Friends. I think that this distinction misses the core of what Quakerism is about. The core is not orthodoxy or orthopraxis, it is orthoakoe. What is orthoakoe? It is a word that I just made up which means right listening. According to the lexicon in Strong's Concordance, akoe means “hearing (the act, the sense, or the thing heard).” Since I don't know Greek, if any readers who have a knowledge of Greek have suggestions for a better word, I would be glad to hear them.

The key to the spiritual life is to listen to the voice of God, the Divine, the Spirit, the Guide, whatever you call that still small voice that nudges you towards God. An important part of the spiritual journey is learning to recognize that voice and be able to distinguish its voice from all of the other, often much louder, voices within us. As Robert Barclay puts it, “It is the privilege of the Christian to know their Shepherd's voice.” This voice does not much care what we call it. It also does not care particularly about what mental constructs we create to make sense of it. What it wants is for us to pay attention to it. Sometimes it shows us our shortcomings and it expects that we will sit with that until we see the way forward to overcome these. Sometimes it shows us the nature of the other voices we hear so that we can learn which voice to follow. Listening transcends belief.

Once we have heard the voice, the voice expects us to follow its promptings. We have a general idea of what changes will happen to us if we obey these nudges. We expect that they will bear the fruit of patience, forbearance, peace, equanimity, integrity, love and compassion. But there is no set of rules or actions to take. We have to rely on the promptings of this voice in determining what particular action we should take in the particular case that is before us. Listening transcends practice.

It is difficult to listen when you are talking. This is why centering practice is so important. If we are going to hear the voice within, we have to quiet the din within. I don't know where I got the idea from but I remember as a small child lying in bed as went to sleep trying not to think. I got to the point when I was only thinking the thought that I was trying to not think any thoughts. Then I tried to make that thought go slower and slower. I remember wondering what would happen if I stopped thinking even that thought, but the prospect scared me. Only later did I discover that I had taught myself to meditate with the help of one of the most cumbersome mantras I have ever heard of. Lately I have had moments when meditation when that inner chattering voice has gone silent. It does make it easier to hear God. Listening requires practice.

As we learn to hear the voice of God in ourselves, we are called to another form of listening as well: Listening to the voice of God in others. At one level, this is the ability to hear when people are saying things that apply to us. Sometimes this is when they are speaking directly to us and sometimes it is taking to heart what they say about themselves or their experience. There is another level to this, and that is listening words into being spoken. Sometimes we need to listen deeply to provide that space for the words to come into. This is part of what we do in unprogrammed meetings for worship. The intensity of our listening may draw forth words of ministry from someone in our midst. This does not deny the role of God in prompting vocal ministry, but a lack of receptivity in the body can sometimes block a minister from giving a message and intense listening can draw forth a message that might not otherwise have come. A harder form of listening is to listen deeply to those that we disagree with, people we find objectionable, and even those we might consider our enemy. But we must listen to these people as well to hear if perhaps God is sending us a message through them. The hardest part is to listen to these people so intently that we draw out the words of God from them.

All of this is orthoakoe.

Blessings,

Will T

What purifies the soul?

2010-11-14T14:13:00.000-05:00

For it is not the hearing of the truth that purifies the soul, but the obedience of the truth which makes the vessel fit for the Master's use, who in His using, and its obedience, makes it a vessel of honor, and glorifies His Son therein, in your bodies to do the Father's will in the world, whereby the Father is glorified in the Son, in whom He shines forth, as the Father begets Him again in you, and you in Him (who was with the Father before the world was,) of His own nature and good will, which as you receive again by faith and obedience, you will be changed into the same image and nature, and to delight only therein, being born of the same Spirit; as he that is born of the flesh delights in the things of the flesh.

James Nayler

I have been reading James Nayler lately and this paragraph has stuck with me. It is the concluding paragraph of his 1657 pamphlet How Sin is Strengthened, and How it is Overcome. I have been reading it in Volume IV of the Works of James Nayler from Quaker Heritage Press. It is also available on-line here or here.

This sums up the essence of early Quaker spirituality quite well and has something to say to us today as well. The first statement brought me up short. Hearing the truth does not purify the soul, it is obedience to the truth that purifies the soul. Reading, writing or speaking the truth also does not purify the soul unless it is done in obedience to the promptings of the Spirit. This can certainly provide a dose of humility for people like me who have some facility with the written and spoken word.

It is God's use of us combined with our uniting with that use that prepares us to be even more fit for God's continued use. This glorifies Christ embodied in ourselves and allows us to do God's will in the world. By this Christ is born in us and by faith and obedience we will be changed into the nature and image of Christ and will delight only in the things of the Spirit.

Claiming that one can be transformed into the nature of Christ is a pretty extreme claim. It is the logical end of the Quaker doctrine that perfection is possible in this life. There is sound scriptural basis for claiming that we can be as Christ but Friends were careful with how they said this because they did not want to be accused of blasphemy. It was, after all, enacting Christ's entry into Jerusalem that got Nayler convicted of blasphemy. During his trial, Nayler claimed that the honor he received was appropriate inasmuch as it was directed to the spirit of Christ in him, but not if it was directed to the fleshly person. Parliament was not inclined to accept this fine distinction and convicted him.

This idea of being transformed into the nature of Christ underlies the Holiness movement which found a home among Friends and is also expressed in the Eastern Orthodox tradition as Deification. Do we take seriously this idea that we can become embodiments of Christ's spirit? Do we see our daily acts of obedience to the Spirit as the method of this transformation? Do we see obedience in small things as a step towards obedience in ever larger things, until we can be obedient in all things? Are we willing to give up our personal areas of rebellion? Are we willing to listen to the promptings of the Spirit in all things that we do? Are we willing to depend on God for everything? Are we willing to sit with the discomfort these questions might create?

Blessings,

Will T

Like a Weaned Child

2010-11-06T20:40:00.001-04:00

O Lord, my heart is not lifted up,

my eyes are not raised too high;

I do not occupy myself with things

too great and too marvelous for me.

But I have calmed myself and quited my soul,

like a weaned child with it's mother;

my soul within me is like a weaned child.

O Israel, hope in the Lord

from this time on and forevermore.

Psalm 131

This is one of the great images of resting and trusting in God and it leaves out most of the story. A weaned child gets to the place of peace and rest, but the weaning child is something else. It is a child who is crying for something they cannot get, crying for what they have lost. It is a child that is hungering for that which no longer satisfies and refuses the better nourishment that is put in front of them. The weaned child is an image of rest and peace, but for both the child and the mother, the process was not easy. They have earned their rest.

Friends in their writings, in both their early writings and their later journals, developed a style that mentions baptizings and difficulties yet is almost totally opaque about what was actually going on with them. Reading about our Quaker heroes presents a picture of strength in the face of adversity but does not give any idea of what the nature of their inner travails. As a result we only get a partial picture and as a result, our spiritual lives seem pale and weak in comparison.

One gets the picture that the spiritual journey is like what we would like to see in our retirement portfolios, a steady line going up and to the right. Like Jacob's ladder, every round goes higher, higher. My spiritual journey doesn't look like that at all. It looks more like my actual retirement portfolio, up some days, dropping precipitously on others and no way to tell what will happen next. My own experience of the spiritual life, though is not one of a linear progression. If there is a mathematical analogy, it is more like chaos theory. It is a path of sharp contrasts and discontinuities. I have moments of insight and awareness of the deep presence of God. I have felt myself led and held. I have had periods where faithfulness came easy and I felt the Presence so strongly that I could do no other than to be faithful. My soul was indeed calm and quiet like a weaned child.

At other times, my inner two year old has been going at full throttle, throwing tantrums and stamping its foot and saying, “No!, you are not the boss of me.” There are times when I am hanging on for dear life, and there are times when I have let go and just say, forget this. But the storm passes, and I find myself coming back to God and I find myself being drawn back into God's acceptance.

James Russel Lowell wrote the poem that provides the words for the hymn:

“Once to every man and nation, comes the moment do decide,

In the strife of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side;”

I have always wished that it were that simple. I find myself being faced with choices constantly. Sometimes I feel like it is once a day, or once an hour. In the midst of the storm, I do not find the Quaker idea of the day of visitation, or the Biblical story of Lot's wife being turned to a pillar of salt because she looked back when fleeing Sodom to be particularly comforting. I find that exhortations to avoid backsliding do not speak to my condition, especially if I am backsliding. What nourishes me is the story of the prodigal son who has wasted his inheritance and is welcomed back with open arms. It is the promise implicit in Jesus' admonition to forgive each other 70 times 7 times, because God's forgiveness is even greater than our own. It is a far cry from Esau's plea, “Father, have you no blessing left for me?”

I take comfort from the psalmist:

Whither shall I go from the spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?

If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there;

If I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.

If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,

Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.

Even when I am refusing the hand, crossing my arms across my chest and stamping my feet. Even when I am insisting on crossing the street by myself, your hand is still there, whether I take it or not.

And yet, each little unfaithfulness, each little act of rebellion makes the next one easier. Our habitual ways of avoiding God, or running full tilt away from God, did not become habitual overnight. They became habits from our constant practice. We are called to examine every part of our life in the Light of Christ. Eventually we will have to address these habits we have built and change our habits of avoidance into habits of faithfulness. The path that we are called to is narrow and strait, but my experience of it is that it is not straight.

Blessings,

Will T

A people to be gathered

2010-09-28T20:50:00.000-04:00

When George Fox climbed Pendle Hill he had a vision of a great people to be gathered. Friends who seek renewal of the Society of Friends use this vision as a touchstone of what the Society of Friends can become again. I know that it speaks to me.

I also think that Friends have lost sight of what it means to be a people. This isn't surprising. North American culture promotes and encourages individualism. There is a relentless drumbeat to privatize, privatize, privatize. This does not just relate to government and politics. We have privatized watching movies. It used to be we did that collectively in large public theaters. Then the large theaters became the multiplex. Then the multiplex became a video store. The video store was replaced by DVDs that came in the mail. Now those little red envelopes are being replaced by electronic downloads directly to your computer or TV. The same dynamic is playing out with drinking water, where once we had large public works projects to provide safe drinking water to large populations, more and more, people are encouraged to think that safe water comes in personal sized bottles that they buy in the store. The list of examples just goes on and on.

So in the face of this cultural and political onslaught, it is no surprise that we have trouble learning how to be a people. It is counter-cultural and old-fashioned. This plays out in many ways in the Society of Friends but today I want to look at how it influences our unprogrammed Meetings for Worship. We often approach meeting for worship very individualistically. One year at New England Yearly Meeting a number of students from Moses Brown School came as part of the schools presentation to the Yearly Meeting. Most of them talked about meeting for worship at the school as a time to go over their plans for the week. The theme was so common that it was clear to me that this was something they were being taught at the school. Even though many of us are not so overtly secular, for many of us, Meeting for Worship is something we do ourselves that has little to do with the other people in the room.

Some people come seeking no more than an oasis of quiet and peacefulness from a hectic world. They do not want to be disturbed by outside noises, restless children or even vocal ministry. If people are going to speak in meeting, it should be brief. In my meeting, there are people who will regularly turn off the blowers on the heaters in the winter, even if it means that the room never gets comfortably warm. The will do the same in the summer with the air conditioning, even if it means a warm and stuffy meeting room. On one memorable occasion, a visitor came to our meeting and rose and gave a message about the noise being made by a refrigerator in the corner of the meeting room. She asked if we had ever considered moving it somewhere else. It was disturbing her.

It is easy to view vocal ministry in the same way. Individuals give ministry as they are led. This is a very interior process but we look at it as private and individual as well. Some seem to look at vocal ministry as a form of self expression. We are told to listen to the messages that are given and let ones that don't speak to us float by. This is good advice as far as it goes but it creates a picture of meeting for worship filled with individual actors that have minimal interaction with each other during the silence.

Meeting for worship was recognized as a communal exercise. There was a recognition that there was a lot going on within the silence. Robert Barclay compared it to the action of steel against steel, each sharpening each other. Elias Hicks had a reputation as a powerful and eloquent minister. When he visited a meeting, so many people would come to hear him that it was not uncommon for the meeting places to be completely filled and people would stand outside of the windows and doors to hear him. Yet in his journal he tells of times when he was completely bottled up and could not give a message because the people were not in a condition to receive the message. In such cases, he found himself led to provide an example of silence. In the communitarian view, the messages are not given to the individual minister, they are given to the gathered body through the voice of one or more individuals. In this perspective, the relatively common experience of someone giving a message that matches your train of thought, or even that you were feeling moving in you to rise and speak, makes a lot of sense. If the messages are being given to the whole meeting, it is to be expected that the Spirit might send the message to the whole meeting..

It is also true that the quality of the waiting and listening can draw out messages. The depth of the waiting of some, can bring others in the room to a deeper place themselves, and this building depth can lead to strong and powerful ministry that would not be possible if the meeting stayed in the shallows or was slumbering. A classic example of this comes from the journal of David Ferris, an 18'th century Friend who had, at this point had spent 20 years resisting the promptings to engage in vocal ministry. Comfort Hoag was a traveling minister who was visiting his meeting and she was becoming increasingly pointed in her encouragements for him to exercise the gifts that were being given to him.

The following day being at meeting, I again felt a concern to speak to the people, but endeavored to evade it. ... Thus I spent the greater part of an hour. At length my divine Master, the great Master Builder, thus addressed me, " Why dost thou still delay .... There never will be a better time than this. I have waited on thee above twenty years ; I have clearly made known to thee my will, so that all occasion of doubt has been removed; yet thou hast refused to submit until thy day is far spent; and if thou dost not speedily comply with my commands, it will be too late; thy opportunity will be lost." I then , clearly saw that if I were forsaken, and left to myself, the consequence would be death and darkness forever! At the sight of the horrible pit that yawned for me, if I continued in disobedience, my body trembled like an aspen leaf, and my soul was humbled within me. Then I said, "Lord ! here am I; make of me what thou wouldst have me to be; leave me not in displeasure, I beseech thee." All my power to resist was then suspended ... and was raised on my feet, I hardly knew how, and expressed in a clear and distinct manner what was on my mind. When I had taken my seat Comfort Hoag rose, and had an open, favorable opportunity to speak to the assembly. After meeting she told me that, during, the time we had sat in silence, her whole concern was on my account; that her anxiety for my deliverance from that bondage was such, that she was willing to offer up her natural life to the Lord, if it might be a means to bring me forth in the ministry; and that on making the offering I rose to speak. On which her anxiety for me was removed, and her mind filled with concern for the people present.

This kind of experience, though often less dramatic, was common enough.

I have found that in conversation with seasoned Friends, that these sorts of experiences are still happening during Friends worship. What we do not have is the regular recording of these experiences as was the case when the journals of traveling ministers were commonly published. Since the laying down of elders and recorded ministers, it appears that we no longer have the place to have discussions about what is going on in meeting by people with long experience and a concern for nurturing the worshiping body. I do not think that recreating the form of the traditional Meeting for Ministers and Elders is what we need to do. I do think that Friends should explore how we can recover the function of nurturing and guiding our ministers in a form that makes sense in our current context. The place to start might be in recognizing that this is a community issue and not just an individual concern and to begin discussions in our meetings about what we experience happening in Meeting for Worship.

Blessings,

Will T

Your rest stop is over

2010-08-25T21:31:00.001-04:00

At NEYM sessions I had a lunchtime discussion with one of the members of my support committee about my spiritual condition and the growing edge of my ministry. As I was answering one of his questions, the phrase that came to me was, “Your rest stop is over.” The phrase comes from taking long-distance bus trips, something that is much less common now than it was in the late 60's and early 70's when I first began traveling on my own about the country. The Greyhound bus line owned the Post House restaurant chain and used these restaurants for rest stops for it's long distance bus routes. The bus would pull into the parking lot and the driver would say that there would be a half-hour rest stop. At the end of that time, there would be an announcement made over the PA system in the restaurant in the form, “All passengers on the bus bound for Washington DC, please return to your bus, your rest stop is over.”

For the past year I have been in a place of rest and fallowness. I have not been led to much public ministry and I have written very little for this blog. I have had some false starts where I thought that new life was emerging and I was ready to resume my writing and other forms of ministry. These turned out to be premature. Now it appears that my rest stop is over and that it is time to get back on the bus, resume my writing and to be open to what new opportunities may arise for me.

This summer, in the time leading up to sessions, I read Deitrich Bonhoeffer's The Cost of Discipleship. I found this to be very helpful to me personally. As I was reading it, it struck me that this was perhaps as good a description of the spiritual approach of Early Friends as I have encountered in readable, contemporary English. The book, of course, is not about Early Friends at all. It is about how we are called to be faithful and
obedient to the voice of Christ every day, in everything that we do. It is about turning from a life dominated by the Old Man to a life where we are reborn in the image of Christ. The similarity comes from a common focus on faithfulness and obedience in our actions, even if this obedience comes at great cost. This sense of being recalled to greater faithfulness was, I think, the final step that brought me out of fallowness into new growth.

Finally, I would like to expand a little more on the image of the Kingdom of God. Like all good spiritual symbols, it has levels of meaning that can take a long time to unwrap. I have been turning the idea over since a commenter on my last post said “Won't ever consider 'walking into the promised land', without everybody else.” There are levels on which this statement is true, but it is not the aspect of the Kingdom that I was thinking of in these last two posts. The aspect of the Kingdom of God that I am exploring might be rendered, the community of those who have made God the center of their life. This presupposes, not just the existence of God, but of having found God in some degree. It requires knowing the voice of the Shepherd and following it and no other. It implies embarking on a process of removing from our lives everything that we would put in the place of God. We do not have to wait for anyone else to do that. In fact to do so puts that other person (or all of humanity) ahead of God. Doing this is hard work. There is interior work to find and then work to heal the broken places in us that keep us from placing God first. There is outward work to make our lives conform to what we are being called to be. There is a constant interplay between the two. Prayer leads to action. We are also changed by our actions. Little acts of faithfulness can sometimes illuminate our inner state more than long hours of prayer. Little acts of faithfulness prepare us for larger acts later. We are all called to this journey. No one can make this journey for us but at the same time, it is not a journey we can make alone. We need our friends, we need our communities and we need God. I hope that some of you may join me on this journey.

Blessings to all,

Will T

Wandering in the Wilderness

2010-08-17T21:57:00.000-04:00

“The only thing that we did wrong
was staying in the wilderness too long.”
Keep Your Eyes on the Prize
Alice Wine

At NEYM this year we spent a lot of time in extended worship waiting to hear God's call. The minute of exercise rising out of one of those sessions was titled “Meeting for wandering in the desert.” This got me thinking about this image of wandering in the wilderness because it seems to be one often used by Friends. In fact, it seems to me that for New England Yearly Meeting, and perhaps unprogrammed Friends in general, wandering in the wilderness falls pretty close to the center of our comfort zone. Actually entering the Promised Land scares the bejeebus out of us. I know that there have been times in my life when the image of wandering in the wilderness spoke to my condition. I was reassured by it that, no matter how far short I had fallen, God would not abandon me. My unfaithfulness was no greater than the Israelites, and God still sent them manna every day. Most Quakers know that the Israelites wandered in the desert for 40 years after leaving Egypt and before entering the land that had been promised them. Far fewer, I suspect, know why this happened.

The story is told in chapters 13 and 14 of the book of Numbers. God told Moses to send spies into the land of Canaan to find out what the land is like, is it good or bad, and the people who live there, are they few or many, are they strong or weak? So Moses selected 12 men, one from each tribe, to go into Canaan and report back. They stayed in Canaan 40 days. It was the time of the new grapes and they cut down a branch with a single cluster of grapes, and it was so large that they had to carry it on a pole between two men.

When they returned, they showed the people the fruit and said that is was a land flowing with milk and honey. They also said that the people are strong, the towns are fortified and there are even giants living in the land. The people were afraid and did not want to go into the land because they were afraid of who lived there. Only two of the spies, Joshua and Caleb said, we should go up directly. God is with us and it is a good land. Everyone else was afraid and they threatened to stone Joshua and Caleb.

God was angry at this disobedience and threatened to destroy Israel and make Moses the father of a new and mightier nation. Moses interceded with God, reminding God that if he destroyed the Israelites, the Egyptians would say that God could not bring the Israelites into the land that he had promised and so killed them all in the wilderness. God relented and did not destroy the Israelites. But God did say that no one who was over the age of 12 at that time would enter into the promised land, except for Joshua and Caleb, because those two alone had been faithful. The Israelites were condemned to wander in the wilderness for 40 years, one year for each day that the spies had spent in Canaan. They wandered until all of those who had refused to enter had died.

For me now, the message of this story is that, while we may be led through the desert for a time, when we receive the call to enter the promised land, we need to answer the call. Me may be called in at first as spies, to have a glimpse of the land and to see the fruit that is available but not to live there yet. But once we have seen it or heard the report of the spies sent in on our behalf, we need to be ready to enter it ourselves, not as visitors but as residents.

What are we afraid of that keeps us from entering the promised land. We are not promised a physical geography but we have been promised the Kingdom of God. This is not a place we go after our physical death, we are called to live in the Kingdom of God, right now, in whatever physical place we are. We have been told what we need to do to enter the Kingdom. The sacrifice we are called to make is a broken and contrite heart. We are told to “do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God.” We are told to take up our cross and follow Jesus. God promised to write the law on our hearts so we don't need to teach each other because we will all know God. We need to know what God has written on our hearts and follow it. Jesus promised to send the Holy Spirit to us as a Comforter and Guide. But we don't follow. We are reluctant to give over our lives to God and to give up the idea that we can achieve security with our efforts and our possessions. We try to create the Kingdom of God instead of living in the Kingdom that is already among us. We are afraid because the powers and principalities of this world are strong. There might be giants there. So we continue to wander in the wilderness, forgetting that the fate of those who wander in the wilderness is to die and never enter into the promised land.

Blessings,

Will T

The spirit and power of the kingdoms of this world

2010-03-06T18:08:00.000-05:00

A recent Lectionary reading included the story of the temptation of Jesus from Luke. Reading the story this time, I was not grabbed by anything about Jesus or the temptations themselves, but this little snippet about the other figure in the story:

Then the devil led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And the devil said to him, "To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours."
Luke 4: 5-7

What gave me pause was the idea that the glory and authority of all the kingdoms of the world are under the control of the devil. I suppose that this would be a much more self-evident proposition if I were an oppressed peasant in first century Palestine. I suppose that it would be more self-evident if I were a poor peasant in modern Burma or Haiti. But this also includes the liberal democracies of North America and Europe. This includes both the liberal wing of the Democratic Party and the conservative end of the Tea Party.

The reason that this is a hard thing to read is that I am one of the privileged people that liberal democracies work for. Johann Maurer writes on his blog about Brian Fikkert's and Steve Corbett's book When Helping Hurts: Alleviating Poverty Without Hurting the Poor...and Ourselves This excerpt caught my eye:

Unfortunately, while public policy has historically encouraged wealth accumulation for middle-to-upper-class people, it has often discouraged wealth accumulation for the poor. Middle-to-upper-class people are encouraged to accumulate wealth through such things as tax-deferred (and often employer-matched) retirement savings (IRAs, 401Ks, 403bs [these are USA-specific examples]), and mortgage-interest tax deductions. At the same time, poor people have been forced to deplete their assets before qualifying for welfare assistance and have been penalized with the loss of benefits if they somehow manage to save and invest too much! The end result is that many poor families are highly vulnerable to economic shocks and unable to even think about their financial futures.

This is part of the privilege that is invisible to the people receiving it. For the professional class, the 401-K is such a part of the landscape it is almost invisible. At least until the stock market tanks. Until I read this I had not noticed the class differences in policy towards wealth accumulation.

The real issue for Luke is that government is all about power. The government will use that power to benefit some people at the expense of others. In all cases, it is to benefit the people with power. In most cases, the people with power are the already privileged and wealthy. In times of revolution, the people with power might, for a short time, be the formerly dispossessed and the revolutionary government may work to their advantage. Wealth will always flow towards power. Or perhaps more accurately, power will always pump wealth away from those without power. In the revolutionary situation, over time the formerly dispossessed will become the privileged and wealthy.

But I am left with more questions than answers. I know intellectually that the government, even one lead by Barack Obama will not bring about the Kingdom of God. I am fortunate that the kingdom of this world works more or less to my benefit. But Jesus did not come to the well off and privileged. He came with good news for the poor and marginalized. His kingdom is not of this world. It is a kingdom where the last is first and the world is turned upside down. It is as hard, says Jesus, for a rich man to enter this kingdom as for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. By the standards of most of the world's population, I am a rich man. Right now, I keep being shown glimpses of my privilege. Faithfulness is not always easy and grace is not cheap. But one thing I know is that right leading and right action is always wrapped in the love of God, and in the love of God, all things are possible. And everyone who resided in the Kingdom is wealthy, but not with the wealth of the world.

Blessings,

Will T

Miracles

2010-02-20T18:49:00.000-05:00

Miracles

Susannah McCandless recently received a bone marrow transplant. Her husband Ethan is blogging about the experience here.

Please send prayers their way.

Ethan wrote:

I don't like the idea of miracles. By that I mean, I don't like the idea of specific miracles, the “Lo, then God parted the SUVs and gave His faithful free on-street parking” type. It grates at my intellectual desire for explanations. It also gives me a kind of ethical qualm...if we see a bone marrow transplant as a miracle, aren't we snubbing the thousands of people who have devoted their lives to the work that makes it possible?

But I do believe in the general miracle; I am in awe of that. Death and stasis and entropy seem so compelling. Bad tends to go to worse. In contrast, the riot of living and thinking—more life, as the old blessing goes—feels almost like a sucker bet. ... And yet the whole world is full of life and thought, and it persists tenaciously all the same. That is the miracle.

It got me thinking more about miracles.

Every day the sun rises and the sun sets and it is a miracle. Is it any less of a miracle because it happens every day? It can all be explained with straightforward physics. But before the sky turns from black to blue, it has a moment of red and gold. And before the sky fades to dark, the clouds capture the same red and gold from the sun. And before the line of light that is always moving from east to west across the earth, there is a line of song. Before the light, the birds awake and start to sing. Even in February in New England, there are song birds singing at dawn. Even in the islands in the ocean, where they cannot hear the rest of the chorus, birds wake up and sing. This circle of birdsong has been circling the earth with the dawn for millions of years. And it, like the dawn itself, is a miracle.

At the ocean the tide rises and falls. And the waves break on the shore and go out and break again. This has been going on since the oceans were formed billions of years ago. There is a miracle there.

My home is near the top of a rocky granite ridge in New England. The soil is thin and full of rocks. 20 thousand years ago there was no soil here. The rock was scraped clean and was covered by a glacier. The soil here ended up on Cape Cod and Long Island. The soil was formed by the action of water and ice on rocks and pebbles and the decay of the plants that started to grow. This was a miracle.

Nearby there are some ponds. They are called kettle hole ponds and they were formed when large chunks of ice from the melting glaciers took longer to melt and so formed depressions in the ground. At first they were filled with water from the melting ice, and then with water from springs. There was a time when these ponds, Spy Pond and Fresh Pond, were ringed with ice houses. In the winter the ice would be cut into blocks and stored. It would be shipped to the cities in the South and to the Caribbean Islands and as far away as India. This was the hard work of many, but when the ice showed up in the tropics,
it was also a miracle.

Miracles are not supernatural events, even though it is common to think of them that way. We talk about the healing miracles in Jesus' ministry but science records similar miracles regularly in clinical trials. They get categorized as the placebo effect. It is true that people get better just because they have faith that someone has done something to make them better. The miracle in feeding the multitudes was not that Jesus magically multiplied a few loaves and fishes. The miracle happened because he was able to move people to a place where they were aware of the abundance around them so that they were able to share what they already had with them. When they went from each one holding on to what they had, to sharing, they found that there was enough for everyone.

The secret of a miracle is not in the event, but in standing in the place where we can see the wonder that underlies it. The other secret is that we never deserve miracles no matter how fervent our prayers or how righteous we try to be in our lives. The miracles are poured out on us in an unending, undeserved bounty of blessing. They are poured over us even when we are too blind to see them.

More life. More life. What a miracle. The windswept rocks at the tops of mountains are covered with lichen. At timberline in the Rockies are gnarled trees no higher than your knees that are hundreds or thousands of years old. More life. Besides volcanic vents on the floor of the ocean where there is no sun or air, there are colonies of plants and animals living off of the heat of the volcano and the minerals spewn forth from the earth itself. More life. Even the crabgrass and dandelions that grow in the cracks of my sidewalks and driveway, threatening to break them up is the miracle of more life.

More prayers for Ethan and Susannah, too, because prayers are miracles too.

Blessings,

Will T

A Reading from the Lectionary

2010-02-06T14:56:00.000-05:00

This winter I have started the practice of each week reading the Bible selections from the common lectionary. (For those who are not familiar with it, the common lectionary sets forth the 3 year cycle of Bible passages to be read in Christian worship services each week – with extra days thrown in for major church holidays like Christmas and Ash Wednesday and so on. It can be found on line here.) Last week the readings included 1 Corinthians 13:1-13. This is a passage that is so commonly read at weddings that it is easy to overlook it's value in other areas of life. The following section caught my eye and has stayed with me in the context of the divisions among Friends. If particular the controversies within FUM and also the controversies over New England Yearly Meeting's relationship with FUM came to mind.

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
1 Cor 13:4-7

I know that my actions have not always met this standard, especially the parts about not being arrogant or insisting on my own way. I am sometimes irritable and resentful and often impatient. I want things to go the way that I think is best. Especially I want things to go in the way I think God thinks is best. Now I am boasting about my arrogance. How rude.

I hear echoes of Corinthians in James Naylor's deathbed confession:

There is a spirit which I feel that delights to do no evil, nor to revenge any wrong, but delights to endure all things, in hope to enjoy its own in the end. Its hope is to outlive all wrath and contention, and to weary out all exaltation and cruelty, or whatever is of a nature contrary to itself. ... Its crown is meekness, its life is everlasting love unfeigned; it takes its kingdom with entreaty and not with contention, and keeps it by lowliness of mind.

If we are called to love our enemies, isn't this how we are called to act? If God is love, then this is the nature of God. Isn't this the way God works with us, wearying out all in us that is of a nature contrary to God? Faithfulness requires that we proceed in in the manner of love. If I am to be faithful it means I have to do more listening and less talking. It means I have to listen deeply and not just so that I can formulate the perfect response. I have to listen deeply enough and openly enough to listen into words what is on the heart of those I am listening to. I need to hold those words and treasure them because God speaks through the words of the heart.

Blessings,

Will T

A new beginning

2010-01-31T14:03:00.000-05:00

Dear Friends,

I spent most of 1970 in Kenya as a student at Friends World College. I spent much of August of that year at the school's campus which, at that time, was housed in an old hotel in Kaptagat in the highlands outside of Eldoret. The road up from Nairobi crossed the Equator as it climbed out of the Rift Valley. Kaptagat was at 10,000 feet. August is the time of the long rains and the weather was cold and raw. We had fireplaces for heat in our bungalows but the firewood was pretty green and wet so keeping a fire going was always a challenge. And then one day I woke up and went outside and the sun was out and the air felt different and I knew that the rain was done.

That is how I feel now. I have been on hiatus from this blog since August. This has been a fallow time for me. A time of being low. It was not possible for me to write. I thought of it a number of times but there was no energy to do so. Even attending the FUM General Board meeting in October did not bring me to write. But today I feel a change in the internal weather. The promptings to write have come back. I expect to write about many of the things that I have in the past but there are also signs of new growth.

New England Yearly Meeting has been exploring Jubilee this year. In Levitical Law there was to be a Sabbath Year every 7 years when the land was to be left fallow. After 7 weeks of years (that is 7 times 7 years) was the year of Jubilee. In the 50'th year debts were to be forgiven, slaves freed, and land would revert to the original owner. This year New England Yearly Meeting will meet for the 350'th time. If we observed them, it would be our seventh Jubilee.

It feels like I am completing the Sabbath time, the fallow time. One of the new sprouts in me is a consideration of what does Jubilee mean. Some argue that there is no evidence that the Jubilee ever happened in Hebrew society. That is almost immaterial. It exercised a powerful influence on prophetic thought. Isaiah proclaimed the year of the Lord, the year of Jubilee. Jesus echoed that call at the beginning of his ministry. What was it that they were proclaiming? In the year of Jubilee, not only were debts forgiven but the land was returned to those how had sold it. It was a circuit breaker to prevented the excessive accumulation of wealth. Every 50 years the economic deck was redealt. It did not mean that some people would not become wealthy. It did not mean that no one would be poor. What it did mean was that the children of the rich would need to work for their own riches and that the children of the poor did not have to remain poor. Every 50 years there would be a new start. We as Quakers are a pretty privileged lot. What would the year of Jubilee look like for us? It might not look like a party, just as I don't think the wealthy Hebrews looked on giving up land and the income stream that came from it as a cause of celebration.

I will explore this more in future posts. I also look forward to seeing what other seeds my be sprouting. It feels good to return to the Quaker blogosphere.

Blessings to all,

Will T

New England Yearly Meeting and the Power of the Lord

2009-08-11T21:01:00.000-04:00

New England Yearly Meeting finished last Thursday. Because we were trying to fit 10 pounds of business in a 5 pound poke, we were still at it Thursday morning when the children joined us. Perhaps because we were mostly centered while doing our business, the children settled in quietly and remained quiet through most of the time. (My experience has been that children have a very good sense of the centeredness of a meeting. They are mostly quiet in a settled meeting and tend to be more restless in a meeting that has lost, or never found, it's center.) But I missed the singing and the sense of celebration. Which is too bad, because we were doing work worth celebrating.

The first item to celebrate was a minute affirming our support for the gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, transgendered, intersex and queer Friends among us. It called for us to be sensitive to the difficulties that the families with GLTBQ parents or children encounter and to provide support to them. It also said that the same-sex marriages that have been or may be taken under our care are well-ordered. Given that same-sex marriage is now legal in five of the six New England states, this was not the prophetic witness that it might have been, but it is still an important step for the Yearly Meeting. It is official recognition of what has been true in much of the Yearly Meeting for some time.

Here is another take on this decision.

The second item was a consideration of our contribution to FUM. Last year sessions had asked Finance Committee to prepare a mechanism whereby monthly meetings could accommodate individuals who did not want their contributions to go to FUM because of the personnel policy which requires all employees to be celibate except if they are in a monogamous heterosexual marriage. This question was very contentious last year. The Finance committee had reluctantly prepared a mechanism to accomplish this and had presented it to Permanent Board. (Permanent Board is the body in NEYM which is authorized to conduct the business of the Yearly Meeting between annual sessions.) Permanent Board had not adopted this policy because of concerns about what this meant in terms of individual discernment overriding the discernment of the body.)

Many people were disappointed with the decision of Permanent Board. In our initial consideration this year, we were not able to come to any unity and a working group was asked to continue to wrestle with the issue and report back. The recommendations of the working group were the minute of support I described above. The second recommendation was that the proposal from Finance Committee to allow for contributions to be specified as not going to FUM. This will allow people with this concern to be easy in their conscience that they are not giving financial support to an organization that discriminates. They also recommended that there be a fund set up so that Friends who are concerned that FUM be made whole as far as the yearly meetings budgeted contribution can make additional contributions to the Yearly Meeting to make up for what has been withheld. This provision will last for just the upcoming year and we will re-examine it next year.

At first glance this mechanism seems to be a crazy contrivance that ends up making no difference. That view does not explain the sweetness that came over the working group as this “contrivance” was taking shape. That sense of sweetness is one of the hallmarks of the work of the Holy Spirit. As I have thought more about this, I have come to see more clearly the spiritual principals at work here. Robert Barclay talks about how even a mistaken conscience is still binding upon a person. I had forgotten this. This resolution acknowledges that the people who want to withhold money from FUM are being faithful to their conscience and provides a way for them to be faithful. Before I felt anger towards some of these people because I was aware of how damaging their conscientious position was to FUM. With this resolution, my anger has been changed to a sense of love. I can help carry the burden that they cannot, by making an extra contribution. We have time to labor together to see where each of us may be being faithful to a mistaken conscience. This is a pastoral response that is bad policy for an organization. My hope is that it will serve as a way to move the conversation along so that we can come to a better solution later on. In the words of George Fox, “In this I see the power of the Lord over all.”

Blessings to All
Will T

What has happened to Will T

2009-06-30T22:05:00.000-04:00

I have been absent from this blog for a long time. I have received a request for a report on the latest General Board meeting that was held last weekend. I expect to post a report at some point, but not immediately. To explain why the delay, let me recount what has happened since I last posted in April.

The short version is that life happened. The long version is a lot longer.

I went to Meeting on my birthday at the end of April. My wife is very into birthdays and she could never figure out why I wanted to get up early on Sunday and go to meeting on my birthday when I could have slept in and had a perfectly nice day. Maybe I should have listened to her. After meeting we had a brief presentation on Quakerism for newcomers, which I attended. Almost at the end I started having what felt like severe stomach cramps. As soon as the presentation was over I stood up and walked around but I had no relief. I told my wife I needed to leave right away. She questioned me in the car and had me diagnosed before we were half way home. She called the doctor and we headed to the emergency room. The pain went away before the doctor in the ER actually saw me, but they wouldn't let me leave. Their diagnosis matched my wife's. I had passed a gall stone. They kept me in the hospital over night for observation. (So much for our birthday dinner reservations.) The next day they recommended that I have my gall bladder removed. Not being one to waste a good fast, I agreed. In ten minutes I was being wheeled down to the operating room.

It was about a week and a half before I started going back to work. It was only a few hours a day at first. I had thought that I might be able to write a lot while I was recuperating. I seriously underestimated how much energy our cells use up knitting themselves back together after your insides have been rearranged. I only had laproscopic surgery so there were no large incisions to heal, but the surgeon said that they still did a lot of work under the skin and it would take time to heal. She was right.

The only writing I was able to do was to revise an article on Quakers and the Bible that I had already submitted to Quaker Life and my papers for the final residency of the Way of Ministry Program. At the same time, my friend Bill who had a brain tumor was in worsening condition. As I prepared for and attended the final residency it became clear to me that, in the short term, the only ministry I had was that of accompaniment for Bill and his family. My daughter came up from Philadelphia on Memorial Day weekend (while I was at Pendle Hill for the Way of Ministry.) She went wedding dress shopping and during the following week arranged for the DJ and photographer for her wedding next June. She is a wonderfully organized young woman. On Memorial Day she and my wife went out to visit Bill. He was sitting in a chair on the front yard of their house and waved to them as they arrived. They had a nice visit and pushed him in his wheel chair up and down the street.

Later that week I went out to his house with some presents from people in the Way of Ministry and he was in a hospital bed in his family room. Every visit after that he was progressively less responsive. He died on the morning of Tuesday, June 9, six months from his initial diagnosis. Thursday I went to the FUM General Board meeting, returning Saturday night so I could go to meeting with my community. The following Saturday the memorial service.

I have much I can write about, but it might be a while yet before I can. This is a time for me to take stock of where I have been spending my time and what is important. For now that will probably mean less time on line but I don't expect to disappear.

Blessings to all,
God is good, all the time.

Will T

Counsel to the Christian-traveller

2009-04-08T21:38:00.000-04:00

About a month ago now, I received an unexpected blessing in the mail. It was a slim volume called Counsel to the Christian Traveller: also Meditations and Experiences by William Shewen. I opened it and started reading and found great drafts of refreshment for my soul from a writer I had never heard of. Here is how Shewen starts his Counsel to the Christian-Traveller:

Put your hand to the plow (look not back) keep it there until the fallow ground may be plowed up, and the briars and thorns rooted up and destroyed, so that the seed may grow up in you to perfection.
Have you known the kingdom and the power, in which it stands, like a little leaven hid in the three measures of Meal? Hinder not it working; let it leaven the whole lump?
Do you know the field where the pearl of great price is hidden? Then dig deep, and find it; and when you have found it, sell all, and purchase it, and then you will be the wise Merchantman indeed.

The entire book is like this, a richly layers of Biblical images illuminating lived Quaker doctrine. The book reflects the Quaker spiritual journey from captivity to perfection not as doctrine but as a rich tapestry of images layered on on top of another.

There are a number of other treatises and essays besides the Counsel to the Christian-Traveller. The largest portion of the book is Meditations and Experiences. This is a series of 70 short meditations. They are like messages in a meeting for worship. Here is one of the shorter ones:

LX.It is a true saying which Christ spoke to his Disciples, when he said, If I go not away, the Comforter will not come. There is much in the words; many have read them, but have not understood what they read; for it is a blessed thing to know the going away of Christ after the flesh, and to be able to say, as one of old did, know I him so no more. They are those that know him come again in the Spirit as a comforter, as a prince of peace, and are witnesses of his peaceable governance in their souls, and can say, he is come, and we look not for another.

I find this book both a challenge and an encouragement to continue to follow the Inner Guide until I lie down in the deep valleys where the good pastures and fresh waters are. I recommend this book to all who seek a less intellectual way into the essence of early Quakerism or who seek refreshment on their own journey.

William Shewen was an early Friend. He lived in London on the south bank of the Thames. In 1656, his house in Southwark was one of the first in London south of the river. This book was originally published in 1683. It has now been reprinted by Inner Light Books. It is also available from the FGC Bookstore.

Blessings to all,

Will T

A prayer

2009-03-29T14:41:00.000-04:00

Last week I as at a residency for the Way of Ministry program of the School of the Spirit. During our worship, I was given a prayer whose words were close to this:

Oh God,

“If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea;
Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.”

When men flew to the moon, you were with them. When they beheld the beautiful and delicate home that you have made us, rising over the moonscape, their hearts were filled with joy and awe.

If men and women fly to Mars, you will greet them there.

If the aliens from Alpha Centauri land in their flying saucers, when they disembark, we will behold the faces of your children.

Your hold us and comfort us in our deepest grief. In our joy, you laugh with us.

God, help us to find you and feel you and know you in the most difficult place of all, in the ordinariness and routine of our daily lives.

Amen.

Rectification of Names

2009-03-08T15:02:00.000-04:00

The idea of the rectification of names is an important concept in Confucian thought. “If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success.” The idea is that names used in discussion should accurately reflect what is being discussed. Unrectified names are common in political discourse. The idea of using names that accurately reflect the thing being referred to has a lot in common with the Quaker ideals of integrity and plain speaking.

So what Quaker phrases would I like to rectify today? I have two candidates. In the interest of full disclosure, these are both terms that I have used but I have come to disfavor them. The first one is “Christocentric.” This word is often used to identify one of two groups in liberal Yearly Meetings (although I have heard the term used by Orthodox Friends as well.) I have no problem if this is used by someone to self-describe their spiritual condition. To me it indicates someone whose spirituality revolves around Christianity but they haven't fully committed to being a Christian. Certainly there was a time that I fit that description. I liked it then but it no longer fits me and it its use has other side effects. Many times it is used in describing the spectrum of Quaker belief. Often the spectrum of belief is identified as Non-Theist (or Universalist) to Christocentric. This truncates the spectrum of belief in the predominately Liberal yearly meetings. It makes it sounds as Friends are either non-Christian or are people with ambivalent feelings about Christianity. In even the most liberal Yearly Meetings, there are a number of deeply committed Christians. Only referring to Christocentric Friends marginalizes these Friends. It makes questioning Christianity sound like the norm. Over time I was able to overcome my resistance to using the word Christian. I think we need to do that collectively as well.

The second phrase I would like to remove from the Quaker lexicon is “dual-affiliated yearly meetings.” This phrase is used to describe the yearly meetings that are members of both FGC and FUM. These are Baltimore, Canadian, New England, New York and Southeastern Yearly Meetings. I dislike the dual-affiliated phrase because it implies that these yearly meetings are somehow divided by their dual membership. The phrase I prefer is “united yearly meetings.” This term is more accurate because it reflects that the dual-affiliation (except in the case of Southeastern) is the result of a reunification of yearly meetings that had split earlier. The dual affiliation is the result of peace-making among yearly meetings that had joined the different umbrella groups in the time that they had been divided. Southeastern is the exception in that it is a relatively new yearly meeting that made a conscious decision to join both organizations as a testimony to unity among Friends. United yearly meetings reflects that history of peace making. It is also a much less cumbersome phrase.

So are these changes more reflective of truth or am I just moving language away from reflecting the truth of things? Are there Quaker phrases that you would like to see rectified? Make your suggestions in the comments.

Blessings to all,

Will T

An unexpected journey

2009-02-27T21:02:00.000-05:00

Let me tell you about my friend Bill. He is the gentlest and most self-aware person I know. I have known him for almost 30 years. We both attended Cambridge Meeting and our families both came to Fresh Pond Meeting when it started 20 years ago because we were seeking a more intimate spiritual community. Our kids grew up together. They commiserated with each other about how their parents were always the first to come and the last to leave. When I started leading workshops and traveling, he served as an elder for me and a traveling companion.

We have been participating in the Way of Ministry program of the School of the Spirit this year. We have enjoyed the opportunities to travel to Philadelphia together and to share the experience. Now I have become his traveling companion on a journey that neither one of us expected. In the beginning of January he shared with our support committee that he was going to have a CAT scan the next day because of some neurological symptoms he was experiencing. What they found was an inoperable tumor growing deep in his brain.

He is undergoing radiation and chemotherapy treatments and some of his symptoms have improved. It has been a privilege to see the courage and grace with which he is facing his situation. He talks about his sense of the presence of God with him. He tells about waking in the night and taking his sleeping bag and sitting on his deck watching the stars and being filled with joy. Just being with him, I have learned a lot about what is real and what is not. We had been looking forward to opportunities to share our journeys together. This is not the journey we had been expecting to take together now.

Please pray for Bill and his family.

Blessings to all.

Will T

Back from Richmond with a quiet heart

2009-02-18T20:08:00.001-05:00

I returned on Sunday from the FUM General Board meeting in Richmond, Indiana. There were a number of logistical problems. Because high winds in New York forced the closing of New York airports for several hours on Thursday, some people did not arrive until late on Thursday night. I had a direct flight from Boston to Indianapolis and I did not encounter such a problem. However, when I arrived at Quaker Hill and entered Woodward Lodge, where I expected to be sleeping, I discovered that they were mopping up some very rusty looking water from the floor of the basement where my room was to be. I heard variously that the hot water heater in the building had sprung a leak, or exploded, depending on the dramatic tendencies of the teller. I was moved into Evans House which had hot water but some people had to make do without hot water in their rooms.

Last fall the Superintendents of the 5 Orthodox yearly meetings in North America sent a letter to the clerk expressing concerns about the future of FUM. The letter can be found here. This letter provoked quite a bit of discussion some of which was here and here.

The Executive Committee met in December and on Friday afternoon made their report. They identified a number of questions for us to explore: Is FUM a missionary society or a denomination? Are FUM General Board members responsible for representing the views of their yearly meetings or are they selected to exercise their own discernment? They also named that there are cultural differences between members from the East Coast and the Midwest. Seeing some of the items listed let me see that some of these issues can be separated from our theological differences. This meant that we could, at least in theory, come to some resolution for some our organizational problems without having to resolve the theological ones.

The clerk and the executive committee had planned at this point for us to go into small group discussions. John Smallwood, from Baltimore YM asked us instead to go into prayer as a body. He felt that we were trying to solve the problem using human tools rather than turning to Christ for guidance. We entered into a period of deep worship and prayer. People spoke of how God calls us to love one another. I spoke of how I felt pained by the mentions of being unequally yoked. In the morning session we had been considering various parts of our work and we had worked well together and there were important contributions from people in many different yearly meetings. We had seemed to be working well together and pulling together to carry out the work of FUM. When I hear the phrase being used, I am pained because it feels as if it is excluding me, as if I am some kind of second-class Christian. I offered another image, where Paul suggests that Christians should not divorce an unbelieving spouse so that they may become an instrument of salvation.

Kelley Kellum quoted Jeremiah 6:16-17
This is what the LORD says:
"Stand at the crossroads and look;
ask for the ancient paths,
ask where the good way is, and walk in it,
and you will find rest for your souls.
But you said, 'We will not walk in it.'
I appointed watchmen over you and said,
'Listen to the sound of the trumpet!'
But you said, 'We will not listen.'

We recognized that we did not know how to proceed and that we needed to stay at the crossroads and ask to be shown the good way and when we find it, walk in it.

We continued in the deep worship until it was time to break for dinner. In the evening session we sang some hymns and prayed for the work of FUM but broke early. Everyone seemed pretty tired and ready for an early evening. No matter what changes spending deep time in the presence of God may work in our hearts, minds and souls, it can be tiring.

On Saturday morning we entered again into worship on the matter and again we went to a deep place. We heard from a number of the superintendents who had signed the letter. I spoke to the idea that the middle does not have to be a mushy place but can in fact be seen as the center of mass around which binary stars revolve. It is the center that holds things together and keeps them from going off in their different directions. The clerk was looking for us to provide some guidance to the Executive Committee on how to proceed but we did not provide much. Mostly we continued in that place of unknowing. We went on to the rest of our business and finished it up by the middle of the afternoon. The Executive Committee met at that point and I believe that they have some thoughts as to next steps but I do not know what they are.

After the Friday afternoon session I felt a change in the dynamics of the board as a whole. There seems to be a greater willingness to work together. There seems to be less of a desire to break FUM apart. There seems to be a willingness to stay in this place of brokenness and unknowing a while longer. There is more of a willingness to name the conflicts and to face them directly. We are just starting on this journey and we have not always found ways to talk with each other without hurting each other. But we have made a start. If we stand at the crossroads long enough, we will see the good way to go. As I have held this image, I think perhaps we are not standing at the crossroads, we are just standing at the Cross.

I am more optimistic about FUM than I have been for a long time. To quote Fox, “The good Lord is at work in this night of darkness that can be felt.”

Continue to pray for FUM and the Society of Friends,

Blessings to all

Will T

The All-New Hampshire Gathering

2009-02-09T21:41:00.011-05:00

Last Saturday I attended the All New Hampshire Gathering of Friends. This is an annual meeting for all Friends in New Hampshire. There is no one Quarterly Meeting for the state so it is a meeting for fellowship and discussion of common issues. This year they chose to explore the area of sexual ethics. One of the outcomes of the discussions of the sexual ethics portion of the FUM personnel policy has been a realization that New England Friends have not engaged in an exploration of the nature of their sexual ethics in at least the last half-century. While many Friends are opposed to the sexual ethics embodied in the FUM personnel policy, as a corporate body, NEYM has no statement on the matter. Although a number of monthly and quarterly meetings have taken positions and meetings have conducted many same-sex marriages, especially since they became legal in Massachusetts, the matter has never come before the yearly meeting for a decision. We have also not addressed issues of heterosexual ethics although our Young Friends and Young Adult Friends have asked for guidance in this area. Two years ago, more or less, the Yearly Meeting asked the local meetings to start a consideration of their sexual ethics with the idea that out of this the Yearly Meeting might come to some unity on the subject. This gathering was part of that process.

The keynote speaker was Gene Robinson, the bishop of the Episcopal diocese of New Hampshire. He discussed the difficulties that the Anglican communion is having over issues surrounding acceptance of gays and lesbians. He, of course, has been a lightning rod for this controversy since he is the first openly gay bishop. Even though he was discussing the Episcopal Church, it sounded very much like the situation among Friends.

In the afternoon I led a discussion on homosexuality and the Bible. (You can find my posts on the subject here) There were questions about the so-called “terrible texts” or the clobber verses. These are the 6 passages in the Bible that are the basis of the Biblical case against accepting gays and lesbians. I explained how the context for most of them is not homosexuality as it is practiced in today's society but male temple prostitution in Canaanite religion. I also presented material on the places in the Bible where same sex relationships are portrayed in a positive light.

Another set of questions people had revolved around how to talk about these issues with people who seem them so differently. I stressed that there is nothing in any of these verses that have changed anyone's mind on the issue, in either direction. My beliefs in equality for gays and lesbians are deeply held and would not be easily changed. People who don't agree with me on this are also expressing deeply held beliefs. In any discussion like this we need to assume an equal level of sincerity, conviction and desire to be faithful on all sides. The problem is, what to do when you have sincere, faithful and deeply convicted people who disagree. I wish I knew the answer.. At the workshop I said, this is where miracles happen. On Thursday night I am flying out to Richmond, Indiana, for the FUM General Board meeting. The sexual ethics issue will come up as part of a larger consideration of the entire personnel manual. I am hoping and praying for a miracle.

Blessings to all,

Will T

Specks and Beams

2009-01-24T19:40:00.000-05:00

On Friday night a week ago, I woke up and rubbed my eyes. It felt like something had gotten under my eyelid. It bothered me but I decided that it wasn't bothersome enough to get up in the middle of the night. (I was tired.) So I slept poorly and decided to call my doctor in the morning. He has Saturday office hours but it was the Martin Luther King holiday weekend and they were closed. It was still bothering me but not enough to keep me from doing what I had planned for the day. By the afternoon, my plans were done and my eye was starting to really bother me, so I called the on-call doctor and he sent me to the emergency room. I ended up waiting several hours. When they finally saw me they found and removed a tiny fleck of paint that was less than a 1/16th of an inch across. I went home and looked at the ceiling in my bedroom and there was a crack in the paint directly above my pillow.

This got me thinking. Here I was, I could not stand to leave a mote in my eye that was smaller than a mustard seed. In less than a day I couldn't stand it any more and had it taken out. Yet how many beams do I carry around in my eye that I don't even notice? Do I notice how my position of relative privilege prevents me from seeing the injustice and suffering around me? Do I notice the relationship between the military power of the United States and the wealth I enjoy? Do I notice that I use far more than my share of the world's resources? Do I notice the amount of carbon I put into the atmosphere? Do I notice that my my comfort is going to make the entire world less comfortable in my childrens lifetime? I could start a lumber yard with the beams in my eye.

Then I started looking at the beams that keep me from looking inward. The beam of pride that would let me think that I am somehow better and more deserving. The beam of the fear of death that keeps me from seeing my life in perspective. The beam of insecurity that keeps me from opening up to people. The beam of greed that causes me to see my needs but not the needs of others. All these beams and more I am familiar with and it doesn't bother me to carry them around in my eye. Yet I couldn't stand the speck for a day.

Blessings to all

Will T

Holiness: The Soul of Quakerism

2009-01-18T14:19:00.000-05:00

As promised here is my reflections on the book Holiness: The Soul of Quakerism by Carole Dale Spencer. I had heard about this book before but I had been put off by the dry academic tone. The tone is understandable as I understand that the book started life as a dissertation.

Her definition of holiness as “a spiritual quality in which human life is ordered and lived out as to be consciously centered in God.” In Quakerism, holiness was often used interchangeably with perfection. Perfection was understood as the vocation of the sanctified Christian. Justification and sanctification were the same process for early Friends because you could not be justified without being made just or holy.

Spencer identifies eight elements of Holiness Quakerism. These elements characterize historical Quakerism in the first generation. These elements are:

Scripture – Quakers had a thoroughly Scriptural world view and accepted the scriptures as authoritative.
Eschatology - Quakers anticipated the imminent second coming of Christ. When it did not happen, they recognized that Christ had come spiritually, within each person.
Conversion – Quakers were born again. The old self died and a new self was born.
Charisma – Quakers were filled with and led by the Holy Spirit.
Evangelism – Quakers were evangelistic and prophetic.
Mysticism – Knowledge of God came through direct experience.
Suffering – Quakers were persecuted and martyred, joyfully taking up the cross of Christ.
Perfection – Quakers experienced union with God, becoming the fully restored image of God and victory over sin.

She traces these elements through Quaker history by examining the lives of Quakers in various periods. She has some interesting observations as to what happened to some of these elements. Suffering, for instance became taking on Quaker testimonies and distinctives. When external persecution ended, the cross that Friends struggled with taking on was plain dress and plain speech and the rejection of worldly communities. Evangelism under the Quietists became traveling in the ministry, mostly among Friends. Among modern Friends, the goal of spiritual perfection has been replaced by social action.

She credited Friends with the rediscovery of silence among Protestants (it had a long history in the monastic and contemplative traditions.) It was radical in its time. Over time it became a form and end in itself and spiritual renewal among Friends in the 19th century came, not through silence but the overabundance of words, song and praise. Traditionalists, such as Joel Bean, reclaimed silent worship using it as a mark of the “faithful remnant.” Among liberal Friends, it allows people to come together in apparent unity, even if they hold radically different beliefs and experience silence in different ways. I don't disagree with this analysis but I don't think it is completely accurate. For a long time my experience was that silent worship was the only form of worship in which I experienced the presence of God. I have lately felt the presence of God in other forms but I still have the experience of the presence of God most frequently and easily in open worship. I also think that there is a rediscovery of apophatic spirituality among Friends and that open worship is an expression of that path. (Apophatic spirituality is sometimes called the via negativa. It involves finding God by removing all things that are not God.)

Carole Spencer suggests using holiness as a way of organizing Quaker history. She has a chart of what the tree of Quaker history looks like and it ends up with the Evangelical branch in the center. She highlights all of the groups and trends that had a strong holiness element. This path extends from the first generation of friends through Quietism and then the Orthodox and Guerneyites on on down through the Evangelical Holiness revival. The Wilburites are included as a group for which holiness was important. The interesting thing about this chart is that none of the contemporary Quaker organizations, including Evangelical Friends International are identified as having holiness as a distinctive or important part of their identity.

I very much appreciated the book. It has given me much to think about. It provides an approach that may allow us to look at our history without reliving the schisms of the past. It also reinforces the view that I had when I first started exploring Barclay, that the most important part was the sections on Christ, Justification and Perfection. I thought that they outlined a spirituality that was missing from liberal Quakerism. I also think that this reframing of Quaker history might have a lot to say to convergent Friends.

Blessings to all,

Will T

The Underground Railroad

2009-01-10T20:29:00.001-05:00

Happy New Year Friends, this is my first post of 2009. It will soon be snowing here. It feels like I have spent a fair amount of time the past several weeks shoveling snow. I enjoy winter. I find it a time of inwardness and reflection. Snowstorms provide welcome interruptions in our lives and unscheduled times of retreat and breaks in the busy-ness of our lives. They are like random moments of Sabbath rest sprinkled through our lives. Of course afterward there are the driveways and walks to shovel. Even then, it often seems that the whole neighborhood is out shoveling at the same time. We sometimes joke with our neighbors how we see them more in the winter when we are digging out than we do any other time of the year.

In a meeting for worship this fall I spoke about the faith of the woman who touched the hem of Jesus' robe and was healed and the faith of the people who lined the road leading to the temple so that they would be healed by Peter's shadow falling on them. Such faith is important and all of us need healing at one time or another but we are called to more. We got the name Society of Friends from what Jesus said on the night of the Last Supper. I no longer call you servants, I call you friends because now you know everything. Barclay says that the privilege of the Christian is to know their master's voice. We need to know the voice of God as well as we know the voice of a friend who we recognize on the phone even before they say their name. We need to know our teacher and friend's voice so well that we can recognize it even when it is speaking in a crowd.

Later a visiting Friend spoke about how Moses had followed the voice of God and led a whole people to freedom. Harriet Tubman had done things on a smaller scale. Instead of leading a whole people, she went to the South and led individuals to freedom. She went and looked individuals in the eye and saw if they were ready for freedom and the difficulties of the journey. If they were, she would lead them or tell them the way.

I was struck by this as a metaphor for the Gospel Ministry and for the nurturing role of the elder. The job is to look people in the eye and see if they are ready for the rigors of the path to Gospel Freedom. Are they willing to go into the forest and risk pursuit and capture; to trust in strangers; to go a place they have never seen to be cared for by people they have never met.

Isn't this also the spiritual path? And isn't the role of the minister and elder like that of the conductor on the Underground Railroad? To find people and build them up until they are ready to leave their home in captivity and undertake the dangerous journey to freedom. To help strengthen them on their journey. To provide safety and healing when needed and to move them along when it is time. At the end of our journey, may we all be able to say, “Free at last. Free at last. Thank God Almighty, free at last.”

Blessings to all,

Will T

Through flaming sword

2008-12-28T20:46:00.000-05:00

I have been writing this blog for 2 ½ years. I have enjoyed the writing and the exchanges in the comments. Every once and a while, it brings me a surprise. This fall I received one of these in my inbox. It was a query from the good folks at Barclay Press as to whether I would be interested in receiving a copy of their reissue of Through Flaming Sword which is Arthur Roberts biography of George Fox. They assured me that I would be under no obligation to review the book. Judging from the mentions of this book that I have seen on other blogs, I would hazard a guess that I am not the only person to have received such a query. Apparently this is how viral marketing is done among Friends.

I am glad that I accepted the offer because I enjoyed reading the book. The biography was a useful, easily read introduction to the life of Fox. The part that grabbed my interest was the section on the legacy of George Fox where Roberts discusses the holiness tradition among early Friends. Growing up as I did among liberal Friends I had tended to view holiness as something that had swept over 19'th century Friends and somehow subverted the Quaker movement. Roberts made Quaker holiness understandable to me. He also showed me that it has been at the heart of Quakerism from the beginning.

As Roberts explains it, holiness is the idea that justification and sanctification are heart of the religious life. It is the work of Christ within us that actually makes us holy. This may happen over time, but eventually we are made perfect and holy by God. This was the part of Barclay that made my heart sing. It is the part of Quakerism that I would like to see liberal Friends recover. It is just that I had never known to put the name of Holiness on that doctrine. So I was a bit gobsmacked to see an Evangelical friend declaring this to be the heart of Quakerism and something that had been preserved in their branch of Quakerism. This confirmed my belief that Friends need to spend more time talking with each other. The different strains of Quakerism are holding on to different pieces of what had been a unified whole. I think that silent worship is a unique gift of Friends to Christianity. But it loses some of its transformative power without the idea of holiness. With holiness, Meeting for Worship becomes more than just a quiet hour of reflection, it becomes a tool whereby the Spirit of God can work in us to bring us along the road to perfection or holiness. I understand how Hannah Whitehall Smith could have heard holiness preached and thought that it was just Quakerism in clearer language.

Reading this got me to start reading Carole Dale Spencer's more thorough and scholarly study of holiness, Holiness: the Soul of Quakerism. Before I would have thought that title a bit of a stretch. Now I am not so sure. I will at least have to finish her book before I can say.

Blessings to all,

Will T

The Messiah No One Expected

2008-12-19T16:10:00.000-05:00

In the days of Herod the Great, the people waited expectantly for the Messiah, the person who would liberate their country from imperial rule and bring about a new state of justice and peace. Nobody except Joseph and Mary and their immediate family was waiting expectantly for the birth of Jesus. No one expected a Messiah to be born in a stable to temporarily homeless people. No one expected a Messiah whose kingdom was not of this world. No one expected a Messiah who said that the Kingdom of God is within and among you already. No one expected a Messiah who said that the way to the Kingdom is to give up yourself. No one expected a Messiah who said that you must give up your ego, the false self, the one you have created, as if from fig leaves, to hide those parts you are ashamed of. Certainly no one expected a Messiah who would give himself up to be killed by the powers and principalities of that world of falsehood.

When the world, that world built on the basis of all those false selves, realized what this prophet was teaching, they rejected him, and finally killed him. No one expected a Messiah that would be reborn. The false self fears its death and does not realize that its death is a rebirth into wholeness whereby we accept in ourselves everything, even those parts we are ashamed of. It is a rebirth into a place where we can acknowledge our imperfections and make amends, when needed, for the times when our imperfections have hurt others. We are reborn into a place of honesty and integrity about ourselves and our place in the world. In that place we come to know the love of God but the world that is based on lies and deception hates us. It hates us because our integrity holds up a mirror to the false self, and the false self cannot stand what it sees. It is through meekness, humility and the death of this false self that we come into God's kingdom.

So the Messiah that no one expected, who was born in a stable and died on a cross and was reborn, is now standing outside and knocking on the doors of our hearts, asking us to let him in so that we too can be reborn. Asking that we might cease to be servants of God and become friends.

The world hasn't changed so much since the days of Herod. This advent season we are waiting the new president who will lead us into a world of justice and peace and prosperity while the Messiah is standing outside our door knocking.

Blessings to all,

Will T

Community, Safety and God

2008-12-10T21:44:00.001-05:00

Our meeting had a retreat recently. For the first hour we shared about what we would need to feel safe during the retreat. People shared about needing to feel heard and respected. They needed to have their responses taken seriously and not judged. People shared about needing to be able to speak passionately without it being taking as anger or judgment. People spoke of needed to be able to speak up if they felt hurt by something someone said. At one point I found myself getting a little impatient. When were we going to get past this and on to the real business of the retreat. Then I realized that this was the real business. The purpose of the retreat was to explore our vision for the meeting community. I realized that all of these needs that we were expressing for the session also described what kind of community we wanted our meeting to be. We want a place where we feel respected. We need to hear each others voices. We need to express our vulnerabilities. We need to be able to express our passions. We need to recognize that we are all imperfect and sometimes we will hurt each other. When that happens we need to be able to name the hurt, reconcile and heal, and go on.

I was struck by the paradox of what we were doing. We were trying to create a community where we would all feel safe. But the purpose of the community is to be a place where we can find God. But encountering God is an inherently dangerous activity. “It is a fearsome thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” [Hebrews 10:31] Moses asked if any mortal could look on the face of God and live. It is because of the inherent danger of what we are about that the safety of the community is so important. You would not go rock climbing without a companion and a rope. The community provides the safe place to do a dangerous thing. It provides the support and encouragement that allows us to go on.

The other irony is that the encounter with God is not dangerous to our souls. It is only dangerous to our egos, our personas, the false self we project to the world. It is dangerous to our illusions about ourselves because the encounter with God shows us as we really are. God is dangerous to the defenses we have built over the years to protect ourselves from the hurts we have encountered. But God strips all of that away from us. God will be as the refiners fire and burn away from us all that is not of God. Ultimately this is healing. In fact it is a source of great joy. It allows us to grow into who God would have us be. But it is awesome in prospect and sometimes painful in the process. And so we need safe and supportive companions as we embark on such a perilous journey. This is why community is so vital to Quakerism.

Blessings to all,

Will T

The election and God's Kingdom

2008-11-10T20:44:00.000-05:00

I have been reading the responses to the election from at least the liberal end of the Quaker blogosphere. I felt joy and excitement at seeing a black man being elected president. I was moved by the tears on Jesse Jackson's face. This was certainly an historic occasion. There was a long hard struggle that made it possible and many people sacrificed a lot to see this day happen. It is a significant and joyous day for our country. Nevertheless, it is important for Friends, in fact for all Christians, to remember that this does not bring us one step closer to the Kingdom of God.

God's Kingdom is not of this world and God is not a liberal Democrat. God is also not a conservative Republican. God's Kingdom is not achieved either through the force of arms or the force of the ballot box. God's Kingdom is within us and among us. It is achieved by the intimate working of God and the Holy Spirit in our inmost parts. We enter its borders when we give up our own striving and seeking and turn our hearts and minds wholly to God. We travel deeper into it as we open ourselves to the transforming work of the Holy Spirit. We find our way by following in the steps of Christ. When we get there, the scales fall from our eyes and we realize that we have always been living in it but we didn't see. In the world of James Naylor, “Its crown is meekness, its life is everlasting love unfeigned; and it takes its kingdom with entreaty and not with contention, and keeps it by lowliness of mind.”

Blessings to all,

Will T

Thoughts on Christian Witness

2008-11-03T21:44:00.000-05:00

I have been considering witness lately. Certain Friends at NEYM sessions proclaimed rather loudly that they wanted to make a witness by refusing to send money to FUM because of the FUM personnel policy that discriminates against gays and lesbians. In my last post I talked about the confusion between our approach to political conflicts and spiritual ones. Here I want to look at the issue of witness.

Before I go any further I want to acknowledge that Baltimore Yearly Meeting has been holding it's contributions to FUM in escrow. I have only been a distant and partially informed observer of this. A major difference in the situation there is that this is the result of a corporate decision and it has been combined with a corresponding effort to visit with and build relationships with other yearly meetings in FUM.

I do not consider withholding funds from FUM, as it was discussed at NEYM, to be a Christian witness. It is a political act. At it's root, it is a coercive act. It says, “If you don't change, I won't give you any money. If you change, I will give you money.” It is not a surprise that people from the more evangelical wing of FUM consider this an insult. It feels to them as if they are being offered a bribe. It is as if we think that they would be willing to change their beliefs for money. Mostly I think it is an act of spiritual and political narcissism. This is something that an individual can do that has no risk for them but it has the trappings of a principled moral stand. As such it serves to make the person feel better about themselves but it is not clear that it works to further God's purpose.

A Christian witness requires that the person suffer the consequences of their act of witness. The archetypal act of Christian witness is Jesus accepting death on the cross. Early Friends, when talking about their acts, made a point of how they acted even though it was against their best interests. They acted and willingly suffered the consequences of their actions. Thus they filled the jails and had their land and property seized and suffered beatings. For some, their persistence led to their death.

The whole rationale behind non-violent witness as practiced by both Gandhi and the civil rights movement was to act as if the change they wanted had already happened and take on themselves the consequences of the actions. They idea was to make the people enforcing the status quo to recognize their role and to touch their hearts so that they would change their actions. Images of large numbers of people willingly accepting suffering and even death led the people in England and the United States to look at themselves and ask , “What kind of people are we that we are doing this?” When they started asking this question, colonialism and segregation were doomed.

The other piece of non-violence witness is that it is motivated by love. John Woolman, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King were concerned about the effects of oppression on the oppressor and not just the plight of the oppressed. What part of withholding money is motivated by love? Where is the direct involvement with people? Where is the building of bonds of love and trust. When John Woolman was concerned about Quaker slave owners, he went and traveled among them and stayed in their homes. Baltimore Yearly Meeting has an active program of intervisitation. New England set up a such a program but very few people have been willing to participate.

Withholding money from FUM looks like a witness but it isn't. At the end of the day, the person withholding money has more money in their pocket than they would have otherwise. The consequence of their action is a benefit to them. It appears to me to be motivated by a desire to maintain some kind of moral purity. It is saying that, in this one particular case, the withholder will keep their money from coming into contact with an organization they disapprove of. I do not see how it is any different from the concern for maintaining moral purity that lies behind the rejection of gays and lesbians from full participation in our meetings and churches.

Of course I cannot know what is really going on in another person's heart or mind. I am often enough unclear about what is going on in my own heart and mind. This is why we all need to stay close to our Guide. We also need to remember that when God speaks to us, it is with love. If we seek to speak God's word to each other, we need to do so in the same spirit.

Blessings to all.

Will T

Politics and Spirituality

2008-10-26T12:32:00.000-04:00

I have been thinking lately about the difference between a spiritual and a political approach to conflict. This has been prompted by my experiences dealing with conflict in New England Yearly Meeting (NEYM) and in Friends United Meeting (FUM). And this being the week before an election, politics is pretty hard to avoid.

One of significant differences between the two approaches is in how the decision is implemented. The political process carries with it the threat of coercion to enforce the decisions. The whole idea behind elections is to count up the size of the “army” of supporters for each candidate or position and victory goes to the largest “army.” In any case, once you get 50% plus 1 to agree on something, then you have the entire coercive power of the state to enforce the decision. As a result, a major part of any political campaign is to get out the vote of like-minded people. The easiest way to victory is to get your people to the polls. The next part is to try to convince people who do not have any opinion or only mild opinions, that your side is correct. What is really hard to do is to convince people who disagree with you to change their mind. Most politicians don't even bother. They mobilize their base and go after the undecideds.

In legislative bodies things are only a little different. The members of the legislature work together on many issues so that they have an opportunity to develop personal relationships. Votes are often rounded up, not by persuasion but by the giving and receiving of favors. I will support your bill for this if you support my bill for that. Since many bills are relatively non-controversial, this works. When there is a controversy, the work is often to find language that both sides can live with.

Spiritual decision making, at least as practiced by Quakers, is different. The body usually has no power to coerce consent with a decision. People have to unite with the decision for it to actually be implemented. The goal of decision making is to discern God's will so there is an expectation that people may have to change their minds. Of course, we are not always happy to change our minds and we often resist doing so. We need to leave the business of changing minds and hearts to God, since there is always the possibility that the heart or mind that needs to change is ours.

Most Friends are comfortable in the political arena. We are not necessarily so comfortable with spiritual decision making. It is a mistake to bring our political experience to spiritual decision making. The goal is different. It is not, how can we find something that 50% plus one, or 90% or even everyone can agree on. It is finding unity on discerning how God wants us to proceed.

One of the reason that NEYM sessions were so difficult this year was that people brought political methods to a spiritual process. There was a contingent of people who had little or no previous experience at Yearly Meeting coming to try to get the yearly meeting to adopt their position. The position that they were advocating was essentially a coercive action against other Friends. If FUM does not change it's personnel policy, we will stop sending money.

At the FUM General Board Meeting, there was an attempt to try to find language that people could agree on that would acknowledge differences but allow a way to approve the personnel manual. This didn't work because the differences are too great to allow a change of wording to resolve it

In spiritual decision making, there is a need to let down your guard and your defenses. Let down your own willing and striving and see what God wants to do. This is difficult. There is a tendency to see God as the ultimate army of political backers. God is on our side and His vote counts for more. In the case of FUM and the sexual ethics portion of the personnel policy, both sides are convinced that God is on their side. When this happens, it is a clear sign, at least to me, that both sides are seeing only a piece of what God wants. What is required is the difficult work of removing logs from our eyes so that we can see clearly. We need to unstop our ears so that we can hear each other and God more clearly. We need to open up our hearts to each other so that we can approach each other in love. We need to pray together so that our hearts and minds are opened to God so that we all may be changed.

Impressions from the October FUM General Board Meeting

2008-10-15T20:54:00.001-04:00

The FUM General Board met last week. This was the first meeting of the new triennium so we had new clerks, some turnover in membership and we had to reappoint our standing committees. Because of other commitments and my travel schedule, I didn't arrive at Quaker Hill until almost the end of the morning session on Thursday. As soon as I walked in I felt a different spirit. It seemed gentler and more open. I wasn't sure if it was due to changes in my attitudes or the beautiful weather but I heard other people making similar comments. I took encouragement from even this small sign.

On Thursday night and Friday morning, informal discussions were scheduled while the various board committees were meeting. I caught the tail end of the discussion on the Richmond Declaration on Thursday night. On Friday I participated in the discussions on “The Christian Faith of Friends,” a pamphlet by Ben Richmond, and one that followed on the Bible. Through all of this there was respectful listening. I think that this was a good opportunity for us to discuss our beliefs outside of the context of decision making.

Meanwhile the Executive Committee was wrestling with the Personnel Manual. There are a number of items that need to be cleaned up. They wanted to change the vacation and sick time accrual and usage to be based on the FUM fiscal year and not the calendar year. They also wanted more clarity about exempt and non-exempt employees. While different parts of the manual have been approved, it is not clear that the General Board has approved the entire manual. This normal sort of organizational housekeeping, of course, runs smack into the controversy about the sexual ethics policy. There were efforts to craft a minute that would acknowledge the differences but acknowledge that there was not unity on changing it. The hope was that this would allow the Board to proceed with approving the non-controversial parts of the manual.

When this issue came before the Board, these hopes were proven to be futile. There were people who would not approve of dropping the paragraph. There were others who could not approve a manual that included a discriminatory policy. As the discussion progressed I found myself becoming increasingly uneasy with the approach of trying to come up with acceptable language. It seems to me that trying to find a solution in carefully crafted language is a political approach to what is really a spiritual problem.

The immediate resolution was to send the proposed manual to a labor lawyer to see that it conforms with Indiana labor law. There should also be consultation with someone familiar with immigration law to see what risks we are exposed to by our policy of not requiring people to submit I-9 forms. Our position as a church makes us exempt from the anti-discrimination laws concerning gays and lesbians but there were questions about whether our acceptance of US Government grants for the Kenyan hospitals and Ramallah Friends School has any impact on this. Basically we said that we could not approve the manual until this consultation happened, any required revisions were made, and our questions of fact were answered. This of course does not resolve the problem, it only provides more time. Whatever the lawyers say, I do not expect that it will resolve the problem.

As far as I can tell, we cannot solve the problem of the sexual ethics policy by any of our normal organizational means. This does not mean that the problem is insoluble. Nothing is impossible to God. At some point, the General Board will have to be willing to spend as much time in prayer as is needed to find God's will. We will need to be humble enough, all of us, to recognize that the solution we favor may not be what God would do. It may also be that we have to spend a long time in prayer together before we can see a way forward. I would ask everyones prayers for FUM in dealing with this issue. In particular I would ask for prayers that we can all lay down our agendas and be able to listen carefully to God and to each other so that we can come to a place of unity in Spirit that can lead us forward. God is working here already. God is always working with us. I pray that we can find ways to work with God.

Blessings to all,

Will T

In God We Trust

2008-10-03T22:27:00.000-04:00

The current economic situation reminds me of the apocryphal sign behind the counter in a store:
“In God we trust, all others must pay cash.”

One of the things that is aggravating the current economic situation is that the banks and large financial institutions have stopped trusting each other. They do not trust that they will be repaid if they loan each other money. So they don't. Or they only do so at rates so high as to be unaffordable. How did we get to this place.

Quakers were instrumental in creating many of our financial structures and institutions. Quakers founded and operated a number of the banks in England. There were a number of reasons for this but one of them was the Quakers' reputation for absolute honesty, integrity and sobriety. Who better to trust your money to than a person committed to telling the truth in all things. A plain dressed Quaker was also unlikely to siphon off your money to pay for their luxuries.

Quakers were well known for their carefulness with money. Bankruptcy was grounds for disownment. Not paying debts was considered a form of untruthfulness because you had broken your word. It also indicated that you had perhaps overextended yourself and had not stayed low and faithful to your Inner Guide. It indicated that perhaps you had let a desire for worldly goods to cloud your judgment.

Nowadays Quakers mostly seem not to take to careers in business or finance. They lean much more towards academia and social or medical services or software engineering. I suspect that there is fertile ground fo sociological studies examining why this is. At least one part of it is a desire to good in the world. Teaching or healing or working for non-profits are obvious ways of doing good. But wouldn't the world be a better place today if there had been a few more Quaker bankers and financiers. Would we be in this sub-prime mortgage mess if the mortgage originators had been committed to scrupulous honesty? Would we have had the piling of debt upon debt if the financial institutions had been run by people who would not consider making a promise that they could not keep?

But none of that was the case and we are in a mess. So who do we trust now? Friends will claim to trust in God, but do we? Did we feel confident because we were living in good times and do we feel insecure now that our investments and retirement funds have taken a serious hit and we do not know what lies in store? When early Friends refused hat honor, or used thee and thou with people who thought they should be addressed with the plural your, they were holding a mirror up to them to see their pride. Friends considered that the angry reactions that they provoked were a way for the person getting angry to see how much pride had gotten a hold on them.

The current situation is a similar opportunity. It is a chance for us to see, in our reactions, where we have really laid up our treasure. Have we laid them up in heaven or on earth where rust, moths and financial collapse consume? How much of our lives serve God and how much Mammon? Is the Lord our rock and our refuge?

Is our cry that of Revelation 19:11-17:

"The merchants of the earth will weep and mourn over her because no one buys their cargoes any more— cargoes of gold, silver, precious stones and pearls; fine linen, purple, silk and scarlet cloth; every sort of citron wood, and articles of every kind made of ivory, costly wood, bronze, iron and marble; cargoes of cinnamon and spice, of incense, myrrh and frankincense, of wine and olive oil, of fine flour and wheat; cattle and sheep; horses and carriages; and bodies and souls of men.
"They will say, 'The fruit you longed for is gone from you. All your riches and splendor have vanished, never to be recovered.' The merchants who sold these things and gained their wealth from her will stand far off, terrified at her torment. They will weep and mourn and cry out:
" 'Woe! Woe, O great city,
dressed in fine linen, purple and scarlet,
and glittering with gold, precious stones and pearls!
In one hour such great wealth has been brought to ruin!'

Or, in this our time of difficulty do we sing like the author of Psalm 46:

God is our refuge and strength,
an ever-present help in trouble.
Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way
and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea,
though its waters roar and foam
and the mountains quake with their surging.
Selah
There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,
the holy place where the Most High dwells.
God is within her, she will not fall;
God will help her at break of day.
Nations are in uproar, kingdoms fall;
he lifts his voice, the earth melts.
The LORD Almighty is with us;
the God of Jacob is our fortress.
Selah
Come and see the works of the LORD,
the desolations he has brought on the earth.
He makes wars cease to the ends of the earth;
he breaks the bow and shatters the spear,
he burns the shields [b] with fire.
"Be still, and know that I am God;
I will be exalted among the nations,
I will be exalted in the earth."
The LORD Almighty is with us;
the God of Jacob is our fortress.
Selah

I find myself switching between songs, often several times a day.

Blessings to all,

Will T

A pebble in a pond

2008-09-22T20:25:00.000-04:00

The speaker rose and spoke out of the immediate inspiration of the Holy Spirit and gave forth a message which included a reminder that our lives touch so man others in ways that we cannot know. It is like a pebble thrown into a pond and the ripples move out in ways we cannot know...

The curmudgeonly Quaker sat in a back bench and began to pray:

"How long, oh Lord, how long
can we keep throwing pebbles into this pond
before it fills up with stones."

Smiles and blessings to all.

Will T

God helps me with my homework

2008-09-08T21:02:00.002-04:00

Last week I attended the first residency of the Way of Ministry Program of the School of the Spirit at Pendle Hill. During my first peer group session I shared about a difficult experience in my ministry. At almost the end of the time a Friend asked if I had considered forgiveness for the people involved and for myself. I said that I had not and that I would have to take this up as a homework assignment.

Every morning we started with meeting for worship. The next morning I walked into meeting with my half-finished mug of coffee from breakfast still in my hand. The moment my butt touched the cushion a prayer came to me “God help me pray for my enemies.” This was a real surprise to me. First of all I usually spend the first moments in worship settling myself physically, mentally and spiritually. So here God was giving me a prayer right off of the top. The second surprising thing was that I don't usually think of myself as having enemies. I get along with most people. I try to be agreeable and to find common ground. The third and most surprising thing was that I knew immediately who the people were that I needed to pray for. These were not enemies in the abstract but specific people in my life.

The image I have always held about enemies was that they were the armies that were invading my country. People did not become enemies until they committed some extreme act of aggression against me or a group I identified with. It was even better if they were abstract and generalized. Then I thought about how wars really happen. A country becomes your enemy before the battle start. They have already become your enemy when you start planning for the battle. It starts when you start thinking about the other as totally alien. It starts when you decide that the other needs to be overcome by whatever means are necessary. Having an enemy has nothing to do with what the other has done. It is all about your attitude towards them.

I thought about myself and I thought about Friends in general. I find myself asking if George Bush and Dick Cheney are our enemies. How about John McCain? How about fundamentalist Christians or homophobes? Are Barack Obama and liberal democrats the enemy? Or liberal Friends? How about non-theist Friends or pagan Friends? Are they the enemy?

So here was God not only reminding me of my assignment but helping me get started.

Later in the week I was talking with my prayer partner about what we might do between residencies. I said that praying for people was not part of my regular practice. For whatever reason it was not something that I usually did. But I said that I would work on doing so, that it seemed like a useful discipline to undertake. I would take this as homework. I really should learn faster.

The next day in worship I sat down and from the beginning I found myself picturing one of the people from my list of enemies being surrounded by white light. I hate the phrase “hold something or someone in the Light.” It seems like a phrase used by liberal Friends who are nervous about the idea of prayer. When I am feeling curmudgeonly I think, “Just come out and ask us to pray for this.” Holding someone in the Light smacks too much of somehow the outcome is our doing. Praying is acknowledging that whatever happens it is God who has done the work. And here I was literally holding my enemy in the Light. I found myself praying for their healing – not even knowing what they might need to be healed from but knowing that we all bear wounds that need healing. I found myself praying that God's grace come into this persons life in whatever way God wanted. I did not want healing for them so that they would start doing what I wanted them to do. I found myself asking for the best that God has to offer. Throughout that meeting for worship, whenever I found myself straying, I returned to the image of this face framed with white light and it powerfully recentered me. I knew that there were other people I needed to pray for but I felt that God would lead me to that. There were people I was not yet ready to pray for. Since then some of those names have been added to my prayers.

When I got home I started reading If Grace is True by Phillip Gulley and James Mulholland. I picked it up because it was an easy read, it is relatively short and it is not on the Way of Ministry reading list for the next residency. It seems that it was on the reading list for the School of Christ. It speaks powerfully to the grace of God. It is reinforcing the work of forgiveness that is at work in me. It also reinforces for me that I will be doing this work with God all of the way. I will not be doing this by my will or strength. This is good because both are inadequate to the task.

But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing that others? Do not event the Gentiles do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. [Matthew 5:44-48]

Blessings to all,

Will T

The night of the IBQs – NEYM Part 5

2008-08-15T20:54:00.000-04:00

I don't remember who at sessions mentioned Iron Butt Quakers (IBQs) who can sit for long hours in business sessions. We certainly had them in quantity on Wednesday evening. The scheduled called for the meeting to last from 7:00 to 9:00. We still had a few unfinished items of business. We had two memorial minutes that we hadn't heard yet. We had the history chapter from the new Faith and Practice that was due for preliminary approval. We had to approve the nominating committee report. And we had to approve the budget. We got through most of everything else by shortly after 8:00. The Finance Committee brought back the budget with some changes. They had restored the travel budgets but they had not restored the money for FGC and FUM. They stressed that this budget was in deficit by about $17,000 and that this would almost exhaust our reserves. At that point I spoke that there was another way to look at this. I said that by accepting this budget we would be committing ourselves and our meetings to increase their contributions to the Yearly Meeting by $17,000 overall. If at the beginning of the year you had told me that I would speak as much on the budget as on FUM issues, I would not have believed you. Such are the surprises that happen at Yearly Meeting. I do need to be careful how much more I speak on the subject or Nominating Committee will be asking me about the Finance Committee or the Advancement Committee.

At that point people began asking again for ways that they could keep their contributions from going to FUM. There were number of people who spoke how they could not be complicit with the discrimination they saw in FUM. There were expressions of anger and pain. Other people spoke of the need to remain engaged with FUM There were expressions of anger and pain. It was 9:00 pm and some parents had to leave to collect their children from the evening activities.

The meeting continued.

Paul Hood gave a lengthy testimony of his experiences as a marine in the Pacific in World War II and how he was eventually led to being a tax resister. Although he hasn't paid Federal income taxes since the Vietnam War, he found to his surprise that he was eligible to a tax rebate check this year. After giving it some thought he filed a tax return and has now decided to give his rebate check to the Yearly Meeting.

The meeting continued.

Wellesley Meeting has not approved it's budget for the year because they have not reached unity on what to do with their contribution to NEYM because of the FUM issues. Phil Fitz, a gay man who had been the clerk of the Working Party on the FUM Personnel Policy, said that he would take that work back up. He also offered that, if Wellesley reduced its contribution to the Yearly Meeting, he would personally make up the portion of that which would have been their contribution to FUM.

At one point I looked up and the clerk of the Finance Committee was still standing by the podium where she had been when she made her presentation as if she were waiting for more budget questions, although it was clear that we had long gone past that point. I don't know how long she stayed there.

I sat in my seat holding the meeting and the clerks in prayer.

The meeting continued.

There were more expressions of anger and pain. Someone said that they did not know if there was a sense of the meeting. Jan Hoffman said that there was a clear sense of the meeting. The sense of the meeting was that there was a lot of pain around these issues and that we had a lot of work to do.

The meeting continued.

A lesbian friend spoke, asking us why we had to look so far away for homophobia to fight. Why didn't we fight the homophobia in our meetings and our communities. She is responsible for our child care and she said that it was possible, although she didn't know that it had happened, that people might not come to sessions or bring their children because they wouldn't want her caring for them. She works in early childhood education but there are schools in Massachusetts that won't hire her because of her sexual orientation. Why aren't we working on that? She reminded us that last year we had committed ourselves to look at our own issues around sexual morality, to work on our own issues of homophobia. Had we forgotten that and abandoned the commitment we had made just last year?

Shortly afterwards the Chris McCandless, who had done an excellent job of clerking the entire session, said that it was his sense that we had approved the budget, that we would trust the Finance Committee to create a mechanism that would allow people to specify that their contributions not go to FUM and that the clerks would prepare a minute and bring it to us in the morning.

The meeting ended sometime between 10:30 and 11:00

Iron Butt Quakers indeed.

The last night of Yearly Meeting is traditionally the night of the coffee house. It is organized by the Young Friends but Friends of all ages participate. It is a fun way to end sessions. This year will be known as the year the adults did not come to coffee house. At one point they stopped the performances and held the adult business session in prayer. They knew that if the business meeting was going this late, it needed our prayers.

There were many people holding the business session in prayer. The meeting stayed well focused and centered throughout. In the journals of Quaker ministers that I have read, I have seen references to being involved in close, hard, work during a meeting. This was certainly our case that night. There is a lot of work that remains before us. Pray for New England Yearly Meeting.

The thing that saddened me was to feel the same spirit of schism here as I had felt at the FUM Board Meeting in Kenya. It was not as strong or as prevalent, but it was there. I was also saddened that the entire discussion seemed to be focused on New England. By and large, the people speaking about withholding money were talking about their need to not be complicit. There was little willingness to hear about how their actions might be perceived by others. There was no discussion about how we might work to end homophobia within FUM. It was all about us. This might be a necessary stage to go through but ultimately God is calling us to be all about other people. Eventually we will have to emerge from our self-absorption and deal with the people in the world who do not see things the same way we do.

God grant me the strength, courage and wisdom to do that.

Blessings to all.

Will T

A change of pace and convergence - NEYM Part 4

2008-08-14T21:40:00.000-04:00

On Tuesday morning, during the worship after the Bible Half Hour, Peter Blood-Patterson suggested that Friends who didn't want their NEYM contributions going to FUM should instead send some multiple amount of that amount to some other organization doing some similar work such as the African Great Lakes Initiative. While he was speaking I made the mental calculation of the membership of NEYM and the amount that we send to FUM and realized for the current year that meant $5 per person and in the proposed 2009 budget it would be $2.50 per person. I was reminded me of the New England town meetings I have attended where budget items worth tens of millions of dollars would be approved with no discussion and a $1000 appropriation for something like parades would take most of an evening.

In the morning business session the representatives to the FUM Triennial made our report. We read the epistle from the Triennial. A Friend from Maine spoke to how Ramallah Friends School had been founded by Friends from Maine and it had been operated by New England Yearly Meeting until it was transferred to the Board of Missions which later brought it under the care of FUM. Eden Grace, who is FUM Field Staff in Kenya and a member of Beacon Hill Friends Meeting, then gave a five minute report on all of the work being done in Kenya.

Tuesday night we did not have a business meeting. Instead we had a concert by Anais Mitchell who had grown up as a Young Friend in New England. I enjoyed the music and it felt restorative to not be discussing difficult issues – either inside or outside of worship. I had advertised an interest group on Convergent Friends for that evening after the concert. Lynn said that she knew what we needed and went to the store and got chocolate chip cookies and strawberries and lemonade. About 15 people showed up. We talked about what Convergent Friends were and the place of the Bible in our spiritual lives. The question I had that we didn't get to discuss much was what does it mean to be a Convergent Friend in New England. Is it just a discussion that happens on-line and at interest groups at other conferences or is there something more that we are called to do. Whoever we is.

One of the things I realize is that New England YM probably has as broad a range of theological diversity of any Yearly Meeting, at least in North America. We have pagans and vocal non-theists. We a plain Friend who taught for years in Kenya. We have pastoral meetings that identify strongly with FUM. We have liberal unprogrammed college meetings. We have committed social activists. We have recorded ministers. We have meetings on record that they do not record ministers. And somehow we manage to hold together and work together and worship together and be strengthened and nourished and nurtured by each other. Sometimes this is in spite of our differences and sometimes it is because of them.

Blessings

Will T

Things heat up. NEYM – Part 3

2008-08-13T21:42:00.000-04:00

On Sunday afternoon the business agenda was given over to hearing the State of Society Report, hearing the report on the Working Party on Spirituality and Sexual Ethics, and threshing on Friends United Meeting. That was the way it was laid out in the agenda. After the Working Party report, the clerk said that there was an hour left and this was time to bring up any concerns people might have. For the first half hour, the comments centered on responses to the Working Party and how we should provide guidance to our young people and so on. After about half an hour I turned to my wife and whispered to her that this wasn't the conversation that I had expected.

No sooner were the words out of my mouth and a Friend stood and asked the clerk again when the threshing on FUM was going to begin. Once again, the clerk said that this was the time to bring up any issues that might be on people's hearts. This brought forth a series of speakers with concerns about the FUM personnel policy, the perceived homophobia of FUM and how people could not see their money going to support this organization any longer. There was a lot of pain and anger expressed. At least one person got up and read a brief extract from the Richmond Declaration and part of the General Board minute from February, 2007 which reaffirmed it. He used this to support his position that NEYM should withdraw from FUM. As he read the minute, my first reaction surprised me a bit. I found myself saying to myself, “Hey, I wrote that minute-don't read it back to me and tell me what it means.” Fortunately I had spent the week or two before sessions began recalling James 1:19-20, “You must understand this, my beloved: let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger; for your anger does not produce God's righteousness.” Sometimes I think that these words should be projected on a screen above the clerk's head at every business session everywhere.

Towards the end of the meeting I was able to speak to remind Friends that FUM was more than just a personnel policy. It includes people who, when faced with violence in their own communities, sheltered and protected people in their own homes, brought food and blankets to the displaced, and helped facilitate reconciliation when displaced people returned to the communities they had fled. They had thought that the peace testimony did not apply to them because they lived in a peaceful country but when they needed to, they rose to a witness in their lives, at considerable risk, that we in America would be hard pressed to match. I spoke of the need to remain in dialog. I spoke of the need for spiritual hospitality. I encouraged people to look to see whether their need to maintain their own purity in not associating with the homophobes of FUM was not prompted in part by the same spirit that caused Friends elsewhere to not want to associate with the sinful homosexuals. Based on later comments, I don't think that suggestion gained much traction among Friends.

In the evening we heard the reports from the Quarterly Meetings on their consideration of the minute of commitment and how they had begun the process of exploring their understanding of sexual ethics. There was more discussion of all the issues at that time as well. Sylvia Graves, FUM General Secretary, arrived fresh from Western Yearly Meeting, in time for the evening session. She remained with us for the rest of our sessions. I do not remember many specifics of that session. My memories of some of the details is already getting a little hazy. One thing I do know was that by this point I had a number of appointments to discuss these issues over meals later on.

Monday morning my wife and I skipped the business session and went for a bike ride. The weather was sunny, dry and not too warm. It was the most enjoyable part of sessions for me. Monday night was the first presentation of the budget. This was where people started talking about wanting a mechanism so that they could contribute to the Yearly Meeting but not have their contributions go to FUM. The budget issue I found myself speaking to was the elimination of the representatives travel budget. I am fortunate enough that I can afford the extra expense that this would mean for me. I was concerned that this restriction would limit who would be able to serve the Yearly Meeting as a representative to the larger Quaker bodies. I also felt that it was changing the terms under which I had accepted a three year appointment last year. The hardest part for me was that it felt like the Finance Committee was devaluing the work of the various representatives. More precisely, they were setting a value of $0 for all of the time and energy I have put into being one of the representatives to the General Board. I described the job to some friends like this: “I go to the FUM General Board meetings and say things that some people there don't want to hear and then I come back to New England and say things that people here don't want to hear.” I am getting an increasing appreciation for the work of mediators and diplomats.

More to come.

Will T

Setting the Stage - NEYM Part 2

2008-08-12T20:54:00.000-04:00

I returned from New England Yearly Meeting on Thursday and proceeded to get sick. Not from the happenings but perhaps from a lack of self-care (like getting sufficient sleep) during sessions. I have spent a lot of time sleeping and resting since then and I am feeling better. I don't know that the time has given me any more perspective on sessions. I recall what I heard from a number of people, “This is all so complicated.”

The theme of the sessions was “War, God Help Us.” The idea was that we would look at our response to the current wars that have been going on for 7 years without much response from Friends in New England. At least not corporately. There were references to the Peace Testimony but they as often related to divisions among Friends as they did to our external condition. The greater part of our corporate discernment was devoted to our finances and our relationship to FUM and our reaction to the personnel policy of FUM which restricts employment by FUM to people who are celibate or in a heterosexual marriage with only one other partner. One can look at this as a valuable exploration of our condition and a continuing exploration of our differences, something that a regular reader of this blog will know that I generally favor. Or you can look at it as another victory for the forces behind the war who have skillfully managed to distract their opponents into disputes on the topic of sexuality. As far as I can tell, both are true. God will have to help us sort this out.

Last year NEYM had begun addressing the issue of the FUM personnel policy. We had realized that we could not address the statement of sexual ethics contained in the personnel policy when we, as a yearly meeting, had not examined our own sexual ethics. We have been asked a number of times by our Young Friends to provide some guidance but we have so far not done so. The Yearly Meeting had minuted our commitment to begin exploring these issues. On Sunday night we heard reports from all eight of the Quarterly Meetings about the progress that had been made on this issue. There was a range of responses. Some meetings actively embraced the discussion. Some meetings felt that other issues were of higher priority and had done nothing. Many meetings fell somewhere in between.

There was a group of people, who came with a concern that they could not, in good conscience, see their money go to FUM because they felt that it would make them complicit in the discrimination that they see being practiced by FUM. There were some who went so far as to say that New England should disaffiliate with FUM because of the reaffirmation of the Richmond Declaration.

In addition to these issues there were issues with the Yearly Meeting budget. There was a significant shortfall in donations both from monthly meetings and from individuals. The Finance Committee presented a budget that contained some deep cuts. One area that was eliminated completely in the initial presentation was representative travel. Another significant cut was that our donations to both FGC and FUM were cut in half.

The stage was set for a difficult Yearly Meeting Sessions.

Blessings,

Will T

Laying down and taking up burdens. NEYM Pt 1

2008-08-11T21:01:00.000-04:00

I want to start out my discussion of this years sessions of New England Yearly Meeting with an observation from our opening session. On Saturday evening we had an exercise in which we were divided into smaller groups and from those into triads to answer some queries. The second of the queries was along the lines of “What burden do you bring to Yearly Meeting Sessions that you would like to lay down with God's help.” As I sat with that I realized that the burdens that I brought to Yearly Meeting were ones that God had asked me to take up, so there was no laying them down. The burdens I was carrying were my concern for unity among Friends, my concern for healing and reconciliation within FUM and my concern for the relationship between NEYM and FUM.

As I sat with this some more, it appeared to me that the question arose from a truncated view of the spiritual life. As we begin our spiritual journey we carry many burdens that come from the pain and injuries that we have received in the course of our lives. The first part of our journey is to find the healing that allows us to lay those burdens down. The progressive laying down of burdens of pain and sin is a lifetime process. But at some point there is a change. We have healed and grown enough that we start getting burdens offered to us. These are the burdens of the concerns that we come under that shape our spiritual life's work. They are the ways in which we turn our healing and our growth into gifts for the larger community. There is a sense of rightness about undertaking these things that makes the work bearable. They provides a focus that allows us to let go of things that we are not called to. They are the way in which we find our place in the body of Christ. Sometimes we are carried and held in the work in a way that it seems effortless. Other times it is still hard work. The yoke may be easy – meaning that it fits comfortably and doesn't chafe or hurt – but sometimes the load is heavy. You do not need a yoke to carry something light. You need a yoke to carry something heavy and bulky. Of course a yoke implies that you are not working alone. Oxen are yoked in tandem, so part of taking on the yoke is knowing that you will have help. But there is still work to do.

It seems to me that many Friends seem to think that the spiritual life consists exclusively of the first part, of the laying down of our personal burdens. We do not talk so much about the second part of the journey where we take up the burdens of the work that God would have us do. Do we like to stay at the level of Quakerism 101? Are we reluctant to move on the higher level courses? Where is Quakerism 322 or 453? Where are the graduate courses? In our meetings do we even acknowledge the advanced curricula in the school of Christ? Are we content to welcome newcomers and provide them with a basic introduction to Quakerism and let them find their way after that or do we demonstrate and teach the challenges and joys of living a life of faithfulness? Do we demonstrate that we are finders or do we wish to remain seekers forever?

Blessings,

Will T

Hope and Future – FUM Part 5

2008-07-28T22:16:00.000-04:00

The theme of this year's FUM Triennial was Hope and Future taken from Jeremiah 29:11 “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” A number of speakers used this to talk hopefully about what good things God has in store for us. They talked about the good work that we are being called to do. John Punshon put this passage into a larger context. This prophesy was made before the Babylonian captivity. Yes God had plans and would provide a hope and a future, but in the mean time there would be 70 years of exile and captivity. Most speakers ignored this part of the prophesy, the part of the difficulty, the pain, the exile and the self-examination that would happen before the hope and the future would be realized. Likewise FUM mostly ignored the difficulties before it. They avoided all of the difficult issues. They did not even ask for a time of prayer to hold these issues up to God, because we do not know how to resolve them. They focused so much on the hope and the future that they ignored the 70 years of exile. I cannot help but think that it was the time in exile that made the hope and future possible. The Israelites that returned from Babylon were not the same as their parents and grandparents were when they were carried away. The speakers ignored the work that FUM needs to do to be able to have a hope and a future. God may have plans but we need to stop squabbling among ourselves and clear our ears so that we can hear those plans. We also have to be willing to face the difficult work before us that will prepare us for our hope and future.

On Sunday I attended the closing worship of North Carolina Yearly Meeting-Conservative. I had a chance to have a nice visit with Liz Opp before the meeting. The meeting was centered and joyful. During their sessions they had wrestled with issues of how we can live in harmony with the earth and be its stewards. During the worship it was clear that people had wrestled with issues and were not the same people that they had been when they arrived. I did not have this feeling at the FUM triennial and I mourn the lost opportunity.

This is not to say that the Triennial was a failure. I think the emphasis on missions was an attempt to focus on work that Friends are more likely to unite in. The question of the role of FUM is still very much up in the air. Is it a denominational body? Is it a voluntary association of Friends from the Orthodox tradition? Is it a missions board? There were opportunities to meet and talk with people from across the spectrum. I was enriched by this and I know that others were as well. Certainly there was a temptation to take meals with Friends I already knew. I was aware of clumps of New England Friends or Baltimore Friends eating together. I suspect the same was true for Iowa Friends or Indiana Friends but I don't know them well enough to have identified them.

It is perhaps unfair to compare a Triennial session of an international body with a Yearly Meeting. In a yearly Meeting it is much easier to grapple with issues. There are already established relationships and connections so that there is a higher level of trust from the beginning. Trust is required to undertake any difficult spiritual work together. Secondly a yearly meeting has a certain amount of business that it must accomplish. FUM has organized itself so that there is very little business that needs to come before the body. Mostly it hears reports on what has happened during the past 3 years and what is being planned for the next 3. In fact the one piece of business that needs to get done is the appointment of the new clerks for the next triennium and that was not completed. Traditionally the Nominating Committee does its work during the Triennial Sessions. This year they were not able to find someone to accept the position in such a short time. So Gary Farlow, the current assistant clerk will serve until the October General Board meeting at which time the General Board will receive the recommendations from the nominating committee. We also approved a change in procedure so that Yearly Meetings will be asked to name their representatives to the Nominating Committee a year before the Triennial sessions so that they have an opportunity to meet and start the search and discernment process well before the Triennial starts. This seems like a healthy change in process.

This concludes my reports on the FUM Triennial. Next week I will be attending the annual sessions of New England Yearly Meeting. I don't expect to blog from the sessions but I plan to make some sort of report when I return. I have also been accepted into the Way of Ministry program of the School of the Spirit. My first residential session starts on August 27. I will be doing a lot of reading and writing for that program. Some of that experience is likely to show up here as well. Even with Barclay done, I don't expect to be running short of things to write about soon.

Blessings to all

Will T.

Gender balance among Friends – FUM Part 4

2008-07-25T21:12:00.001-04:00

During the final business session on Saturday, the only one in which we conducted any actual business, someone asked, during the Nominating Committee report, how many of the trustees were women. The answer was one, Betsy Muench from New England. I don't remember if there was an explicit request that the Nominating Committee consider issues of gender balance but the implication hung in the air.

At another time, someone commented privately about the leadership of FUM is almost exclusively male but the work is all done by women. The entire North American paid staff is made up of women. Most of the pastors in FUM are men. As I started noticing this and started thinking about it, my first thought was there was something wrong with this. There is a noticeable gender imbalance. Then I thought some more. Not so long that my thinker got sore, but I remembered something.

When I attended the FGC Traveling Ministries retreat last March I had a question for Deborah Fisch, the FGC staff person for the program, “Where are the men?” Of the sixty or so attendees the men could have been counted on the fingers of one hand. The current clerk of New England Yearly Meeting is the only male to hold that position in the past 20 years. I am not sure that unprogrammed Friends necessarily do any better at gender balance but it goes the other way.

By having a paid pastorate, programmed Friends provide a way for men to participate in leadership. By insisting on free ministry, unprogrammed Friends limit who can take on leadership positions. It makes it very difficult for anyone who is the primary wage-earner for their family. In our North American society those primary wage-earners are still mostly men. There are very few opportunities for unprogrammed Friends to support themselves doing Quaker work. People can be involved as young adults before they have responsibilities or they can get involved when they retire. I am able to travel as much as I do because I have been in my job long enough to get 4 weeks of vacation a year, but this is an exception. And even with this, it means that my wife and I don't get as many vacation trips together as we would like. At the Triennial I spoke with a pastor who seemed taken aback when I mentioned that I was there on my vacation. For many of the attendees, this was part of their job.

Both approaches have strengths but each produces their own characteristic imbalances. I have no suggestions. This is just something I noticed.

Blessings to all

Will T

Converging on FUM – FUM Triennial Part 3

2008-07-21T20:44:00.001-04:00

On Friday afternoon I was scheduled to take a tour of the Mendenhall Plantation. But on Thursday before lunch they announced that there would be a meeting of people interested in Convergent Friends on Friday at 1:30. Friday before lunch they announced a place to meet. I was thinking that there might be four or five people who showed up. By my count, 24 people showed up and from their comments it seemed as if each of them expected four or five people. What surprised me was the number of pastors within the group. There were more pastors (5) than people I could identify as bloggers (3).

The session was convened by Tony Lowe who identified himself as a pastoral minister from one of the three convergent meetings in North Carolina Yearly Meeting. Many of the participants came out of curiosity about convergent Friends so we had more questions than answers. When Convergent was described as a combination of Conservative Friends and the Emergent Church Movement, the question came up immediately what was the Emergent Church. Tony described the following five characteristics:
Worship is not a spectator sport.
Experiential knowledge.
Being in a long unbroken tradition.
Being the church and not going to church.
Coming together of the Evangelical and social justice traditions.

The part about being in a long, unbroken tradition puzzled me but Tony gave the example of some emergent churches experimenting with things like Gregorian chants. The entire 2000 year Christian tradition is available to us as a resource. We can look to things that happened before the middle of the 19th century or even from before the Protestant Reformation.

These five points all had echoes to me of the rise of early Friends. They were actively involved in worship and were insistent upon the inward experience of Christ. As primitive Christianity revived they were claiming the original tradition of the Church. Although they felt that the church had fallen away horribly in the intervening years there had always been people who had been faithful to the original vision of the church. Barclay had no hesitation in quoting the Church Fathers to establish his points. He had no problem quoting John Calvin either. They had a clear sense that the church was the community of believers and not the building that housed them. Their use of plain language and dress was part of their witness to social justice.

Someone asked what Convergent Worship looks like. This started quite a discussion. One characteristic that was mentioned was that convergent Friends were experimenting with worship. Someone used the example of Freedom Friends Church in Oregon which identifies itself as Radically Christian and Radically Inclusive. They have a pastor and song but no sermon. Instead they have a significant period of open worship. Someone else said that we need to celebrate our differences. Because people have multiple intelligences (emotional intelligence, physical intelligence, intellectual intelligence, etc) they need to worship in different ways.

We were cautioned, however, that when people come in the door of a Quaker church or meetinghouse, they expect Quaker. We need to offer them Quaker. If they want Baptist, they can find that at the Baptist church. If they want Jewish, they can find that at a synagogue. The only place to find Quaker is with the Quakers. This leaves us, of course, with the question of what is it that people are looking for when they look for Quaker? Or what is it that we have that identifies us as Quaker in spite of all of our differences?

A Friend said that Convergent is about relationship and not so much about worship. Can I listen to someone past the first thing they say that I disagree with? What about the Friend who says, “I need baptism.” or “I need communion.” or “I am Jewish.” or “I am Buddhist.” Take a step back and ask why that person needs that ritual or identity. Convergent Friends are about dialog and not legislation.

The final question was what do we do next when we get back to our home meetings and churches. Find people in your local meetings or in your Quarterly and Yearly Meetings with whom you can discuss these issues. Be open to how you may be led.

This wasn't mentioned during the discussion but another trait that I would add about what Convergent Friends are about is curiosity and openness: curiosity about finding what people are seeking and finding and openness to new understandings and living with differences. Convergence is about seeing where God is leading people today. What great work is God preparing us for?

I really enjoyed the discussion. The most important thing for me was to identify a number of people that I sought out to have more in depth discussions with in the remaining time at the Triennial. In spite of my frustration with the formal part of the gathering, it gave me hope that God is working somewhere below the surface. That being the case, and since all the factions in FUM are convinced that God is on their side, perhaps the best thing to do is to wait expectantly to see what God will bring forth instead of seeking a political victory based on our own efforts.

Blessings to all,

Will T

Renewing the Peace Testimony - FUM Triennial Part 2

2008-07-19T13:30:00.001-04:00

On Thursday night at the Landrum Bolling, former president of Earlham College, gave the Betty Carter Peace Lecture on the subject of Renewing the Peace Testimony. One can only hope to be as fit and sharp at age 94 as Landrum Bolling is. He told a number of stories from his experience in peacemaking in the Middle East. He told stories of faith and redemption. He told stories of non-Friends whose actions made an impact. He told stories of change and transformation. The transcript of his talk can be found here.
He also called on Friends to examine what the peace testimony really means to us today, where we are going in our lives and what we want to accomplish. What does it mean and do we really believe it? Do we really try to live it out?

He said:

I come back to reformation, not asking us to change the testimony. Just look at the major principles of the testimony. You know what they are: Do unto others as you would have them do to you. Love your neighbors as you love yourself. … Pray for those who spitefully use you. Recompense no man evil for evil. As much as lies within you live peaceably with all men. If your enemy hungers, feed him. If he thirsts, give him drink. Blessed are peacemaker for they shall be called children of God.

He called for Friends to recognize that there are consequences to our ideas and beliefs. You cannot make a clear division between religious faith and practice and political action. They are not the same exactly but there are political consequences to our beliefs. He spoke of the trend that started before the election of George Bush that the president as commander-in-chief as unlimited power to decide what should be done about peace. The president has usurped the power from the Secretary of State and the diplomatic corps. As we witness for peace, do we have anything to say about this? The United States spends more on arms than all the other countries in the world combined. What are we doing about this?

He ended by quoting his favorite bumper sticker: “God bless everybody, no exceptions.”

At the end of his talk I couldn't help thinking that if we believe that Israelis and Palestinians should reconcile their differences, what about the differences between Indiana Yearly Meeting and New England Yearly Meeting? What about the differences between Elgon-North Yearly Meeting and New York Yearly Meeting? What about Iowa Yearly Meeting(FUM) and Iowa Yearly Meeting( Conservative) or North Carolina Yearly Meeting(FUM) and North Carolina Yearly Meeting(Conservative)? If we are serious about making peace in the world shouldn't we start with our own house?

Since I come from a liberal background, nothing that I said sounded very controversial. But I spoke with another Friend afterwards who said that there was an implied challenge in the message, especially in the words about what has been done by the Republicans to usurp power from the diplomats. There are some Friends who believe that the wars between Israel and the Arabs and Palestinians should be understood in light of Biblical prophecy. These are precursors of the end times and the second coming of Christ. I don't know how Landrum's message was received by those Friends. It was another conversation that didn't happen. At least not where I was.

So are we willing to live the peace testimony in our lives or is it just a hook for political action? Are we willing to remove the logs and beams from our own eyes, both personally and as Quakers, as part of our witness to the world of the need for reconciliation? Are we willing to undertake the work to resolve the conflicts among us? Are we willing to take the Sermon on the Mount seriously? Are we willing to trust God even when we don't know the way or when we are afraid of what might happen?

More to come.

Blessings to all,

Will T

And now a word from our sponsor - FUM Triennial Part 1

2008-07-16T21:29:00.002-04:00

I returned on Sunday from the FUM Triennial sessions held this year in High Point, NC. If you want the excruciating detail, they had a court reporter transcribing the sessions as they went and displaying the text on a screen for the hearing impaired. They have published the transcripts here. These are not corrected transcripts so there are transcription errors and there are spots where they missed things. The missing parts are mostly marked by ellipsis. While it is not perfect it is the most complete recording of the events of any Friends gathering I have ever seen. So if you want all of the gory details of what happened, go there. I will try to give a more impressionistic view.

The meetings were held at High Point Friends Church and the attached Friends School. The facilities were excellent and the welcome was most warm. I wish to commend the local arrangements committee for their hard work and the care they provided.

If anyone had been expecting some sort of pyrotechnics because of the simmering tensions within FUM they would have been disappointed. All the tensions were left to simmer just below the surface. While there are business sessions at the triennial they are mostly used to present reports. There is little substantive business conducted, or at least there hasn't been any at the last two, which are the only ones I have attended. Someone described the FUM Triennials as a family reunion for Orthodox Friends. It is an opportunity to meet and spend time with friends that you might not see otherwise and to make new contacts with people from other yearly meetings. This being my second triennial and since I have served on the General Board the past two years I had a number of people I was glad to see there.

At the Wednesday night keynote, Sylvia Graves presented what was, in essence, a state of society report for FUM. She candidly acknowledged the tensions and differences that face us. That was, however, the last time those issues were raised. In the rest of the sessions the time was mostly spent hearing reports from the various missions of FUM. They were fascinating and it sounds as if a lot of good work is happening. All of the foreign missions are facing a number of problems, not the least of which is that the ongoing devaluation of the dollar means that the funds we send abroad do not get us as much as they used to. This is particularly true when paying salaries. As a result of the financial difficulties of FUM, most of the reports had a subtle, or not so subtle, subtext of please contribute to this mission. There were times when I felt as if I had stumbled into the middle of a PBS pledge week. But there are significant needs and there is a lot of good work happening so if you are inclined, go to the FUM web site and see what you are led to do.

I realize that some of my discomfort with the fundraising is cultural. Liberal Quakers are much more diffident about asking for money and we never take a collection during worship. Here there was a collection during every worship service. I remember a time a number of years ago at New England Yearly Meeting when the Finance Committee reported that there was going to be shortfall in the budget that year. Someone suggested that they pass the hat right there in the session. Then the Treasurer said that she was uncomfortable with doing that. I don't recall the exact nature of her scruple but was the only time I have heard of a treasurer being reluctant to collect money. Some other method was found to collect money from Friends at the sessions and they more than met the shortfall. I suppose it depends some what in what you are used to. I suspect liberal Friends may have something to learn from Orthodox Friends in this regards.

There is a lot more to write about, including a meeting of Convergent Friends and my visit to North Caroline YM – Conservative. Tune in again next time for another episode in the ongoing saga of FUM.

Blessings to all,

Will T

Happy Fourth of July

2008-07-04T15:19:00.001-04:00

If the rain holds off, we will go into Cambridge tonight and watch the fireworks. We will sit on Memorial Drive, listen to the Boston Pops concert on the speakers and then look across the Charles River at the fireworks with the buildings of Boston's Back Bay in the background. We get to see the light of the fireworks reflecting off of the glass of the Hancock and Prudential buildings. Fireworks are one of my guilty pleasures. I know that they are derived from military technology. But I enjoy the colors and the explosions. I like the scale of the displays. I like it that they take up so much of the sky. I like to be close enough to feel the thump of the explosions on my chest. I like the transitoriness of the experience. There is no going back to see it later. It is not something you can enjoy on television. You have to be there. And part of the enjoyment is sharing it with a large number of other people. I even enjoy sharing the subway ride home even though the trains are packed.

But I have a real ambivalence about the holiday that is the occasion for the fireworks. The ideals of freedom, equality and justice that we claim for the United States – as if we have a monopoly on them – are all to often used as a justification and motivation for wars that do not promote those ideals. More and more it seems that the laws of the United States are being written to favor the rich and the powerful over the poor or even the average. I don't know if this is a change in how things are or if I have just become more sensitive to it. I think the turning point in this regard happened a number of years ago when Lynn and I went to the lawyer to draw up our wills. What he said in effect was, these are the rules. And then, if you want to spend the money and the time, here are all of the ways you can get around the rules. In other words, one set of rules for most people and another set for those who can afford to hire lawyers and establish trusts.

The real issue is that my ultimate allegiance is not to the United States or to any country. My ultimate allegiance is to God. Now politicians like to invoke God to bless the country and to insinuate that we somehow have a favored spot in God's heart. Certainly the God of ancient Israel and Judah is portrayed like that. The infidelity of Judah and Israel to that God is also amply documented. But the aspect of God that speaks to me is the God of the prophets who remind the rich and the powerful to remember the poor and the needy, who advocate for widows and orphans, who condemn those who join house to house and field to field so that there is no room for the poor, and who call to account those who use false weights and measures in the marketplace.

There are people who equate patriotism with wearing a flag pin on your lapel. This is a patriotism of outward forms. It seems often to be used as a mask to cover up our own infidelity to our ideals. To me the ultimate patriots are people like Martin Luther King who challenged us to live up to our ideals, who said that if we want the blessings of God on us and our posterity, that we need to build a society that embodies God's justice and compassion. We need a patriotism that is based on something more than a celebration of our military power and economic might. At a time when we see economic and environmental dislocations in our immediate future, how do we respond with compassion. How do we build a society based on justice and sharing equitably when our natural response is to seek security by holding on to as much as we can for ourselves.

Happy Fourth of July.

Will T

The Convincement of Thomas Lurting

2008-06-24T21:32:00.001-04:00

Now, for a change of pace. I will tell a story. This is the story of the convincement of Thomas Lurting. Thomas Lurting is mostly known for his encounter with pirates off of Algiers told in the children's book Thomas Lurting and the Pirates. I take this information from his account titled The Fighting Sailor Turned Peaceable Christian which is reprinted in Historical Writings of Quakers against War published by Quaker Heritage Press.

Thomas Lurting was 14 when he was first pressed by the Royal Navy in 1646. The major recruitment tool of the Royal Navy at that time and into the 19th century was the press gang. Press gangs would go through the streets and taverns of port cities rounding up sailors and taking them on board navy ships. They would sometimes cut the belts or suspenders of their recruits so they would have to use one hand to hold up their pants, slowing them down if would be inclined to run away.

He seems to have done well because in time he became a boatswain's mate on frigate and had 200 men under his command. One of his responsibilities was to force men to attend the religious services on Sunday. He was in a number of battles in appears to have served fearlessly in them. He recounts a number of deliverances that he had during these battles, including a time when a man sitting beside him in a small boat was shot.

At one point a Scottish soldier was put on board the ship for a short time. This soldier had attended a Quaker meeting in Scotland and during his time on board ship talked with two sailors. About 6 months later, these sailors refused to attend services and hear the priest and refused to take off their hats for the captain. The started meeting together in silence. The changes in them drew attention from the rest of the crew and over time their meeting grew.

The captain and the priest ordered Thomas to beat and persecute the Quakers for not attending services. As he continued in this he was reminded of the times when God had delivered him during battle and found that he could no longer beat the Quakers. God opened his heart and he saw a great difference between the behavior of the priest and the Captain, who was also a Baptist minister, and of the Quakers. He started taking time of retirement and sought after God. He felt God working in him both in judgement and in tenderness. After about 6 months he felt the Lord telling him that he should join the Quakers so he went to Roger Dennis, one of the leaders of the Quakers on board ship, and asked him to his cabin for a talk.

The following First Day he attended the Quaker meeting instead of the worship on deck. When this was found out many sailors left the priests service and came to the Quaker meeting to see what was going on. The captain sent for Thomas and interviewed him with a number of the other officers. Afterwards Thomas told the Quakers, “when I went to the captain, I was scarce half a Quaker, but by their lies and false reports against me they have made me almost a whole Quaker, or at least I hope to be one.” After that he continued to meet with the Quakers.

With Thomas Lurting's convincement, the persecution of Quakers on board ended for a while. Thomas was given back his cabin which he used as a meeting place for the Quakers. A disease spread through the ship and some 40 sailors died. Although none of the Quakers died many of them were taken ill and the other sailors noticed what good care they took of each other while they were sick. Even non-Quakers came to them feeling that they would be well-cared for.

At this point the new Quakers on the ship had no sense of pacifism and fought as bravely as anyone else on board. They were ordered to sail to Barcelona where they were to shell a castle on shore. While the men were preparing the cannons Thomas went on deck to watch the shots so that he could help redirect the aim as needed. As he came on deck he felt God ask him, “how if he had killed a man?” He was struck with such power by this that he put back on his clothes, having been stripped down to his waistcoat for the action, and wandered on deck under a great exercise of mind. When people asked if he was hurt he said, “No, I am under a scruple of conscience on the account of the fighting.”

The next day Thomas Lurting discussed this with the other Quakers. Some had misgivings about fighting but none had as strong a scruple as Thomas did. He felt that since they had been such valiant fighters before, they needed to bear a strong testimony against it. He did not doubt that the Lord would protect him. When one of the Friends went to the captain to request a discharge because he could fight no longer the captain said “He that denies to fight in time of engagement, I will put my sword through his guts.” He then beat the sailor with his fists and cane. It was a standing order on the ships of the Royal Navy that if anyone left their posts during battle, anyone on the ship could kill him.

Some time later – Thomas Lurting dates this as in 1655 – they were sailing and they saw a large ship coming towards them. They supposed it to be a Spanish man-of-war and so the crew began to prepare for battle. The Quakers gathered in Thomas Lurting's cabin for a meeting for worship. In it he was moved to speak about his scruples about fighting but he did not want to lay this on any of the others. If they would respond to the call to quarters, they should do their part to the best of their ability. If they chose not to fight they needed to be careful to not give the captain reason to say that they had deceived him. Then Thomas went and sat on deck in full view of the captain. The other Friends joined him there.

When the lieutenant came and ordered them to their posts they answered that they could fight no more. When the captain heard of this he drew his sword. Thomas Lurting heard the Lord say, “The sword of the Lord is over him; and if he will have a sacrifice, proffer it to him.” He rose to go and Roger Dennis joined him. They walked across the deck and when they were half way up the steps to the half-deck where the captain was the captain turned pale, turned away and called his servant to take away the sword. After a bit Roger said to Thomas, “The captain is gone, let us return to the others.”

The ship turned out to be friendly and so there was no battle. Later the captain sent the priest to Thomas asking that he not be angry with the captain, that he had acted out of passion. Thomas replied that the captain should be careful of his passion lest he kill someone and then seek repentance and not be able to find it. Afterwards Thomas reports that the captain was very kind and respectful to him.

I love this story, partly because it is just such a good story. I also like what it illustrates how the peace testimony came to be. At the time of the battle in Barcelona, Thomas Lurting had been on ship and had not had any contact with any Quakers but the ones who had been convinced on board. They knew that Quakers did not pay honor to social postion and met in silent worship. Their testimony against fighting came to them through God working in their hearts. When this happened, they followed that leading although it could easily mean their lives. It also shows the kind of deliverance that is possible to one acting in full confidence in the power of the Lord to protect them.

This happened a full 5 years before George Fox and others wrote the letter to King Charles that is often referred to as the Peace Testimony. The real testimony was in the lives of ordinary Friends like Thomas Lurting. The testimony of their lives meant that Fox was able to write the words overnight in confidence that he was speaking for Friends in general.

I am also challenged by this story. I don't know that I would have the courage to stand up and walk towards an angry man with a drawn sword. I also don't know that I have the courage to be so single minded in following the Light I have been given in the face of the comforts and distractions of a world that would say, be comfortable, be happy, don't look too closely at the cost of your comfort.

Blessings to all,

Will T

Concerning the Power of the Civil Magistrate

2008-06-11T22:21:00.002-04:00

Friends,

It has taken two years, but this post marks the end of my posts on Barclay's Apology. I discussed the 15'th proposition in September 2006 when our First Day School was examining the Testimony on Simplicity. I have enjoyed this examination of Barclay and parts of it have sparked much interest among you. I have gained a greater understanding and appreciation of the thought of early Friends from this exploration. More importantly I have come to have a deeper understanding of their religious exercise. In particular I have come to appreciate both the inwardness of it and the simultaneous expectation that the inward work will manifest itself in our outward lives. I have found myself being challenged to greater faithfulness in my religious walk. I trust that this has been helpful to you as well. I will continue to post about current happenings among Friends and reflections on what I read but I do not foresee me taking on a reflection on a major work in the near future. So with thanks for your support, here is Barclay on the power of the Civil Magistrate.

Since God hath assumed to himself the power and dominion of the conscience, who alone can rightly instruct and govern it, therefore it is not lawful for any whosoever, by virtue of any authority or principality they bear in the government of this world, to force the consciences of others; and therefore all killing, banishing, fining, imprisoning and other such things which are inflicted upon men for the alone exercise of their conscience or difference in worship or opinion proceedeth from the spirit of Cain, the murderer, and is contrary to the Truth, providing always that no man, under the pretence of conscience, prejudice his neighbour in his life or estate, or do anything destructive to, or inconsistent with human society, in which case the law is for the transgressor, and justice is to be administered upon all without respect of persons.
[Barclay's Apology, Proposition 14]

In the United States we tend to think that this is a settled matter. That isn't so elsewhere. Perhaps 7 years ago I had the opportunity to visit Friends in Cuba. When I was at Holguin Friends Church I was given a chance to speak to the church and I presented a brief rundown Barclay's Apology. When I got to the part about religious persecution proceeding from the spirit of Cain, the person who was translating for me turned to me and asked in English if I really wanted him to translate this. I said that I did and he did, as near as I could tell. I have sometimes wondered whether this was the right thing to do and I hope the Friend has not gotten into trouble for speaking words that were not his.

Barclay starts off by pointing out that conscience is a persuasion of the mind of the truth or falsity of some matter. Even if a person is wrong about the matter in question it is a sin for them to act in a way that is not in accord with their belief. This principle is another reason why we need to be gentle with each other when dealing with the controversial issues that divide Friends. In many cases we have disagreements that turn on matters of faith, belief and conscience. Even a mistaken conscience is binding on us. So it is not enough to attempt to prove to someone the errors of their ways, however much we are tempted to do so. What is required is a change of heart, of conscience, and that is work for the Holy Spirit. The Spirit in these matters seems to have much more patience that we do.

“[T]he conscience of man is the seat and throne of God in him, of which God is the alone proper and infallible Judge.” The church can remove heretics from its membership but they cannot remove them from civil society. To make the magistrate to punish according to determination of the church is to make the magistrate the church's hangman. This is still true today whether the law in question is sharia, the Ten Commandments, laws on abortion or limiting marriage to one man or one woman. In all of these cases people are asking the state to create and enforce laws that codify a particular set of religious beliefs. These are areas in which religious people have serious and sincere differences of opinion. A church may certainly hold their members to a more restrictive code of conduct than society as a whole does, but they should not rely on civil society to enforce those rules on everyone.

Christ's kingdom is not of this world and we should not rely on the powers of this world to promote it. Barclay quotes 2 Cor 10:4 that the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but spiritual. Would we turn to wrestling with flesh and blood if we cannot prevail with the Spirit? If we cannot succeed with spiritual means should we turn to carnal weapons to create Christ's kingdom?

[T]his forcing of men's consciences is contrary to sound reason, and the very law of nature. For man's understanding cannot be forced by all the bodily sufferings another man can inflict upon him, especially in matters spiritual and supernatural: 'tis arguments and evident demonstrations of reason, together with the power of God reaching the heart, that can change a man's mind from one opinion to another, and not knocks and blows, and suchlike things, which may well destroy the body but never can inform the soul .... To seek to force minds in any other manner, is to deal with men as if they were brutes[.]
[Apology, Proposition 14, Section IV]

By force we can make men hypocrites but we cannot make them Christians. God only seeks the sacrifices that come from a contrite heart, not a coerced one.

If dissenters prove resolute in the face of persecution and are willing to suffer boldly for what they believe to be right, this often leads to commendation of the sufferers and not the persecutors. This was the experience of early Friends and their sufferings led to the establishment of religious toleration in England and the United States. This principle is the underpinnings of all non-violent resistance. It underlay Gandhi's struggle for independence in India and it lay at the American civil rights movement. It is a practical application of the same sacrificial suffering the Jesus exemplified in his crucifixion. In fact Barclay finds the ground of all persecution to be the unwillingness to suffer. “No man that will persecute another for his conscience would suffer for his own, if he could avoid it.” True, faithful Christian suffering is to profess and practice what one believes to be true, no more and no less, in the face of either outward encouragement or the threat of persecution. This was the witness of Quakers who kept to their meetings even when they were banned and disrupted.

Barclay describes the persecutions that Quakers endured and sums up:

What liberty we now enjoy, it is by his mercy, and not by any outward working or procuring of our own, but 'tis he has wrought upon the hearts of our opposers; nor was it any outward interest hath procured it unto us, but the testimony of our harmlessness in the hearts of our superiors: for God hath preserved us hitherto in the patient sufferings of Jesus...
[Apology, Proposition 14, Section VI]

Blessings to all

Will T

Concerning Communion

2008-06-02T20:56:00.001-04:00

The communion of the body and blood of Christ is inward and spiritual, which is the participation of his flesh and blood, by which the inward man is daily nourished in the hearts of those in whom Christ dwells; of which things the breaking of bread by Christ with his disciples was a figure, which they even used in the church for a time, who had received the substance, for the cause of the weak; even as "abstaining from things strangled, and from blood;" the washing one another's feet, and the anointing of the sick with oil; all which are commanded with no less authority and solemnity than the former; yet seeing they are but the shadows of better things, they cease in such as have obtained the substance.
[Proposition 13]

These two propositions, the one on baptism and this on communion are ones that I have not thought a lot about. When I have given workshops on Barclay I have focused on the ones dealing with the spiritual journey – the saving light through perfection – because they were the areas that were of most interest to me. This approach also seemed to make them more accessible to others. Having been raised a Quaker, baptism and communion did not come up much unless I was visiting another church when they were having a communion service.

As a result I had a rather simplistic view of what baptism and communion meant. I thought of baptism as some sort of initiation ritual and communion was a celebration of community. Both of these were really notions formed by the outward practices I had seen around me. This illustrates just how hard it is to see through these outward things to the inward reality that early Friends were pointing to.

Communion is the inner nourishment of the soul. The outward ritual represents this nourishment but is not the spiritual sustenance. Once the inward reality is known, the ritual is no longer needed. This is how Barclay describes communion:

Quest. If it be asked then what that body, what that flesh and blood is?
Answ. I answer, it is that heavenly Seed, that divine, spiritual, celestial Substance, of which we spake before, in the Fifth and Sixth Propositions. This is that vehiculum Dei, or spiritual body of Christ, whereby and wherethrough he communicateth life to man, and salvation "to as many as believe in him," and "receive him," and whereby also man comes to have fellowship and communion with God.
[Apology, Proposition 13, Section II]

So the body and blood of Christ is the Divine Seed within us. It is what modern liberal Friends so tepidly call “that of God within everyone.” But it is so much more. It is the root and source of our being and the source of our spiritual nourishment.

[T]hat this body and spiritual flesh and blood of Christ is to be understood of that divine and heavenly Seed, before spoken of by us, appears both by the nature and fruits of it: first, it's said, "it is that, which cometh down from heaven, and giveth life unto the world": now, this answers to that Light and Seed, which is testified of (John 1) to be the "Light of the world," and the "Life of men." For that spiritual Light and Seed, as it receives place in men's hearts, and room to spring up there, is as bread to the hungry and fainting soul, that is, as it were, buried and dead in the lusts of the world, which receives life again, and revives, as it tasteth and partaketh of this heavenly bread; and they that partake of it are said to come to Christ; neither can any have it but by coming to him, and believing in the appearance of his Light in their hearts, by receiving which, and believing in it, the participation of this body and bread is known.
[Apology, Proposition 13, Section II]

So if baptism is the negative aspect of the washing and purifying action of God within us, communion is the positive aspect of the growth of the Seed and the Light within us. If the body and blood are that Seed and that Light, then our communion happens as we take that into ourselves and understand it and absorb it into our beings.

So that the supper of the Lord, and the supping with the Lord, and partaking of his flesh and blood is no ways limited to the ceremony of breaking bread, and drinking wine at particular times; but is truly and really enjoyed, as often as the soul retires into the Light of the Lord, and feels and partakes of that heavenly Life, by which the inward man is nourished, which may be, and is often witnessed by the faithful at all times, though more particularly, when they are assembled together to wait upon the Lord.
[Apology, Propostion 13, Section III]

Barclay has much to say about the nature of the outward observances of baptism and communion and why neither outward ceremony are required of Christians but I am not going to go into them in detail here. The gist is that it is the inward baptism and communion that is required and not the outward. The outward forms were never commanded as a rule for all time. There are other rituals such as the washing of the feet that are commanded much more explicitly than either baptism or communion yet, on the whole, the church chooses not to require that ritual. I recognize that this is an area that has been an area of discussion in certain yearly meetings lately. For anyone involved in those discussions I commend propositions 12 and 13 to your study.

Blessings to all.

Will T

What is baptism?

2008-05-20T20:43:00.002-04:00

This is Barclay's proposition concerning baptism:

As there is one Lord and one faith, so there is "one baptism; which is not the putting away of the filth of the flesh, but the answer of a good conscience before God, by the resurrection of Jesus Christ." And this baptism is a pure and spiritual thing, to wit, the baptism of the spirit and fire, by which we are buried with him, that being washed and purged from our sins, we may "walk in newness of life;" of which the baptism of John was a figure, which was commanded for a time, and not to continue for ever. As to the baptism of infants, it is a mere human tradition, for which neither precept not practice is to be found in all the scripture.

Before Barclay comes to the issue of baptism, he takes on the more general question of the sacraments. He says that it has long been a human habit to seek worldly, or as he puts it, carnal worship, instead of pure spiritual worship. He mentions the Pharisees “whom Christ so frequently reproves for “making void the commandments of God by their traditions.” (Matt 15:6,9)

This complaint may at this day be no less justly made as to many bearing the name of Christians, who have introduced many things of this kind, partly borrowed from the Jews, which they more tenaciously stick to and more earnestly contend for than for the weightier points of Christianity: because that self, yet alive and ruling in them, loves their own inventions better than God's commands.
[Apology, Prop 12, Section I]

He then quarrels with using the word sacrament itself. He points out that it does not appear in scripture (Early Friends were amazingly literal, at least to modern readers, in their approach to scripture. They also refused to accept the doctrine of the Trinity because the word Trinity never appears in scripture, either.) He then makes the point that the word sacrament was borrowed from the military oaths of the Romans.

The question I had when I come to this point was, what is baptism? The early Friends were clear that it was a spiritual thing and not the outward rite, whether by immersion or sprinkling. Barclay in fact talks about how there is only one baptism, and since the Bible talks about the baptism of the Spirit and of fire, this baptism cannot be referring to the baptism of water. The baptism of John is said to be a prefigure of the baptism of the Spirit and is so ended since that which it has prefigured has come.

So if it isn't the ritual involving water, what is it? Charismatic Christians claim that the baptism of the Holy Spirit is some sort of ecstatic experience marked by speaking in tongues. But that is not what Barclay is claiming. So what do the early Friends mean by baptism?

In the proposition itself baptism is described as “not the putting away the filth of the flesh but the answer of a good conscience before God, by the resurrection of Jesus Christ.” It is a spiritual thing, “the baptism of the Spirit and fire, by which we are buried with him, that being washed and purged from our sins, we may walk in in newness of life.” The first part of this is a quote from 1 Peter 3:21. What is this “answer of a good conscience?” The New Revised Standard Version translates answer a appeal. The New International Version translates it as pledge. From this one could make a case that baptism then an act of repentance with a promise of reformed behavior. Or perhaps it is just the acceptance of the gift of righteousness bestowed on us by Jesus as a result of His death and resurrection. But this second view runs counter to Barclay's earlier argument in his discussion of Justification against any imputed righteousness without us actually becoming righteous. The second part of the definition implies a much more active role taken by God. It is a baptism of spirit and fire that washes us and purges us internally and spritually. In section IV of this proposition, Barclay says:

Now this answer cannot be but where the Spirit of God hath purified the soul and the fire of his judgment hath burned up the unrighteous nature; and those in whom this work is wrought may be truly said to be baptized with the baptism of Christ, i.e., "of the Spirit and of fire."
[Apology Proposition 12, Section IV]

Later on Barclay discusses how the Bible often uses the name of the Lord to mean something more than than the bare sound of the word. It also stands for the virtue and power of the thing named. Therefore, those who were baptized into the name of Christ were baptized into the virtue and power of Christ. In the words of Paul, “as many of them as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ.” This means that the baptism of the spirit involves entering into the virtue and power of Christ. This baptism may be a requirement for salvation. After all, how are we to be justified and perfected without taking on the virtue and power of Christ. We certainly cannot do this by ourselves. But this does not mean that it is a requirement to join a congregation. In fact Barclay notes that Paul gives thanks at one point that he has baptized only a very few people. This is from one of the greatest apostles of the early church.

This then is the one true baptism of Christ: It is the purifying and cleansing work of Christ in us turning us from sin and willfulness towards holiness and faithfulness to God. It is not a sprinkling with water or a babbling in tongues, it is the fire of God burning away the dross within us.

Blessings to all,

Will T

On Worship – Battleground in the Lamb's War

2008-05-07T21:32:00.001-04:00

This is where Barclay's description of worship differs most from the way Friends today tend to describe the experience of worship.

Our work then and worship is, when we meet together, for everyone to watch and wait upon God in themselves .... And as everyone is thus stated they come to find the good arise over the evil and the pure over the impure, in which God reveals himself and draweth near to every individual, ... and therefore the Lord oftentimes, ... doth .. cause his Power to break forth in a more strong and powerful manner; ... then the good Seed ... will be found to work as physic in the soul, ... and through the contrary workings of the power of darkness there will be found an inward striving in the soul,.... And from this inward travail, while the darkness seeks to obscure the Light, and the Light break through the darkness ... there will be such a painful travail found in the soul that will even work upon the outward man; so that oftentimes ...the body will be greatly shaken, and many groans and sighs and tears ... will lay hold upon it; ... sometimes the power of God will break forth into a whole meeting, and there will be such an inward travail, while each is seeking to overcome the evil in themselves, that by the strong contrary workings of these opposite powers, like the going of two contrary tides, every individual will be strongly exercised as in a day of battle; and thereby trembling and a motion of body will be upon most, if not upon all, which, as the power of Truth prevails, will from pangs and groans end with a sweet sound of thanksgiving and praise, and from this the name of "Quakers," ... was first reproachfully cast upon us.
[Propostion 11, Section 8]

Have we ever experienced our meetings as a battleground in the struggle of good and evil? Do we even think of our spiritual lives in those terms? Even if our interior life is free of what we call evil, what about our lives in the world. All of us Friends, at least those in North America and Europe are inextricably enmeshed in an economic system that consumes a disproportionate share of the worlds resources. Gas prices are rising because oil production can no longer keep pace with worldwide demand. Food prices are rising because we are using food crops as replacements for oil. The Day of the Lord is upon us. Are we ever stricken with trembling, groans or tears? Are we seeking comfort and peace when we should be seeing what we have wrought over the face of the earth?

The seeds of war and economic injustice and ecological destruction are deeply planted on our hearts, our lives and our societies. Do we see meeting for worship as a place where the seed of God can be nourished so that it can grow to dominion over these seeds of darkness. Do we come to meeting for worship seeking the gentle rain and the warm sun when what we need might be the deep plowing and the laying of the axe to the roots of the overgrowing scrub brush? Most important, do we come to meeting undertaking to do this work together, trusting in the power of the Lord to do what we cannot do for ourselves?

Blessings to all,

Will T

My visit to Quip

2008-05-02T20:41:00.002-04:00

I had the privilege to attend the Quakers United In Publishing annual meeting held at Brown Summit, NC, on April 24-27. I had been invited to come to speak on a panel discussing Quaker blogs. This was my first exposure to QUIP and I really did not know what to expect.

The first thing that I discovered was how diverse the membership of QUIP is. They have two co-clerks, one English and one American, and two treasurers, again, one English and one American. They rotate their annual meetings between England and various parts of North America in some more or less regular pattern. There were participants from all branches of North American Quakerism. What was most gratifying to me was that these people all got along with each other. No one questioned the theological beliefs on anyone else and they were able to focus on the work at hand.

I was able to have informal conversations with people from yearly meetings in FUM. It is clear that there are a range of views in those yearly meetings. At the level of the FUM board the yearly meetings are sometimes seen as discrete entities that speak with a single voice on various issues. The reality is much less simple than that. There are liberal and evangelical voices within many yearly meetings.

The other thing that was clear was that when Friends do have common interests and are sharing in work that is mutually beneficial, they can work very well together. I saw it with QUIP and I have had glimpses of this at the General Board.

Robin Mohr, Gil Skidmore and I were the blogging panel. Gil moderated the discussion and talked a little. Robin and I shared more extensively from our experience and we had a good discussion. One of the themes of the meeting was dealing with electronic media and how to adapt to the changes in the world of publishing. There was quite a bit of discussion of what we bloggers were about and also some of the mechanics. There were also a number of bloggers present who were not part of the panel.

On Saturday we went to Guilford College and visited the Quaker Archives. I was pleased to see people who were excited by questions of how to archive electronic media for future historians. What will happen to the records of Usenet groups like soc.religion.quaker that was one of the first places for the Quaker discussion on line? Do Quaker organizations have a responsibility to archive this against the day that Google stops? What about the Quaker mailing lists that continued the discussion? I am glad that there are people who are thinking about these things.

In conjunction with this meeting the editorial board for the QUIP Youth Book project met. On Saturday night the editorial board had a panel in which they introduced themselves and what they hoped for from the project. One of the questions that they were asked was what qualified them for their position on the board. Their responses were pretty awesome.

As I listened to them I remember that it was when I was a Young Adult Friend that I first experienced the power that can happen in meeting for worship. I had my first experiences of trying to live a faithful life. I also first became frustrated that the adult meetings just did not seem to get the treasure that was in their midst. They seemed to be content with just a bare shell of what they could have. In fact I still have that same frustration today.

As is often the case, the best part of the meeting was not the formal program but the opportunities to speak with a variety of Friends from different backgrounds and to get to know them a little better. I had the opportunity to meet fellow bloggers C. Wess Daniels and “Elizabeth Bathurst”, the Quaking Harlot. And while looking up these links I discovered that Sarah Hoggatt is a blogger, too. All in all it was a favored time.

The question I am left with is this: How can we be publishers of truth in this changing world?

Blessings to all,

Will T

On Worship - Centering together.

2008-04-28T20:22:00.002-04:00

I have just returned from the Quakers Uniting in Publishing (QUIP) annual meeting where I was part of a panel discussion on Quaker blogging. I will write more about that later but here is the second part of my thoughts on worship.

For when people are gathered thus together, not merely to hear men nor depend upon them, but all are inwardly taught to stay their minds upon the Lord and wait for his appearance in their hearts, thereby the forward working of the spirit of man is stayed and hindered from mixing itself with the worship of God; and the form of this worship is so naked and void of all outward and worldly splendor that all occasion for man's wisdom to be exercised in that superstition and idolatry hath no lodging here; and so there being also an inward quietness and retiredness of mind, the witness of God ariseth in the heart, and the Light of Christ shineth whereby the soul cometh to see its own condition. And there being many joined together in this same work, there is an inward travail and wrestling; and also, as the measure of Grace is abode in, an overcoming of the power and spirit of darkness; and thus we are often greatly strengthened and renewed in the spirits of our minds without a word, and we enjoy and possess the holy fellowship and "communion of the body and blood of Christ," by which our inward man is nourished and fed.
[Proposition 11, Section 7]

I have heard many Friends talk about coming to meeting for an oasis of quiet in a busy world, or words to that effect. I know that there was a period when I likened my common experience of meeting for worship as being like a cat curled up in a warm spot behind a wood stove. I was just basking in the presence of God that I felt. This was a healing and a resting time for me. I came to know and trust God as a source of comfort and love. I did not know it at the time but this was laying a foundation for more vigorous work later on. In some ways it was like the long rest in base camp that mountain climbers have to take to acclimatize their bodies to exertion at altitude. I also did not come to meeting seeking that experience, no matter how precious it was when I found it. If we come to meeting just seeking quiet we are short circuiting the work of God as much as if we come planning to give a message.

Such is the evident certainty of that divine strength that is communicated by thus meeting together and waiting in silence upon God, that sometimes, when one hath come in that hath been unwatchful, and wandering in his mind, or suddenly out of the hurry of outward business, & so not inwardly gathered with the rest, so soon as he retires himself inwardly, this Power, being in a good measure raised in the whole meeting, will suddenly lay hold upon his spirit, and wonderfully help to raise up the good in him and beget him into the sense of the same Power, to the melting and warming of his heart, even as the warmth would take hold upon a man that is cold, coming in to a stove,...
[Proposition 11, Section 7]

When we come into meeting do we see that our centering can help center the entire meeting? Do we think of meeting for worship as an individual activity or do we see it as an attempt by the body gathered to center down corporately and so do we take up our work, not as an individual practice but as part of an attempt by all to come into the presence of God? At Fresh Pond Meeting the children go to First Day School for the first portion of meeting and come in to meeting for the last 15 minutes or so. There are many of them relative to the number of adults and they can bring in a fidgety energy with them. But when the meeting for worship is strongly gathered, it seems that they come in more quietly and settle themselves more quickly than at other times.

To be continued...

Blessings to all,

Will_T

On Worship – Laying down our will and wisdom

2008-04-22T22:09:00.002-04:00

I have found writing about worship has been surprisingly difficult. I made several starts and what I finally came up with was much too long for a single post. I have broken it up into three parts but the transitions are a little abrupt. I will be talking about blogging with Robin M at the Quakers United in Publishing annual meeting at the end of the week. I don't know what access to the internet I will have there so I may be even more sporadic than usual responding to comments. I will post the continuations when I get back.

Some of Barclay's words on worship are quoted often in Quaker books of Faith and Practice and in other descriptions of silent worship. But when I read the entire eleventh proposition I get a different sense of worship than I get in most Friends meetings today.

... the great work of one and all ought to be to wait upon God, and returning out of their own thoughts and imaginations, to feel the Lord's presence and know a "gathering into his Name" indeed, where he is "in the midst" according to his promise. And as every one is thus gathered, and so met together inwardly in their spirits as well as outwardly in their persons, there the secret power and virtue of life is known to refresh the soul, and the pure motions and breathings of God's Spirit are felt to arise, from which as words of declaration, prayers, or praises arise, the acceptable worship is known which edifies the Church and is well-pleasing to God, and no man here limits the Spirit of God nor bringeth forth his own cunned [researched] and gathered stuff, but everyone puts that forth which the Lord puts into their hearts: and it is uttered forth not in man's will and wisdom but "in the evidence and demonstration of the Spirit and of Power."
[Proposition 11, Section 6]

This is what unprogrammed Friends lay claim to, no matter how far short they fall in practice. Certainly I have heard much in meetings for worship that seems to be far more an evidence and demonstration of man's (and woman's) will and wisdom than a demonstration of the Spirit.

As there can be nothing more opposite to the natural will and wisdom of man than this silent waiting upon God, so neither can it be obtained nor rightly comprehended by man but as he layeth down his own wisdom and will so as to be content to be thoroughly subject to God.
[Proposition 11, Section 7]

Laying down our own will and wisdom is not easily done. It is not our natural will to be thoroughly subject to God. Our natural will always tries to put itself first. As we become better at centering and focusing on God during our worship, our natural will becomes more subtle in seeking ways to divert us from God or to speak from ourselves and not from what God would have us say.

For many thus principled, meeting together in the pure fear of the Lord, did not apply themselves presently to speak, pray, or sing, &c., being afraid to be found acting forwardly in their own wills, but each made it their work to retire inwardly to the measure of Grace in themselves, not only being silent as to words but even abstaining from all their own thoughts, imaginations and desires, so watching in a holy dependence upon the Lord and meeting together not only outwardly in one place but thus inwardly in one Spirit and in one name of Jesus, which is his Power and Virtue.
[Proposition 11, Section 7]

When people first come to Friends meeting we often give them hints on how to center down and settle their bodies, but do we go the whole way and say that they should try to center themselves so thoroughly that even their thoughts should cease? This practice is not unique to Friends and the instructions are not difficult. When I was perhaps 5 years old I remember putting myself to sleep by thinking the thought that I was not going to think any thoughts. I pretty soon go to the point that I could think just that thought and then think it slower and slower but I was totally frightened by what might happen if I stopped thinking even that thought. I was afraid that if I stopped my internal monologue completely that I would die. As an adult I have been able to get to that state a number of times, so I know it is possible and it hasn't killed me yet. I also know how slippery a state it is because as soon as you notice you are in the state of not thinking, you are thinking about it and so already coming out of it.

To be continued ...

Blessings to all.

Will T

The Seed is a Weed

2008-04-10T22:05:00.001-04:00

This came to me when I sat down in meeting one day:

The Seed is a weed.
This is a good thing,
and my heart was glad.

Early Friends used the image of the Seed, or the Seed Christ a lot. I would imagine this seed growing into some sort of beautiful flower or mighty tree. But this is not the way it is.

The Seed is a weed.
This is a good thing,
and my heart was glad.

Jesus said “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.”

A mustard seed is small, but you do not sow it in your fields. It is a common weed that grows by the side of the road. It is thoroughly nondescript. It has a woody shaft and it grows to four or five feet. It does not branch. No bird nests in it. It does have pretty yellow flowers but when you see it growing among the ragweed and the Queen Ann's lace by the side of a road or in an empty field, you might not notice it.

The Seed is a weed
This is a good thing,
and my heart was glad.

When I go to the garden shop and buy seeds or plants, I will mix fertilizer and compost with the soil, put them in the dirt and water them. Then what? I will not weed them until the weeds have grown so large that pulling the weeds will pull up what I planted. I will think about fertilizing but I will put it off until it is too late in the year when the annuals are dead and the perennials are going dormant. I will water them when they have already turned brown from the drought. I never build a fence to keep out rabbits that would eat the leaves or groundhogs that would eat the roots. But if I did, the fence would not be tight enough and I would forget to shut the gate.

But the seed is a weed.
This is a good thing.

The seed grows in me even when I neglect it. The seed grows in me even if I am treading it down. The seed grows even when I do not water it or nurture it or tend to it.

The Seed is a weed.
This is a good thing,
Because if it weren't a weed, if it were a tender, delicate species, it would not grow in me.

The Seed is a weed.
This is a good thing.
And my heart is glad.

Blessings to all,

Will T

Ministers and Money

2008-04-03T22:04:00.001-04:00

We now come to the last of Barclay's pleadings for ministers.

The ministers we plead for are such as having freely received, freely give; who covet no man's silver, gold or garments; who seek no man's goods, but seek them, and the salvation of their souls; whose hands supply their own necessities, working honestly for bread to themselves and their families: and if at any time they be called of God so as the work of the Lord hinder them from the use of their trades, take what is freely given them by such to whom they have communicated spirituals; and having food and raiment are therewith content; such were the holy prophets and apostles, as appears from Matt. 10:8; Acts 20:33-35; 1 Tim. 6:8.

Part of the early Quaker opposition to the hireling ministry was that it was supported by the state and paid for by the church tax or tithe. This led to a situation in which the ministry was considered an occupation. A spiritual call was not a requirement. Appointments were often made on the basis of political connections. Ministers were often looking to move to parishes that would provide them with a better living. Quakers opposed paying tithes to support men who were not, in their eyes, true ministers. Their refusal to pay tithes often led them to have their goods seized or even to be sent to prison.

Until the advent of the pastoral system among Friends, there was always the expectation that Friends called to the ministry would support themselves by their trade. Famously John Woolman left of his work in merchandise and became a tailor and apple grower to allow himself more time to devote to his spiritual life. On the other hand, Joseph Hoag describes in his journal the difficulties that he encountered when he was led to travel in the ministry while he was struggling to get himself established and to clear himself of debt. His meeting was reluctant to allow him to travel because of his financial situation.

I have read other Friends from the early 19th century who encouraged Friends called to the ministry to establish a “competency” so that they would be free to travel. What they were suggesting was that a Friend should devote himself to business so that by the time they were 30 or so, they would have gained a sufficient fortune that they could live off of it for the rest of their life while they devoted themselves to the work of the Society of Friends. Of course some Friends ministers, such as Joseph John Gurney, came from wealthy families. Anna Braithwaite traveled in such a fine carriage that one contemporary commented, “however she may walk, she does not ride humbly, although she may do justly and love mercy.”

Early Friends said that training in Cambridge and Oxford did not prepare one to be a minister. So there is no little irony that many of the most respected Quaker authors of the 20th century, Rufus Jones, Thomas Kelly and Douglas Steere, Howard Brinton, Henry Cadbury and Hugh Barbour were all academics. This may partly reflect a more general shift among Friends, at least liberal Friends, from occupations in business towards occupations in academia and social services. It also is reflective that an academic career provides the time and flexibility to write books and to travel extensively.

Friends have not done well with resolving the tension between the ministry freely given and freely received and providing financial support for those engaged in such a ministry. In the middle part of the 20th century, much of the work of a meeting was handled by women who did not have paid employment outside of the home. Now there are fewer women who are not working outside of the home. At the same time, jobs seem to be requiring more time. For poor and working class people, things are often harder with people having to work multiple jobs to support themselves. This general decline in the American standard of living has had a serious impact on Friends Meetings. There are fewer and fewer people available to do the work of the meeting. I suspect that one of the reason for the prevalence of gray and white haired people who are active in Quaker organizations is that it is only when they retire from their jobs that they have time to give to Quaker activities.

When a meeting, or other Friends organization, does hire help, we have very low wage scales. Why do we expect that people who work for Friends organizations should earn less than they would elsewhere? One principle behind tithing is that ten families can support one family at the average level of the other ten. What voices do we not hear because we restrict leadership to those who can afford to donate their services to the Society of Friends? It has seemed to me at times that Friends often confuse Quaker simplicity with being cheap. Friends don't like to talk about money but unless we can adapt our structures to fit with current economic realities we will continue to have a difficult time maintaining the leadership we need.

Blessings to all,

Will T

Ministry, humility and community

2008-03-26T21:01:00.002-04:00

The ministers we plead for are such as, being holy and humble, contend not for precedency and priority, but rather strive to prefer one another and serve one another in love; neither desire to be distinguished from the rest by their garments and large phylacteries, nor seek the greetings in the marketplaces, nor uppermost rooms at feasts, nor the chief seats in the synagogues; nor yet to be called of men Master, &c. Such were the holy prophets and apostles, as appears from Matt. 23:8-10, and 20:25-27.
[Barclay's Apology, Proposition 10, section XXXIII]

Even in their plain garments, it seems clear that there were some ministers in the history of Quakerism who indeed sought the chief seats on the facing bench and the greetings in the market place. The fear that this will happen again is often used as an argument for not recognizing minsters. This is interesting for two reasons. First of all, not many Friends alive today in the liberal tradition, has any direct personal experience of sitting in a meeting for worship and having the recorded ministers and elders sitting in the facing benches overlooking the congregation. It has been my experience that even in meetings that have facing benches in their meetinghouses, it is rare that anyone sits in the upper rows of the facing benches unless space is an issue. The second reason is that refusing to record ministers does not remove the temptation to pride that comes from being recognized as a weighty Friend. What we have removed is the system of accountability that could provide a check for that tendency towards pride.

As I have discussed earlier, a faithful minister will be provided by God many opportunities to work on their pride. A minister such as Barclay describes is one who will strive to be faithful to their Guide and to their gifts. The problem comes from those who may not be so faithful or who, in the course of time, begin to put too much faith in their own powers and not rely wholly on the Lord. Or there are some who might seek to be respected in the meeting, or who feel that the meeting is in great need of their wisdom, and so speak more often or at greater length than they should. In business meetings I often think of these Friends as “Hallmark Friends.” They have a message for every occasion. The problem is that by no longer naming ministers and elders, we have removed the structures that would have provided a check or a guide to those who, for whatever reason, are not being sensitive to their inward guide.

Since we have, for most practical purposes, given up providing outward discipline for those who might not have sufficient inner discipline, Friends from time to time are faced with people who are going off, with no guidance or oversight, speaking for Friends on one subject or another. This is most often seen with Friends with some burning concern. When this happens, Friends on Ministry and Counsel or in a similar position of responsibility are often in a bit of a quandary as to how to proceed. They are often reluctant to say anything except in the most egregious cases because they do not feel that they have the proper authority or standing to speak. This timidness extends as far as an unwillingness or inability to provide guidance to Friends who speak frequently and inappropriately in Meeting for Worship.

The root cause of this problem is that we have lost sight of the fact that one of the principal features of Quakerism is that it is a communal exercise. We respond to an inner prompting to speak or act, but we are also speaking and acting in the context of a community. A message in meeting may be inspired by the Spirit but at the same time it is also drawn out by the quality of the listening for the Friends assembled and worshiping together. When Stephen Grellet spoke in the wilderness there were three parties involved, although Stephen only knew of two. He was there and the Spirit was there. But the other key person was the logger who was listening unseen. His listening ears were also an indispensable part of the story. Elias Hicks notes a number of times when he was unable to speak or unable to speak as well or as fully as he was called to because the listeners, what he called the auditory, was not prepared to hear the message he was carrying.

This idea of a communal spiritual practice is strongly counter-cultural in American society which places an inordinate emphasis on individualism. It stands against the social, economic and political trends which seeks to privatize as much of civic life as possible. But the communal nature of Quaker spirituality also pushes towards humility. It reminds us that we are not the only judge of our spiritual life. It recognizes that we may be wrong and that others may see some things more clearly than we can. It recognizes that we hold our gifts, not as treasures for ourselves, but as stewards for the community. This also puts a burden on the community to receive the gifts that have been given to individuals on behalf of the community. This means recognizing gifts that have been given, drawing them forth, nurturing them and providing guidance and support for the people exercising them. This is true as much for the person whose gift is teaching First Day School or sending get well cards to Friends who are ill as it is for those who are led to become public Friends in one form or another.

Blessings to all,

Will T

Ministry – Is it God or Us?

2008-03-22T22:04:00.003-04:00

Barclay continues with his summary of Quaker ministers and ministry:

The ministers we plead for are such as act, move and labour in the work of the ministry, not from their own mere natural strength and ability, but as they are acted, moved, under-propped, assisted and influenced by the Spirit of God, and minister according to the gift received, as good stewards of the manifold grace of God, such were the holy prophets and apostles: 1 Pet. 4:10-11; 1 Cor. 1:17; 2:3-5,13; Acts 2:4; Matt. 10:20; Mark 13:11; Luke 12:12; 1 Cor. 13:2.
[Barclay's Apology, Proposition 10, section XXXIII]

This is the aspect of ministry that I wrestle with the most. Ministry is supposed to rise from the direct influence of the Spirit of God. It is not to come from our mere natural strength and ability. But the Spirit of God also seems quite happy to make use of our strengths and abilities, under-propping and assisting as needed, so the discernment is always a little tricky. This is where learning the voice of your inward Guide is important.

Speaking in meeting is not being a trance medium where we give up our consciousness so that some other voice can make use of our lungs and vocal chords to give a message and we have no memory later of the message we gave. Likewise it is not a place for delivering an intellectual message suitable for a classroom lecture – although these messages are common enough, especially in meetings near to institutions of higher education.

In some ways, speaking in meeting is the essential mystery of unprogrammed Quakerism. Vocal ministry is what distinguishes Quaker Meeting for Worship from other forms of group meditation. Vocal ministry is also the place where our discernment is honed, our inward ear opened and our voice trained. Our speaking is inspired by the Spirit but the Spirit makes use of our individual experiences, talents, strengths and weaknesses. There is an expression among Friends, “The water always tastes of the pipes.” This means that the messages always carry the flavor of the person giving it. We may try to get ourselves out of the way as much as possible but we never get out of the way entirely. What comes from the Spirit, what comes from us? We may be prompted by the Spirit to stand and speak but we always maintain some degree of control. We are taught that there are things to consider before standing. Has there been enough time since the last speaker? Is it too close to the end of the meeting? Is this message for me or the meeting? We are always there, choosing the time, choosing the words.

The Spirit is supposed to guide our speaking but our motives are not always pure. Speaking can give us attention or validation. It can increase our stature in the community. Of course regularly speaking inappropriately can also reduce our stature in the community. A number of years ago I came to see that what I had thought was the power of the Lord in my speaking was, to some extent, the power of anger I had not dealt with. As I came to terms with that my ministry has taken a gentler tone. I have been wrestling lately with how much of my ministry has been motivated by a desire for attention and validation. In the worship at the recent TMP retreat I was shown the roots of that desire in myself. I am now holding this part of me in prayer so that this desire can be reduced in me and my ministry become more faithful. These difficulties and issues have faced Friends from the very beginning. Samuel Bownas offered advice and counsel on this matter in his 1750 book A Description of the Qualifications Necessary to a Gospel Minister.

The Spirit is able to make use of even our impure motives. I can see that without the anger and the desire for attention and validation I would never have embarked on the path that has lead me to the public ministry and this blog. It is only by standing and speaking that one begins to learn what is required. It is only by hearing and following the voice of our Guide and the voices that only sound like our Guide that we, in time, learn to know that voice and listen to only it.

The man who enters by the gate is the shepherd of his sheep. The watchman opens the gate for him, and the sheep listen to his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes on ahead of them, and his sheep follow him because they know his voice. But they will never follow a stranger; in fact, they will run away from him because they do not recognize a stranger's voice." (John 10:2-5 NIV)

Faithfulness in our lives and in our ministry is a learned skill and our failures are as an important part of our learning as our successes. Our ministry is inspired by the Holy Spirit. But it is we fallible humans who are inspired. We bring all of ourselves, both our strengths and our weaknesses to the work to which we are called. By being as faithful as we can to the small promptings we increase our capacity to be faithful in larger things. Our continued faithfulness becomes a tool in our continued growth and sanctification.

Blessings to all,

Will T

TMP, QUIP, visitors and spring

2008-03-20T23:19:00.002-04:00

This has been an interesting week. This past weekend I attended the retreat of the FGC Traveling Ministries Program. Working on this series on ministry was a good preparation and while there I have had some insights that will inform what is yet to come. It was a good opportunity to reconnect with some old friends and make some new ones. I had a chance to meet Lucy Duncan who had invited me to attend the Quakers Uniting in Publications (QUIP) annual meeting in April. I will be presenting on a panel on Quaker Blogging with Jez Smith and Robin Mohr. The panel will be moderated by Gil Skidmore. Lucy says that there is still room if you are interested. Details can be found here.

Sometime when I was in Pittsburgh at the TMP retreat this blog had it's 10,000^th visitor. Now I keep a counter but I don't know if this is 100 people who have visited 100 times or 10,000 people who never came back. It is probably somewhere in between. So thank you all of you for stopping by and leaving comments from time to time.

Oh, and happy Spring.

Blessings to all.

Will T

Preparation for the Ministry

2008-03-11T22:03:00.002-04:00

The ministers we plead for are such as are acted and led by God's Spirit, and by the Power and operation of his Grace in their hearts are in some measure converted and regenerate, and so are good, holy, and gracious men, such were the holy prophets and apostles, as appears from 1 Tim. 3:2-6; Tit. 1:7-9.
Barclay's Apology, Proposition 10, section XXXIII

God does not call the prepared. God prepares the ones God calls. This preparation is not always easy. There must have been Christians already in the Jerusalem Church who would appear to have the credentials to become an apostle to the Gentiles. Instead God prepared Saul. The preparation was not particularly gentle. It involved being struck down on the road to Damascus, being made blind and having to seek help and healing from the very people he had been persecuting. Then once he began his work he faced beatings, stonings, imprisonment, shipwrecks and floggings. He recites the entire list in 2 Corinthians 11:23-30.

I do not think that this aspect of the ministry is fully appreciated by those who fear that naming gifts will set one person above another. I certainly do not claim to have experienced the hardships or difficulties of Paul. But sometimes I have been called to do things that have reminded me of a story told by Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln said that he had spoken to a man being run out of town on a rail and asked him what he thought about the situation. The man replied, “If it weren't for the honor of it all, I think I would just as soon walk.”

One does not always recognize the preparation when it is happening. I had been reading the Bible and the writings of early Friends because I enjoyed doing it long before I came to realize that, since I had studied all this material which was not accessible or easy for many people, I had an obligation to share what I had learned or else all my study would be just so much self indulgence.

Sometimes the preparation happens as part of being faithful and doing the work to which we are called. The more I have taught about Barclay and the beliefs and lives of early Friends, the more I have been challenged by those very things. When I speak, am I following the guidance of the Spirit? I am often brought up short by the idea that God cannot reside in a place that is impure and unholy. There are times when I can think of no place more impure and unholy than my own heart. But Jesus came to heal the sick and cleanse and purify the unclean and impure and I experience that blessing. There are times when I feel the presence of God so strongly that being anything less than faithful seems an unfathomable choice. There are other times when I deliberately choose to be unfaithful to drive God away. I may talk a good story about living the transformed life but there are times when I say, but not that transformed. I am grateful to never have gotten the same instructions as Lot and his wife or else I would have long ago become a mighty fine pillar of salt. In spite of all that, I feel some improvement in my overall condition and I feel God's continued encouragement. Fortunately the requirement for ministry is a measure of conversion and regeneration and not perfection.

This recognition of our own weakness and fallibility is an important part of the preparation. It promotes humility. It also allows us to talk to people who are also struggling and be able to share something of value. Our experiences of grief and suffering enable us to be compassionate in the face of all of the grief and suffering in the world. If we are called on imitate Christ, our own experiences of pain and suffering opens us to share in some small way in Christ's work of bearing and bearing witness to all the suffering of the world. Christ is pictured as the wounded healer and the suffering servant and we also find that our wounds can be a source of healing to others.

In his introduction Barclay says, “For what I have written comes more from my heart than from my head; what I have heard with the ears of my soul and seen with my inward eyes and my hands have handled of the Word of Life, and what hath been inwardly manifested to me of the things of God, that I do declare.” He is in turn referring back to 1 John 1:1-3. As we have seen earlier, Quakers claimed to have the same prophetic ministry that the apostles had. This apostolic ministry is based on the personal experience of God and Christ. For the apostles, it was direct and outward while Jesus was alive and direct and inward after Pentecost. For everyone since, it has been direct and inward but it is the same personal knowledge of God. It is the same personal teaching and guidance as we learn to follow God's ways and forsake the ways of the world. This teaching and guidance converts and regenerates us. It also gives us our ministry. We can only minister from what we know from our own experience. This includes the pain and desolation that comes as we are transformed but it also includes the joy and peace the comes as well. We get to swim in both the ocean of darkness and the ocean of light and our messages, in season, come from both experiences.

Blessings to all,

Will T

On Ministries and Ministers

2008-03-06T20:54:00.002-05:00

The ministry and ministers we plead for are such as are immediately called and sent forth by Christ and his Spirit unto the work of the ministry, so were the holy apostles and prophets, as appears by these places: Matt. 10:1,5; Eph. 4:11, Heb. 5:4.

Liberal Friends have become uncomfortable with the idea of having ministers. They think that it sets up some sort of hierarchy, that by naming a minster it raises that person up and pushes down the rest. I have a friend who has tried to resolve this issue by talking about ministries and not ministers. But this formulation denies something very fundamental about the way God works. God does nothing in the abstract. God always works in the particular. There is no ministry separate from the minister that embodies that ministry. God does not speak to us in a voice from the clouds. We always hear God in the voice of a person, either in the voice of someone speaking to us, or writing on a page or computer screen. I don't know how it is for others but even when I hear a voice speaking to me internally, it speaks with my accent and my phrasing and my language. The voice sounds much like our own which provides an ongoing opportunity to hone my sense of discernment. God does not call forth a ministry without calling forth the minister. Likewise, a minister is not called without a ministry.

“And one does not presume to take this honor, but takes it only when called by God, just as Aaron was.” (Hebrews 5:4) According to Friends tradition, one does not seek to be named a minister but is someone whose gifts are recognized and named by the community. By and large, liberal Friends have abandoned that responsibility and have been hurt by it. The first tentative shoots of a new ministry may cease to grow from lack of nourishment. A person new to the ministry may lack someone to turn to for guidance. Traditionally, the people responsible for recognizing new ministers and encouraging them were the elders. If any role is in lower regard among Friends today than that of minister it is that of elder. The journals of many of Friends ministers record the important work of ministers and elders in helping them get started and grounded in their ministry. Ministers and ministry emerges from the community and the community has a responsibility to nourish and encourage it.

Today, people with a ministry often find themselves in an awkward position. Our Quaker culture says to wait until you are recognized. But then we don't recognize anyone. In this environment it means that people who do come forth are people who are willing to put themselves forward. Sometimes this is the result of God's promptings, sometimes it is their own pride and ego and most of the time it is some mix of the two. The community doesn't have the tools in place to help the minister learn to distinguish between the two and the ministry and the community are both hurt. It is also denied the contribution of those who may not be so assertive.

In my last post on this subject I said that we cannot, in our unbelief, prevent God from raising up ministers. At the same time, we can, and do, hinder the development of those who are being raised up. There are two forces working to do this. The first is American society's increasing emphasis on individualism. The idea that an individual can and should be self-sufficient has a corrosive influence on community. Communities need opportunities to care for their members. Individuals need times of being cared for. A minister grows out of the community and relies on the community for support. While we need prophetic ministry, we need to move beyond the image of the prophet living as a hermit in the desert and coming as an outsider to proclaim a message, usually of doom and misfortune, on the poor, benighted and wayward sinners. God is found where people gather and if prophets speak for God, that is where they will be found as well. This is not to say that a minister does not need to take times of retirement and solitude to nourish themselves and to come to hear the voice of God. After all, Jesus was always going off by himself, often to empty and barren places to pray. But ministers also need the community of their meeting and a community of other ministers to nourish them and help them grow. The meetings need the ministers for the same reasons.

The second way in which we inhibit ministry from arising among us is our insistence on egalitarianism. By egalitarianism, I do not mean our testimony on equality or our insistence that God speaks to all of us without an intermediary. I am having trouble finding the words to describe what I mean so I will use an example from economics and politics. In American civic life everyone is assumed to be middle-class. This is a useful fiction. It makes the poor disappear which eases the conscience of the better off. It also makes the rich disappear so they do not become a target of resentment and people don't notice how the wealthy get that way by extracting wealth from those below them. Anyone, especially a politician, who dares to challenge this assumption and point out the very real class differences in our society is accused of promoting class warfare.

The way this plays out in our meetings is that we say that we cannot single out gifts in vocal ministry because we are all ministers and besides it ignores those who may have other less valued ministries. While it is true that we are all ministers and that in any given meeting for worship, God may use anyone to give a message, it is also true that God does not appear to distribute gifts uniformly. We have no trouble recognizing that some people have been given more or less athletic ability, singing ability or physical beauty. But for some reason we are reluctant to admit that not everyone has the same level of spiritual gifts. And it is not as if, by not recognizing gifts in ministry, we are giving honor to those with less visible gifts. I have not seen any sign that the meetings that are reluctant to recognize and support gifts in the ministry go out of their way to recognize and encourage those Friends whose gifts may lie in any other area either. People whose contribution to the meeting is that they always provide fresh flowers, or see to it that the meeting room is tidy and ready for meeting, or that always clean up after the potlucks are invisible across the board. Insistence that we are all ministers in some way often turns into acting as if none of us are ministers. This is similar to the way in which Quaker insistence that all days are holy seems to have created a situation in which all days are secular.

God does not want us to all be alike or to do the same thing. The image of the Body of Christ captures this. 1 Corinthians chapters 12-14 explores this issue. We all have a role to play. Gifts are not given equally and not everyone gets the same gifts. We need to recognize and celebrate the diversity of gifts that we have all received and honor them all. If God blesses someone it does not mean that there is less for everyone else. In 1 Corinthians 14:1 Paul explicitly encourages all to seek after the gift of prophecy. If we are all encouraged to this, then there must be enough to go around because God does not set us impossible tasks. God has an abundance of gifts for us. We cannot let our fear of scarcity prevent us from accepting that abundance.

O children of Zion, be glad
and rejoice in the Lord your God;
for he has given the early rain for your vindication,
he has poured down for you abundant rain,
the early and the later rain, as before.
The threshing-floors shall be full of grain,
the vats shall overflow with wine and oil.

You shall eat in plenty and be satisfied,
and praise the name of the Lord your God,
who has dealt wondrously with you. And my people shall never again be put to shame.

Then afterwards
I will pour out my spirit on all flesh;
your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
your old men shall dream dreams,
and your young men shall see visions.
Even on the male and female slaves,
in those days, I will pour out my spirit.

Joel 2: 23,24,26,28,29

Blessings to all,

Will T

True ministry is like that of the apostles and primitive church.

2008-03-01T15:01:00.002-05:00

In the final section of the 10'th proposition, Barclay sums up his thoughts on ministry with a summary statement and 5 points. I was going to quote them and then comment on each of the points in one post. When I had gotten onto the third page and had only covered his summary and the first point I realized that this was too much for one post. This will be easier for me to write. I expect it will be easier for you to read, and I hope that it will allow ample time for whatever discussion comes up from this.

This is how Robert Barclay sums up his view of Quaker ministry:

The sum then of what is said is that the ministry that we have pleaded for, and which also the Lord hath raised up among us, is in all its parts like the true ministry of the apostles and primitive Church.

This sets a very high standard for ministry within the Society of Friends, a standard that has not been uniformly attained or maintained. Barclay starts out with the audacious claim that the ministry raised up among the Quakers is equivalent to the ministry of the apostles and the primitive Christian church. A look at the history of the Valiant Sixty (the term used for the first set of people who undertook to preach Quakerism to the world at the beginning of the Quaker movement.) shows that the claim is perhaps not unjustified.

So why is it that we do not see that level of ministry being raised up among Friends today? Sometimes I have thought that somehow we are not faithful enough. If only we did something different, better or were in some way more like early Friends, we would find a radically powerful ministry being raised up among us. But when I stopped and thought about this, I realized that this is, as Barclay says in another place, “a horrid blasphemy against the power of God.” Do we really think that we are so powerful in our unbelief that we can prevent God from raising up the ministry God needs?

So does that mean that God does not need or want to raise up a vibrant prophetic ministry? God has been willing and able to do so in other times and places. It doesn't seem that that the world has reached such a state of blessedness that such a ministry is unneeded.

So maybe we are just looking in the wrong places. God usually raises up prophets from among the marginalized and downtrodden. Have we became so complacent that we are unwilling to admit that we might need to live transformed lives? Do we value our privileges so much that we have become afraid of the ability of the Inner Light to show us our faults and then transform us? Are we afraid that, like the young man who came to Jesus to find out what he must do for eternal life, we will be asked to sell everything and give it to the poor? Instead of raising up Quaker ministers, God turned to the drunks and the addicts to preach a message of a Higher Power, available to everyone, who can do what we cannot do by ourselves, which is to restore us to sanity and transform our lives. God raised up Mohandas Gandhi from out of South Africa to bring a message of peace and freedom to India. God raised up Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King to lead their people to freedom. God raised up Friends in Rwanda and Burundi and the Congo to show that the Peace Testimony means forgiving those who had massacred your family and neighbors. God is even now raising up ministers of peace in Kenya to heal and comfort the people there and to show that there is a different way.

God's prophets, including the Valiant Sixty, have come from unexpected places. Moses was a fugitive murderer with a speech impediment. David was a shepherd, Jesus a carpenter. His disciples were fishermen. George Fox was apprenticed to be a shoemaker. Mary Fisher who went and preached to the Sultan of Turkey was a serving maid. God is always raising prophets, just not from the ranks of the comfortable and privileged.

We need to be careful what we ask for. If we want God to raise a prophetic ministry among us and God raises prophets from the downtrodden, what is it that has to happen to us before such a ministry can arise? Who are the marginalized already among us who may be trying to speak to us? Before we get prophetic voices do we need prophetic ears?

Barclay and the Church

2008-02-15T21:01:00.002-05:00

Proposition 10 in Barclay's Apology deals with ministry. But before he goes into his elaboration on that subject he spends some time talking about the church. He says that before he talks about offices of the church he should say something about the church in general. Barclay defines the church as “the society, gathering, or company of such as God hath called out of the world and worldly spirit, to walk in his Light and Life.” This includes not just those still alive but also those who “having already laid down the earthly tabernacle are passed into their heavenly mansions.” This is the one universal church made up of “as many, of whatsoever nation, kindred, tongue or people they be (though outwardly strangers and remote from those who profess Christ and Christianity in words and have the benefit of the Scriptures), as become obedient to the holy Light and testimony of God in their hearts, so as to become sanctified by it and cleansed from the evils of their ways.” This universal church is the Body of Christ.

In addition to this universal church there is also the “particular” church. This is made up of “a certain number of persons gathered by God's Spirit, and by the testimony of some of his servants raised up for that end, unto the belief of the true principles and doctrines of the Christian faith, who through their hearts being united by the same love, and their understandings informed in the same truths, gather, meet, and assemble together to wait upon God, to worship him, and to bear a joint testimony for the Truth against error; suffering for the same; and so becoming through this fellowship as one family and household in certain respects, do each of them watch over, teach, instruct and care for one another, according to their several measures and attainments.”

The inward calling of God and the turning of the heart to righteousness is required for membership in the particular church just as much as it is required for membership in the universal church. But in addition, membership in the particular church requires outward profession of their faith. For Barclay, this faith is a “belief in Jesus Christ and those holy truths delivered by his Spirit in Scripture.” According to Barclay, it is due to the work of the devil, this has become twisted so that some Christians claim that one cannot become part of the universal church without outward profession of belief and that with the right rituals and confessions, one can enter the Church of Christ while still inwardly unreformed.

I don't know that I would go so far as Barclay and ascribe the current confusion among Friends to the work of the Devil, but part of the problem is a confusion between the two churches. Liberal Friends have taken the idea that one can belong to the universal church regardless of their religious beliefs and apply that to questions of membership in their particular church, or in this case, monthly meeting. Likewise, when other Friends advocate the Richmond Declaration as a statement of faith, Liberals hear it as a statement that if you cannot accept this statement, you cannot be acceptable to God and cannot be part of the universal church.

The particular church (and that could be a denomination or a congregation) is a subset of the universal church where people have been gathered together to worship together and to provide each other with support and guidance as they attempt to live out the implications of their faith. For any particular church, there needs to be a certain degree of unity of faith or experience so that the body can make an outward profession of their faith. It finds unity in “their hearts being united by the same love, and their understandings informed in the same truths.” Many liberal meetings are not easy exploring whether their understandings are indeed informed by the same truths. They claim to be united by the same love, but sometimes it appears to be acceptance of those who share certain unspoken social, cultural and political norms. On the other hand, there are also Friends who are so concerned about insuring that all are informed by the same truths that they ignore the need to be united in the same love. There is a dynamic tension between these two requirements. It has always been a challenge to find the right balance between being loving and accepting of all the tender-hearted and of having enough coherence of belief that the community can speak with one voice on matters of importance. The history of Friends in the last two centuries is full of our failures to find that balance.

Last weekend I was at a meeting of the FUM General Board. Since its founding, FUM has been marked by an ongoing struggle between its liberal and its evangelical factions. This struggle has been very present in the organization lately and both sides take it very seriously. At this meeting I saw the whole struggle in a different light. We are brothers and sisters in Christ and we are acting like it. Not in the pious loving terms we usually think when we think of brothers and sisters in Christ. No, we are acting like siblings who are on a long journey sitting in the back seat of the car. “She's touching me.” “He's looking at me. Make him stop.” “Are we there yet?” Do we really think that God only loves our faction? Are we afraid that God loves the other faction more? Is there a limit on the love of God so we have to struggle to get our share?

Barclay says that the church is made up of those whom God has “called out of the world and worldly spirit, to walk in his Light and Life.” When we consider people for membership, do we consider if their association with Friends has made a difference in their lives? I have been told that Cuban Friends make new attenders at their churches wait for a year or two before they can become members. In that time they expect to see positive changes in that person's life and behavior. If they don't see that, they cannot join.

In the earliest period of Quakerism, there was no such thing as membership. One became known as a Friend because your language, wardrobe and behavior changed. These days the changes would be more subtle. What changes would you expect to see in someone becoming a Quaker?

Will T

Names

2008-01-31T22:17:00.001-05:00

We do not know the name of God. When Moses asked God his name, God answered, “I am that I am.” When the Hebrew scribes wrote this down, they just recorded the consonants. When markings were added to Hebrew writing to indicate the vowels, they used the vowels from a different word so that no one would say the real name of God by mistake. So we have God, AKA Jehovah, DBA (Doing Business As) Yaweh. Moslems use the alias Allah. There are hundreds of other names in use around the world and none of them are the real name of God. God isn't the real name either.

Likewise, we do not even know our own names. In Revelation we are told that we will receive a stone with a name on it that no one knows. (Revelation 2:17) This is our true name but we don't know it until we receive it from God..

Barclay says that one of the privileges of a Christian is to know the voice of God (by whatever name.) He is drawing on images from the Gospel of John where Jesus says that he is the shepherd and his sheep know his voice and will follow no other. (John 10:1-6)

If we listen to the voice of God we will sometimes be told things we do not want to hear, be shown things we don't want to see and be asked to do things we don't want to do. If we do these things, there is no guarantee that we will be safe, or that everything will work out. What we are promised is that if we follow the promptings and leadings of the voice within, the voice of the Shepherd, that God will be with us, what ever might happen.

And that is the blessing of good old what's his name, God.

Will T

Perserverance

2008-01-25T22:14:00.000-05:00

Although this gift, and inward grace of God, be sufficient to work out salvation, yet in those in whom it is resisted it both may and doth become their condemnation. Moreover, in whom it hath wrought in part, to purify and sanctify them, in order to their further perfection, by disobedience such may fall from it, and turn it to wantonness, making shipwreck of faith; and after "having tasted of the heavenly gift, and been made partakers of the Holy Ghost, again fall away." Yet such an increase and stability in the truth may in this life be attained, from which there cannot be a total apostasy.
[Barclay's Apology Proposition 9]

This proposition states simply that God's work in us can be resisted either at the beginning or later on. In fact, one can have experienced some amount of Grace and still fall away. It finally proposes that it is possible to achieve to such a state of grace that one cannot fully fall away.

This seems a peculiar proposition. Certainly my own experience can testify to the truth of the first two portions. I have resisted God's working in me any number of times. Furthermore, I have turned back to my old ways any number of times, even after experiencing moments of grace. In fact, I find that it is after times of great spiritual intensity or insight that I am most prone to succumb to temptation and in particular to my own set of besetting sins. I think that it was Jan Hoffman who first drew my attention to the fact that the temptation of Jesus did not take place when he was a spiritual neophyte. It came after what would have to be a spiritual high point. He had just been baptized by John and then the heavens opened and the Spirit of God descended upon him and a voice came from the heavens saying, “This is my Son in whom I am well pleased.” Certainly something like that would be the high point of my spiritual life. So what happened next? Jesus was led into the wilderness where he was tempted. I cannot claim to be Christ-like in much of anything, but maybe in this, a few spiritual high points followed by a lot of time in the wilderness. I am certainly grateful that God seems to have mellowed out some since the days of Lot and his wife fleeing from Sodom and Gomorrah or I would long ago have been turned into a pillar of salt.

But as Barclay begins his argument, it is clear that this is another front on his attacks on predestination. In particular, this proposition stands for the idea that there is not a small group of people so blessed that they cannot fall and the vast majority that cannot be saved no matter what they do.

The final part of this proposition affirms that it is possible to achieve a state of stability in the truth that one cannot fall away. Barclay argues that if this were not true, then it would not be possible to truly enter into God's rest or be assured of God's love and salvation. If one would always be in danger of falling away there could be no rest or assurance. Since many testify to such assurance and it is promised in the Bible, it must be true. Once again, the final argument is based on the love and compassion of God.

And this ends the propositions that describe Quaker spirituality. Simply put, God loves us all, no matter what we have done or how far we have fallen from what God would have us be. Through the working of the Inner Christ, God's light will show us our sins and give us power to overcome them. While it is possible to turn away from this process, if we persevere, we can come into God's rest and become filled with God's presence. We can live in God's kingdom even in this life. The rest of the Apology is a defense and argument for the various ways in which living in God's kingdom made Quakers act in ways that seemed peculiar to those living in the kingdom of this world.

Blessings to all,

Will T

Perfection

2008-01-17T21:13:00.000-05:00

In whom this holy and pure birth is fully brought forth the body of death and sin comes to be crucified and removed, and their hearts united and subjected unto the truth, so as not to obey any suggestion or temptation of the evil one, but to be free from actual sinning, and transgressing the law of God, and in that respect perfect. Yet doth this perfection still admit of a growth; and there remaineth a possibility of sinning, where the mind doth not most diligently and watchfully attend unto the Lord.
[Barclay's Apology, Proposition 8]

The Quaker doctrine of perfection was perhaps one that got the Quakers into the most trouble with their contemporaries and it is probably also the most misunderstood today. This was a shocking claim in the 17'th century and it is shocking to some today as well. But if you look at what it says carefully, it is a qualified perfection. It is not mean free from error or flawless. What it means is that the process of justification and sanctification can proceed to a point where our hearts have been transformed such that it no longer responds to temptation and so the person is free from sinning.

Let me draw an analogy to something that is on many people's mind here in New England, football. Say that sin is like committing a penalty. You, even your whole team could play an entire game without having a penalty called on them. The yellow flags could just stay in the referees pocket for the entire game. You might even go so far as to not commit any penalties, not even the ones the referees miss or ignore. In that regard you have played perfectly. But you might have fumbled the ball, thrown interceptions, missed blocks or done any number of things poorly and so have lost the game. So it is possible to be perfect and still have room for improvement.

This concept of perfection does not mean that you will not be tempted or have trials. It means that when you are tempted, you will not succumb to that temptation. It is also not a static idea of perfection. It allows room for growth. Barclay uses the example that a child's body is as perfect as an adult's body, but it certainly has room for growth. The servant who was given two talents and made four perfected them as much as the one who was given five and made ten. Again, an ounce of gold is as perfect as a pound of gold. We often conflate perfection with prissiness. One common image of perfection is someone like Martha Stewart who is over the top in having every outward detail just so. We resent people like that, they make us feel inadequate and it does not seem to be something we would even want to be. Perfect does not only mean flawless. It also means whole or complete. When I recast Jesus' injunction to “Be ye whole as your Father in heaven is whole,” I find it resonates with me much more. The goal stops being an attempt to make everything look good on the outside but to grow into inward completeness and health.

What Barclay is talking about is not an outward perfection, but an inward condition. It is a state in which temptation does not grab a hold of us. What he is describing is being so spiritually filled that nothing that would take you away from that state is of any interest. When you are whole, you do not need to be desperately trying to fill up a void inside you or try to cover up what you lack. It is like having had a wonderful meal and not even a slice of chocolate cake or other favorite dessert is of any interest to you because you are sated and you already have a good taste in your mouth. I have had glimpses of such a spiritual state. When I am particularly blessed they may last for a day or two. My experience has been that when I become conscious of this happening, it usually means that it will not last for much longer. Then I am back into the muck and grime or my everyday condition.

Most of Barclay's arguments in support of this proposition turn on showing the effects of denying it. Denying that perfection is possible is to deny the power of God. It says that there are things that God cannot do. “He that sinneth is the servant to sin.” (Romans 6:16) How is it possible to be both a servant to sin and a servant to God? Denying perfection is inconsistent with the justice of God. God does not require of us things that are impossible for us to do. But Jesus tells us “Be ye perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect.” Denial of perfection denies the power of Christ to save us from our sins. “How is it that the servants of Christ are less his servants than the devil's are his?”

If people cannot come to perfection in this life, then it makes the work of ministers useless and ineffectual. (Maybe it is because we do not believe any more in the attainability of perfection that the status of ministers has fallen so far among Friends.) Without perfection, no one can be said to be justified and sanctified as it was discussed in the previous proposition. If justification is to be made to be actually just, then this work must be able to be completed. Finally, if perfection is not possible, it means that there is no difference between the Law and the Gospel. Perfection, as it is used here, is the result of having the Law written on our hearts. If that does not happen, then we are left with trying to follow an outward law and our Quaker and Christian faith is in vain.

This vision of the life in Christ as something attainable in this life was what motivated early Friends. They were not seeking something far off. They were seeking to know God directly and to led by God in all things. This was the driving force behind the entire Quaker movement. This is why they spoke so harshly against those priests and preachers who were, in their view, preaching sin by saying that one could not overcome the power of sin in this life. The entire Quaker witness was to a life that could be lived in faithfulness in this world.

Blessings to all,

Will T

Destruction, Resolution and Justification

2008-01-10T22:11:00.000-05:00

Friends,

I am still saddened by the tragedy still unfolding in Kenya. But I am also heartened by the responses of Friends and others in Kenya and around the world in responding to the situation. Mary Kay Rehard has created a blog Kenya News where she is collecting news and information about the situation there, with particular emphasis on the Society of Friends. I am continually amazed at the ability of the web and the people on it to collect information from so many seemingly remote and unlikely places and to make it available. Continue to pray for the people of Kenya, their country and Friends there. See how you are led to respond. Mary Kay's page has links to a number of organizations that are providing humanitarian relief.

I have never been one for making New Year's resolutions but this year I did. I have slacked off on posting to this blog this fall. My resolution is to be more intentional and regular about posting again. As part of that, I want to finish up with my on again, off again, series on Barclay's Apology. So, with that for justification, I will turn to what Barclay has to say about justification.

No little theological ink has been spilled on the subject of justification. Justification is the act or process of being made acceptable to God. For some later Protestants, including some Friends in the Holiness tradition, justification refers to God's act of accepting you and then Sanctification is the process whereby your life is brought into line with God's will. In Barclay's theology justification and sanctification were a single process. As Barclay says in this proposition:

As many as resist not this Light, but receive the same, it becomes in them a holy, pure, and spiritual birth, brining forth holiness, righteousness, purity, and all those other blessed fruits, which are acceptable to God, by which holy birth, to wit, Jesus Christ formed within us, and working his works in us, as we are sanctified, so are we justified in the sight of God, according to the apostle's words: “But ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Cor. 6:11).

Note that this formulation totally sidesteps the entire debate of whether we are justified by faith or by works. We are justified by the working of the Holy Spirit if we do not resist this work. The result of the work of the Spirit in us is that we will bring forth good fruit in the form of good acts. We are not justified by the mere performance of good acts. But acts done as the fruit of the spirit working in us may be a means by which we are changed. The acts of faithfulness have a way of working on us inwardly as well as on the world outwardly. Justification and sanctification are a process that continues over time as we are brought into greater and greater conformance to what God would have us be.

Barclay does not minimize the importance of Christ's atonement on the cross. This was important because it obtains forgiveness for past sins and makes the grace of God's work within us available to us. Likewise he mentions Christ's work in offering intercession for us (Romans 8:34). This is for our conversion during our day of visitation and for our continued faithfulness after our conversion. It is then the growth of the Seed of Christ within us that purifies, justifies and sanctifies us. What is not effective for justification are works and rituals carried out under the Law or out of self-will.

He summarizes his entire position in the last section (Section XIII) of his discussion:

And to conclude this theme, let none be so bold as to mock God, supposing themselves justified and accepted in the sight of God, by virtue of Christ's death and sufferings, while they remain unsanctified and unjustified in their own hearts, and polluted in their sins, lest their hope prove that of the hypocrite, which perisheth. Neither let any foolishly imagine that they can, by their own works, or by the performance of any ceremonies or traditions, or by the giving of gold or money, or by afflicting their bodies in will worship and voluntary humility, or foolishly striving to conform their way to the outward letter of the law, flatter themselves that they merit before God, or draw a debt upon him, or that any man, or men, have power to make such kind of things effectual to their justification, lest they be found foolish boasters and strangers to Christ and his righteousness indeed. But blessed forever are they, that having truly had a sense of their own unworthiness and sinfulness, and having seen all their own endeavours and performances fruitless and vain, and beheld their own emptiness, and the vanity of their vain hopes, faith, and confidence, while they remained inwardly pricked, pursued, and condemned by God's holy witness in their hearts, and so having applied themselves thereto, and suffered his grace to work in them; are become changed and renewed in the spirit of their minds, passed from death to life, and know Jesus arisen in them, working both the will and the deed; and so having "put on the Lord Jesus Christ," in effect are clothed with him and partake of his righteousness and nature; such can draw near to the Lord with boldness, and know their acceptance in, and by him; in whom, and in as many as are found in him, the Father is well pleased.

The situation in Kenya, in Iraq, in the United States, certainly holds up to us our need for forgiveness. We certainly see that we cannot resolve the conflicts before us by ourselves. May it be not just as as individuals but our societies that can find themselves changed and renewed in the spirit.

Blessings to all

Will T