Abraham, Isaac and me

My faith has been challenged again this past week. I had dinner with a dear friend of mine last Sunday, whose 15 year old son almost died in August last year when an ice cave collaped on him and a friend. The two boys were buried under the ice for over 4 hours before they were rescued. For most of that time, the rescuers and my friend C didn’t think the boys could have survived. Last Sunday, C told me that there was a point when her son had been under the ice for about three hours when she had a sudden image of God standing over her son with a knife in hand, just like Abraham stood over Isaac, and God asked C: “Are you ready to give your son to me?” C says that, stricken with fear, she nonetheless answered,  ”Yes, Lord, if you give me the strength to live without him.”

Just a few minutes later, the rescuers heard a voice under the ice, her son’s voice, and he was rescued. His friend was rescued a little while later.

I have always resisted theologies that portray someone’s illness or death as “God’s will” or part of “God’s plan”. As a chaplain I witness the suffering that people go through when someone they love dies, especially when that someone is their child. I can’t bring myself to believe that God would ever be the cause of that kind of pain.

And yet I could hear in my friend’s story that she found comfort in giving her precious son to God. As painful as it was, it was profoundly meaningful and it helped her face a future without her son. 

I’m not sure I am explaining this very well, but I can’t think of what other words to add. 

In my own life, I know that I am a much better parent when I think of my daughters not as mine, but as beloved children of God, who have been entrusted to my care. When I think of the incredible gift they are in my life, and that I am accountable to God for raising them to be loving, responsible, and independent women – that’s when I make the best decisions on their behalf. I am a much better wife when I think of my husband not as mine, but as a child of God, and when I remember that one of my major responsibilities as a wife is to help him grow closer to God.  

My friend C says that after she turned her son over to God, she was filled with gratitude for the 14 years she had had with him.

I still find it hard to think of ”God’s will” when a child dies. What I do know is that I am deeply grateful for the people who have appeared in my life and whom I have been fortunate to love and nurture. I hope that my gratitude will always sustain me, even when it is time to say a last ”goodbye” to someone I love and give him or her to God.

Queries for prayerful reflection:

What does it mean to give someone to God? In what ways do I turn the ones I love over to God? In which ways do I not turn them over to God?

Appreciation of Quakers

Thank you to those of you who held me and my neighborhood in the Light as we met to discuss my city’s plans to build at least 66 units of housing for the formerly homeless here. Your and my Meeting’s support made it so much easier for me to stand up and say to my neighbors that I welcome formerly homeless men and women into housing here, knowing that many of my neighbors will be very, very angry with me.

As I have advocated for homeless men and women in my neighborhood, I have met many people who see the world very differently from what I do. The responses to my op-ed piece in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and discussions with neighbors who oppose mixed-income housing here have opened my eyes to just how common it is in this society to operate with gradations of people: some people are good and some people are bad. Many of my neighbors seem to see homeless people as unworthy and harmful to their surroundings, and most people in houses as deserving and beneficial to their surroundings (except for housed people like me who welcome homeless people, I guess we are traitors?). I have a brand new appreciation of how unique it is that Quakers insist that EVERYONE is a beloved child of God, that each person is the bearer of “that of God”.

Knowing that I have a whole faith community, both past and present, that stands with me has been a great source of comfort to me as I have faced my neighbors’ wrath. I was flooded with gratitude when I asked for my Meeting’s prayers and my on-line community’s support, and in so doing became aware that I was presuming that my fellow Quakers would be supportive. I would not presume that in any other setting, and I know other homeless advocates do not presume that their faith community will stand with them on this issue.

I am grateful to be a Quaker today. 

Query for prayerful consideration:

What aspects of Quakerism fill me with gratitude?

Prayer Request

Dear reader,

I spent a large portion of the day yesterday (Saturday May 31) at a neighborhood meeting where we discussed the plans for some surplus military land that hopefully will be turned over to the city of Seattle. One of the federal requirements is that this land be used in part to serve the needs of the homeless. Many of my well-to-do neighbors in Seattle are not pleased with the prospect of having some 300 new units of housing added, about 30% of them subsidized/affordable, and I have felt called as a Quaker to be a pastoral presence in the discussions. In this hostile environment, I feel called to be 

• a calm, loving, and non-anxious presence to my neighbors to let them know that we have nothing to fear
• an affirming and encouraging presence to the facilitators and presenters when they are met with hostility from my neighbors
• someone who encourages listening, discussion, and persuasion (as opposed to hostility and name-calling)
• someone who speaks about the beloved-of-God nature of the men, women, and children who are at a financial disadvantage

And I CAN do and be all these things, and I can do it effectively, but I have discovered over the years that it comes at a high personal cost. It’s not so much that I feel hurt by being called names and being yelled at. The part that does damage to me is that I seem to soak in the energy of the room, and my mind gets tangled up in trying to figure out how people so casually can put others down, call them names, twist, and distort their intentions, and actively try to make another person look bad. I don’t sleep well, I become sad and my thoughts about the interactions and the situation race on at uncomfortable speeds. My world as a Quaker, chaplain and spiritual director is lived in environments where most people commit to seeking to hear, acknowledge, affirm, and respect the validity of another’s perspective. I don’t have much exposure to adversarial environments. I know in general that I am not called to participate in those kinds of adversarial political processes – the personal cost to me is too high – but since I bear the Quaker mark, this is my neighborhood, and no-one else from the neighborhood seems to be willing/able to take on this role now, it falls to me to do it.

So I ask for your prayers for my spiritual safety and protection at these meetings, dear reader. 

The next neighborhood meetings are scheduled for

• Monday June 2, 6.30 pm – 8.30 pm Pacific Daylight time (GMT + 9 hrs)
• Monday June 16, 6.30 – 8.30 pm
• Saturday June 21, 9.00 am – 1.00 pm
• Saturday July 12, 9.00 am – 1.00 pm
• Saturday July 19, 9.00 am – 1.00 pm

My Meeting is already holding me and my neighbors in prayer, and I ask you to join in and hold us in the Light.

Query for prayerful consideration:

What does prayer mean in this context?

My Joy Is In God, Part II

In my description of the purpose of my blogs, I write that “everything I know about God gets put to the test by my experiences in the real world, and everything I experience in the real world affects how I understand God to be present to us”. As a chaplain, I have a test for my theological beliefs: whatever I believe is something that I would not be embarrassed to say to someone who is in crisis and sees no hope for the future.

The post I wrote on 4/29 could on the surface look like it might fail my own test, and so I want to write some more about the idea that the source of the joy that sustains us comes not from the good we see in the world or ourselves, but from God. And from that I concluded that we can decide to be joyful. I see joy as the result of entrusting ourselves and our future to God, rather than an emotional response to a happy experience.

How might this sound to someone who is suffering from depression, who lives with chronic pain or a terminal illness, someone who is watching their child die, or someone who is in a destructive setting of abuse, violence, starvation, or oppression, or has lost everything they own?

This question came to me with renewed urgency as I considered the Austrian woman who recently was freed from the basement where her father had held her imprisoned for more than 23 years. During those years she was repeatedly raped by her father. She gave birth to 7 children, one of whom died, and three were taken away from her to live upstairs with her father, where they were molested, too.

The descriptions are so horrifying that it is well-nigh impossible to imagine what it can have been like to be her. And yet that is the test that I feel my faith must pass - that I could speak about it without embarrassment, even to a woman in her circumstances. Please understand that this is a hypothetical exercise – when as a chaplain I visit a person in distress, my theology is usually not the topic of discussion. In a pastoral visit, we usually talk about how the person I’m with creates meaning based on his or her experiences.

I hope it is apparent that the joy I am talking about finding in God is not the funny-ha-ha kind, but the fruit-of-the-Spirit kind. I am talking about the kind of joy that is like a safety-net underneath the emotions a person may be aware of at a given time. I am talking about what I experienced when my beloved grandmother – who embodied unconditional love – died. Walking out of the hospital room in which her body lay was one of the hardest things I have ever done, and I was overcome with grief during her funeral service. But then, when I walked out of the church afterwards, I was struck by the sudden insight that I had not seen my grandmother for the last time. Even as I continued to mourn my grandmother’s death, there was that deep assurance underneath – I will see her again some day! I could call it joy, or perhaps hope is a better word for that Fruit of the Spirit?

I think of the week I spent about a year and a half ago between the time when the doctor found a lump in my breast and the ultrasound that revealed it – thankfully – to be something completely benign. It was at once the scariest week of my life and the most joyful week of my life. Facing the prospect of losing my health and considering the hardships my young daughters and husband would face – it was torture! And at the same moment that tears were filling my eyes and fear gripping my gut, I was seeing the beauty of life with a crisp clarity unlike anything I had ever known: I could almost touch the essence of my husband and our love, the Life bursting in and around my daughters, the fulfillment I was fortunate to feel in my core in being a chaplain and spiritual director! It was all so precious to me, and the most mysterious part was the sense that cancer and illness and death could not possibly touch the essence, the life, the core of me and them. I knew at a very deep level that something like cancer couldn’t make any of these things less precious, less vibrant, less amazing. I could hardly hold it together to sing my daughters to sleep, and yet I was safely floating on the vast ocean of God’s Light and Love.

The deep joy I felt was a gift – it was grace – not something I can claim credit for. And yet I talked earlier about a decision to be joyful, as if it were my choice, as if it were something over which I have control… In that amazingly paradoxical way of faith, there is some truth to the choice aspect, too. The truth in that statement arises out of having fought my way to believe it was possible to experience that deeper Fruit-of-the-Spirit-Joy. I already had decided that the world would be unacceptably unjust if oppression, suffering, pain, illness, and death were the final word – if they got to define the value of a life.

This is the story of that fight: In looking precisely at the points of greatest suffering – of starvation, deprivation, unseasonal death -I initially was terribly depressed. But I wrestled and wrestled and wrestled with the meaninglessness of that image of the world. The words from Jeremy Irons’ character in “The Mission” have echoed in my soul since I first saw the movie as a teenager: As a Jesuit priest, he watches some of the brothers take weapons in hand to try to save a mission in the jungle from being destroyed. The mission was created as a safe haven in Christ for men and women to be safe from slave catchers. The Jeremy Irons character decides not to defend the mission, but to stay there, even if he is sure that he and anyone else who stays there will be killed. He will not abandon the men and women who came to the Mission. These are his words to his religious superior as he defies the order to leave: “If might is right… then love has no place in the world. It may be so. But I don’t have the strength to live in a world like that.”

My struggle in the face of suffering was much like the Jeremy Irons line: If a person with power not only can make people suffer at will, but also gets to define that person’s life, then I can’t find the desire to be alive in this world. I may very well be wrong, but I’m not sure how I would deal with the suffering in the world if death or suffering do define a life.

The fruit of my wrestling ultimately became a KNOWING in my heart that God would not create a life that could have no hope of joy or meaning, even in desperate circumstances. Because God is a God of love, and because Jesus suffered pain and death in the ultimate demonstration of love, I decided there has to be more to Life than those external physical circumstances. 

So I fought, long and hard, to find how life might be meaningful and joyful, even in the face of suffering. Ultimately I have found a way to understand and conceive of joy in the midst of suffering. In part it arose from hearing the wisdom of patients and family members in crisis, in part it came from God’s free gifts of joy even in the midst of pain. And yet another part was my own persistence – my need to understand. That is the sense in which I speak of a decision to be joyful: the choice to believe that joy is possible, and if I don’t know how, I won’t quit until I do. Perhaps “commitment” or “drivenness” are better words than “decision”?  

This is also one of the areas where I feel most strongly the absence of preaching and teaching of theology in liberal Quaker Meetings. The fact is that the insight that I had to work so hard to arrive at, is a pretty basic tenet of Christian theology. Through Jesus death and resurrection, life and love conquered death and darkness forever. An important part of my insight came from the Bible and Christian preaching and teaching, and most of what I learned in that respect, I heard from other Quaker groups and other faith groups, not my liberal Quaker Meetings. 

And so I am back to the starting place of my previous post: When in my Meeting/Church do we talk about finding our joy in God? Is there a place in my Meeting/Church for accompanying others as they struggle to find hope, joy, and purpose when meaninglessness and suffering threaten? For those who don’t relate to traditional Christian theology, what is your source of hope and life, and how do you speak of it to someone who suffers?

My joy is in God

I arrived late, so I may have missed it. It is possible the presenters talked about it and I just didn’t arrive in time to hear it. But I don’t think so, because the Quaker presenters on building peace talked about how easily peacemakers can become discouraged and then they led us into an activity designed to generate hope and joy. The source to which they led us to find joy and hope was our own accomplishments.

Sigh. I could get discouraged.

Friends, I agree that we often do wonderful things. And the presenters to whom I am referring gave a good presentation, and I found myself stirred to join in their efforts at the Air Force base an hour or so down the road – after spending an hour by myself in the woods to re-find my hope and joy following their presentation. So there is lots of good stuff happening. I do not wish to complain. And yet I have to ask, what happened to the joy of faith?

When I look back at my blogging and other writing and speaking during the past 6 months, I discover that I have started preaching. Me - preaching? I feel like I owe my liberal friends an apology: “Honestly, I swear, I didn’t mean to become a preacher of the joy I find in God. It just … happened.”

But seriously, here is the anatomy of my transformation to becoming a preacher of the Good News of faith in God:

The first movement was God lifting me out of the deep trough of depression in 1994. I had been passively suicidal for months following the end of an abusive relationship. And suddenly, after daring to yell angrily at God in a private prayer time, God filled me with love. I began to know the power of God for good, and I began to talk about God as our source of hope, just a little bit. But I still looked to prophetic, righteous anger as our source of energy for transforming the world. 

The second movement was attending worship at West Hills Quaker church whenever I was in Portland to visit my in-laws. I had Ffriends there from my seminary days. What I noticed was how little time attenders at the church spent expressing righteous anger over the shortcomings of the world around them and how much time they spent doing things like cooking meals together for homeless people.

The next step was in the days after September 11, 2001, when mental health counselors suggested that we limit our intake of bad news. In the run-up to the Iraq invasion in 2003, when depression began to set in again at the hopelessness of everything, I heeded their advice for the first time. I took a few weeks off from intense reading of newspapers and only took in enough to be informed about the big picture. To my amazement, I found an upsurge of energy to be engaged in resisting the war!

At some point after becoming a Good News Associate in the summer of 2003, I noticed how joyful I usually feel after being with my fellow Associates, most of them evangelical Quakers, and how joyless liberal Quakers often seem to be.

While teaching Ignatian spirituality last fall to men and women in recovery from addictions, many of whom are homeless and have lost their jobs and family relationships as a result of their substance abuse, I noticed that many of them nonetheless expressed gratitude, time and time again. They were grateful for things like waking up in the morning; for being free from the dehumanizing effects of their addictions; for God’s love; for the kindness others showed them. Their gratitude stood in stark contrast to the fears, worries, and cautious planning I would hear at Quaker Meeting from all those of us who have houses, food, and family life.

My next step was a simple decision to be more joyful. I felt embarrassed to be spending time worrying and fretting about the stuff in my life when women and men who have nothing can be so grateful, generous, and compassionate. It was clearer to me than ever before that joy does not arise out of having a sufficiency – if that were the case, homeless people would be unhappy and liberal Quakers would be happy. My AHA! was that joy comes from entrusting one’s future to God. So yes, it is as easy as deciding to be joyful.

So, Friends, I decided to be joyful. I prayed to God that I would feel gratitude for all the amazingly wonderful things and people that surround me. I prayed that my worries and sadness about the problems of the world would simply fade away. I decided to tell people about my discoveries, and my early blog entries (look at October, November,and December entries) give more details about my journey to joy. It began to feel burdensome to listen to comfortably-off people worry and be sad.

Since deciding to be grateful, I keep discovering more and more reasons to be joyful. It is no longer merely a decision now. More and more, I feel it rising up within me. I still work in a hospital where I see death and illness, and I still work with homeless men and women whose material futures seem bleak, and I still read of conflict and troubles in the world. Suffering is still real. What’s different is that I now know hope and joy are not waiting for us on the other side of attaining world peace, eliminating physical pain, or eradicating poverty. Peace of mind is not waiting for us on the other side of securing the future for our children or securing work or our own retirement. Hope is not based on seeing the exact route to the happy ending at the end of the story. Trust in the future is not based on seeing the societal developments that will lead to a peaceful settlement between conflicting sides.

I can no longer keep myself from telling everyone who wants to listen that hope, joy, peace, and feeling safe arise out of being in the hands of a God who promises to be with us in whatever we encounter. How can I keep from proclaiming what I know to be true – that this God of ours has plans of peace for us? That God is actively at work, using even the bad things that happen for good.

The mystery of it all is that as I allow this joy and gratitude to bubble up within me, I can hardly keep myself from throwing myself into work for peace and justice. The more I trust God, the more I also see God at work in societal developments, too. It looks like peace, abundance, and safety are just waiting to be birthed into the world, and I want to be part of it!

Query for prayerful consideration:

What is the source of hope in my life?

Quakerism and Structure

One of the key parts of George Fox’s revelation was that religious structures can kill the free movement of the Spirit. That was one of the main reasons the early Quakers left their gatherings unstructured: to allow the Spirit to give worship its form every time. I think George Fox recognized how deeply embedded the human need for structure is: after we have found an experience we like, we try to recreate the experience with the use of structure.

My Ffriend R has advocated the practice of disbanding the Religious Society of Friends every 5o years. He believes that the spark of the initial vision and passion of religious groups only survives for about 50 years before developing structures start to choke the movement of the Spirit. Then expectations of ”correct” practice take over, and the authentic fire gets doused. So R would disband the RSoF after 50 years, believing that a new RSoF (perhaps with a different name) would arise out of the ashes of the first group and be helpful for about 50 years, after which the structure would become harmful and the RSoF should be laid down again.  

I think R’s idea is a bit too radical, perhaps. And yet… 

Many Meetings around the USA have taken “sabbaticals” during the past decade or so. They needed a break from the weight of their committees and regular work. More recently I’ve heard that at least one Yearly Meeting (Pacific) and several Monthly Meetings (North Seattle Friends Church and University Friends Meeting here in Seattle) have decided to set aside a year to discern what the group’s needs are and what kind of a structure is most conducive to worshiping God and being faithful to God’s call in the world.

My own liberal Meeting, Salmon Bay, has just taken its own major steps. Despite worship being strong and deep for a while now, there is little life outside the hour of worship. Many members report feeling a sense of heaviness in relationship to Meeting, and our newcomers find it hard to get involved in the Meeting. Nominating Committee has struggled for years to fill all the committee positions and responsibilities for our Meeting. This year we were unable to put together a Nominating Committee: No-one wants the task of asking someone to take on yet another responsibility. Something had to be done.

First a little background: Our Meeting consists primarily of youngish families, with very few retired members with time to give to the Meeting. Most of our adult members have full-time commitments to family needs or very demanding paid work and have little energy left over for the Meeting structure. And yet there are almost as many offices to be held as there are adult members of our Meeting.

Now Salmon Bay’s Ministry & Worship Committee (on which I serve) has suggested to our Meeting, based on the model of our local evangelical church, North Seattle Friends Church, that we enter into a 6 month trial period of suspending as much of the old structure as we can. During that time we will put our focus on worship and fellowship. We will have a potluck on our regular business meeting Sunday, and if there is business that requires the full Meeting’s attention, we will have a short business Meeting, but only for matters of substance. Otherwise we will just eat together and talk with each other.  

We want to change the way we think about our role as a Meeting – rather than being there to test leadings and ensure that everything under the Meetings’s auspices happens according to “good order”, we want to be encouragers and cheerleaders when vision emerges or energy flows. We want to help the Fire burn stronger and hotter!

We have proposed that our clerk take care of correspondance and outside requests in executive fashion, consulting with members of M&W/Oversight when needed. M&W and Oversight would continue to meet, but only to care for worship and our members in the most immediate ways, not to do any seasoning/pre-discernment for business that will come before the Meeting as a whole. There would be childcare, but we aren’t sure whether there will be children’s education, or adult education for that matter. Perhaps we will just use that time for intergenerational fellowship? In the past we have only had 20 minutes for fellowship each week, and I think many of us feel like we are strangers to each other.

In other words, we don’t want to try to serve the structure Quakers created more than 350 years ago. We want to rekindle the flames and devote ourselves again to the Fire. Then, when our attention is on the Fire, we can create whatever structure is appropriate based on our condition.

Isn’t that what Quakerism is truly about – being attentive so that the Letter of the law doesn’t kill the Spirit?

Query for prayerful consideration:

What are the needs of the Quaker group in which I worship? Do other Quaker groups (in my own branch of Quakerism and in others) have creative ideas which we might borrow to help keep structure from killing the Spirit?

Fear and Prayer

I recently had an experience of facilitating a women’s group’s retreat where it seemed like most of the women came with a deep thirst for God, and because their thirst was so strong, I knew almost before the day had begun that the event would be deeply transformative for some of the participants.  

I also think of events I have attended where it seemed many of us came with some trepidation, not quite sure of what might happen, not sure if we were there for the same reason others were there, waiting to see if it would be safe to open ourselves up. If there are too many cautious attenders, in my experience, a facilitator can be as spiritually grounded and prayerful and well prepared as anything – but it will be hard for him or her to create an atmosphere in which the Spirit will move the group.

I do not mean to say there are limits to God’s power, but I do mean to say that our beliefs and degree of openness sometimes make a difference to what God can do in our lives. 

As politicians try to increase our fear so we will give them more power, and as companies try to sell us new safety products for us to buy, and as the media increasingly focus on conflict and heighten our awareness of “adversaries” and things that may have an adverse effect on our lives, I sometimes wonder what this means for our Meetings, churches, and our worship?

When God knocks on our door, do we peer cautiously through the spy hole and challenge the visitor to prove his identity and good intentions before we allow the door to open a crack for further verification? Or do we throw the door open with a big welcoming smile and arms open for an embrace, trusting that the visitor means to love us and be good to us? 

Queries for prayerful consideration:

In worship, do I open the door to the visitor God sends? Do I listen with eagerness to everyone’s message, expecting from every speaker a Word from God? In encounters with my “neighbor” and my “enemy”, is my door sufficiently open to allow God to be in the interaction and transform me? How do I release any fears I have? How can I be more welcoming in Meeting? How can I be more welcoming of God’s Word to me in every interaction?

LQHeresies Part II: Mysticism

A Lutheran pastor once told me that most people don’t have mystical experiences, and the Quaker expectation that they would is elitist. Taking communion, singing hymns and listening to a sermon, though, those are things that everyone can participate in. That is truly democratic, she said. 

A Protestant friend of my husband once came along to Quaker meeting. It was a “covered meeting” with a very powerful experience of the presence of the Spirit. As they left Meeting, my husband’s friend said, “Oh my God, I don’t know if I could stand that kind of intensity every Sunday!”

In my series on Liberal Quaker heresies, I want to turn my attention to the claim that Quakerism is a mystical religion. I fear that claim may make us guilty of the heresy of creating a hierarchy of religious experience. 

Many Quakers have mystical experiences and many mystics feel drawn to Quaker worship because it provides a space for those kinds of experiences to happen. Once again, I need to confess that I define my own faith as being of the mystical variety and that if indeed we Quakers are committing a sin, I am as guilty as anyone else. Now, there is nothing wrong with mystical experience in and of itself. It only becomes a heresy if we claim that it is the only authentic experience, expression, or practice of faith, or that it is somehow superior to others.  

I don’t want to look at technical definitions of this because that is not my style of doing theology. Whether or not I or others understand the technical definitions of mysticism is not important. My style is the applied theology approach: I want to look at what actual people mean when we say that Quakerism is mystical and what this statement means for those who don’t identify themselves as having had mystical experiences.

Liberal Quakers like to think that unprogrammed silent worship levels the playing field and creates the opportunity for everyone to encounter God in their own way. We may think that is true, but what if others don’t see it that way? Many of the people I come into contact with as a spiritual director or chaplain or just conversation partner don’t claim to have had mystical experiences. Those who don’t identify themselves as having had mystical experiences tell me this in hushed tones, almost like a guilty confession. If they are Quakers, they often seem to feel like 2nd class citizens among Friends, or they express a sense of inferiority compared to Friends’ mystical faith. It is especially painful to me if they express a sense that I must be something special because of the  mystical experiences I have had.

When that happens, I know that – whatever the reason – the person I am talking with has been subject to the heresy that mystical experiences are somehow superior, and they have most likely been exposed to someone who has sinned by claiming superiority. I hope that someone wasn’t me.

I am convinced that God does not create some ways of practising faith than are better than others – provided we are engaged wholeheartedly in faithful living. I am convinced that God has not created a hierarchy of prayer and faithful living so that we might fight about the superiority of one over another – again, provided we are engaged wholeheartedly in faithful living. 

So how might we talk about mysticism in ways that make it just one among many other forms of faith, all of equal value? Isn’t the Quaker message fundamentally that faith is not a one-size-fits-all proposal? That would be my statement about Quakerism: It is a faith that recognizes the wide variety of ways in which we can know God.

I have already looked at issues of power gained by those who get to do the defining, see this post, so I won’t say more on that topic here, except to state that whether we want it to be that way or not, we can’t be naive about the fact that mystical experience has historically been defined as superior. We each need to examine our souls in prayer and be sure that we aren’t making use of an historical injustice in ways that feed our own egos. 

Let’s question the often unstated belief that spontaneous mystical experience is superior. Here follow some other ways of looking at mystical experience that I have found helpful to my own consideration. Some of these thoughts may make it sound as though mystical experiences are inferior, and I want to let you know that my intention is not start an argument about which is best. My intention is to say things that will give us pause, things to make us less sure of what we know to be true, and perhaps to come to a place of relinquishing evaluations of good-better-best to God, if they need to be done at all. My goal is to confuse my own and your intellect.  

Jesus said to the man we call Doubting Thomas: “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” Paul defines faith as “being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.” My own understanding of my mystical experiences is that my atheism was so firmly entrenched that God knew I needed something radical to believe anything at all, and so God gave me a solid mystical “whack over the head” in a Meeting for worship I happened to be attending. In general, I would say that I have a hard time trusting in things unseen, though I am getting better at it. But I have a lot of respect for people who believe and commit to God without having been given that loving whack over the head.

My understanding is that open worship is for the purpose of allowing the Spirit to lead, not for us to expect something such as a mystical experience. We engage in idolatry if we set expectations that we expect God to fulfill. Then we have tried to put ourselves in God’s place.

Many faith development models hold that focus on the delight of spiritual experience often is a characteristic of a new or immature faith. These models see mystical experiences merely as the lure that God uses to draw us deeper into relationship. Mature faith, however, is about commitment and obedience.

The previous point about lure and delight makes me wonder whether we sometimes confuse delightful feelings with mystical experience? One of the things I know as a spiritual director is that a deeper relationship with God often frees and increases our range of feelings and our physical sensory range as well. Is it possible that we sometimes confuse our emotional and sensory experiences with mystical experiences?

Jesus did not say “feel me” or “experience my presence”, he said things like “sell all your belonging and follow me”.

Queries for prayerful consideration:

Do Quakers say directly or indirectly that mystical experience is the only authentic experience, expression, or practice of faith, or that it is somehow superior to others? When Quakers talk about mysticism in relationship to Quakerism, are we sensitive to the perception many people have of mystical experience as superior to others? When we talk about mystical experience in worship, are we sure we are distinguishing between mystical experience and delightful feelings? Am I sure I do not denigrate other forms of worhip, prayer, and faith commitment?  

Peace Testimony for Non-Quakers

As a companion piece to my recent post here on liberal Quaker heresies, I wrote about my understanding of the Quaker Peace Testimony on my other blog that doesn’t presume knowledge of Quakerism. If you’d like to check it out, here it is: The Quaker Peace Testimony. 

Liberal Quaker Heresies: Part I

My Easter and resurrection reflections have drawn my attention once again to one of the peculiarly American liberal Quaker/Christian heresies: we are prone to making an idol of “sensitivity”, taking our desire to avoid hurt feelings to an unhealthy extreme. This idol has a companion sin: we commit acts of verbal violence against people if we think they are hurting another’s feelings. We feel justified and righteous in verbal attacks even when it flies in the face of our peace testimony and our belief in ”that of God’ in every person. We seem to think we shouldn’t be loving of people who have hurt another’s feelings or are intolerant. We are tolerant of everything, except intolerance.

I write this with fondness and humor, Friends, because I am, ahem, intimately acquainted with this particular heresy and sin. I could write this as a confession of the times when I have been out of balance in my own understanding of what justice required me to do. “Balance” is the key word here: I am absolutely in favor of sensitivity and clearly naming the injustices we see. Quakers are good at being sensitive and speaking truth to power, although as with most groups, there are a few injustices we ourselves commit, to which we are still blind! I’m proud of our commitment to justice, incomplete as it is in some areas, and though we take it a little bit too far in others.

We love and desire justice, and that is good. But these good things can become idolatrous and harmful when taken too far. They become demonic when they arise from an inability to accept the flaws of humans, human institutions, and the world in which we live.

And oh, what joys we miss out on when we put too much emphasis on achieving complete justice instantly! So let me write about the theological components that I believe could bring our desire for justice into balance and give us a taste of God’s own sweet consolation. I came to these conclusions reluctantly. Resisting, kicking, and screaming, to be precise. All of the following statements used to offend my sense of justice. But much as I disliked them, I have found a deeper joy, greater sense of purpose, and more energy for action in accepting them! I encourage you to meditate on each one of these statements:

1. Life is not fair. In fact, as Buddhists would say, “life is suffering”. I think we have an easier time accepting this when it comes to earthquakes and sickness and death. Unfortunately, I suspect this to be the case with human-made injustices, too. No sooner have we done away with one injustice than another arises in its wake, oftentimes as a result of an over-correction in addressing the first injustice (examples: excessive penalties placed on Germany after World War I may have led to the social conditions that laid the foundation for the rise of Hitler and World War II; the UN’s good desire to create a safe haven for Jews after WWII led to excessive demands on Palestinians, whose land and homes were taken away). God still requires us to do justice and love mercy, so acceptance of the inevitability of injustice is not an excuse for inaction. Acceptance of injustice as the way of the world merely allows us to be generous and merciful as we seek to eradicate injustice.   

2. We humans are all fundamentally flawed, and God seems to be able to work with us anyway. Robert Barclay, in his Apology, challenged the theology of original sin and formulated a Quaker theology that says we aren’t sinners until we have sinned. Still, he claims that humans have “the propensity to sin” – not a one of us will avoid sinning. Knowing that God only has flawed human beings to work with is liberating! We don’t need to be perfect, nor do we need to insist that others be perfect. We know God’s work will get done with whatever raw material God has to work with. Jesus routinely despaired at the limitations of his disciples, yet they were his beloved companions and founded the church. Saul was a persecutor of Jesus’ followers - until he was blinded, turned around, and became a leader of the church! So we can be kind and merciful with a person who falls short, knowing it is only a matter of time until we ourselves fail and want to be met with kindness and forgiveness.

3. Brokenness, sin, and death can be sources of new life. When someone suffers, God finds a way to redeem the suffering and bring forth new life. I recently wrote about my daughter’s experience of injustice on the basketball courts here. Not a major injustice in the grand scheme of things, but to me a small-scale illustration of how character and compassion grow forth out of adversity. In my own life, I became deeply depressed and miserable when I learned I was pre-diabetic, but made changes in my life that ultimately made me healthier, more energetic, and more respectful and appreciative of my body than I was when I thought I was healthy. Sometimes we can even do damage if we insist on justice before the process of resurrection has come to completion. 

4. We are just sojourners here on earth, visitors in a strange land. Our true home is in God. As long as we wander on earth, we should expect previews and foretastes of heaven, yes. But we cannot expect that we will see the divine order fulfilled here and now. Walter Wink has done a tremendous service in proclaiming that every human institution is 1) created for a divine purpose, 2) fallen, and 3) redeemable. Rather than berate leaders of institutions when their fallen nature is visible, we can call forth the Divine purpose for which they were created and invite them to strive for redemption. But true joy and peace lies in knowing that we can never be fully satisfied with anything or anyone here on earth, and not to place our hopes in institutions or organisations that cannot truly satisfy our deepest longing.

In all of these statements, our good desire for justice becomes idolatrous when we seek to push outside the true nature of Gods’ creation and intentions, when we want people, institutions, or the world to be something they cannot be.

Query for prayerful consideration:

How do I know when my pursuit of justice becomes idolatrous?