I am drawn to talk of “God’s will” because I believe liberal society has ignored a hugely important area of reality.

I hope you’ll say more about this in future posts, Richard. Right now, I haven’t a clue about what “area of reality” you are talking about!

Blessings,
Liz Opp(enheimer), The Good Raised Up

I would never assert that I know what “God” wants, for anyone but myself.

I am struck by your quotation marks around the word “God.” I would have thought you’d more likely put them around the word “wants” or even the word “know.”

Of course, I am among those Friends and theists who speak in terms of felt-senses: You likely know that it’s not unusual to hear me or others say something like,

“…My sense is that you are being called on or led to do such-and-so….”

But that sense is often built up by watching a person’s non-verbal cues, by hearing the rise and fall of the voice, the pieces of a story that seem to be part of a larger puzzle…

So while I do not “assert” that I might “know” what God may want for another person, I might test my own sense of what seems to be arising in the person’s own spiritual life.

Like many things in the Quaker faith, there is a thin line between assertion of one’s being RIGHT and testing of one’s own sense of God’s leading.

It seems to me I have tripped over that line many a time… smile

All that said, I appreciate the care with which you are approaching this and related subjects. I’ve enjoyed our exchanges–on line, in person, what-have-you.

Blessings,
Liz Opp(enheimer), The Good Raised Up

Since I could not be in two places at one time, I ended up missing the panel on Quakers and Jesus. Thanks for mentioning it here, though: I’ll want to keep my ears open for stories from others who attended the panel.

Your experience of such an opening like the one you’ve shared here reminds me of experiences I myself have had, as well as stories I’ve heard from other Friends who come to understand that we had put You-Name-It at the center of our lives, rather than putting the Divine Principle there.

At various times, I have had my own needs/expectations at the center; another person’s perception of me at the center; and my disappointment/frustration with the monthly meeting at the center. But when I have realized my error, and when I have “let go” and have restored what I call God to the center, I find I relax and become more present to the moment that is in front of me, rather than worry so much about what the future may or may not hold.

In the manner of sharing personal experience–as Rhoda has done (Thanks, Rhoda!)–I’ll share this particular awakening I had around this theme:

Two years ago, I was in a significant amount of spiritual pain, asking myself, Why do I feel like such an outsider of the meeting? …Why doesn’t anyone see the pain I’m in? …How is it I could attend annual sessions of the yearly meeting when I don’t feel Known by so many fellow Friends?

The answer came in such an unexpected way during worship one afternoon. I came to realize that I was, in a way, demanding that my needs be addressed by others before I would “step up” and get reengaged in the meeting. In essence, I had been putting MY needs at the center of my faith.

When I realized that that is what I had done, even in my pain I intuitively “rearranged” the paradigm I had been carrying and restored God to the center. Yes, God knew about my spiritual pain. And yes, God was caring for me even in my suffering.

At the same time, God was calling me to service–something I understood only because soon afterwards, several Friends from outside the monthly meeting asked me to support them around concerns and travels they were engaged in.

The “edge” of my pain dissipated and my focus shifted from “me” to “Thee.”

Like giving up a long-time bad habit, I still “forget” about what it is I am to keep in the center of my life. I still fall into my old ways. But I’m having an easier time discovering the source of my unease when I’m off-balance, which, once recognized and named, helps me rearrange what I’ll call my inward, private actions.

Thanks for taking the time to share your own openings here, Richard.

Blessings,
Liz Opp(enheimer), The Good Raised Up

I must say I am a bit baffled by this. There is a absolutely nothing navel-gazing about the former phrase. “Walk cheerfully over the world, responding to that of God in every one,” if it directs us to anyone’s navel, it is to the navel of our brothers and sisters, and not our own. And that is a very good place to gaze. It is very clearly about how we treat and respond to one another. Whatever we think or believe or hear or feel about God, if we can’t do at least as well for one another we have nothing to offer. There may be a mystical presence–I’m not at all certain that I experience it–but if it is going to distract me from the full-bodied and warm-hearted physical presence of the human being in front of me, then I would be better off without it.

I know this snippet is not central to your message here. But I have heard Fox’s beautiful, loving and crucial phrase dismissed this way before, and it seems to me so seriously wrongheaded that I had to comment.

I think that we (certainly I) react to the pietism that surrounds a lot of Jesus-talk and Christ-talk. Pietism, I think, is a confusion of the formula with the reality, and maybe in Spong’s terms it would be a worship of the Jesus-stories rather than of Jesus. I think of pietism as the things that people do in order to present the appearance they think a “proper” Christian should present — and sometimes Quakers fall into our own form of pietism (presenting ourselves the way we think “proper” Quakers should present themselves). It’s like a layer of frosting so thick that my teeth hurt! I can’t get through the frosting to the cake underneath, and I’m more likely than not to turn away from the whole plate because the frosting is too much for me. What you’ve done here, with the help of Spong and John Cowan, is to scrape the frosting off so I can taste the cake — and there’s a surprising amount of cake there to enjoy!

It’s a little embarrassing for a good Quaker to tell this story, and it comes to mind anyway: one of my most powerful spiritual experiences (so powerful that it was physical as well) came from assisting at a Roman Catholic mass.

This happened when I was a chaplaincy student at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center in Chicago in 1988. We students rotated responsibility for the chapel services on Sundays. We’d lead the Protestant service at 10:00 (usually very small attendance) and stay on for the mass at 11:00 (usually quite a few patients, staff, and family there). The student would offer the same homily for both services, sitting up on the altar with the priest who would officiate for the ritual of the mass itself. Obviously, this meant that the students who were nuns led the Protestant service, and students who were Protestants led gave the homily at the Roman Catholic service, and the Quaker bumbled her way through both. (I was never very good at leading worship!)

On this particular occasion, though, the priest and I (a guy I particularly liked) managed to do something the Wiccans would call “raising power” up there on the altar. I have no recollection of my homily, and as usual I did not partake of the wafer and wine, because I’ve never been baptized. Nonetheless, when the priest (Jim) turned to hug me with the greeting “Peace of God”, I could feel power surging through us both. It was like the whole altar was alive. The feeling of joy and power lasted all through communion, making me tingly and light-headed. On the way home afterwards, I had to stop the car and ground myself, because I wasn’t safe to drive in that condition.

So, frosting or no, formulas or no, the power is there and available, and in this case appeared suddenly, out of nowhere. (My homily certainly didn’t do the trick!) The “inbreaking of the Kingdom of God” as Paul Tillich might say, happens in “transitory moments of unambiguity” which don’t come at our own bidding — and which we can nonetheless prepare ourselves for, and certainly long for. Grace is the Divine reaching out for us, and prayer and worship is us reaching out for the Divine.

It sounds — if I may be bold — as if something new is starting to happen with you. I believe that our True Guide, whom in our tradition we call the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of the Risen/Living Christ, the Seed/Principle of God planted in our heart, is beckoning you, comforting you, inviting you and even challenging you to come to a different place. “Behold, I stand at the door and knock…” (and similar testimony given through The Beloved Disciple, the writer of the Fourth Gospel).

You speak of your quest, your journey, your striving, and I think something new is starting to happen for you. In spite of the rigor with which liberal/unprogrammed Friends speak of our being “Seekers,” I believe you are now confessing that you are in some measure a “Finder” as well. (I’ll separately e-mail you the little piece on that I did for our Ill.YM publication, “Among Friends.”)

But even beyond that, my testimony to you… and I detect elements of that perhaps being your testimony as well… is that it is not WE who do the finding. Rather, we ARE FOUND — by the Good Shepherd who has never let us wander fatally off the cliff. That, I think, is the heart of Luther’s discovery that “By Grace are we saved, through faith… not by works, lest any man should boast.” The initiative is from The Divine, our cosmic Lover.

I will repeat here something I gave in ministry at our Meeting not too long ago (in abbreviated form.) A watershed experience for me was during a midwinter conference (Athens, Ohio) my freshman year at Oberlin (’59-’60 New Year), sponsored by the World Student Christian Federation. We heard a keynote by Martin Luther King. I was in a workshop with Eduardo Mondlane, the “George Washington” of Madagascar (Malagasy, is it now?) — who had grown up in Methodist mission schools, and became leader of the national resistance/liberation movement against the Portuguese (not exactly pacifist, but within certain strands of the Christian tradition.)

But beyond these stellar folks was a man who had written the study document that preceded the conference, Anglican bishop Leslie Newbiggin. I probably still have his book on a shelf somewhere. However, what sticks with me the most from that week was one phrase (later elaborated) from a talk he gave.

He said, more or less, aphoristically:
“Religion is about man seeking God. The Gospel is about God reaching out to mankind.” That made my mind do one of those 180-degree flips, and largely put behind me all the demands, the rigor, the anxiety, about whether we were “doing it right” — either in terms of behavior or belief. From that point on, I’ve been open to — and largely experiencing — the marvel and miracle and Grace of God reaching and finding me, affirming and restoring me (through all my many failures and weaknesses) to that Imageo Dei of which you eloquently speak. I continue to be amazed by this Bounty, which is so diffeerent from the self-help “gospels” which flood our particular subcultures if not culture itself.

If I have a quibble with you (and I believe there is a fundamental unity underlying whatever quibbles I propose), it is that you may still be captive to that version of Quakerism in which you and I both have been immersed for maybe 3 decades, and which I don’t believe gets to the essential center of the revolutionary movement of God which seized that earliest generation and “shook the earth for 10 miles around” (rough quote, unattributed.)

In other words, we’ve been confined by that phrase picked up by mid-20th century Quakers of the stripe that has flourished around college campuses, that what we believe in (the only statement of “dogma” allowed) is “that of God in everyone.” And it ends up being a statement about ourselves, rather than about God’s transformative Power.

(I’ve sometimes said, in theological shorthand, that we’ve made it a statement about Anthropology rather than Soteriology — a description about ourselves, rather than God’s salvation.)

Lewis Benson (do you know any of his essays?) pointed out that the T.O.G.I.E. phrase was not all that common in Fox’s useage — and a look at when and how he used it comes out at a very different place than how it’s been used in our dominant FGC tradition. Rather, the most frequent Foxian testimony was, “The Power of the Lord was over all.” Looking to the Source, not to our navels.

Somewhat along this line, I’ve been discovering the whole letter that Fox wrote to Cromwell’s mentally-distressed daughter, Lady Claypool, and will send you that entire text to take into prayer and contemplation. We’ve all heard the lead line of the letter, “Be still and cool in thine own thoughts…” but seldom have come to the heart of his advice and testimony. When you read it, I welcome your saying how it may grab you.

A dear Friend whom I’ve rediscovered after first meeting her at a national conference on Quaker Service 10 years ago has sent me a one-page summary/translation of that same piece; I will forward also to you this writing by Helene Pollock on Fox’s classic. In sum, both George and Helene are saying that we’re going a mistaken direction in looking at ourselves (including our consuming pathologies) rather than to the Light which both reveals our “transgressions, confusions, and distractions” AND empowers us to gain victory over them — a first step on the way to Peace.

This, dear Friend, is a treasure I can’t help sharing with you. And if witnessing to that Good News makes me “evangelical,” I’ll take whatever blame accrues to that word… which I don’t want to concede as a monopoly of the so-called Evangelicals.

I guess I was starting out in this “note” to write you a simple query, about your recent FGC experience: whether you had met and/or been at the workshops of either (1) Steve Chase, and/or (2) Helene Pollock and her alter ego Rachel Hicks? If so, that would give us some more common ground on which to discourse.

My printshop beckons: blessed old Omega Graphics, with the press purchased after the fire in 1984, exactly matching the proceeds of the benefit concert organized by our friends/clientelle, Rhian being one of the instigators. I’m having good progress on the annual IYM MinuteBook project, which I started in 1980. The book was only 40 pages then. It set a record this year at 108. As clerk of our Publications Committee, I’ll be working with colleagues to give Friends some guidelines as to appropriate length and content, which has been pretty much undisciplined up to now. “Discipline” — there’s another word both misunderstood and underappreciated among “our kind” of Quakers — which has come to have increased positive meaning for me.

Well, I’ll get down out of my pulpit now, as I tie on my shop apron and go to my other place of labor (as much as I appreciate this keyboard.) Thank you, Friend, for letting me benefit from hearing you in your pulpit.

With hugs and cheers and some tears of happiness,

Sharing in God’s Spirit, -DHF

I am glad you have raised this tension, and I am utterly unsurprised that you come down squarely on the side of tolerance, understanding and communion within diversity.

Indeed, there are folks–millions and millions of them!–for whom Christian or theistic language is actually *intended* to separate themselves from others. They seek a fellowship of those with similar theological beliefs, or at least in which all agree not to talk about their underlying disagreements with the orthodoxy.

If that’s what they want, it is their right. I think it undersells the greatest value and power of deep religious community, and in the case of Christians, misapprehends the teachings of Jesus–but that is a question for them to explore or ignore, not me.

But I want a deeper and broader religious community than that, and recognize that theological beliefs and symbolic language are just that–theology, symbolism. I think most of the Friends I know want this, too, though not all.

I think it is of great importance that you use the language and symbols that resonate most deeply for you, and I will do my best to translate your language into my own. Sometimes it is a tough job but that’s OK.

One problem with symbolic and mythical language, though, is it tends to be much easier than wrestling with all the language and feelings and intelligence you can muster to say what you really mean. That is really hard work. If you use mostly language and symbols that has been handed down, there is a great chance you will overlook where that language does not really express what you feel and think, and I will never know you as well as I could if you spoke only out of your own experience. And, perhaps, you will never know yourself as well as you could.

Richard, you have a tendency to develop your own mythology, perhaps sprinkling in bits of what’s been handed down but never settling for the formulas. This is a great strength. Yet, while it makes your expression personal and truthful, it can be pretty opaque sometimes–not always, but sometimes. I think it might be worthwhile for you to find more direct ways to express yourself. What are the psychological and social and historical threads that run through your mythology? Genuine psychology and sociology, remember, are not the same as psychological or sociological theory. The real things are far deeper and mysterious than any textbook has ever gone.

Anyway, I really don’t want people to avoid their genuine, natural religious language to keep from hurting my feelings as a self-identifying nontheist. What troubles me is when people want to restrict OUR religious community along those lines. A communion of people who agree is a weak communion indeed. Even worse is a communion of people who pretend to agree, which, in my opinion, is the state of any substantially sized church that insists on an orthodoxy.