QuakerRanter.org

My listing quaker blogs and websites is included in Beliefnet’s current lead article, The Best Spiritual Blogs. I’ve been getting about 30-40 visitors a day from them over the last few days. I would be more excited, except that most of the visitors come and leave without looking around at all. Whoever wrote Beliefnet article clearly read through my list, as a couple of our selections overlap including one very obscure quaker webpage.

Sometimes my Quaker Ranter posts dry up for awhile. I console myself that I’m doing enough giving out the daily reading list of Quaker posts, reading through my new old Quaker book collection (Samuel Bownas just visited the meeting I’m attending most frequently these days!) and working my new advancement and outreach job—oh, and of course there’s also the family! But you could also just follow my train of thought by looking over my shoulder at comments made at other sites. Over the last few days the Quaker blogosphere has had a number of interesting posts. Here’s a cobble-together of posts and comments that have spoken to me about the inherent Quaker snare of confusing our “Quaker faith” for God.

Over on Kwakersaur, David M shares some renewal queries for his yearly meeting. Nancy A detected a “sense an overall fatigue” in them and Beppe agreed, asking if the seemingly-simple answers to these sorts of queries require that we first have the much harder-to-come-by “understanding [of] who we are.”

One of the queries goes “What does our Quaker faith ask us to DO?” Eeeyyaa-aa-yaaaaawwwn. My favorite Quaker committee-meeting trick of late consists of replace all the “we”-like phrases with God. How about “What does God ask us to DO?” (Just a quick testimony: I love David’s work and I value his wonderful online ministry. Any time he wants to come down to Philly to tend to our flock with talk of Quaker renewal, he’s welcome!! I’m sure everyone on the Consultation and Renewal Working Group is deeper than the queries would indicate and suspect that this is an example of the Quaker corporate dumbing-down tendency that’s practically our modus operandi.)

All this ties into a great post from AJ Schwanz, Can I Say I’m Emerging If I Haven’t Emerged or Quaker If I Haven’t Quaked?,. Here’s a taste:

Part of me has thought of shedding my Quaker pin. How can I use it?: have I ever quaked with the power of God? Shedding my differentiation label certainly would support the idea that “there’s really only one church, but lots of meeting places.” Particularly in this town where the Quaker college is perceived as pretty insular, would I have different interactions with folks if I simply said “I’m a follower of Christ” rather than a “Friend”? What would I miss out on? What would be gained?

Paul L implicitly addresses the question of shedding the Quaker pin in his review of Punshon’s Reasons for Hope, where he asks if “Quakers have a unique niche to fill in the Christian and broader social landscape.”

Are we Quaker because it’s comfortable, because our friends are, because the buildings are cool and the social hour coffee hot? Or the opposite: are we Friends because we really liked Barclay’s Apology but couldn’t care less for the messyness of flesh-and-blood religious community? Another Quaker blogger recently sent me a private email in which he confided: “My main question of late to Quakers is: what is so remarkable about Quakers? I sometimes have to be a pain-in-the-ass in order to ask these questions.” That seems like both a good question and a important meeting role.

There’s something about living both within a community and outside it. The real deal isn’t in any of our human institutions, theories or notions yet it is through these that we live out our faith. Christ as transcendent everythingness and Christ as a particular guy in a particular place speaking a particular language and living a particular life. The pull between the eternal and peculiar is the very essence of the human condition. The same voice that spoke to the prophets and apostles speaks to us today, if only we have ears to hear. How can we learn to lessen the volume on our own self-kudos long enough to hear the divine whisperer?

Over on Beppeblog, Liberal Quakerism is no longer Quakerism, the first of a multi-post series. In part one, Beppe looks at our difficulty articulating a collective voice that might proclaim “Truth.” Individualism has really taken a hit on Quakers, that’s for sure. In this day and age, how can a group set itself apart as a “religious society”—a coherent community of believers? I don’t find fulfillment in my own self and I’m an awfully slow learner when I try to figure out things myself. I need other’s wisdom but books and blogs only take me so far.

As Dave Carl reminds us in the comments, the inward Christ is available to all, everywhere. But just because you can have a visited while standing in the supermarket checkout line doesn’t make the supermarket a religious society or the cashier a minister. Many of our meetings are good for the casual seeker who wants a stress-free meditation center. The RSOF seems to serve many seekers as an in-between point: a place of entry back into the Christian tradition (for those who have been alienated by false prophets) but not a final destination in itself. If you want to get serious you often have to leave. That’s a shame, not only for the lost seeker, but for our own religious society which sees a constant “brain drain” leaking-out of gifted ministers.

I turn on the TV and radio and hear all sorts of perversions of the gospel being spouted out (yesterday’s Memorial Day pap was particularly annoying—hasn’t any of these Christians read the Sermon on the Mount?!?). The world still needs the kind of radical, back-to-the-roots Christianity that Quakers have long held up as an alternative. But how can we unite to speak with that prophetic voice if we have no collective voice.

I’m not as pessimistic as all this sounds. I think most Friends want something more. We’re constantly lifing up the example of dead Friends with prophetic voices and there’s a strong pride in our history of social justice. Our modern culture of individuality blinds us to how these voices got nutured and how those old-timey Friends were able to come together to speak out these truths. But Friends have often been lured away from our calling and every age has had faithful Friends who have been willing to hit their heads against the brick walls of frustration time and time again in order to remind us of who we are. The back-and-forth of reaching out into the world and pulling back into our tradition is actually itself part of our tradition and Quaker bodies have often seen healthiest when we’ve been able to hold both together.

PS: Check here for Beppe’s second post, which argues that Liberal Quakerism continues to be Quakerism.