desires Posts

It's been a fascinating education learning about institutional Catholicism these past few weeks. I won't reveal how and what I know, but I think I have a good picture of the culture inside the bishop's inner circle and I'm pretty sure I understand his long-term agenda. The current lightening-fast closure of sixty-some churches is the first step of an ambitious plan; manufactured priest shortages and soon-to-be overcrowded churches will be used to justify even more radical changes. In about twenty years time, the 125 churches that exist today will have been sold off. What's left of a half million faithful will be herded into a dozen or so mega-churches, with theology borrowed from generic liberalism, style from feel-good evangelicalism, and organization from consultant culture.

When diocesan officials come by to read this blog (and they do now), they will smile at that last sentence and nod their heads approvingly. The conspiracy is real.

But I don't want to talk about Catholicism again. Let's talk Quakers instead, why not? I should be in some meeting for worship right anyway. Julie left Friends and returned to the faith of her upbringing after eleven years with us because she wanted a religious community that shared a basic faith and that wasn't afraid to talk about that faith as a corporate "we." It seems that Catholicism won't be able to offer that in a few years. Will she run then run off to the Eastern Orthodox church? For that matter should I be running off to the Mennonites? See though, the problem is that the same issues will face us wherever we try to go. It's modernism, baby. No focused and authentic faith seems to be safe from the Forces of the Bland. Lord help us.

We can blog the questions of course. Why would someone who dislikes Catholic culture and wants to dismantle it's infrastructure become a priest and a career bureaucrat? For that matter why do so many people want to call themselves Quakers when they can't stand basic Quaker theology? If I wanted lots of comments I could go on blah-blah-blah, but ultimately the question is futile and beyond my figuring.

Another piece to this issue came in some questions Wess Daniels sent around to me and a few others this past week in preparation for his upcoming presentation at Woodbrooke. He asked about how a particular Quaker institution did or did not represent or might or might not be able to contain the so-called "Convergent" Friends movement. I don't want to bust on anyone so I won't name the organization. Let's just say that like pretty much all Quaker bureaucracies it's inward-focused, shallow in its public statements, slow to take initiative and more or less irrelevant to any campaign to gather a great people. A more successful Quaker bureaucracy I could name seems to be doing well in fundraising but is doing less and less with more and more staff and seems more interested in donor-focused hype than long-term program implementation. 

One enemy of the faith is bureaucracy. Real leadership has been replaced by consultants and fundraisers. Financial and staffing crises--real and created--are used to justify a watering down of the message. Programs are driven by donor money rather than clear need and when real work might require controversy, it's tabled for the facade of feel-goodism. Quaker readers who think I'm talking about Quakers: no I'm talking about Catholics. Catholic readers who think I'm talking about Catholics: no, I'm talking about Quakers. My point is that these forces are tearing down religiosity all over. Some cheer this development on. I think it's evil at work, the Tempter using our leader's desires for position and respect and our the desires of our laity's (for lack of a better word) to trust and think the best of its leaders.

So where does that leave us? I'm tired of thinking that maybe if I try one more Quaker meeting I'll find the community where I can practice and deepen my faith as a Christian Friend. I'm stumped. That first batch of Friends knew this feeling: Fox and the Peningtons and all the rest talked about isolation and about religious professionals who were in it for the career. I know from the blogosphere and from countless one-on-one conversations that there are a lot of us--a lot--who either drift away or stay in meetings out of a sense of guilt.

So what would a spiritual community for these outsider Friends look like? If we had real vision rather than donor vision, what would our structures look like? If we let the generic churches go off to out-compete one other to see who can be the blandest, what would be left for the rest of us to do?

I guess this last paragraph is the new revised mission statement for the Quaker part of this blog. Okay kids, get a stepstool, go to your meeting library, reach up high, clear away the dust and pull out volume one of "A portraiture of Quakerism: Taken from a view of the education and discipline, social manners, civil and political economy, religious principles and character, of the Society of Friends" by Thomas Clarkson. Yes the 1806 version, stop the grumbling. Get out the ribbed packing tape and put it's cover back together--this isn't the frigging Library of Congress and we're actually going to read this thing. Don't even waste your time checking it out in the meeting's logbook, no one's pulled in down in fifty years and no one's going to miss it now. Really stuck, okay Google's got it too. Class will start shortly.

• Ordinary Brent on the goals of a Convergent movement
  The first thing I believe is that the convergent Friends movement is not for everybodyl. The ultimate question is not "What would Jesus do?" but rather the more demanding, "What would Jesus have us do?" That requires carefully discernment work.
  (tags: quaker quaker.convergent)
• LizOpp on how Friends are and are not individualistic
  The trick is that our meetings, as a whole, must be willing to engage in the labor of understanding just how far to tilt the scales, whether it be toward the individual and each of our preferences, beliefs, and practices.
  (tags: quaker quaker.ministry quaker.community)
• Gregg on joining the Spirit in the trenches
  I have so many things that need to be plucked, so many chains of attachment: desires for things, for significance, for others' approval. I want God to pluck out and break the bonds of these things that show how the world has shaped me more than God.
  (tags: quaker quaker.ministry)

• Chronicler on ideas about vs experience of God
  "People who have moved from ideas about God to an intimate communion with Him have also made the transition from Definer to Defined. Christ Jesus, as the Logos or Light, is changing that person into what He intends or desires..."
  (tags: quaker quaker.christian quaker.ministry)
• R. Scot Miller on Quaker distinctives today
  "The question that remains is, are we doing so as a people dedicated to such in a manner that identifies us as primarily committed to such distinctives as a corporate expression of faith."
  (tags: checkback)
• Kirk Wattles helped invent Wink!
  Is Wikipedia's 19th Cent. creation myth wrong? "Well, for youngsters today who grew up in the 1980s and ’90s, I guess the early 1970s are probably as far removed as the 1800s. It’s an interesting example of American folklore in action."
  (tags: quaker quaker.youth quaker.influences)

I've finally done it. I've read John Woolman's Journal. Here I've been an activist among Quakers for almost two decades and I've read one of our Big Books.

I have tried before. Many's the time over the years where I cracked open Moulton's edition to settle myself down. Chapter one read, chapter two read. Then to chapter three, opening with:

About this time, believing it good for me to settle, and thinking seriously about a companion, my heart was turned to the Lord with desires that He would give me wisdom to proceed therein agreeably to His will, and He was pleased to give me a well-inclined damsel, Sarah Ellis, to whom I was married the 18th of Eighth Month, 1749.

And that's it. One run-on sentence about courting and marrying his wife. I always put the book down here. I tuck a bookmark in with all good intentions of continuing after dinner. But the book sits on the coffee table till a week or so goes by, whereupon it's moved to the library area for a month or so until it's finally reshelved. The bookmarks stays put until a year or two passes and I re-start the Journal with renewed determination.

I know why the sentence stops me. Throughout my twenties and early thirties a lot of my emotional energy was drained in the (mostly Quaker) dating scene. In theory I thought it a good time "for me to settle" and would have been quite content with a well-inclined damsel. But the chaos of my personal family history combined with the casual dating culture I was part of combined to keep me distracted with the largely-manufactured drama of relationship roller-coasters. For better or worse, if and when I ever write a journal I will have to find a way to talk about the ways this dating era both fed and stunted my spiritual growth.

One of the lesson I learned back in the early 90s when I was editor at New Society Publishers was that I should pay attention when I put a manuscript or book down. The temptation is to chalk it up to tiredness or a busy life but I found there was usually something going on in the text itself that caused me to drop it. When I picked the manuscript back up and re-read the passages on either side of my abandoned bookmark, I found some sort of shift of tone that weakened the book.

I appreciate that Quaker journals are not racy memoirs; they have a specific religious education purpose. But I think it's natural to look to them for clues about how to live our lives. Samuel Bownas talks a bit about his engagement and David Ferris turns meeting his future wife into quite a humorous story. Perhaps Woolman was such a saintly aesthete that Sarah was simply presented to him with no futher questions. But still, there's a level of privacy in Woolman's writings that separates him from us; I'll return to this is part three.

Before I go: so how did I get through the journal this time? Two things are different now: first, my five year wedding anniversary is only a few weeks away; and second: Woolman's Journal is now always with me inside my Palm Pilot (courtesy the Christian Classics Etherial Library). A few weeks ago I found myself on the train without reading material and started reading!

Next: The Last Safe Quaker

Reading John Woolman:

• Part One: "The Public Life of a Private Man" (this page)
• Part Two: The Last Safe Quaker
• Part Three: The Isolated Saint
• Part Four (forthcoming)

I've been emailing back and forth with a friend who's considering starting a blog [update: as she has, The Good Raised Up]. She's thinking of approaching a couple of Friends to act as elders "so as not to outrun my Guide."