Tag Archives ⇒ edge

FGC Gathering program is up, whew…

March 23, 2005
· Martin Kelley

Thank you to every­one who refrained from com­ment­ing after 9pm last night. I final­ly slogged through the work of putting the FGC Gath­er­ing pro­gram online in my role as FGC web­mas­ter. Whoo-whee! For those who don’t know, the Gath­er­ing is a week-long con­fer­ence held at dif­fer­ent loca­tions each sum­mer: this year’s takes place Sev­enth Month 2 – 9 in Blacks­burg, Virginia.

Now I guess it’s time to think about work­shops. Zach Moon and I are offer­ing up one called “Strangers to the Covenant” but then you know that already. Liz Oppen­heimer aka the The Good Raised Up is lead­ing one called “Quak­er Iden­ti­ty: Yearn­ing, Form­ing, Deep­en­ing” that I sus­pect will be informed by her “own expe­ri­ence of step­ping into a Quak­er iden­ti­ty”. There’s also an excit­ing his­to­ry work­shop being led by Bet­sy Caz­den, “Dilem­mas from Our Quak­er Past” (I have to admit when I saw the list­ing I won­dered if I should call Zach up and assure him he’d be fine doing the Strangers work­shop on his own so I could take Bet­sy’s). Oth­er men­tions: my wife Julie real­ly liked the Lynn Fitz-Hugh work­shop she took a few years ago.

As always there are work­shops whose lead­ers I know to be more sol­id and ground­ed than the work­shop they’re propos­ing; con­verse­ly, there are work­shops that sound more inter­est­ing than I know their leader to be. Like always there are plen­ty whose appeal and/or rel­e­vance to Quak­erism I just don’t com­pre­hend at all, but that’s the Gathering.

Any rec­om­men­da­tions from the peanut gallery? I should say that I’d like to refrain from ridi­cul­ing all of the work­shops that beg to be made fun of. It feels as if this would edge too close to detrac­tion. We will only get to King­dom by mod­el­ing Chris­t­ian char­i­ty and wear­ing our love on our sleeves.

Uh-Oh: Beppe’s Doubts

March 9, 2005
· Martin Kelley

I’ve occa­sion­al­ly thought of Beppe­blog’s  Joe Gua­da as my blog­ging Quak­er dopple­ganger. More than once he’s writ­ten the post I was about to write. And more than one impor­tant arti­cle of mine start­ed as com­men­tary to one of his insight­ful articles.

So I’m wor­ried that he’s writ­ten the first of a mul­ti­part arti­cle ask­ing Is it time to leave Quak­erism. I’m wor­ried not just that Quak­erism would lose a bright Light, etc., etc, but because I know that now I’m going to have to pub­licly mull over the ques­tion that’s a con­stant back­ground hum that I try not to think about.

Update: just to prove my point, my com­ment to Joe’s post was more inter­est­ing that my post point­ing to his post. Here’s the com­ment I just left there:

There was one day in wor­ship a few years ago right around the time when my wife Julie decid­ed to leave Quak­erism when I had this odd vision. I imag­ined us as boul­ders the front edge of a water­fall. Thou­sands of gal­lons of water swept over us every day, erod­ing and scar­ring our sur­face and under­min­ing the frag­ile base we were on. When Boul­der Julie final­ly dis­lodged and fell off the precipice of Quak­erism, I real­ized that one of the rocks that had held me in place was now gone and now there was going to be even more water and pres­sure try­ing to push me off.
I say this because you’ve become one of my blog­ging rocks, some­one who con­firms that I’m not a total nut­case. If you went over the edge I’d have to reassess my sit­u­a­tion and at least take a peek down myself. At the very least I’m going to have to blog about why I’ve stayed so long. I’m sure this is only part one to my com­men­tary on these issues…