AFSC inter­views rel­a­tive of Japanese-American Friend Gor­don Hirabayashi:

I also think that Gordon’s spir­i­tual side was key too… I don’t remem­ber Gor­don as an overtly spir­i­tual or reli­gious per­son when I was a teenager, and yet in the course of read­ing the let­ters and the diaries, I think his spir­i­tu­al­ity was def­i­nitely some­thing that sus­tained him.

One of the things that is intrigu­ing me lately is the nature of Quaker debate.  There are half a dozen seemingly-perennial polit­i­cal issues around which Friends in my cir­cles have very strong opin­ions (these include abor­tion, nuclear power, and the role of Friends in the trou­bles of Israel/Palestine) . We often jus­tify our posi­tions with appeals to our Quaker faith, but I won­der how often our opin­ions could be more accu­rately pre­dicted by our demo­graphic profile?

How many of your polit­i­cal posi­tions and social atti­tudes could be accu­rately guessed by a savvy demog­ra­pher who knew your date of birth,  postal code,  edu­ca­tion and fam­ily income? I’d guess each of us are far more pre­dictable than we’d like to think.If true,  then what role does our reli­gious life actu­ally play?

Reli­gious beliefs are also a demo­graphic cat­e­gory,  granted, but if they only con­firm posi­tions that could be just as actu­ally pre­dicted by non-spiritual data, then doesn’t that imply that we’ve sim­ply found (or remained in) a reli­gious com­mu­nity that con­firms our pre-existing biases? Have we cre­ated a faith in our own image? And if true, is it really fair to jus­tify our­selves based on appeals to Quaker values?

The “polit­i­cal” Quaker writ­ings I’m find­ing most inter­est­ing (because they’re least pre­dictable) are the ones that stop to ask how Quaker dis­cern­ment fits into the debate. Dis­cern­ment: one could eas­ily argue that Quaker open­ings and tools around it are one of our great­est gifts to human spir­i­tu­al­ity.  When we build a wor­ship com­mu­nity based on strict adher­ence to the imme­di­ate prompt­ing of the Holy Spirit, the first ques­tion becomes fig­ur­ing out what is of-God and what is not.  Is James Nayler, rid­ing Jesus-like into Bris­tol, a prophet or a nut?

When we go deep into the ques­tions,  we may find that the answers are less impor­tant than the care we take to reach them.  Wait­ing for one another,  hold­ing one another’s hand in love despite dif­fer­ences of opin­ion, can be more impor­tant than being the right-answer early adopter. How do you step back from easy answers to the thorny ques­tions? How do you poll your­self and that-of-God in your­self to open your eyes and ears for the poten­tial of surprise?

Emi­grants from the Irish potato famine, via Wikipedia

Peo­ple some­times get pretty worked up about con­vinc­ing each other of an mat­ter of press­ing impor­tance. We think we have The Answer about The Issue and that if we just repeat our­selves loud enough and often enough the obvi­ous­ness of our posi­tion will win out. It becomes our duty, in fact, to repeat it loud and often. If we hap­pen to wear down the oppo­si­tion so much that they with­draw from our com­pan­ion­ship or fel­low­ship, all the bet­ter, as we’ve achieved a patina of unity. Reli­gious lib­er­als are just as prone to this as the conservatives.

These are not the val­ues we hold when talk­ing about the nat­ural world. There we talk about bio­di­ver­sity. We don’t cheer when a species mal­adapted to the human-driven Anthro­pocene dis­ap­pears into extinc­tion. Just because a plant or ani­mal from the other side of the world has no nat­ural preda­tors doesn’t mean our local species should be superseded.

Sci­en­tists tell us that bio­di­ver­sity is not just a kind of do-unto-others value that sat­is­fies our sense of nos­tal­gia; hav­ing wide gene pools comes in handy when near-instant adap­ta­tion is needed in response to mas­sive habi­tat stress. Monocrops are good for the annual har­vest but leave us espe­cially vul­ner­a­ble when phy­toph­thora infes­tans comes ashore.

It’s a good thing for dif­fer­ent reli­gious groups to have dif­fer­ent val­ues, both from us us and from one another. There are pres­sures in today’s cul­ture to level all of our dis­tinc­tives down so that we have no unique iden­tity. Some cheer this monocrop­ping of spir­i­tu­al­ity, but I’m not sure it’s healthy for human race. If our reli­gious val­ues are some­how truer or more valu­able than those of other peo­ple, then they will even­tu­ally spread themselves–not by push­ing other bod­ies to be like us, but by attract­ing the mem­bers of the other bod­ies to join with us.

God may have pur­pose in fel­low­ships that act dif­fer­ently that ours. Let us not get too smug about our own inevitabil­ity that we for­get to share our­selves with those with whom we differ.

Try­ing to catch up on the read­ing on the One Year Bible plan: I’m
two days behind. That’s a point where it’s easy enough to catch up but
another day or so becomes hard to catch up. The whole point of this for
me is not to read the Bible in bursts or even to get through the whole
thing in a year, but to develop the lifestyle habit of daily scrip­ture
reading.

I’m in Exo­dus 30 now and the Lord is giv­ing Moses a list
of very spe­cific laws. In 30:17, he spec­i­fies how Aaron and the
priestly caste must wash their feet every­time they come into the
Taber­na­cle and gives the what else: “or they will die!” Then God makes
the law firm: “This is a per­ma­nent law for Aaron and his descen­dants,
to be observed from gen­er­a­tion to generation.”

I’m read­ing a spe­cial One Year Bible,
where all of the daily read­ings are grouped together. There’s not too
much com­men­tary and I tend to skip it but the edi­tors did feel the need
to address the laws of the Old Tes­ta­ment head on and asked in one
side­bar “Do we need to fol­low these laws today?” The answer was yes and
no: “The moral law is still to be fol­lowed… The cer­e­mo­nial laws no
longer need to be fol­lowed because of the final sac­ri­fice for since has
been made by Jesus.”

God very clearly says in Exo­dus that the
laws he’s giv­ing are per­ma­nent. I don’t really read much wig­gle room in
there. Priests need to wash their feet… and kill a cer­tain num­ber of
lamb every year… and splat­ter the sac­ri­fi­cial blood around the alter a cer­tain
way and… I know Jesus is the new law, etc., but still it’s kind of
funny how literal-interpretation Chris­tians will shrug off a direct and
per­ma­nent order from God. It seems obvi­ous that the reli­gious
tra­di­tions in the Bible dif­fer greatly, as do the mod­ern lens we bring
to them and the two cen­turies of shift­ing Chris­t­ian prac­tices we’ve
brought to them.

Does any­one hap­pen to know if there’s any reli­gious group still try­ing to fol­low the details of the Mosaic Law? I won­der close do cer­tain Ortho­dox Jew­ish groups get?