spiritual workshop Posts

This weekend was the long-prepared New Monastics and Convergent Friends weekend at Pendle Hill, co-led by myself and Wess Daniels, with very helpful eldership from Ashley W. As I posted afterwards on Facebook, "I feel we served the Lord faithfully, navigating the hopes and fears of the members of the church who gathered into this short-lived community. Not the conversation we expected, but the conversation we were given, which is enough (always) and for which we feel gratitude." 

A busy Quaker week. On Tuesday I heard North Carolina Friend Betsy Blake give a talk called "He Lives" at Pendle Hill, the story of how "Jesus has been her rock" to quote from the program description. It was a great talk and very well received.

Betsy is a graduate of the Quaker program at Guilford (so she was a good followup for Max Carter's talk this weekend) and she helped organize the World Gathering of Young Friends a few years ago. The talk was recorded and should be up on the Pendle Hill shortly (I'll add a link when it is) so I'll not try to be comprehensive but just share a few of my impressions.

Betsy is the kind of person that can just come under the radar. She starts telling stories, funny and poignant by turn, each one a Betsy story that you take on its own merits. It's only at the end of the hour that you fully realize she's been testifying to the presence of Jesus in her life in all this time. Real-life sightings, comforting hands on shoulders family tragedy, intellectual doubts and expanded spiritual connections all come together like different sides of the elephant.

One theme that came up a few times in the question-and-answer section is the feeling of a kind of spiritual tiredness--a fatigue from running the same old debates over and over. It's an exhaustion that squelches curiosity about other Friends and sometimes moves us to follow the easy path in times of conflict rather than the time-consuming & difficult path that might be the one we need to be on.

The last time I was in the Pendle Hill barn it was to listen to Shane Claiborne. I'm one of those odd people that don't think he's a very good speaker for liberal Quakers. He downplays the religious instruction he received as a child to emphasize the progressive spiritual smörgåsbord of his adulthood without ever quite realizing (I think) that this early education gave him the language and vocabulary to ground his current spiritual travels. Those who grow up in liberal Quaker meetings generally start with the dabbling; their challenge is to find a way to go deeper into a specific spiritual practice, something that can't be done on weekend trips to cool spiritual destinations.

Betsy brought an appreciation for her grounded Christian upbringing that I thought was a more powerful message. She talked about how her mom was raised in a tradition that could talk of darkness. When a family member died and doubt of God naturally followed, her mother was able to remind her that God had healed the beloved sister, only "not in the way we wanted." Powerful stuff.

The sounds at Pendle Hill were fascinating: the sound of knitting needles was a gentle click-clack through the time. And one annoying speaker rose at one point with an annoying sermonette that I realized was a modern-day version of Quaker singsong (liberal Friend edition), complete with dramatic pauses and over-melodious delivery. Funny to realize it exists in such an unlikely place!

And a plug that the Tuesday night speaker's series continues with some great Friends coming up, with North Carolina's Lloyd Lee Wilson at bat for next week. Hey, and I'll be there with Wess Daniels this May to lead a workshop on "The New Monastics and Convergent Friends."

Hey all, the Reclaiming Primitive Quakerism workshop at California's Ben Lomond Center wrapped up a few hours ago (I'm posting from the San Jose airport). I think it went well. There were about thirty participants. The makeup was very intergenerational and God and Christ were being named all over the place!



I myself felt stripped throughout the first half, a sense of vague but deep unease--not at how the workshop was going, but about who I am and where I am. Christ was hard at work pointing out the layers of pride that I've used to protect myself over the last few years. This morning's agenda was mostly extended worship, begun with "Bible Reading in the Manner of Conservative Friends" (video below) and it really lifted the veil for me--I think God even joked around with me a bit.

As always, many of the high points came unexpectedly in small conversations, both planned and random. One piece that I'll be returning to again and again is that we need to focus on the small acts and not build any sort of movement piece by piece and not worry about the Big Conference or the Big Website that will change everything that we know. That's not how the Spirit works and our pushing it to work this way almost invariably leads to failure and wasted effort.

Another piece is that we need to start focusing on really building up the kind of habits that will work out our spiritual muscles. Chad of 27Wishes had a great analogy that had to do with the neo-traditionalist jazz musicians and I hoped to get an interview with him on that but time ran out. I'll try to get a remote interview (an earlier interview with him is here, thanks Chad for being the first interview of the weekend!)

I conducted a bunch of video interviews that I'll start uploading to my Youtube account and on the "reclaiming2009" tag on QuakerQuaker. When you watch them, be charitable. I'm still learning through my style. But it was exciting starting to do them and it confirmed my sense that we really need to be burning up Youtube with Quaker stuff.

I need to find my boarding gate but I do want to say that the other piece is putting together collections of practices that Friends can try in their location Friends community. Gathering in Light Wess led a really well-received session that took the Lord's Prayer and turned it into an interactive small group even. We took photos and a bit of video and we'll be putting it together as a how-to somewhere or other.

Pictures going up on Flickr, I'll organize them soon. Also check out ConvergentFriends.org and the Reclaiming Primitive Quakerism workshop page on QuakerQuaker.

A few weeks ago a newsletter brought written reports about the latest round of conflict at a local meeting that's been fighting for the past 180 years or so. As my wife and I read through it we were a bit underwhelmed by the accounts of the newest conflict resolution attempts. The mediators seemed more worried about alienating a few long-term disruptive characters than about preserving the spiritual vitality of the meeting. It's a phenomena I've seen in a lot of Quaker meetings.

Call it the FDR Principle after Franklin D Roosevelt, who supposedly defended his support of one of Nicaragua's most brutal dictators by saying "Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch." Even casual historians of Latin American history will know this only led to fifty years of wars with reverberations across the world with the Iran/Contra scandal. The FDR Principle didn't make for good U.S. foreign policy and, if I may, I'd suggest it doesn't make for good Quaker policy either. Any discussion board moderator or popular blogger knows that to keep an online discussion's integrity you need to know when to cut a disruptive trouble-maker off--politely and succintly, but also firmly. If you don't, the people there to actually discuss your issues--the people you want--will leave.

I didn't know how to talk about this until a post called Conflict in Meeting came through Livejournal this past First Day. The poster, jandrewm, wrote in part:

Yet my recognition of all that doesn't negate the painful feelings that arise when hostility enters the meeting room, when long-held grudges boil over and harsh words are spoken.  After a few months of regular attendance at my meeting, I came close to abandoning this "experiment" with Quakerism because some Friends were so consistently rancorous, divisive, disruptive.  I had to ask myself: "Do I need this negativity in my life right now?"

I commented about the need to take the testimonies seriously:

I've been in that situation. A lot of Friends aren't very good at putting their foot down on flagrantly disruptive behavior. I wish I could buy the "it eventually sorts out" argument but it often doesn't. I've seen meetings where all the sane people are driven out, leaving the disruptive folks and armchair therapists. It's a symbiotic relationship, perhaps, but doesn't make for a healthy spiritual community.

The unpopular solution is for us to take our testimonies seriously. And I mean those more specific testimonies buried deep in copies in Faith & Practice that act as a kind of collective wisdom for Quaker community life. Testimonies against detraction and for rightly ordered decision making, etc. If someone's actions tear apart the meeting they should be counseled; if they continue to disrupt then their decision-making input should be disregarded. This is the real effect of the old much-maligned Quaker process of disowning (which allowed continued attendance at worship and life in the community but stopped business participation). Limiting input like this makes sense to me.

The trouble that if your meeting is in this kind of spiral there might not be much you can do by yourself. People take some sort of weird comfort in these predictable fights and if you start talking testimonies you might become very unpopular very quickly. Participating in the bickering isn't helpful (of course) and just eats away your own self. Distancing yourself for a time might be helpful. Getting involved in other Quaker venues. It's a shame. Monthly meeting is supposed to be the center of our Quaker spiritual life. But sometimes it can't be. I try to draw lessons from these circumstances. I certainly understand the value and need for the Quaker testimonies better simply because I've seen the problems meetings face when they haven't. But that doesn't make it any easier for you.

But all of this begs an awkward question: are we really building Christ's kingdom by dropping out? It's an age-old tension between purity and participation at all costs. Timothy asked a similar question of me in a comment to my last post. Before we answer, we should recognize that there are indeed many people who have "abandoned" their "Quaker experiment" because we're not living up to our own ideals.

Maybe I'm more aware of this drop-out class than others. It sometimes seems like an email correspondence with the "Quaker Ranter" has become the last step on the way out the door. But I also get messages from seekers newly convinced of Quaker principles but unable to connect locally because of the divergent practices or juvenile behavior of their local Friends meeting or church. A typical email last week asked me why the plain Quakers weren't evangelical and why evangelical Quakers weren't conservative and asked "Is there a place in the quakers for a Plain Dressing, Bible Thumping, Gospel Preaching, Evangelical, Conservative, Spirit Led, Charismatic family?" (Anyone want to suggest their local meeting?)

We should be more worried about the people of integrity we're losing than about the grumpy trouble-makers embedded in some of our meetings. If someone is consistently disruptive, is clearly breaking specific Quaker testimonies we've lumped under community and intergrity, and stubbornly immune to any council then read them out of business meeting. If the people you want in your meeting are leaving because of the people you really don't want, then it's time to do something. Our Quaker toolbox provides us tool for that action--ways to define, name and address the issues. Our tradition gives us access to hundreds of years of experience, both mistakes and successes, and can be a more useful guide than contemporary pop psychology or plain old head-burying.

Not all meetings have these problems. But enough do that we're losing people. And the dynamics get more acute when there's a visionary project on the table and/or someone younger is at the center of them. While our meetings sort out their issues, the internet is providing one type of support lifeline.

Blogger jandrewm was able to seek advice and consolation on Livejournal. Some of the folks I spoke about in the 2003 "Lost Quaker Generation" series of posts are now lurking away on my Facebook friends list. Maybe we can stop the full departure of some of these Friends. They can drop back but still be involved, still engaging their local meeting. They can be reading and discussing testimonies ("detraction" is a wonderful place to start) so they can spot and explain behavior. We can use the web to coordinate workshops, online discussions, local meet-ups, new workship groups, etc., but even email from a Friend thousands of miles away can help give us clarity and strength.

I think (I hope) we're helping to forge a group of Friends with a clear understanding of the work to be done and the techniques of Quaker discernment. It's no wonder that Quaker bodies sometimes fail to live up to their ideals: the journals of  olde tyme Quaker ministers are full of disappointing stories and Christian tradition is rich with tales of the roadblocks the Tempter puts up in our path. How can we learn to  center in the Lord when our meetings become too political or disfunctional (I think I should start looking harder at Anabaptist non-resistance theory). This is the work, Friends, and it's always been the work. Through whatever comes we need to trust that any testing and heartbreak has a purpose, that the Lord is using us through all, and that any suffering will be productive to His purpose if we can keep low and listening for follow-up instructions.

Warning: insider Quaker conversation to follow.

Over on her blog Robin M has a great post looking at the Convergent Friend conversation now. It's kind of State of the Convergent Friends report. It's very good and well worth a read and makes me wonder again where exactly I stand.

Even though I was around at the gestation and birth of the term, and even though it originally referred to a small group of bloggers who I all love, I go back and forth between using and refusing to use the label. I don't feel the need to always be explicitly "convergent." Sometimes I can just embody the spirit of it, which as a renewal movement is really just the same old spirit of Quakerism, which as its own renewal movement is the same old spirit of Christianity, with is just that spirit which animates the world.

See: it's too easy to throw up terms as a defense shield or as a way of boosting ourselves. I know I'm prone to this trap. I'll say "I'm doing this as a [Convergent Friend/Quaker/Christian]" as if that explains anything, as if careful listening to the Holy Spirit isn't all the authority that any of us needs.

I think a central part of the convergent experience is stepping outside of the institutional boxes and walking into the discomfort zone of our brand of Friends--asking the thorny questions and pointing out the inconvenient elephants. If "Convergent Friend" ever settles down into a set definition and annual rituals (like a Gathering interest group?), we'll see our own brier patches take root along those inconvenient pathways.

I've noticed Friends with bright ideas brand and sell themselves, and have wondered to myself how freely the gospel spirit is moving after ten years of Gathering workshops and Pendle Hill workshops. I'm not so much purist that I don't understand that sometimes those of us led to the ministry have to push through doubts and present things we've promised to present even if we're not in the best mood (praying that we find that groove). But I've also sat through committee meetings that felt like the Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day, where I look around and realize the same people have been sitting in the same room having the same conversation for twenty years, and everyone is just so tired and the feeling is they're all reading a script and would want to be anywhere but where they are.

A friendly amendment to Convergent

Just the last thing is that for me if our work isn't ultimately rooted in sharing the good news then it's self-indulgent. I don't want to create a little oasis or hippy compound of happy people. Friends aren't going to go to heaven in our politically-correct smugness while the rest of the world is dying off. It's all of us or none of us. If we're not actively evangelizing <liberal translation: sharing the spiritual insights and gifts we've been given />, then we are part of the problem. "Convergence" is Quaker lingo. When we say it we're turning our back to the world to talk amongst ourselves: a useful exercise occassionally but not our main work.

I've been reading a lot of seeker blogs where Quakers are mentioned and I'm struck by how so many of the words we routinely use in our blogs and self-statements are totally alien to others.

It may be too late to throw a switch on the quickly-gathering-steam train that is the "Convergent Friends" express. But here's my friendly amendment: Convergent Friends need to be ready to get out of the Quaker conference centers and need to be ready to put aside the Quaker arcana we've accumulated over the years. If all we're doing is sitting around talking to roomfulls of Quakers in our hopeless-inaccessible lingo then we're fooling ourselves that any real renewal is happening.

Frankly, I have no idea what this would look like. I'm as clueless and scared by the possibilities as most of y'all. I just know we need to do it. Even if I had all the travel money and time in the world (I have neither), I don't know if I'd have enough motivation to get to the next Barnesville / Greensboro / Richmond / Newberg / wherever conference (I just realized I'm reinforcing my last Quaker post!). I love meeting other Friends and I soooo miss seeing other Friends in my current relative isolation. But. But. I wish I had a better ending to this post. I guess I'll just throw it out to the comments: what are we being called to do to send this work into the world?

Wess Daniels posts about Quaker theology on his blog. I responded there but got to thinking of Swarthmore professor Jerry Frost's 2000 Gathering talk about FGC Quakerism. Academic, theologically-minded Friends helped forge liberal Quakerism but their influenced wained after that first generation. Here's a snippet:

"[T]he first generations of English and America Quaker liberals like Jones and Cadbury were all birthright and they wrote books as well as pamphlets. Before unification, PYM Orthodox and the other Orthodox meetings produced philosophers, theologians, and Bible scholars, but now the combined yearly meetings in FGC produce weighty Friends, social activists, and earnest seekers." ...
"The liberals who created the FGC had a thirst for knowledge, for linking the best in religion with the best in science, for drawing upon both to make ethical judgments. Today by becoming anti-intellectual in religion when we are well-educated we have jettisoned the impulse that created FGC, reunited yearly meetings, redefined our role in wider society, and created the modern peace testimony. The kinds of energy we now devote to meditation techniques and inner spirituality needs to be spent on philosophy, science, and Christian religion."

This talk was hugely influential to my wife Julie and myself. We had just met two days before and while I had developed an instant crush, Frost's talk was the first time we sat next to one another. I realized that this might become something serious when we both laughed out loud at Jerry's wry asides and theology jokes. We ended up walking around the campus late into the early hours talking talking talking.

But the talk wasn't just the religion geek equivalent of a pick-up bar. We both responded to Frost's call for a new generation of serious Quaker thinkers. Julie enrolled in a Religion PhD program, studying Quaker theology under Frost himself for a semester. I dove into historians like Thomas Hamm and modern thinkers like Lloyd Lee Wilson as a way to understand and articulate the implicit theology of "FGC Friends" and took independent initiatives to fill the gaps in FGC services, taking leadership in young adult program and co-leading workshops and interest groups.

Things didn't turn out as we expected. I hesitate speaking for Julie but I think it's fair enough to say that she came to the conclusion that Friends ideals and practices were unbridgable and she left Friends. I've documented my own setbacks and right now I'm pretty detached from formal Quaker bodies.

Maybe enough time hasn't gone by yet. I've heard that the person sitting on Julie's other side for that talk is now studying theology up in New England; another Friend who I suspect was nearby just started at Earlham School of Religion. I've called this the Lost Quaker Generation but at least some of its members have just been lying low. It's hard to know whether any of these historically-informed Friends will ever help shape FGC popular culture in the way that Quaker academia influenced liberal Friends did before the 1970s.

Rereading Frost's speech this afternoon it's clear to see it as an important inspiration for QuakerQuaker. Parts of it act well as a good liberal Quaker vision for what the blogosphere has since taken to calling convergent Friends. I hope more people will stumble on Frost's speech and be inspired, though I hope they will be careful not to tie this vision too closely with any existing institution and to remember the true source of that daily bread. Here's a few more inspirational lines from Jerry:

We should remember that theology can provide a foundation for unity. We ought to be smart enough to realize that any formulation of what we believe or linking faith to modern thought is a secondary activity; to paraphrase Robert Barclay, words are description of the fountain and not the stream of living water. Those who created the FGC and reunited meetings knew the possibilities and dangers of theology, but they had a confidence that truth increased possibilities.

This First Day I stayed up late (I'm doing some fill-in night work these days and morning is late for me) and visited northwest Philadelphia's Chestnut Hill Monthly Meeting for worship and a monthly education hour they call "Forum." This month's focus was on Quaker blogging and I was asked to speak along with Imperfect Serenity Eileen Flanagan and Juliloquy (as usual I'm using the identities they give on the blog). In the audience were SEPTA Kid (who I knew I knew from Flickr!), A Thin Place Dan Evans and Christie, the yearly meeting staffer who helped put together the recent yearly meeting youth blog. When we began the Forum moderator asked for a show of hands for people who had blogs and there were even more bloggers there. Per capita Chestnut Hill might even outpace Twin Cities in blogdom. A few thoughts in no particular order:

Blogging Cultures

A recurring theme to the questions was privacy and how far we go to name ourselves and family members. All three of us cloak ourselves in one way or another (mine is primarily geographic, though Dan claimed he could find my address if he wanted (tell me if you can so I can see if I can plug up that hole!)). The whole concern seemed a little age-reflective, just in that I wondered if folks there knew just how open the whole Facebook/Myspace 20-something crowd can be. A difference of course is that we three panelists (and most of the audience) are of that professional age where we do have to worry about outward appearances. A common message on Myspace is the announcement that someone's got a job and will now take down their more wild pictures. Are the differences in how willing people are to share their lives online a reflection more of changing generational standards or age-based necessities?

Mommy and Daddy Blogs & Bloggings

We three bloggers were all parents of young'ish children and this all came up in our stories. With my small kids, family arrangement with my wife not being Quaker and current night-shift work, it's nearly impossible for me to give a lot of face-time to Quaker activities (Chris M recently posted about being able to accept an important meeting appointment that he had to turn down a few years ago, in part because of parental responsibilities). The particulars of my current life arrangement makes getting to worship a major accomplishment. Many bloggers are parents of small kids and our sites have given us the ability to stay more engaged in a sort of intellectual life than we could be otherwise. Many other bloggers seem to be geographically isolated from their peer group, which creates a similar dynamic.

Panels & Interest Groups, Workshops and Worship

It's tempting to compare this panel to the outwardly-similar interest group I convened with LizOpp and Robin M at last year's FGC Gathering. The most pronounced difference is that the interest group didn't focus on blogging but mentioned it only as a piece of our spiritual life story. Our concern was the ministry that was growing out of the blogosphere. We grounded our session in worship and as I wrote last summer, much of the talk had a feel of testimony to it.

At the Chestnut Hill Forum blogs were the focus. I'm quite qualified to talk about blogs and the internet from a purely technical and social standpoint, of course, and that's mostly what I did but it felt awkward for me. Christie touched on this when she asked a question towards the end about why my blog posts tend to have strong opinions but my presentation that day was so mild. The question has stayed with me and I think part of the difference is that the monthly Forum series is pattered after a secular educational model: it's more workshop that worship sharing. For me that kept it on a level on mechanics. I could share what's been happening on the Quaker blogosphere from a sociological standpoint but to give something approaching "testimony" would have felt out of place. Educational forums are fine and I don't want to dismiss their value but their form probably does keep the conversation at a particular level.

Contextless Forwards

In her question Christie also mentioned how certain posts of mine sometimes get forwarded around to yearly meeting staff. I consciously try to keep my blog wide-ranging, as a way to give readers a way to know the person behind the blog. I know what I write can sometimes be challenging. I know too that it's easy to dismiss challenges by taking statements out of context in such a way that the messenger can be parodied as some sort of other who can be safely ignored. Regular readers will hopefully catch the love that undergirds everything I write (my goal at least) and will understand the balance I try to keep between liberal and traditional Quakerism. But it's good to remember that some people only reading certain posts: I might want to take care to represent myself completely in everything post I write, even if it's only a disclaimer.

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Enough for now, I've got to wake up the baby from his nap. It was great to visit Chestnut Hill, where I've never worshiped before. It was quite refreshing to be a meeting where there's lots of parents and families. It was nice to meet the other bloggers and have a chance to talk about Friends and blogging to a new audience. Thanks to Amey for organizing it, my dear friend Thomas for tech'ing it up and to everyone who came and participated.