Tag Archives: spiritual

May 13

Bits and pieces, remembering blogging

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I really should blog here more. I really should. I spend a lot of my time these days shar­ing other people’s ideas. Most recently, on Friends Jour­nal you can see my inter­view with Jon Watts (co-conducted with Megan Kietzman-Nicklin). The three of us talked on and on for quite some time; it was only an inflex­i­ble train sched­ule that ended my participation.

The favorite part of talk­ing with Jon is his enthu­si­asm and his tal­ent for keep­ing his sights set on the long pic­ture (my favorite ques­tion was ask­ing why he started with a Quaker fig­ure so obscure even I had to look him up). It’s easy to get caught up in the bus­tle of dead­lines and to-do lists and to start to for­get why we’re doing this work as pro­fes­sional Quak­ers. There is a real­ity behind the word counts. As Friends, we are shar­ing the good news of 350+ years of spir­i­tual adven­tur­ing: obser­va­tions, strug­gles, and imperfect-but-genuine attempts to fol­low Inward Light of the Gospels.

Theo writing for his class blog (seriously)My nine year old son Theo is blog­ging as a class assign­ment. I think they’ve been sup­posed to be writ­ing there for awhile but he’s really only got­ten the bug in the last few weeks. It’s a full-on Word­Press site, but with cer­tain restric­tions (most notably, posts only become pub­lic after the class­room teacher has had a chance to review and vet them). It’s cer­tain ironic to see one of my kids blog­ging more than me!

Enough blog­ging for today. Time to put the rest of the awake kids to bed. I’m going to try to have more reg­u­lar small posts so as to get back into the blog­ging habit. In the mean­time, I’m always active on my Tum­blr site (which shows up as the side­bar to the right). It’s the bucket for my inter­net curations–videos and links I find inter­est­ing, and my own pic­tures and miscellanea.

Mar 23

Outreach gets people to your meetinghouse / Hospitality keeps people returning.

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Over on Twit­ter feed came a tweet (h/t revrevwine):

seo - Google SearchTo trans­late, SEO is “search engine opti­miza­tion,” the often-huckersterish art of trick­ing Google to dis­play your web­site higher than your com­peti­tors in search results. “Usabil­ity” is the catch-all term for mak­ing your web­site easy to nav­i­gate and invit­ing to vis­i­tors. Com­pa­nies with deep pock­ets often want to spend a lot of money on SEO, when most of the time the most viable long-term solu­tion to rank­ing high with search engines is to pro­vide vis­i­tors with good rea­sons to visit your site. What if we applied these prin­ci­ples to our churches and meet­ing­houses and swapped the terms?

Out­reach gets peo­ple to your meet­ing­house /
Hos­pi­tal­ity keeps peo­ple returning.

A lot of Quaker meet­ing­houses have pretty good “nat­ural SEO.” Here in the U.S. East Coast, they’re often near a major road in the mid­dle of town. If they’re lucky there are a few his­tor­i­cal mark­ers of notable Quak­ers and if they are really lucky there’s a highly-respected Friends school nearby. All these meet­ings really have to do is put a nice sign out front and table a few town events every year. The rest is cov­ered. Although we do get the occa­sional “aren’t you all Amish?” com­ments, we have a much wider rep­u­ta­tion that our num­bers would nec­es­sar­ily war­rant. We rank pretty high.

But what are the lessons of hos­pi­tal­ity we could work on? Do we pro­vide places where spir­i­tual seek­ers can both grow per­son­ally and engage in the impor­tant ques­tions of the faith in the mod­ern world? Are we invi­ta­tional, bring­ing peo­ple into our homes and into our lives for shared meals and conversations?

In my free­lance days when I was hired to work on SEO I ran through a series of sta­tis­ti­cal reports and redesigned some under­per­form­ing pages, but then turned my atten­tion to the client’s con­tent. It was in this realm that my great­est quan­tifi­able suc­cesses occurred. At the heart of the con­tent work was ask­ing how could the site could more fully engage with first-time vis­i­tors. The “usabil­ity con­sid­er­a­tions” on the Wikipedia page on usabil­ity could be eas­ily adapted as queries:

Who are the users, what do they know, what can they learn? What do users want or need to do? What is the users’ gen­eral back­ground? What is the users’ con­text for work­ing? What must be left to the machine? Can users eas­ily accom­plish intended tasks at their desired speed? How much train­ing do users need? What doc­u­men­ta­tion or other sup­port­ing mate­ri­als are avail­able to help the user?

I’d love to see Friends con­sider this more. FGC’s “New Meet­ings Tool­box” has a sec­tion on wel­com­ing new­com­ers. But I’d love to hear more sto­ries about how we’re work­ing on the “usabil­ity” of our spir­i­tual communities.

Sep 17

Plain like Barack

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As befits a Quaker wit­ness, when I felt the nudge to plain­ness ten years ago, I didn’t quite know where it would take me. I trusted the spir­i­tual nudges enough to assume there were lessons to learn. I had wit­nessed a God-centering in oth­ers who shared my spir­i­tual con­di­tions and I knew from read­ing that plain­ness was a typ­i­cal first step of “infant min­is­ters.” But all I had been given was the invi­ta­tion to walk a par­tic­u­lar path.

After the ini­tial excite­ments, I set­tled into a rou­tine and dis­cov­ered I had lost the “what to wear?!” angst of get­ting dressed in the morn­ings. Gone too was the “who am I?” drama that accom­pa­nied cat­a­log brows­ing. As clothes wore out and were retired, I reduced my closet down to a small set of choices, all vari­a­tions on one another. Now when I get dressed I don’t worry about who I will see that day, who I should impress, whether one pair of shoes goes with a cer­tain sweater, etc.

Appar­ently, I share this prac­tice with the forty-fourth pres­i­dent. In “Obama’s Way,” a wide-ranging pro­file in Van­ity Fair, Michael Lewis shares the President’s atti­tude about clothes:

[He] was will­ing to talk about the mun­dane details of pres­i­den­tial exis­tence… You also need to remove from your life the day-to-day prob­lems that absorb most peo­ple for mean­ing­ful parts of their day. “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits,” he said. “I’m try­ing to pare down deci­sions. I don’t want to make deci­sions about what I’m eat­ing or wear­ing. Because I have too many other deci­sions to make.” He men­tioned research that shows the sim­ple act of mak­ing deci­sions degrades one’s abil­ity to make fur­ther deci­sions. It’s why shop­ping is so exhaust­ing. “You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to rou­tinize your­self. You can’t be going through the day dis­tracted by trivia.”

A few dis­tract­ing caveats: we can assume Obama’s grey and blue suits are bespoke and cost upwards of a thou­sand dol­lars apiece. He prob­a­bly has a closet full of them. He has staff that cleans them, stores them, and lays them out for him in the morn­ing. You won’t find Barack wan­der­ing the aisles of the Capi­tol Hill Macy’s or the Lan­g­ley Hill Men’s Ware­house. Michelle’s never run­ning things to the dry clean­ers, and Sasha and Malia aren’t pair­ing socks from the laun­dry bin after com­ing home from school. A Pres­i­dent Romney’s closet would also fea­ture gray and blue (though his under­wear drawer would be more uncon­ven­tional). When pro­to­col calls for the commander-in-chief to devi­ate from suits–to don a tux perhaps–one appears. Presidential plain­ness is far from simple.

The Quaker move­ment started as an invi­ta­tion to com­mon sense. Every­one could join. Early Friends were min­i­mal­ists on fire, fear­less in aban­don­ing any­thing that got in the way of spir­i­tual truth. In a few short years they method­i­cally worked their way to the same con­clu­sions as a twenty-first cen­tury U.S. pres­i­dent: human decision-making resources are finite; our atten­tion is at a pre­mium. If we have a job to do (run a coun­try, wit­ness God’s King­dom), then we should clear our­selves of unnec­es­sary dis­trac­tions to focus on the essen­tials. Those core expe­ri­en­tial truths have last­ing value. As Jef­fer­son might say, they are self-evident, even if they still seem rad­i­cally pecu­liar to the wider world.

Unfor­tu­nately the kind of plain­ness that Barack and I are talk­ing about is a kind of mind-hack, its power largely strate­gic. I’d love to see a pres­i­dent take up the chal­lenge of some hard­core Quaker val­ues. How about the tes­ti­mony against war? Eliza Gur­ney got pretty far in cor­re­spon­dence with Obama’s hero, hon­est Abe, but even he punted respon­si­bil­ity to divine will. The wit­ness continues.

Jul 09

Torching Meetinghouses Ctd.

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Appar­ently Micah Bales wasn’t call­ing for twenty-something Friends to engage in a reign of ter­ror, of kerosene and matches. He was engag­ing in some­thing called he calls metaphor. Micah reminds us that the liv­ing church needs to be able to ask questions:

A liv­ing, breath­ing com­mu­nity can­not be per­fect in this sense. True life is found in dynamic ten­sion. Liv­ing com­mu­ni­ties change and grow; they repro­duce them­selves in a diverse array of shapes and sizes, suited to their own times and places.

I myself would have avoided the burn-baby-burn pose, even rhetor­i­cally, if only because I’ve had too much per­sonal expe­ri­ence of Quak­ers who com­pletely lack a sense of irony. But it’s cer­tainly not with­out prece­dent for Friends to chal­lenge our con­nec­tion to mate­r­ial space (Micah aint’ got noth­ing on Ben­jamin Lay!). This cri­tique is why we call them meet­ing­houses, not churches, and it’s why their most promi­nent archi­tec­tural style in the Delaware Val­ley resem­bles noth­ing so much as a barn–the most generic of open struc­tures in the eyes of the farm­ers who built them.

There have been some good reac­tions among the com­men­taries on Micah’s post. Isabel P. wrote from the per­spec­tive of a “spir­i­tual vagabond”:

For those of us with no meet­ing­houses, who wan­der from place to place try­ing to find a home for our wor­ship groups, this sort of hyper­bole (metaphor though it may be) is just painful. Is tra­di­tion and her­itage really such an awful weight? Try being a spir­i­tual vagabond …

Else­where, Macken­zie paints the pic­ture of a not-atypical wealthy East Coast meet­ing that focuses on structure:

The meet­ing room is larger than needed for how few peo­ple show up weekly (about 70 on a “good” day, while the room can hold about 250). The cam­pus is larger than the par­tic­i­pants are will­ing to put in the sweat equity to main­tain. You’d think work­ing together to main­tain it would go under the cat­e­gory of build­ing com­mu­nity, which our First Day School claims is a tes­ti­mony. Instead, the bud­get must be ever-expanded to hire some­one else to fix things up, rather than have any­one get their hands dirty. Never mind that the meet­ing is run­ning on endow­ments from long-dead Friends as it is. So much paid main­te­nance puts a strain on the bud­get, mak­ing for per­sis­tent calls for more money.

Fur­ther down in that same thread, Tri­cia shares the heart­felt thank-you notes of Philadelphia-area Occupy activists who found refuge in Quaker struc­tures:

Dear­est Quaker Friends, Thank you for har­bor­ing us in a safe place in your park­ing lot. We appre­ci­ate it, in solidarity—the 99%.

I’m so grate­ful that you opened your hearts and your space to us. (cat­a­stro­phe averted!) I want to be a Quaker. Love and Peace, Barbara.

There have also been some obnox­ious reac­tions, all too-typical dis­missals cit­ing some supposedly-inherent inabil­ity of younger Friends to be trusted in dis­cern­ment or lead­er­ship. Of course our own tra­di­tion proves this wrong. When we talk about Quaker the­ol­ogy, the start­ing point for Friends of all fla­vors is an essay writ­ten by a twenty-eight year old. When George Fox had his famous open­ing that “there is one, even Christ Jesus, who can speak to thy con­di­tion,” he was a twenty-three years old talk­ing about a son-of-God that never left what Friends would call his “young adult” years. William Penn co-founded his first Quaker colony at age 33, and even old Mar­garet Fell earned her nick­name “the mother of Quak­erism” for the orga­niz­ing work she began at age thirty-eight. By counter-example, I’m sure we find some older Friends who lack some­thing in the dis­cern­ment or self-control depart­ment. The moral of the exam­ples: age is not the most impor­tant fac­tor in Quaker spir­i­tual discernment.

Now I want to turn back to the meet­ing­house ques­tion and put things in a bit of per­spec­tive. There are prob­a­bly only five or six dozen unpro­grammed meet­ings in North Amer­ica that are so large they couldn’t sim­ply squeeze into the near­est vol­un­teer fire hall. If calamity struck the meet­ing­house, the great major­ity of our con­gre­ga­tions could take a quick phone poll of mem­bers to deter­mine who has the largest liv­ing room and relo­cate there the fol­low­ing First Day. Yes, of course it’s nice to pro­vide space to the occa­sional pro­test­ers (and local yoga group, bat­tered women’s shel­ter etc.), but it’s fair to ask if this is what we’re called to do with this time and money. There would be cer­tain oppor­tu­ni­ties gained if a monthly meet­ing sold or long-term leased its prop­erty and re-established itself as a net­work of house churches. I don’t think it’s nec­es­sar­ily a good option for most meet­ings but it would be an intrigu­ing exper­i­ment. And it’s def­i­nitely worth imagining.