Reading John Woolman 3: The Isolated Saint

August 17, 2006
· Martin Kelley

Read­ing John Wool­man Series:
1: The Pub­lic Life of a Pri­vate Man
2: The Last Safe Quaker
3: The Iso­lat­ed Saint

It’s said that John Wool­man re-wrote his Jour­nal three times in an effort to excise it of as many “I” ref­er­ences as pos­si­ble. As David Sox writes in Johh Wool­man Quin­tes­sen­tial Quak­er, “only on lim­it­ed occa­sion do we glimpse Wool­man as a son, a father and a hus­band.” Wool­man would­n’t have been a very good blog­ger. Quot­ing myself from my intro­duc­tion to Quak­er blogs:

blogs give us a unique way of shar­ing our lives — how our Quak­erism inter­sects with the day-to-day deci­sions that make up faith­ful liv­ing. Quak­er blogs give us a chance to get to know like-minded Friends that are sep­a­rat­ed by geog­ra­phy or arti­fi­cial the­o­log­i­cal bound­aries and they give us a way of talk­ing to and with the insti­tu­tions that make up our faith community.

I’ve read many great Wool­man sto­ries over the years and as I read the Jour­nal I eager­ly antic­i­pat­ed read­ing the orig­i­nal account. It’s that same excite­ment I get when walk­ing the streets of an icon­ic land­scape for the first time: walk­ing through Lon­don, say, know­ing that Big Ben is right around the next cor­ner. But Wool­man kept let­ting me down.

One of the AWOL sto­ries is his arrival in Lon­don. The Jour­nal’s account:

On the 8th of Sixth Month, 1772, we land­ed at Lon­don, and I went straight­way to the Year­ly Meet­ing of min­is­ters and elders, which had been gath­ered, I sup­pose, about half an hour. In this meet­ing my mind was humbly contrite.

But set the scene. He had just spent five weeks cross­ing the Atlantic in steer­age among the pigs (he does­n’t actu­al­ly spec­i­fy his non-human bunk­mates). He famous­ly went out of his way to wear clothes that show dirt because they show dirt. He went straight­away: no record of a bath or change of clothes. Sto­ries abound about his recep­tion, and while are some of dubi­ous ori­gin, there are first hand accounts of his being shunned by the British min­is­ters and elders. The best and most dubi­ous sto­ry is the theme of anoth­er post.

I trust that Wool­man was hon­est­ly aim­ing for meek­ness when he omit­ted the most inter­est­ing sto­ries of his life. But with­out the con­text of a lived life he becomes an ahis­tor­i­cal fig­ure, an icon of good­ness divorced from the minu­ti­ae of the dai­ly grind. Two hun­dred and thir­ty years of Quak­er hagiog­ra­phy and latter-day appeals to Wool­man’s author­i­ty have turned the tai­lor of Mount Hol­ly into the oth­er­world­ly Quak­er saint but the process start­ed at John’s hands himself.

Were his strug­gles mere­ly inte­ri­or? When I look to my own min­istry, I find the call to dis­cern­ment to be the clear­est part of the work. I need to work to be ever more recep­tive to even the most unex­pect­ed prompt­ing from the Inward Christ and I need to con­stant­ly prac­tice humil­i­ty, love and for­give­ness. But the prac­ti­cal lim­i­ta­tions are hard­er. For years respectibil­i­ty was an issue; rel­a­tive pover­ty con­tin­ues to be one. It is ask­ing a lot of my wife to leave respon­si­bil­i­ty for our two small boys for even a long weekend.

How did Wool­man bal­ance fam­i­ly life and min­istry? What did wife Sarah think? And just what was his role in the sea-change that was the the “Ref­or­ma­tion of Amer­i­can Quak­erism” (to use Jack Mari­et­ta’s phrase) that for­ev­er altered Amer­i­can Friends’ rela­tion­ship with the world and set the stage for the schisms of the next century.

We also lose the con­text of Wool­man’s com­pa­tri­ots. Some are named as trav­el­ing com­pan­ions but the col­or­ful char­ac­ters go unmen­tioned. What did he think of the street-theater antics of Ben­jamin Lay, the Abbie Hoff­man of Philadel­phia Quak­ers. The most widely-told tale is of Lay walk­ing into Philadel­phia Year­ly Meet­ing ses­sions, open­ing up a cloak to reveal mil­i­tary uni­form under­neath, and declar­ing that slave-made prod­ucts were prod­ucts of war, plunged a sword into a hollowed-out Bible full of pig’s blood, splat­ter­ing Friends sit­ting nearby.

What role did Wool­man play in the larg­er anti-slavery awak­en­ing hap­pen­ing at the time? It’s hard to tell just read­ing his Jour­nal. How can we find ways to repli­cate his kind of faith­ful­ness and wit­ness today? Again, his Jour­nal does­n’t give much clue.

Picked up today in the Philadel­phia Year­ly Meet­ing Library:

PYM Librar­i­an Rita Var­ley remind­ed me today they mail books any­where in the US for a mod­est fee and a $50/year sub­scrip­tion. It’s a great deal and a great ser­vice, espe­cial­ly for iso­lat­ed Friends. The PYM cat­a­log is online too!

The Wonders of RSS feeds

August 11, 2006
· Martin Kelley

RSS
Syn­di­ca­tion feeds are small web files that sum­ma­rize the lat­est posts
to a par­tic­u­lar blog or news site. They’re a cen­tral repos­i­to­ry of
basic infor­ma­tion: title, author, post date, a sum­ma­ry of the post and
some­times the whole post itself. You can open these files direct­ly (here’s the raw file for this blog) but you’ll see there’s a hier­ar­chy of cod­ing that makes it visu­al­ly uninteresting.

Syn­di­ca­tion
feeds are the lin­gua fran­ca pow­er­ing all the cool new web­sites. It
does­n’t mat­ter what blog­ging plat­form you use or what oper­at­ing system
you’re on: if your soft­ware pro­vides an RSS feed I can mix and match it and use it to pull in con­tent to my site.

Exam­ples 1: Pho­tographs: I email all of my adorable kid pic­tures to the pho­to shar­ing site Flickr,
which then pro­vides a syn­di­ca­tion feed (“here”). I use a lit­tle fancy
patch of cod­ing on my web­site to pull in the infor­ma­tion about the
lat­est pho­tos (loca­tion, cap­tion, etc) so that I can dis­play them on my
home­page. When­ev­er you go to my Theo age you’ll see the lat­est Flickr pho­tos of him. 

Exam­ple 2: Book­marks. I also use the “social book­mark­ing” sys­tem with the odd name of del​.icio​.us.
When I find a page I want to book­mark, I click a Deli­cious but­ton in my
brows­er, which opens a pop-up win­dow. I write a descrip­tion, pick a
cat­e­go­ry or two and hit save. Deli­ciouis then pro­vides an RSS syn­di­ca­tion
feed which I can use to pull togeth­er a list of my lat­est book­marks and
dis­play it on my web­site. Wave a few mag­ic wands of com­pli­ca­tion (pay
no atten­tion to the man behind the cur­tain!) and you have the main
trick behind Quak​erquak​er​.org.

I’ve sim­pli­fied both exam­ples a bit but you prob­a­bly get the point. Syn­di­ca­tion feeds are the secret behind blog read­ers like Blog­lines and email sub­scrip­tion ser­vices like the one’s I pro­vide for quak​erquak​er​.org.

New to me is the con­cepts around the Well-Formed Web. As described by Kevin Don­ahue
“The lay­man’s premise of the Well-Formed Web is that each site will
have drill-down feeds — a top lev­el feed, item spe­cif­ic feeds, and so
on.” What this means is that you don’t just have one sin­gle RSS feed on a site (your lat­est ten posts) but RSS feeds on every­thing.
Every cat­e­go­ry get its own unique feeds (e.g., the last ten posts about
web design) and every post gets its own unique feed track­ing its
com­ments (e.g., this feed of com­ments from my “Intro­duc­ing Mar​tinKel​ley​.com” post).
It cer­tain­ly seems a bit like overkill but com­put­ers are doing all the
work and the result gives us a multi-dimensionality that we can use to
pull all sorts of neat things together. 

Resources on the Lebanon conflicts

August 11, 2006
· Martin Kelley

Voic­es for Cre­ative Non­vi­o­lence is doing some orga­niz­ing around the fight­ing in Lebanon/Israel/Gaza. Check out “Beyond the Esca­la­tion of Injustice”:vcnv.org/beyond-the-escalation-of-injustice which calls for “direct engagement.”
Through them I found a link to “Jihad Against Hezbollah”:www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/3412, the new piece from Steven Zunes, a very knowl­edgable writer for For­eign Pol­i­cy in Focus. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet (this after­noon on the train) but it looks like good back­ground mate­r­i­al on the group.

Reading John Woolman 2: The Last Safe Quaker

August 10, 2006
· Martin Kelley

Read­ing John Wool­man Series:
1: The Pub­lic Life of a Pri­vate Man
2: The Last Safe Quaker
3: The Iso­lat­ed Saint

Some­one who only knew Wool­man from arti­cles in pop­u­lar Quak­er peri­od­i­cals might be for­giv­en for a moment of shock when open­ing his book. John Wool­man is so much more reli­gious than we usu­al­ly acknowl­edge. We describe him as an activist even though he and his con­tem­po­raries clear­ly saw and named him a min­is­ter. There are many instances where he described the inhu­man­i­ty of the slave trade and he clear­ly iden­ti­fied with the oppressed but he almost always did so with from a Bib­li­cal per­spec­tive. He acknowl­edged that reli­gious faith­ful­ness could exist out­side his beloved Soci­ety of Friends but his life’s work was call­ing Friends to live a pro­found­ly Chris­t­ian life. Flip to a ran­dom page of the jour­nal and you’ll prob­a­bly count half a dozen metaphors for God. Yes, he was a social activist but he was also a deeply reli­gious min­is­ter of the gospel.

So why do we wrap our­selves up in Wool­man like he’s the flag of proto-liberal Quak­erism? In an cul­ture where Quak­er author­i­ty is deeply dis­trust­ed and appeals to the Bible or to Quak­er his­to­ry are rou­tine­ly dis­missed, he has become the last safe Friend to claim. His name is invoked as a sort of tal­is­man against cri­tique, as a rhetor­i­cal show-stopper. “If you don’t agree with my take on the environment/tax resistance/universalism, you’re the moral equiv­a­lent of Woolman’s slave hold­ers.” (Before the emails start flood­ing in, remem­ber I’m writ­ing this as a dues-paying activist Quak­er myself.) We don’t need to agree with him to engage with him and learn from him. But we do need to be hon­est about what he believed and open to admit­ting when we dis­agree. We shouldn’t use him sim­ply as a stooge for our own agenda.

I like Wool­man but I have my dis­agree­ments. His scrupu­lous­ness was over the top. My own per­son­al­i­ty tends toward a cer­tain puri­ty, exem­pli­fied by fif­teen years of veg­an­ism, my plain dress, my being car-less into my late thir­ties. I’ve learned that I need to mod­er­ate this ten­den­cy. My puri­ty can some­times be a sign of an elit­ism that wants to sep­a­rate myself from the world (I’ve learned to laugh at myself more). Asceti­cism can be a pow­er­ful spir­i­tu­al lens but it can also burn a self- and world-hatred into us. I’ve had friends on the brink of sui­cide (lit­er­al­ly) over this kind of scrupu­lous­ness. I wor­ry when a new Friend finds my plain pages and is in broad­falls and bon­nets a few weeks lat­er, know­ing from my own expe­ri­ence that the speed of their gus­to some­times rush­es a dis­cern­ment prac­tice that needs to rest and set­tle before it is ful­ly owned (the most per­son­al­ly chal­leng­ing of the tra­di­tion­al tests of Quak­er dis­cern­ment is “patience”).

John Wool­man presents an awful­ly high bar for future gen­er­a­tions. He reports refus­ing med­i­cine when ill­ness brought him to the brink of death, pre­fer­ring to see fevers as signs of God’s will. While that might have been the smarter course in an pre-hygienic era when doc­tors often did more harm than good, this Chris­t­ian Scientist-like atti­tude is not one I can endorse. He sailed to Eng­land deep in the hold along with the cat­tle because he thought the wood­work unnec­es­sar­i­ly pret­ty in the pas­sen­ger cab­ins. While his famous wear­ing of un-dyed gar­ments was root­ed part­ly in the out­rages of the man­u­fac­tur­ing process, he talked much more elo­quent­ly about the inher­ent evil of wear­ing clothes that might hide stains, argu­ing that any­one who would try to hide stains on their clothes would be that much more like­ly to hide their inter­nal spir­i­tu­al stains (all I could think about when read­ing this was that he must have left child-rearing duties to the well-inclined Sarah).

Wool­man proud­ly relates (in his famous­ly hum­ble style) how he once tried to shut down a trav­el­ing mag­ic act that was sched­uled to play at the local inn. I sus­pect that if any of us some­how found our­selves on his clear­ness com­mit­tee we might find a way to tell him to… well, light­en up. I sym­pa­thize with his con­cerns against mind­less enter­tain­ment but telling the good peo­ple of Mount Hol­ly that they can’t see a dis­ap­pear­ing rab­bit act because of his reli­gious sen­si­bil­i­ties is more Tal­iban than most of us would feel com­fort­able with.

He was a man of his times and that’s okay. We can take him for what he is. We shouldn’t dis­miss any of his opin­ions too light­ly for he real­ly was a great reli­gious and eth­i­cal fig­ure. But we might think twice before enlist­ing the par­ty poop­er of Mount Hol­ly for our cause.

Forsaking Diplomacy

August 10, 2006
· Martin Kelley

In the New York Times, a “glimpse behind the scenes of the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion’s sup­port for war in Lebanon”:www.nytimes.com/2006/08/10/washington/10rice.html:
bq.. Washington’s resis­tance to an imme­di­ate cease-fire and its staunch sup­port of Israel have made it more dif­fi­cult for [US “Sec­re­tary of State”:www.nonviolence.org/tag/secretary%20of%20state] Rice to work with oth­er nations, includ­ing some Amer­i­can allies, as they search for a for­mu­la that will end the vio­lence and pro­duce a durable cease-fire.…
Sev­er­al State Depart­ment offi­cials have pri­vate­ly object­ed to the administration’s empha­sis on Israel and have said that Wash­ing­ton is not talk­ing to Syr­ia to try to resolve the cri­sis. Dam­as­cus has long been a sup­port­er of “Hezbollah”:www.nonviolence.org/tag/hezbollah, and pre­vi­ous con­flicts between the group and Israel have been resolved through shut­tle diplo­ma­cy with Syria.
p. The wars in “Lebanon”:www.nonviolence.org/tag/lebanon and “Iraq”:www.nonviolence.org/tag/iraq are caus­ing irrepara­ble harm to the U.S. image in the Mid­dle East. High-sounding words about democ­ra­cy ring hol­low when we for­sake diplomacy.

Marketing and Publicizing Your Site

August 8, 2006
· Martin Kelley

“Build it and they will come” is not a very good web strategy.
Instead, think “if I spent $3000 on a website but no visitors came, did
I spend $3000?” There are no guarantees that anyone will ever visit a
site. But there are ways to make sure they do.

Much of web mar­ket­ing fol­lows the rules of any oth­er mode of
pub­lic­i­ty: iden­ti­fy an audi­ence, build a brand, appeal to a lifestyle
and keep in touch with your cus­tomers and their needs. A sucess­ful web
cam­paign uti­lizes print mail­ings, man­u­fac­tured buzz, gen­uine word of
mouth and email. Finances can lim­it the options avail­able but everyone
can do something.

One of the most excit­ing aspects of the inter­net is that the most
pop­u­lar sites are usu­al­ly those that have some­thing inter­est­ing to
offer vis­i­tors. The cost of entry to the web is so low that the little
guys can com­pete with giant cor­po­ra­tions. A good strat­e­gy involves
find­ing a niche and build­ing a com­mu­ni­ty around it. Per­son­al­i­ty and idio­syn­cra­cy are actu­al­ly com­pet­i­tive advantages!

It would be cru­el of me to just drop off a com­plet­ed web­site at the
end of two months and wash my hands of the project. Many web designers
do that, but I’m more inter­est­ed in build­ing sites that are used. I can
work with you on all aspects of pub­lic­i­ty, from design to launch and
beyond to ana­lyz­ing vis­i­tor pat­terns to learn how we can serve them better.

Making sites sticky

We don’t want some­one to vis­it your site once, click on a few links
and then dis­ap­pear for­ev­er. We want to give your vis­i­tors rea­sons to
come back fre­quent­ly, a qual­i­ty we call “sticky” in web par­lance. Is
your site a use­ful ref­er­ence site? Can we get vis­i­tors to sign up for
email updates? Is there a com­mu­ni­ty of users around your site?

Making sites search engine friendly

Google. We all want Google to vis­it our sites. One of the biggest
scams out there are the com­pa­nies that will reg­is­ter your site for only
$300 or $500 or $700. The search engines get their
com­pet­i­tive advan­tage by includ­ing the whole web and there’s no reason
you need to pay any­one to get the atten­tion of the big search engines. 

The most impor­tant way to bring Google to your site is to build it
with your audi­ence in mind. What are the key­words you want peo­ple to
find you with? Your town name? Your busi­ness? Some spe­cif­ic qual­i­ty of
your work? I can build the site from the ground up to high­light those
phras­es. Here too, being a niche play­er is an advantage. 

I know lots of Google tricks. One site of mine start­ed attract­ing four times the vis­its after its pro­gram­mer and I redesigned it for Google. My sites are so well indexed that if I often get vis­i­tors search­ing for
the odd­est things. We can actu­al­ly tell when vis­i­tors come from search
engines and we can even tell what they’re search­ing for! Google
appar­ent­ly thinks I know “how to flat­ten used sod” and am the guy to
ask if you won­der “do amish women wear bras.” I can make sure your impor­tant search terms also get noticed by Google and the rest!

Reading John Woolman 1: The Public Life of a Private Man

August 7, 2006
· Martin Kelley

Read­ing John Wool­man Series:
1: The Pub­lic Life of a Pri­vate Man
2: The Last Safe Quaker
3: The Iso­lat­ed Saint

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 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 Time: Wrap­ping our­selves in the flag of Woolman

Turning workshops into worship

July 4, 2006
· Martin Kelley

Last night LizOpp, Robin M and myself host­ed our FGC Gath­er­ing inter­est group. The title was “On Fire!: Renew­ing Quak­erism through a Con­ver­gence of Friends.” All morn­ing long we’ve had Friends grab­bing our arms to tell us how pow­er­ful and impor­tant it was for them. One well-traveled Friend went so far as to say the spon­ta­neous wor­ship that occurred halfway through was the deep­est he’s expe­ri­enced in twen­ty years of Quak­erism. The obvi­ous chal­lenge for us hosts is keep­ing our egos secure­ly tamed from all this praise.

The work was­n’t ours. We sim­ply set the stage. My first impulse is to say we helped cre­ate an envi­ron­ment where the Spir­it could break into the event, but that’s not real­ly it. We tried to cre­ate a space where par­tic­i­pants would rec­og­nize when the Spir­it knocked on the door.

Powell House Weekend (Food for Fire par­tic­i­pants.Powell House Weekend (Blog­gers at the work­shop pose for a goofy attacking-one-another photo.

What hap­pened last night felt sim­i­lar to what hap­pened in last Feb­ru­ary’s Pow­ell House Food for the Fire work­shop. While I took notes and jour­naled a lot about it I nev­er gave a fol­lowup blog post. It was pow­er­ful and I need­ed to digest it. Luck­i­ly par­tic­i­pants Rob, Aman­da and Zach and Claire all shared about it or its themes in the weeks afterwards.

I’d like to share some­thing about the assump­tions and prepa­ra­tion that went into these two events. There’s no way to cre­ate a cookie-cutter agen­da to force a deep spir­i­tu­al high. In fact part of what’s need­ed is to move beyond pre­dictabil­i­ty. Both times I’ve had a clear sense that a point came when I was no longer facil­i­tat­ing, where Spir­it was active­ly guid­ing us and par­tic­i­pants were active­ly respond­ing to that process, even elder­ing us past the con­trol of facilitation.

When I came to Pow­ell House I had a work­shop descrip­tion and a keen inter­est in the top­ic. What I did­n’t bring was an agen­da. I’m try­ing to exper­i­ment with not being too pre­pared.* Ear­ly Friends held open meet­ings and while they often bore con­cerns and had themes that fre­quent­ly reoc­curred in their min­istry. Friends today rely very much on mod­els bor­rowed from high­er edu­ca­tion: we have work­shops that expect agen­das, we give talks that expect pre-printed speech­es. These are often the oppor­tu­ni­ties we get for teach­ing min­istries, yet they are very pro­grammed. The chal­lenge is to fig­ure out how to sub­vert them to allow for unpro­grammed surprise.

At Pow­ell House I spent time before each ses­sion walk­ing around the grounds in prayer for guid­ance on what to do next. I had brain­stormed ideas before­hand but my main prepa­ra­tion had been a lot of Quak­er read­ing and prayer in the weeks pre­ceed­ing the event. I want­ed the ses­sions to con­nect to the spir­i­tu­al con­di­tion of the par­tic­i­pants, as indi­vid­u­als and as a group. There were a few moments I thought I was nuts. For exam­ple, walk­ing around before the Pow­ell House Sat­ur­day after­noon ses­sion it seemed like read­ing a chap­ter of Samuel Bow­nas’s Descrip­tion of the Qual­i­fi­ca­tions would be a good idea, but by mid-afternoon I could see the sleepy faces. We did it any­way and faces and spir­it lit up. Peo­ple want­ed to engage with Bow­nas. As it turns out we read all of chap­ter three, “Advice to Min­is­ters in a State of Infan­cy.” It was so cool.

The real inbreak­ing hap­pened a lit­tle lat­er. The group was tired, din­ner was near­ing. I start­ed to rec­om­mend we go into a cir­cle to break up. One Friend inter­rupt­ed, looked at anoth­er across the room and said “you have some­thing to say, don’t you.” The sec­ond Friend said yes, then chal­lenged us that we had­n’t actu­al­ly answered our queries at all. The main ques­tion was still on the table. “What are we called to do?” There was a release. I knew I was not in con­trol of the work­shop any­more. We came into a prayer cir­cle and start­ed to talk about some of this. One Friend said some­thing about nam­ing who it is that call us. A theme came out that it was­n’t enough for us to find some sort of per­son­al sal­va­tion and com­fort in our Quak­er meet­ings: we need­ed to bring all the world into this if it was to be mean­ing­ful. It tru­ly felt like the Holy Spir­it was in the room. It was­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly so com­fort­able and it some­how seemed like not enough, but it point­ed to the work we need­ed to do afterwards.

On Fire! FGC Interest GroupBlog­ging par­tic­i­pants of On Fire! work­shop pose togeth­er. About fifty peo­ple total came out for the Mon­day night inter­est group. Click pho­to for names and links.On Fire! FGC Interest Group
Lots of dis­cus­sions hap­pened at the rise of the worship.blank
The semi-impromptu post-discussion group. (Thanks for FGC’s Emi­ly for tak­ing & post­ing this!)

FGC Gath­er­ing pho­tos on Flickr and Tech­no­rati

Last night, at the FGC inter­est group, some­thing sim­i­lar hap­pened. Robin, Liz and I had planned out the first half of the meet­ing. The most impor­tant piece: com­ing ear­ly to sit in prayer and hold­ing it well past the time the inter­est group was sup­posed to start. The work of Friends needs to be root­ed in wor­ship. We need to be still enough to hear the Holy Spir­it. If the medi­um is the mes­sage, our mes­sage was about the need to not pack our­selves in with agen­das. We start­ed pred­i­cat­bly enough by ask­ing the fifty-or-so par­tic­i­pants to give their names and to name a spir­i­tu­al prac­tice that gives them joy. We asked for space in between speak­ers to keep wor­ship at the fore and we were blessed by a self-faciliating group; Friends did hold the spaces in between.
Then the three of us told our sto­ries of start­ing spiritually-focused blogs and com­ing to find a fel­low­ship that extend­ed beyond our tra­di­tion­al Quak­er branch­es (hence the term “Con­ver­gence of Friends”). I went first and explained that I try­ing to be care­ful not to do this to lift myself up. My sto­ry is sim­ple and like those of many Friends. I was giv­ing tes­ti­mo­ny. The idea of tes­ti­mo­ny rang through­out the evening. Robin’s sto­ry in par­tic­u­lar was very ground­ed and com­ing last it took us into the unpro­grammed agenda-less time we had left free. Friends rose to give tes­ti­mo­ny of oth­er “con­ver­gent” expe­ri­ences, for exam­ple par­tic­pa­tion in the North­west Wom­en’s The­o­log­i­cal Con­fer­ences, events of the West­ern branch of the Chris­t­ian Friends Fellowship.

At some point a woman I did­n’t know stood up with­out being rec­og­nized and she had a pose of sup­pli­ca­tion. My first though, “oh no!” Then I noticed anoth­er Friend, wor­ship­ful in spir­it, who point­ed her to us. She said she was going to sing a song. “Oh no again!” I thought. But this was the facil­i­ta­tion com­ing off our shoul­ders. This was a Friend ris­ing to name what we need­ed and anoth­er Friend point­ing that we need­ed to go this direc­tion. It was like the two Pow­ell House Friends: one rec­og­niz­ing in the oth­er a need to share min­istry and being will­ing to break through “prop­er” group process. At the inter­est group the song was pow­er­ful, it brought us to a place where we could be low and thank­ful. We were now spon­ta­neous­ly in worship.

Liz, Robin and I had planned some clos­ing wor­ship but this was­n’t the time yet. But it was the time and the suceed­ing min­istry was heart­felt and large­ly from the Source.
The only fun­ny aside was that we felt we could­n’t let the group go on past our 8:45 end time, for the sim­ple rea­son that child­care end­ed then and we need­ed to let par­ents go. We men­tioned this around 8:30 but twen­ty min­utes lat­er the wor­ship was con­tin­u­ing. Just then the cell­phone of the Friend giv­ing min­istry went off: it was his daugh­ter call­ing to ask where he was! He turned off the phone but it gave us the excuse to close the meet­ing and invite an extend­ed meet­ing to con­tin­ue out­side. This was won­der­ful as there were a num­ber of oth­er similarly-themed inter­est groups (one on youth min­istries, the oth­er on the World Gath­er­ing of Young Friends) and par­tic­i­pants from all three groups met out­side and con­tin­ued the shar­ing for anoth­er two hours.

Lessons? Sim­ply to ground work­shop events in wor­ship, let the agen­da be emp­ty enough for the Spir­it to inter­vene (hav­ing back­up exer­cis­es just in case it does­n’t is fine!). I don’t think this is a fool­proof method. A lot depends on the par­tic­i­pants and how will­ing they are to share in the facil­i­a­tion and wor­ship. A lot also depends on Friends break­ing into the agen­da, for both times that was what turned the event from a work­shop to a gath­ered meeting.

* For me the dan­ger is a per­son­al style that has long relied on a last-minute mir­a­cles (I was the kind of col­lege stu­dent who read all the mate­r­i­al through the semes­ter but did­n’t actu­al­ly start writ­ing any­thing until the night before an assign­ment was due). I don’t want my the­ol­o­gy to be an excuse for my pro­cras­ti­na­tion and I try to test this regularly.

Related posts

Lots of folks have been talk­ing about the Gath­er­ing and the Mon­day night inter­est group:

I’m sure more reac­tion posts are up there and I’ll link to them as I find them. I sus­pect that in addi­tion to being the biggest group Quak­er blog­ger pho­to to date (sor­ry Gregg!), this will end up being the most blogged about Quak­er event yet, at least till Wess gath­ers West Coast­ers togeth­er next month. I count­ed at least 20 Quak­er blog­gers at the Gathering.