My 9 year old was reading the passage of Jesus’s temptation in the desert found in Matthew 4. I find it such a relatable story. No, no one with pointy ears and a red tail has offered me a kingdom lately, but there are a number of normal human elements nonetheless.

To start with, Jesus is fasting and living without shelter for forty days. I know I become less of the person I want to be when I’m hungry, tired, and stressed. The tempter also proffers a test to see if God cares. That too is familiar: how often do we want something from close family and friends but hold back to see if it’s offered. “Oh, if they really cared I wouldn’t have to remind them.” We do this with God too, confusing changing states of fortune with divine favor rather than welcoming even hard times as a opportunity for growth and understanding.

One of my favorite parts of the Lord’s Prayer is the plea that we not even be led to temptation. There’s a certain humility to that. Jesus might be able to resist the sweet promises of the tempter even when cold and hungry, but I’d rather skip the tests.

It’s hard enough living in this world in a state of humility and cooperation. None of us are perfect, starting with me, and we all certainly have plenty of room to grow. But it’s nice to know that we don’t have to face the tempter alone. God knows just how hard it can be and has our back.

It’s not anti-Christian to say you have doubts about your relationship with Jesus. It’s perfectly human. Most of us would get bogged down in the intellectualism if we tried to map out a precise God/Christ relationship. One thing I’ve always liked about Friends is our radical honesty in this regards. A priest in a strictly orthodox liturgical tradition is expected to preach on topics on which they have no direct divine experience and to base their words on church teachings. When a Friend rises in ministry they are expected to be speak from a moment of direct revelation.

We also have church teachings of course. Robert Barclay is our go-to guy on many theological matters, and certain journals have become all-but-canonized on the way we understand ourselves and our tradition. It’s just that this second-hand knowledge needs to be presented as such and kept out of the actual worship time. As my Quaker journey has progressed, I’ve directly experienced more and more openings that confirm the tenets of traditional Quaker Christianity. That’s built my trust.

I’m now willing to give the benefit of the doubt to beliefs that I haven’t myself experienced. If someone like William Penn says he’s had a direct revelation about a particular issue, I’ll trust his account. I know that in those cases where we had similar openings, our spiritual experiences have matched. I won’t minister about what he’s said. I won’t get defensive about a point of doctrine. I’ll just let myself open to the possibility that even the more intellectually outlandish parts of orthodox Christian doctrine just might be true.

It’s tempting to go to “holy” sites to expect some special revelation. In her post, Jess reports feeling a sense of feeling “bored and indifferent” when visiting the Western Wall and the Garden of Gethsemane. I think this is perfectly normal. There’s the story of the Quaker minister traveling through the American colonies with a local Friend as guide. They come to a crossroads and the local Friend points to tree stump and proudly proclaims that George Fox himself tied his horse to that tree when it was alive. The traveling minister dismounts his horse and walks to the stump. He stands there silently for awhile and walks back to his traveling companion with a sober look. The local is excited and asks him what he saw. The traveling minister replied: I looked into the face of idolatry.

The Holy Spirit is not confined or enshrined in any place–be it the Western Wall, the gilded steepled church or the tree George Fox sat under. Jesus’ death tore the Temple shroud in two and His spirit is with us always, even when it’s hard to feel or see. I think the boredom we experience in “holy” sites or with “holy” people is often  a teaching gift–a guidance to look elsewhere for Spiritual truth.

• Steven Davision: The gospel of Jesus as an economic message

  The good news is that the gospel of Jesus is, at its very heart, an economic message. Jesus defined his role as “the Christ” in specifically economic terms.

  tags: quaker quaker.witness quaker.philadelphia

• Luis Pizarro: Sharing the Good News in Spain

  Our project to create a Quaker Christian worship group in Seville, Spain, has emerged in this complex context.

  tags: quaker quaker.europe quaker.conservative

• Rick Seifert: My Quaker elevator talk

  Quakers realize that most people don’t have a clue about Quakers. What they know often begins and ends with the guy in the funny hat on the oat meal carton.

  tags: quaker quaker.liberal quaker.outreach

• [Western Friend] Quaker Bloggers in the West

  This special issue of Western Friend focuses on lifting up the written ministry of Quaker bloggers in the West!

  tags: quaker quaker.blogs quaker.bayarea quaker.oregon quaker.seattle

• Micah Bales: Preparing for the Harvest

  In both the revivalism of the late 1800s and the New Meetings Movement of the mid-1900s, we see cases in which growth outran the capacity of seasoned ministry, eldership and oversight to care for newly convinced Friends and Meetings. As a result, the tradition was radically, decisively altered in very short periods of time…

  tags: quaker quaker.conservative quaker.liberal quaker.outreach quaker.baltimore quaker.youth

• Ashley W: Jesus and Me

  It was scary, because I knew the answers were not the “right” ones.  But they were real.

  tags: quaker quaker.christianity quaker.oregon quaker.youth

• Emerging Diane looks at a story from Woolman’s Journal

  I think his purpose from the very beginning was more than to tell a confessional story. With this tale, he establishes from the outset a theme that runs throughout the entire journal and pertains to all creation: Once you or I start doing even one evil thing, we create a chain reaction. It’s never just one thing, period.

  tags: quaker quaker.witness

• LizOpp: Taking up the Cross

  Taking up the Cross means choosing to be obedient to the will of God, to be willing to sacrifice at a time when we greatly and intensely don’t wish to.

  tags: quaker quaker.uppermidwest quaker.christianity quaker.conservative

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

The piece speaks for itself but there is one point of context and a few observations to make. The first is that the grassroots culture I was thinking of when I wrote the piece was the “emergent church,” “young evangelical” movement. Thirty years ago the kids I’ve met at “Circle of Hope”, a Philadelphia “emergent church” loosely affiliated with the Brethren could easily have been at a Movement for New Society* training: the culture, the interests, the demographics are all strikingly similar.

(MNS was a national but West Philly-centered network of group houses, publications, and organizing that forged the identities of many of the twenty-somethings who participated; Nonviolence.org is arguably a third-generation descendant of MNS, via New Society Publishers where I worked for six years).

The observation for Friends is that retro-organizing like the relatively-new “Pendle Hill Peace Network” [website URL long since dropped & picked up by spammer] will have a really hard time acting as any sort of outreach project to twenty-somethings (a main goal according to a talk given my monthly meeting by its director). The grassroots peace-centric communities that were thriving when the Network sponsors were in their twenties don’t exist anymore. Rather predictably, the photographs of the next two dozen speakers for the Pendle Hill Peacebuilding Forum series show only one who might be under forty (maybe, and she’s from an exotic locale which is why she gets in). I’m glad that a generation of sixty-something Quaker activists are guaranteed steady employment, but don’t any Quaker institutions think there’s one American activist under forty worth listening to?

I think the best description of this phenomenon comes from the military. They call it “incestuous amplification” and define it as “a condition in warfare where one only listens to those who are already in lockstep agreement, reinforcing set beliefs and creating a situation ripe for miscalculation.” I suspect that peace activists are so worried about their own relevancy that they have a hard time recognizing new peers or changed circumstances.

These numbers and the lack of speaker diversity explain why I rarely even bother with Quaker peace conferences anymore. I wouldn’t mind being overlooked in my peace ministry if I saw other activists my age being recognized. But I can’t take my invisibility as feedback since it’s clearly not about me or my work. The homogeneity of the speakers lists at most conferences sends a clear message that younger people aren’t wanted except as passive audience members clapping for the inspiring fifty- to seventy-somethings on stage. How much of current retro peace organizing is just self-stroking Boomer fantasy?

The in-group incestuousness has created a generation gap of relevancy. When institutions and movements become myopic, they become irrelevant to those locked outside. We have to go elsewhere to build our identities.

The internet is one place to go. From there it’s clear that the institutional projects don’t have the “buzz,” i.e., the support and excitment, that the Gen-X-led projects do. The internet alone won’t save us: there’s only so much culture one can build online and computer-mediated discussions favor argumentation, rationality, and ideological correctness. But it’s one of the few venues open to outsiders without cash or institutional clout.

But what about the content of a twenty-first century twenty-something peace movement?

Many of today’s twenty-something Quakers were raised up as secular peace activists. Our religious education programs often de-emphasize controversial issues of faith and belief to focus on the peace testimony as the unifying Quaker value. Going to protests is literally part of the curriculum of many Young Friends programs. Even more of a problem, older Friends are often afraid to share their faith plainly and fully with younger Friends on a one-on-one basis. The practice of personal and Meeting-based spritual mentorship that once transmitted Friends values between generations is very under-utilized today.

Almost all of these Friends stop participating in Quakerism as they enter their twenties, coming back only occasionally for reunion-type gatherings. Many of these lapsed Friends are out exploring alternative spiritual traditions that more clearly articulate a faith that can give meaning and purpose to social action. I have friends in this lost Quaker generation that are going to Buddhist temples, practicing yoga spirituality, building sweat lodges and joining evangelical or Roman Catholic churches. Will they really be won back with another lecture series? What would happen if we Friends started articulating the deep faith roots of our own peace testimony? What if we started testifying to one another about that great Power that’s taken away occasion for war, what if our testimony became a witness to our faith?

Why are a lot of the more thoughtful under-40s going to alternative churches and what are they hoping to find there?

Don’t get me wrong: I hope these new peace initiatives do well and help to build a thriving twenty-something activist scene again. It’s just that for fifteen years I’ve seen a sucession of projects aimed at twenty-somethings come and go, failing to ignite sustaining interest. I worry that things won’t change until sponsoring organizations seriously start including younger people in the decision-making process from their inception and start recognizing that our focus might be radically different.

Postscript
I share some observations about the different way institutional and outsider Friends use the internet in How Insiders and Seekers Use the Quaker Net.

UPDATE: The Pendle Hill Peace Network was laid down in late 2005. The cited reason was “budgetary constraints,” an empty excuse that sidesteps any responsibility for examining vision, inclusion or implimentation. It’s forum is now an advertising stage for “free mature porn pics.” It’s very sad and there’s no joy in saying “I told you so.”

UPDATE: After twelve years I laid down Nonviolence.org and sold the domain. I never received any real support from Friends.

Since you’re reading this on a computer, let’s start with numbers. Computers don’t recognize the millennium, since they don’t count in tens. The whole existence of the millennium is a trick of our base-ten digital numbering system Our computers more naturally think in binary code-base two rather than ten-or in hexadecimal base sixteen. In hexadecimal, two years from now will be the year “7d0.” In binary, or base two, it’s a hideous mix of ones and zeros that don’t look at al special. But humans have ten fingers and ten toes, so we count in tens, and when you count that way two years from now has a lot of zeros in it’s name.

Well, it does if you’re a Christian. A second assumption is that the latest epoch of human history started with the birth of Jesus of Nazareth in the manger. Most of the world’s people don’t agree with that, using other dates to begin their calendars (for example the Muslim calendar starts with Mohammed’s flight from Mecca). Making matters even more confusing is that early calendar makers mis-counted: Jesus was born a couple of years earlier than they thought which means we’ve already past the millennium mark.

Still, it’s not enough to merely point out the inconsistencies of the millennium-minded peace-makers. What is the draw of this sort of marker? Is it the chance to live in some special age? War often provides this sort of marker-our conceptions of history often use wars as reference points, bringing “antebellum” and “post-war” to our descriptions. Wars re-orient society and it’s basic structures, creating changes in everyone’s lives and giving societies a shared sense of living in history.

Could the millennium mean something if we all just agree that it means something? It’s hokey to think peace could come because the calendar flips, but if enough people believe it, things really could change. The nonviolence movement has been quite fractured in recent years, to the point where one has to really argue whether there is a “movement.” What kind of event could we coalesce around to create fundamental social change? What are we waiting for? What kind of society do we envision and when are we going to come together to work on it?

Big questions, I know. The millennium won’t answer them, I also know. And I don’t think the millennium is really the event I want. But the urge to commemorate a non-war event and use it to bring world peace is a strong one. If we could understand why so many want peace and change to come in 2000, then we could perhaps figure out how to work across our easy answers and bring about a real and lasting peace.