The new issue of Friends Journal is up. I wrote the Among Friends intro this month, waxing lyrically on the “sonic landscape” of my meeting in August:

The sounds of our August silence are far from pure. Although the calls of red-shouldered hawks can be a bit harsh, hearing them reminds me that a family shares the trees of our burial ground. The crunch of the gravel in the driveway reassures me that one of our perpetual late-comers is about to join our fellowship. Not all the sounds are natural, of course. Once or twice in the hour someone will redline a motorcycle on the street outside, the whiny revs and gear changes drifting over to bounce inside our worship space. I usually try to tune out this sound, but sometimes I smile instead, knowing that someone is having fun on a hot summer day. I say a little prayer for their safety and wish them well.

I’ve also recorded a new episode of my author video podcast with John Helding, who wrote How Can I Keep from Singing? The Marvelous Mystery of Worship-Fluid Meetings. He tells a great story of going from a very died-in-the wool unprogrammed meeting to Lopez Island Worship Group (now full Quaker meeting) that scheduled monthly singing worship and worship sharing. I think I’m always going to prefer the model of sitting down quietly and waiting for the Holy Spirit but I do appreciate that it’s hard to build up a meeting culture that invites ministry. I’m happy that the worship sharing at Lopez Island helped uncork nascent ministry in the standard, open worship.

As I wrote a few years ago, I think ministry should be an expected miracle and not have quite so high a bar that people are intimidated from speaking. It takes practice to know when ministry is Spirit-led and maybe part of that practice is not always getting it right. I know some meetings face the opposite problem: ministry that is perhaps too frequent and too headstrong and inappropriate. But a Friends Meeting is a bit like a choir in that it is always needing creative renegotiation to find the sweet harmony. We are a chosen family that just shows up every week, with people experienced and new working and learning how to hold the body together.

Full show notes for my interview can be found here.

I talked with Peterson Toscano about his fiction piece in the November issue of Friends Journal and we segued into all sorts of byways into how fiction can show us parts of spiritual lives that straight-ahead essays can’t.

One of the roles of faith is to remember that we’ve been here before. We’ve been the wandering Jews lost in the desert but fed manna to survive. We remember the disciples taken by surprise by the rush of Roman guards come to arrest our Messiah, who urged us to put away our swords. We tell stories of a young George Fox wandering England looking for spiritual teachers until all his “hopes in them and in all men were gone.” We survive by telling stories. We keep ourselves centered and calm by remembering others who found a path through uncertainty and assured us they were held up by a Comforter.

Just a moment…

www.friendsjournal.org

I am going to make a bold apology for a clarified liberal Quaker identity that retains its roots and recovers worship in the spirit of Christ, but yet releases us from the orthodox Christian preoccupations that no longer speak to so many unprogrammed Friends.

Are Quakers Christian?

I thought I had wandered into a group of people who actually believed that God was able to speak directly to them. I remember saying, “Oh my God, this is Pentecost!” I couldn’t believe that these people think God is actually glllllloing to speak to them! I’m down for this. This is where I belong.

Most of the Quakers reading this can probably guess where this is going–she pretty quickly got a lesson in the unwritten norms against exuberance at many Quaker meetings, the rules that prevent many expressions of worship. Ayesha’s Black and many of the strictures on behavior are pretty middle-class white. But a lot of this isn’t really about race. I’ve been led to do some very non-ordinary things at uptight Quaker meetings and feeling incredibly self-conscious over it. When I came to Friends, I loved the idea of the radical spontenaeity of our worship (anyone can minister anytime!) and the life it called us to but in practice we often are creatures of habit, to our detriment. I love Ayesha’s talk of “experimenting with freedom” and the “liberty of the spirit.” I realize my stories of non-ordinariness are all over a decade old. I wish I felt more of that liberty again.

http://quakerspeak.com/how-does-culture-influence-quaker-worship/

If you look back through Friends Journal archives, you’ll find warnings against competitive behavior. In 1955 Bess B. Lane of Swarthmore (Pa.) Meeting wrote that schools should “Place emphasis on cooperation, sharing, rather than on competition” and wondered if “competition is being overstressed in our schools.” In 1972, Christopher H. Anderson, then a senior at Wilmington College, had stronger words. He contrasted his Quaker education with public schools, which he said “breed a social conformity, an intellectual blandness and a repugnant spirit of competition.”

If you know anyone who is interested in the topic, please forward this along!

Just a moment…

www.friendsjournal.org

I think about the people I’ve cared about who have needed to talk to themselves and make noises. Who need to pace and say things we don’t understand. Spirit is moving through them, in this incarnational way. Reminding them they still have bodies that can make noises, that they still can breath words into being.

http://www.meetinghouse.xyz/everything/2018/12/31/where-do-we-hear-gods-voice