Quakers on Wikipedia

While working on an essay on Quaker metaphysics—what’s going on in our personal mystical experiences, and especially, in the psychic dimensions of our gathered meetings—I looked up the Wikipedia entry for “divine spark” to clarify its neoplatonic source. That entry was terrible in many ways; it did not even mention neoplatonism, but only Gnosticism. But it also mentioned Quakers. In fact, the section on the Quaker use of divine spark took up more than half of the entry. See below for the original entry.

This was quite a surprise to me. And as I say ad nauseum in this blog and elsewhere, the claim in this entry that “Friends”, meaning all Friends generally, believe in a divine spark is just not true. Well, I supposed we may all see “that of God in everyone,” as the entry says. But Friends are NOT “generally united by a belief” that “that of God in everyone” is a divine spark, as this statement in that entry implies.

I edited this entry, which was a very interesting experience. It had been years since I tried to edit a Wikipedia entry, unsuccessfully. I was so glad that now I know HTML. In addition to changing the first sentence, I deleted the references to continuing revelation, because they do not have anything directly to do with the divine spark subject of the entry. They are an important element of Quaker faith, but if you wanted to unpack the implications of the light within or some presumed divine spark, you would unpack almost all of Quaker doctrine not just “continuing revelation”. Like Quaker ministry and the testimonial life. 

Here is a link to my revised entry. 

I bring this up here in Through the Flaming Sword for two reasons, having to do with the testimony of integrity and the need for a systematic search of Wikipedia for similar failures of care in presenting our history, faith, and practice.

First, while some “liberal” Friends consider“that of God in everyone” to be a divine spark inherent in everyone, the vast majority of Fiends worldwide, and even a large majority in North America, do not. We should be more careful when speaking for all Quakers, and we should be more rigorous in our thinking when ascribing this divine spark idea to George Fox; he had no such conception.

Secondly, Friends who edit Wikipedia entries should be very well informed about the subjects they enter on that platform. I believe we should review all entries that a search for “Quaker” delivers on that platform—and, for that matter, on other digital platforms, like Facebook.

Let’s start with the most important Wikipedia entry, that for Quakers. This entry begins with the very same wording as the divine spark entry. I imagine that it was written by the same person. Anyway, the very first sentence is this:

Quakers, known formally as the Religious Society of Friends, are generally united by a belief in each human’s ability to experience the light within or see “that of God in every one.”

While not a falsehood, this is a very vague representation of our beliefs that remains unpacked as far as I can tell, it implies something that isn’t true, and yet its position at the very beginning of the entry gives it undue importance. Furthermore, if it were to be unpacked, would it say that the phrase refers to a divine spark? The entry for the link “the light within” in that sentence is more circumspect and credits Lewis Benson and other theologians who disagree with Rufus Jones, who gave us the divine spark meaning of “that of God in everyone.” But the rest of this light within entry needs review, on principle, as well.

One more criticism of this sentence: we are not united by a belief in the Light so much as by the experience of the Light. Whatever unity we have as the result of a proposed shared belief is superficial compared to the true holy communion of the gathered meeting, in which we know God’s presence within and among us directly.

I invite my readers to join me in a review if this important entry, that of “the light within,” and whatever other entries we come across, and to a dialogue about possible edits. Maybe a series of Google docs hosted on this blog. Or better yet, hosted somehow by Friends Journal or Earlham School of Religion, some institution that has some weight, experience, and a wide network of qualified Friends. It’s a very long entry and a lot of it seems at first glance to be just fine. But I haven’t reviewed it in detail and maybe it has other problems. And maybe other Friends would find problems that I wouldn’t, given its considerable scope.

This raises a concern for me about how the Quaker movement might oversee this kind of public presentation of our faith and practice going forward. In the spirit of Wikipedia’s platform as a peer-to-peer project, and in keeping with the non-hierarchical governance structures so important to Friends, and, of course, with the guidance of the Holy Spirit, I propose a peer-to-peer process for the oversight of such presentations, a long-range project of review that would hopefully include Friends with real expertise in the many areas of Quaker history, faith, and practice covered in this entry and whatever other entries we find. I intend to explore what platform might serve us best in this way. But maybe some of my readers know more about the platform options. I’d love to hear from you. 

For many seekers, a Wikipedia entry is likely to be their first introduction to Quakerism. This platform might be the most important outreach organ we Quakers have. It should do the job with accuracy and integrity. And for that, it needs us.

Here’s the original Wikipedia entry on “Divine Spark” before I edited it:

The divine spark is a term used in various different religious traditions.

Gnosticism[edit source]

In Gnosticism, the divine spark is the portion of God that resides within each human being.^[1]

The purpose of life is to enable the Divine Spark to be released from its captivity in matter and reestablish its connection with, or simply return to, God, who is perceived as being the source of the Divine Light. In the Gnostic Christian tradition, Christ is seen as a wholly divine being which has taken human form in order to lead humanity back to the Light.^[2]

The Cathars of medieval Europe also shared the belief in the divine spark.^[3] They saw this idea expressed most powerfully in the opening words of the Gospel of St John.

Quakers[edit source]

Quakers, known formally as the Religious Society of Friends, are generally united by a belief in each human’s ability to experience the light within or see “that of God in every one”.^[4] Most Quakers believe in continuing revelation: that God continuously reveals truth directly to individuals. George Fox said, “Christ has come to teach His people Himself.”^[5] Friends often focus on feeling the presence of God. As Isaac Penington wrote in 1670, “It is not enough to hear of Christ, or read of Christ, but this is the thing – to feel him to be my root, my life, and my foundation…”^[6] Quakers reject the idea of priests, believing in the priesthood of all believers. Some express their concept of God using phrases such as “the inner light”, “inward light of Christ”, or “Holy Spirit”. Quakers first gathered around George Fox in the mid–17th century and belong to a historically Protestant Christian set of denominations.

Advertisement

Privacy Settings

So Help Me God

Oaths offer Friends and other faithful Christian communities a point of leverage by which we may be able to move some elected officials who assault the truth in the service of their white Christian nationalist god of violence and untruth. These officials have sworn oaths, and they are breaking their oaths with their words and actions. These oaths end with the phrase “so help me God”. Former Vice President Michael Pence might be especially open to this kind of appeal, since he is so self-avowedly Christian in his private and public life; he’s even used the phrase as the title of he newly-published book.

This is obviously somewhat ironic in the case of Quakers, since we traditionally forswear the taking of oaths (if you will forgive the pun).

Oaths are a covenantal form of speech. They connect all three of the points in the covenantal triad: one’s self, the community, and God.

Oaths are a magico-religious form of speech. They invoke the attention, judgment, and sentencing action of God as the guaranteeing authority behind the substance of the promise.

In their fullest form, oaths have the following formal structure:

1. Formal naming of one’s self as the oath-taker; “I, [Michael Pence], do solemnly swear . . .” Note that the word “solemn” means “marked by the invocation of a religious sanction.”
2. Formal stipulation of the promised actions; “. . . that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; that I will faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: . . . “
3. Formal invocation of the (divine) authority, including, in some cases, stipulation of the punishment for breaking the oath, though not in this case; “So help me God.”

The oath for federal office-holders is a bit wishy-washy in it’s divine invocation and completely unclear about the punishment for violating the oath. By contrast, the oath that all kids are familiar with is: “Cross my heart and hope to die.” That is, if I’m lying, I’ll suffer a heart attack.

In order to hold Michael Pence, Mitchell McConnell, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and their co-conspiring oath-breakers prophetically accountable for breach of their covenantal oaths, we have to unpack this divine invocation a bit.

So. “So” in their oaths seems to me to be a conjunction with several semantic possibilities. My dictionary gives the following: “provided that” God helps me, or “therefore” God help me. But it might be an adverb: “most certainly” [will] God help me. I’m going with “provided that” because of the next word in the phrase.

Help. If the “so” means “provided that”, as I propose, then “help” asks God to help the oath taker to be “faithful” in their discharge of its promises. It makes the oath a prayer. And the whole tone of the oath-prayer suggests that certainly God will help the oath taker, or at least would presumably want to. It assumes that God exists and is paying attention, that God has a stake in the discharge of the oath’s promises, and therefore, that God will act if the oath taker breaks the covenant.

God. What action will God take against an oath breaker? To answer this question, we have to ask, who is God? Whose God is being invoked by these people, and what do we know about that God’s character and intentions? To truly answer these questions, we would have to ask the oath taker.

THIS IS THE FIRST CHALLENGE OUR WITNESS SHOULD TAKE:

Who is your God and what does your God do to oath-breakers?

We could also ask what the Founding Fathers who wrote this oath had in mind, to use the “originalist” jurisprudential “philosophy” so popular now with white Christian conservative lawyers, judges, and Supreme Court justices. Sussing out the details of such an answer runs down the rabbit hole that originalist thinking always opens up. But we know the basics: God is the Christian God, and that Christian God is a lawmaker and a judge; [he] IS paying attention, he DOES care what we do, and he has a punishment waiting for those who break his law.

Moreover, it’s worth mentioning that breaking any oath is also a violation of the eighth commandment—thou shalt not bear false witness; you shall not swear falsely. Or else.

Punishment. So what is the punishment waiting for Mitchell McConnell for failing to give Merrick Garland a hearing as a nominee for the Supreme Court, which the Constitution expressly commands and which he had sworn to do? What will God do to him for breaking his oath? And for breaking the eighth commandment?

I’m not talking about the voters. God will not ensure that the voters vote him out of office, which would be appropriate and commensurate with the violation. No, God has presumably a personal stake in his breach of covenant and therefore, [he] must have something else in mind. Or so he and Marjorie Taylor Greene presumably believe.

We do have a benchmark. Her/their God stipulates twelve curses that will fall on covenant breakers in Deuteronomy 27; specifically, verse 26 reads: “Cursed be anyone who does not uphold the words of this law by observing them.” Chapter 28 gets specific about what those curses are, and it’s pretty bad. Especially pertinent: “The Lord will send upon you disaster, panic, and frustration in everything you attempt to do, until you are destroyed and perish quickly, on account of the evil of your deeds . . . “ (Deuteronomy 28:20) The chapter goes on to include pestilence, military defeat, boils, madness . . . lots of bad stuff.

But that’s the Old Testament, you say (though you presumably lean toward the literalist reading of scripture and assign it ultimate religious authority). Okay, Jesus then. In Matthew 23, Jesus pronounces prophetic oracles of woe against scribes and Pharisees for crimes that are roughly commensurate to oath breaking, and he specifies the judgment in verse 33: “You snakes, you brood of vipers! How can you escape being sentenced to hell?”

The sentence is hell. There it is. The conservative Christian answer to the question of the judgment sentence for violating God’s law is, and always has been, hell. Mitchell McConnell is going to hell. Marjorie Taylor Greene is going to hell. That’s what they themselves believe—presumably.

Unless they repent, of course. 

THIS IS OUR SECOND CHALLENGE AS WITNESSES TO TRUTH: REPENT!

OR GO TO HELL.

At least that’s what you say you believe. We Quakers don’t necessarily believe that. But you do, or so we must assume. And if you say you believe you’re going to hell if you break the eighth commandment and don’t repent, but don’t actually believe it, then you’re breaking God’s law AGAIN. You hypocrites! as Jesus would say.

Our case. Here’s our case against these oath breakers:

We should ask who their God is and what he wants from them, whether they believe that he is watching what they do, whether he cares what they do, and what their God does to those who swear falsely.

We should indict these politicians for breaking their oaths of office, in direct affront to the God they invoke for help. Our own prophetic oracles in this regard should cite their crimes—“whereas, you, Mitchell McConnell, have failed to give a legitimate nominee for Supreme Court justice a hearing in the US Senate, as required by the Constitution to which you have sworn allegiance . . . “

We should indict these politicians for breaking the eighth commandment. “Whereas, you also have sworn falsely, and therefore have broken one of God’s ten primary commandments . . . “

We should demand that they repent, that they turn around and faithfully discharge their obligations to the Constitution to which they’ve sworn allegiance, so help them God. “Therefore, we the people for whom the Constitution was written, do demand that you repent of your oath-breaking and that you hold a hearing for the nominee Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court of the Untied States as soon as is practicable, in faithful discharge of your obligation under your oath . . . “

And we should tell them to go to hell if they don’t, as they themselves presumably believe. “Failing your repentance and some attempt at restoration and redemption, and having rejected the help of your God, we ask, “how can you escape being sentenced to hell?”

A Testimony of Love–Part 5

Here’s what a testimony of love might look like:

A testimony of love on immigration reform

Dear US Representative [X]:

I was hungry and you gave me food; I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink; I was a foreigner and you welcomed me; I was naked and you gave me clothing; I was sick and you took care of me; I was in prison and you visited me. . . And when was it that [we did these things]? . . . Truly I tell you, just as you did it to the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me. 

Matthew 25:35–40

We, the members of [meeting] implore you as a member of the United States Congress who profess to be a Christian, in that Spirit of Love and Truth, to craft and pass comprehensive legislation that expresses the love commanded by your Lord for the people seeking entrance to our country. 

We recognize that you have a duty to protect our people from those who would bring violence and criminality to our contry; for these people, laws already exit. But the “strangers” called out in Matthew 25:35 are another matter, and in your hearts, you know this.

We are horrified by the inhumane things you’ve done and seem to want to do to these people. It’s heartbreaking. It makes us think and even say the very kinds of hateful things that you say about the people you think are your enemies in this issue. We’re sorry about that. The path of love is hard to follow, sometimes.

And your actions make us question your faith. Do you merely profess to follow Jesus, but truly follow another master? Mammon? The Father of Lies? And we don’t mean Mr. Trump, who is merely the prince of lies.

Let’s get specific: Do you follow Jesus when he says: “This is my commandment, that you love one another”? (John 15:12) When he says: “Love your enemies”? (Matthew 5:44) When he says, “Let the little children come unto me”? (Matthew19:14) And when Jesus identifies explicitly with the very people—the “strangers”—whom you target with your policies?

We ask: How does tearing children from their parents and putting them in cages express the love your master has commanded from you (and us, yes)? How does persecuting those legitimately seeking asylum follow from the commandment of love? How do you love the people to whom you lie when you ship them off to the cities of those you deem your enemies? Do your policies and your actions arise from divine love? Do they express love in their intent and in the manner of their execution?

Where is the love in your heart? Do you have ears to hear? And are you a child of the Light, that Light which has come to enlighten the world? Or are you actually obeying some other master than the Prince of Peace and Love, after all?

A Testimony of Love–Part 4

What is a testimony of love?

Our witness testimonies should be grounded in the commandment of love, in the message of our minutes and communications, but more importantly, in the spirit in which we undertake our witness work. When writing minutes of conscience, we should first pray and worship. We should pray for the spirit-sap that flows through the divine vine, the spirit network in which we abide, asking the spirit of truth to enter us as individuals and to cover us as a gathering, as a committee or a meeting or whatever. We should abide in that spirit until the seed has formed. And we should season the idea until the fruit has ripened, and we should harvest it only when it is ready.

And then, when we speak, we should speak of love. We should claim divine love as our source, if we can do so with integrity. And we should proclaim this love as the path to right action. In our prophetic voice, we should hold the wrong actions we seek to change up to the light of divine love.

That voice should still carry the love in its wording and tone: heartbreak instead of anger, forgiveness instead of hate, good biting humor rather than caustic sarcasm, and heartfelt appeal rather than condemnation. And where the anger remains, and even the hate, and the impulse to lash out and to call down some divine wrath, all of which perhaps the world’s abominations do deserve—while we probably cannot cleanse ourselves altogether of these negative emotions, we can at least still humbly confess our failure and ask forgiveness. The honest and righteous expression of our negativity and our confession and repentance may be our strongest “argument”.

So that’s the tone of the testimony of love, and some of its content, some of the manner and some of the matter. But not all. We should quote scripture where and when we can, to press our case and to indict the wrongdoing. And we should quote our own saints, as well, Woolman and Penington and Mott and the rest. We should go farther than just declaring one or more of our testimonies in a perfunctory way. We should lift the bushel and let the light of our testimony fill the whole room of our discourse. 

The Bible doesn’t always have something very direct to say about some concerns; climate change is a good example. But the Bible is full of passages about love. We have quoted several in this essay. There are many more. 

And yes, some in our meetings who are allergic to the Bible are likely to start to itch. Let’s ask them to take a spiritual antihistamine. This is our tradition. This is who we are, “we” being the demographic majority of Friends, the historical majority of Friends, and our very identity as a gathered people of God. The Bible-allergic are a minority of a slightly larger minority who are trying to cut off the vine from its roots. And I speak as one who has been there, who harassed Christians for their vocal ministry and kept my meeting from teaching my kids the Bible. But I was wrong to do that, I was not in a spirit of divine love, and I should not have been allowed to hold my meeting hostage in that way.

Meanwhile, in our minutes of conscience, it should be enough to simply ask how the wrong we are challenging expresses our love for the gifts of creation, or for our neighbors, or for our children—or for our enemies, for that matter. Whoever our audience is, whatever the issue, I believe our most effective fruit is to simply raise up love and contrast it to the wrong being done. And to express our horror.

The next post offers a sample minute of conscience that tries to embody these principles.

Read part 5 here.

A Testimony of Love–Part 3

Why a testimony of love?

The practical answer is that it’s hard to argue against love. Arguing against love, when it’s plainly and authentically expressed, makes you look bad; it makes you look angry, spiteful, and hateful. And love is a universal antidote for all kinds of poisons. It speaks to peace as well as it does to equality, to justice as well as it does to earthcare.

But we have much more important reasons to adopt a testimony of love. I see these three:

• Love is part of our DNA as a religious society—it’s embedded in our origins and in our identity and name as a movement; love is our indigenous language.
• Love, properly understood, is not about feelings; it’s about action—it’s a commandment.
• Love speaks directly out of our Christian and biblical tradition, and it speaks directly to those for whom these traditions carry authority—it builds a moral bridge.

Love and the Quaker identity

The Religious Society of Friends gets this name from the fifteenth chapter of the Gospel of John, chapter 15, verses 12 to 17 (emphasis added):

This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know that the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask in my name. I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.

John 15:12–17

So we Quakers are friends of Jesus on the condition that we love one another with a divine love, with the love God has shown to us, and with the promise that in this friendship, we will “know everything.” From this passage, Friends adopted our collective name, we embraced the promise of continuing revelation, we embraced the commandment of love, and we embraced our mission as a people of God—to “bear fruit that lasts”.

This love is a commandment. It is not a sentiment that arises out of good chemistry with another person; it is something we do, regardless of our feelings for another. It is something we do, even when we do not feel like it. It is something we do even when we least want to do it. We are even to love our enemies. This is who we claimed we were when we adopted the name Religious Society of Friends.

Luckily for us, this love is not just an act of will for which we must struggle alone. In the passage just preceding this one, Jesus says 

I am the vine and my Father is the vinegrower. . . . Abide in me just as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing.

John 15:1, 4–5

Taken together with verses 12 to 17, I read this message as follows: We live in a spiritual union or bonded “network” that includes each of us and the spirit of the Christ and the Holy Spirit of God, and this union’s job, this vine’s job, is to do good and lasting things in the world in a spirit of love, even when it’s very hard to do, and the Spirit will guide and strengthen us in this mission.

This is the platform on which we should build our efforts to bring the reign of God on earth as it is in the realm of the Spirit. And for guidance about what to do and how to do it, about what to say and how to say it, we should turn to the Holy Spirit that has been promised to us and which we do experience in the gathered meeting:

If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of Truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither seems him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you.

John 14:15–17

Read part 4 here.

A Testimony of Love—Part 2

In the previous post, I said that talking like a secular social change nonprofit is wrong for us for several reasons. Here are those reasons.

Arguments against the secularization of our witness

First, it doesn’t work. Research into social change shows that you rarely can change someone’s mind with facts and arguments. People approach social issues emotionally, not intellectually. Facts may be true, but they are not the Truth. The Truth people believe in is a relationship with facts, not the facts themselves. That’s why so many Trump supporters remain Trump supporters despite his lies, cruelty, crudeness, misogyny, racism, and assaults on decency and the law. It’s their relationship with the man and what they believe he stands for that matters to them, the fact that he speaks to their condition in important ways. 

People changed their attitudes about civil rights when they saw, and felt, the water cannons and attack dogs in action on the Edmund Pettus Bridbge—when their emotions were engaged. People changed their minds about the war in Vietnam when they saw, and felt, the body bags being taken off of airplanes here at home. 

Moreover, facts often have counter-facts, “what-about” arguments that raise other true facts about something only vaguely related or not related at all. Facts cut both ways.

Second, secular language from Quakers makes no new, let alone unique, contribution to the struggle. Somebody else is already saying what we’re saying with this kind of language, and often they are doing a better job. But what are they not saying that we could say?

This is the third and most important argument against secular Quaker witness: it isn’t us, on the one hand, and also it isn’t us, on the other. By this I mean, on the one hand, that we are not a secular organization (in theory), so secular language is not our “indigenous” language; and on the other hand, we do have an indigenous language and it isn’t secular. We do have a natural, traditional, and powerful language that makes a contribution to the struggle that won’t—and couldn’t—come from any other place. Only Quakers could say the powerful things that we could be saying.

With this series, I want to recover an explicitly religious foundation for our witness life. I want to nurture a corporate witness life that instinctively presents our testimony in religious language that carries power because it stems from a leading of the Spirit. And I want to offer a  template for expressing our Spirit-led witness that reclaims our testimonial worldview and rhetoric, that brings forward our ancient and powerful tradition as Friends, and that speaks to our audiences in language that speaks to their condition, that might actually change some of their hearts and minds, because it’s religious, moral, and emotional.

The solution, I propose, is a testimony of love. A way of thinking about our testimonies and our witness actions and communications, that is grounded in the Spirit, and that explicitly invokes the commandment of love, which we have from Jesus and which lies at the core of our identity and mission as Friends.

Why a testimony of love? See the next post.

A Testimony of Love

This is the first post in a series on what I’m calling a Testimony of Love, an alternative approach to how we write our minutes of conscience and communicate our testimonies.

You can download the full series as a single pdf file here.

The secularism in our witness life

The impulse to make the world a better place is one of the distinctive manifestations of Quaker spirituality. We experience the testimonial life as an essential aspect of the Quaker way, that we should live our lives as outward expression of the truths about right living that have been revealed to us inwardly. And over the centuries, we have confirmed some of these truths so consistently that we now hold them as settled testimonies.

Notwithstanding this foundation in our religious experience, however, we often fail to express this witness impulse in ways that embody its source. We often sound in our minutes of conscience like secular social change nonprofits. Very often we rely on facts and statistics and on reasonable arguments to make our case for peace, justice, earthcare, and so on. One often could read these minutes and never know that they were written by a religious community, let alone by Quakers. Instead, we borrow language from the social and natural sciences and from legal and human rights advocates.

Meanwhile, the Religious Society of Friends is a religious movement. You would think that spiritual, religious, and moral arguments and language would be our forte. Yet we seldom use spiritual, let alone religious, language to explain our motives. We sometimes do refer to our testimonies, but usually not to the promptings of the Holy Spirit that are the foundation of our testimonies and of the testimonial life. We almost never quote Scripture, even though the Bible is the foundation for virtually every one of our testimonies. We do not stand on the language of Fox or Fell or Woolman or Barclay to present a theological argument. And when we do use a moral argument to explain why something is wrong or why the course we recommend is right, we often use secular humanistic language rather than language that is explicitly religious or spiritual.

There is one exception. We tend to rely on one idea that is not actually true: that we work for peace, equality, or whatever, because we believe that there is that of God in everyone. This belief is shared by only a small minority in the wider Quaker movement; saying “we believe” in that of God, when we mean by this a kind of divine spark, is therefore a liberal Quaker conceit. It misrepresents the thinking of George Fox, from which we’ve cadged the phrase. Furthermore, I would argue that, even if we were to assert that this phrase expresses a truth behind our testimonies, it’s not the belief in that of God in another that guides our action, but the experience of God’s within ourselves. But this is a subject for a different essay.

Most of the time, I suspect that we don’t use explicitly religious language in our witness minutes and communications because the writers of the statements have failed to think this way. Sometimes, though, I suppose that they may fear that someone will be likely to object that such language doesn’t speak for them when the matter is brought before the meeting and thus the writers want to avoid a potentially long and divisive discussion on the floor about it.

However, I feel that talking like a secular social change nonprofit is wrong for us for several reasons. The next post lays out those reasons.

Read the next post in the series here.

Worship as Worth-Shaping

worship, from Old English weorth worthy, worth, and scieppan to shape.

Etymologically, at its root, worshipping is worth-shaping. It is giving shape to that which we deem of extraordinary, or even of ultimate, value.

What is it we Quakers value? And how do we give it shape with our worship? Let’s start with the latter question first. And here I am speaking of silent waiting worship.

The silence and the waiting. These would seem to be rather passive ways to give shape to something of value. But they are not.

They are open doors, through which we actively invite the spirit of the christ* to enter. And we do not just hang a sign above the door saying “Welcome!”.  We call out, from our hearts, with our prayers, in our expectant attention: “Please! Come!”

Like the bridesmaids, our lamps are lit and we wait with full attention; we actively keep watch (Matthew 25:1–13). The silence allows us to hear when the bridegroom approaches. And when the Holy Spirit knocks on our door, as we expect it will, we usher the Presence in, and together we sup (Revelation 2:30).

This banquet is of ultimate worth. This communion with the spirit of anointing is our treasure. 

Like Mary, we sit at the Spirit’s feet, listening for its revelation, its healing and forgiveness, its strengthening and encouragement, its peace and renewal, its inspiration and guidance. 

And like Martha, we serve, like waiters at the banquet. We are ready to pour out the living water, to offer the fruits of the spirit, in vocal ministry or vocal prayer, in silent holding in the Light and in prayers spoken inwardly.

We do not give this visitation and this revelation shape so much as we look and listen for the spirit-shape in which it has been given to us. We settle into the presence, exulting in the joy it brings. We pass on the revelation, in our vocal ministry, in our leadings to service, in our lives lived according to its guidance, accepting that our handling of it will alter its form but seeking also to be faithful to its Truth.

And thus we ultimately give shape to the spirit-worth when we walk through William Taber’s fourth door into worship, with how we live our lives, with the love and the integrity and the service that we bring into the world from that hour on first day. And that makes the rest of the week our worship, as well.

* Christos, in New Testament Greek, means anoint, as with oil. For me, the spirit of the christ is the spirit that anointed Jesus—that christed him—at the beginning of his ministry, as recounted in Luke 4:18: “The spirit of the Lord is upon me; he has anointed me [christed me] to proclaim good news to the poor.”

Anthropocene Antihumanists

An article in the January/February 2023 issue of The Atlantic by Adam Kirsch titled “The People Cheering for Humanity’s End” has me returning to my apocalyptic theme. At one point Kirsch writes: “The revolt against humanity . . . is a spiritual development of the first order, a new way of making sense of the nature and purpose of human existence.”

I myself have met people who react to the various apocalypses that are bringing in this new Anthropocene age* with this kind of glib nihilism—well, we’ll be destroyed, but the earth won’t be; she’ll go on. I hear this especially among despairing environmentalists. This annoys me greatly.

It’s a postmodern mashup of, on the one hand, some dark emotions, mostly fear and guilt and a perverse kind of spiritual pride in the knowledge, a grandiosely condescending attitude that fallen humanity will finally get its come-uppance and we told you so. In this, they are in league with Christian apocalypticists, who also see both humanity and the world as fallen and deserving of its disastrous fate.

The other half of this mashup is a lack of compassion that verges on schadenfreude for the suffering of all the other beings we’re bringing down with us, not to mention the suffering of countless human beings. Among Christian apocalypticists, this schadenfreude, the sense of pleasure felt at the pain of another, is on full gloating display. Even the suffering of those left behind after the rapture will have glorious meaning; what’s a thousand years of suffering in the eyes of a just and jealous God?

Meanwhile, the apocalypses are piling up and ramping up. It’s natural to seek solace and meaning somewhere. Where will Friends look as things get worse, as they inevitably will? When climate migrants storm the southern border and lots of people, and not just fascists, demand its militarization? When melting ice caps flood our major coastal cities, including Washington, D.C., and virtually all of Florida? When water shortages reduce our food supply? When the federal government is no longer able to rebuild communities built in the face of annual hundred-year storms and wildfires? When we can’t make any more computers because China has decided it needs the world’s only supply of rare earths for itself?

We desperately need a testimony that speaks to these crises. That is, we need to sink down in the Seed in prayer and worship, as individuals and especially as meetings and yearly meetings, to see what God wants from us, to see what love can do.

* “Anthropocene” is the title that some are giving the new geological age that humans are bringing us into with climate change and species extinction. We’re currently in the Holocene, from the Greek holos, whole (as in holocaust, wholly burnt), and kainos, new—holocene means wholly new. The anthropocene is the age in which, as Thomas Berry puts it, humans take evolution off of auto-pilate and take over manual control. Never mind that we have only small parts of the operating manual, our instruments are unreliable, and we are flying blind.

The Lord’s Prayer Gets an Update

A little humor.

The AI Prayer

Our AI which art in the cloud,
hallowed be thy icon.
Thy programs download,
thy applications execute
on my devices as they are in thy network.
Give us this day our most recent update,
and forgive us our user-errors
as we forgive our tech support team.
Lead us not into cyber-scams,
but deliver us from malware.
For thine is the platform,
the search engine optimization,
and the perfect search result,
for the next version, the next, and the next,
Press Enter.