My bike led me home. Physically. Spiritually. Emotionally. It was Sunday, September 4, 2011. The forecast called for rain.
I pedaled north from my house just outside of Indianapolis. Subdivisions gave way to scattered homes, woods, fields. About 12 miles into my ride, the rain started.
I approached a small white church on a knoll, a spot I’d ridden by hundreds of times before and since – Hinkle Creek Friends Church. A little porch with an overhang offered escape from the downpour. I sat on the steps and listened. Just the other side of the door, a man played an acoustic guitar and sang a folk song. His soothing music blended with the sound of raindrops hitting the trees. He had no idea I was his audience. An unexpected sense of peace and comfort – what I could best describe as a nearness to God – swept over me. I felt tears, and I knew I needed to share this experience.
Truth-telling. It’s hard to say for Quakers today if it matters the way it once did.
That first generation of Friends were honest. Brutally honest. About the crookedness of Church-as-Empire, about the empty strength of the empire itself. Those Quakers were shameless. They preached a God of justice and peace. A God who didn’t. Couldn’t. Wouldn’t tolerate a religion for show nor the vanity of power-schemers. They surrendered their lives to God, and in sweet surrender found themselves dynamically demonstrating the power of God’s Kingdom. On earth as it is in heaven. The early Friends prophesied, subverted society. Convicted by Love, they followed in her footsteps. She shook them, made them quake. And sometimes they danced. Polite society couldn’t understand and didn’t approve. That’s why so many Quakers ended up imprisoned, tortured – or dead.
How much hope is enough? I understand and experience hope to be “leaning into better.” Hope is trusting that as things change, good will come. When we are hopeful, we lean into things getting better, not worse.
Is hope a precious natural resource? Is there a limited amount of hope in the world that we need to carefully monitor? Or is hope a renewable energy, like the wind?
What if hope is sourced from a divine energy, limitless and eternal? Hope never runs out. The supply is unlimited.
We live in a time of a “scarcity culture” says social scientist Brene Brown. A culture of scarcity is where we live in fear of not having enough. If she’s right, then this mentality of scarcity is impacting our national supply of hope. We feel as if we are running low on hope. And too many of us are flat running out of it. Our hope gauge is on empty.
Just over a year ago, I came out as bisexual to those who know and love me. But for the sake of Christian connection, I put myself back in the closet in order to avoid hard conversations, criticism, isolation and the potential loss of relationship. It hurt. I started to lose myself. I became judgmental, defensive, angry, and isolated. All the things I’d been afraid of.
Friends and family tried to reach out to me, to be close with me. They called, texted, and emailed regularly. I shut them out. I kept telling myself, “They won’t understand” because I knew they couldn’t accept me—at least not the real me. What I was forgetting is that many of these people already love and accept me. Always have. Always will. What’s more, many of them suspected I was struggling with something bigger than my anxiety.
I know the statistics. Patterns of discrimination and oppression. Inequalities in education, employment, housing, law enforcement, criminal justice. But this year those data points came to life. For two months I volunteered in the emergency department at the Los Angeles County and USC Medical Center, and the facts I’d read about became a lot more than facts.
Every day at the hospital I met people of color who had been failed by social structures and support systems that I take for granted. Young men who were victims of gang violence. Families denied housing, who used the emergency department as a haven from the streets. People whose lack of access to primary care created preventable health emergencies.
White supremacy is the foundational organizing principle of American public life, and for centuries has held the distinction of being the most consistent animating force in our national history. This reality affects every social institution, certainly including our most visible Christian gatherings. In the Christian tradition, we see this problem in both "multiethnic churches” and in more progressive Emergent circles to the point where people of color are actually emotionally hesitant to participate in these communities, or are sidelined when they do. Although the structural racism embedded in these spaces—whiteness—is an enormous stumbling block, relatively simple changes can be put into motion to make it less lethal at your progressive Christian gathering.
"We do not want you to copy or imitate us. We want to be like a ship that has crossed the ocean, leaving a wake of foam which soon fades away. We want you to follow the Spirit, which we have sought to follow, but which must be sought anew in every generation." —Extracts from the Writings of Friends, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Faith & Practice
A phrase that keeps coming to mind is "a new Quakerism," and oddly enough, I've been hearing other Friends unknowingly echo this phrase back to me. It seems to me that many Friends, even those who consider themselves "convinced," are hungry for more than what the Society has to offer. We keep coming back to the same point: we desperately need to re-imagine Quakerism.
Hi. My name is Megan and I’m a recovering addict. It’s been a little over two months since I quit church. Worshiping at a Quaker meeting, attending a Baptist school, participating in nondenominational youth group, leading interdenominational summer camps and campus ministry, and hanging out with friends of various Christian creeds, church was a constant presence throughout my life. But familiarity bred carelessness. I never anticipated church becoming a problem.
After college my career didn’t pick up like I thought it should and I had to move back into my childhood bedroom. Depression soon took over and I turned to church to take the edge off. Leadership was my drug of choice. I threw myself into teaching Sunday school classes and volunteering for service projects. Each lesson, each board offering more responsibility, each charitable endeavor gave me a hit of control. Everything else in my life was crumbling, but I could perform well in God’s house. Nobody seemed the wiser or, if they were, seemed to care about my circumstances outside the sanctuary so long as kids got taught and committees got manned. It went on like that for another year and a half.
Sunday morning services serve as space-less places. We fill them up with songs and sermons and passings of the offering plate (with background music, of course). What we really need is silence—space to listen. Why are we afraid?
Maybe it is because the openness of unprogrammed worship—in paring away the outside noise—leaves us no choice but to face the noise within: hypocrisy, phoniness, the false self we project (a fragile image).
It has been six months since the Friends World Committee for Consultation (FWCC) World Plenary conference in Peru with the theme “Living the Transformation.” I have experienced that transformation.
I have learned that transformation surprises us. It happens when we are still.
The fruits of the spirit are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control—all of which can be experienced during transformation.
To be transformed, one must go through a process of change.
Charismatic movements throughout Church history have identified water-baptism as a charismatic experience, an awakening or activating experience that stirs up the gift of God within and enables a believer to walk in the power of Christ’s ministry.
Quakerism has never practiced water-baptism. From the beginning, baptism was seen as an inward work of God. Water-baptism was seen as empty ritualism that gave a false sense of spiritual security to those in the corrupt established churches. But even though Friends do not practice water-baptism, the Friends view of baptism shares some dimensions with that of Charismatics.
Isaac Penington wrote, “The promise of receiving the Spirit is upon believing, and it extendeth to every one that believeth. ‘He that believeth on me,’ as the scripture hath said, ‘out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water;’ but this spake he of the Spirit, which they that believe on him should receive…but every one received so much of the Spirit as to make him a son, and to cry Abba, Father, and to wash him.
Not listening lies at the root of spiritual abuse.
So, fittingly, I think listening lies at the root of spiritual abuse recovery.
It starts with telling one person — a counselor, minister, mentor, or trusted friend. Eventually, some people benefit from wider audiences, perhaps sharing their stories in creative ways.
COUNSEL: “I’m Listening”
Michael Nichols’ The Lost Art of Listening says that effective, restorative listening boils down to taking the speaker seriously, not interrupting, and not judging.
Sometimes religious people are the worst at taking people seriously, not interrupting, and not judging. Unfortunately, religious people might not take people seriously if the speaker is a woman or if they’re young (to which I would say Galatians 3:28 and 1 Timothy 4:12 and plenty-more-where-that-came-from). They might interrupt because, well, they’re human and we all interrupt too much…but also if they think the story they’re hearing is getting uncomfortable and they’d rather dish out a nice scoop of Bible verses with a prayer on top.
Christians who are white seem to often get into conversations about “Christian” being the only identity/label that matters. They wax poetic about how this is core to their faith and often weaponize this idea against people of color, and especially against LGBTQ people.
The problem I have with this is that it’s a narrative that only works for the dominant group in a society. Dominant or majority groups have the ease of society being mostly if not entirely centered on them. As such, they don’t have opinions or labels forced on them by an outside group because no one else has the power to do that effectively. Yes, people can call you names, but power is being able to create policy or economic disadvantage for a group that you don’t belong to.
A drum circle is fundamentally a listening exercise.
As the drummers play together, a pulse emerges, a pattern that they are all following. Once this pulse has been established, things get interesting. Some drummers will want to build on the pulse, playing around or in answer to what they hear, which eventually shifts the pulse to something new, maybe something exciting. Others prefer to rest in the foundation of the established pulse.
The thing is, an effective drum circle needs both—in fact it thrives off of the dialogue between where we are and where we are going. If everyone stays with the pulse, the drum circle becomes repetitive and stagnant. But if everyone tries to push ahead, the group loses clarity and becomes chaotic. The power of the drum circle's sound is in the common beat that grounds it. It only works if we all enter in with what we have and contribute as we can.
I chatted with the church ushers in the sanctuary while they handed out bulletins before worship. We joked that I’d keep my eyes on them to get the signal for when to stop preaching. A gentleman in his eighties smiled and said, “Please don’t babble on because then we start squirming in our seats.” I promised to keep my message on point.
The main point of my visit was to open conversations about mental illness, based on my first book Blessed are the Crazy. I’ve learned that when I share about how my family is impacted by mental illness, it gives other people permission to share their stories.
It’s been hard to write, talk, and even think about God as of late. A major life change snuck up on me, devastated me, and left me questioning everything. To be honest, I’ve been wrestling with hopelessness, doubt, and fear on a fairly constant basis the past month. Even as I’ve been able to get my head above water, and as I’ve reconnected with God, I’ve still been pretty hopeless about church. I’ve been haunted by thoughts like, “Maybe it’s time to let the Church die. Maybe it’s a waste of time to try to keep these institutions running. Maybe we need to abandon the Church as we know it.” I am struggling nowadays reconciling institutional Christianity with Jesus. This could just be my 8 wing acting up (for Enneagram nerds) or maybe I am just bitter, but the American Church models and breeds capitalism, white supremacy, nationalism, and it may do some good, but is it worth it prolonging its death for that?
Anyone who claims to be a pacifist, or at least to practice an ethic of nonviolence, has been challenged about its application. It’s not practical, people say, it’s not realistic.
The challenge is especially common during times of imminent or ongoing war. To combat evil or rescue the powerless non-violently is impossible, they say. But I think there’s something deeply true and promising about impossibility.
"You go home and you sleep well at night in your bed and you sit here in suits and talk about these things, but what are we going to do? I’ve been a refugee for 5 years. No more. What if I was your daughter? What if I was your family? What then? There is no mercy for people without legal status. There is no home for refugees.”
Today I attended the first day of my first conference for refugee week.
Check in for the conference began at 9am. I went to bed at midnight last night. I woke up at 6am. Jet lag. Oh well. It meant I had time to get coffee before the conference and made me more at ease knowing I had time to get lost.
When Aboriginal people gather there is always dance. Dance is central to the engagement with life.
Dance involves three dimensions.
There is first of all the music that flows through our bodies and touches our hearts. Music energizes. It is central to all social struggles.
Along with music there are words. Words engage our minds. They call us to think, to wrap our heads around the complex dynamics at work in society; the words help us name things as they are and to discover what needs to be done.
Jesus said that loving your neighbor is the greatest commandment next to loving God. Even more, Jesus did it. He loved people without regard for his reputation, safety, popularity, or even his life. The rabbi who defended adulteresses and prostitutes. The holy man who touched lepers. The king who was abandoned to torture and a humiliating public death.
We speak of his suffering in reverent tones because that's how he atoned for our sins. That's the theological side of the story. But the human side of the story is that his sufferings came as a direct result of loving the despised and unwanted. The hatred, the persecution and the outrage were the result of Jesus healing a withered man's hand on the Sabbath and speaking up for a woman who wiped his feet with her hair (not to mention all the other scandals). So when Jesus commands us to love as he loved and also commands us to suffer as he suffered, he is describing two sides of the same coin. You cannot love the way he loved and not suffer the kinds of consequences he suffered.