Essential elements to acknowledge

Let our relationships be enhanced as we consider the nature of Seed. There are certain qualities all plants arising from seeds possess in common: the work of photosynthesis in response to sunlight, for one, and some form of rooting. Yet each seed is also true to its own nature, whether it be a sequoia or a strawberry vine. As our own lives unfold in response to the divine Light, our personal and unique qualities also come into play and are to be encouraged. This stands in stark contrast to a more conventional teaching that would have each of us becoming a miniature Jesus as we take up a cross in imitation of his suffering. Instead, we are drawn toward the Light – as both Christ and Logos – and have life in consequence. In this relationship, we are created in the image of God.

From RELIGION TURNED UPSIDE DOWN

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Give the poor clerk a break

There’s a tendency in many unprogrammed (“silent”) meetings to turn the clerk into a de facto pastor. This is curious when we consider the widespread resistance in the same meetings to recognize ministers, elders, and overseers – historic roles a modern clerk becomes expected to fill, at least in part. This is something I had observed long before agreeing to serve as clerk of our meeting. (Five years, as it turned out.)

The fact that programmed Friends have both a pastor and a clerk should be a healthy reminder.

The message for quietist Friends like us is that the central job of the clerk is to moderate our business sessions. Yes, by extension, the clerk typically becomes a Public Friend empowered to speak on behalf of the congregation. Other expectations creep in, almost unseen – as the Most Visible Friend is sought out to solve Meeting problems left and right.

No, this one will rarely solve the problem. Our strength is that we ALL have active roles in this faith community. Please stand up and take a bow for the ways you contribute.

From STILLWATER

Arise and shine in the new morning

James Nayler opens his 1655 tract, Salutation to the Seed of God, with this perplexing decree:

Arise, shine forth, thou seed of the covenant, to which the promise is, for thy glory to come; and with judgment is the Lord arisen to redeem his chosen, and all that turn to him shall be covered with righteousness, even that which before the world was, and above all the world is, which is perfect for evermore.

The dense sentence, overlapping itself with metaphor, has more in common with contemporary poetry than it does with analytic exposition. At the outset of the 38-page tract (as it appears in the Collected Works), this galvanizing invocation addresses a puzzling first-person singular “Seed of the Covenant.”

It’s not the building

One of the most revolutionary concepts the Society of Friends has upheld is an understanding of “church” as a body of believers – not as the building or organization or a hierarchy or even a nearby bishop. This sense of a gathering of the saints is the reason ours is a “meeting” of the church – of the believers – and why we gather in a meetinghouse, rather than a building calling itself the church. For that matter, early Friends typically referred to the gathering place of other denominations as a “steeplehouse,” thus emphasizing a distinction between the building and its users.

From STILLWATER

Needlepoint sampler

A favorite old Quaker counsel when we gather in worship. Dover Friends Meeting, New Hampshire. Note the subtle distinction between “mind” and “thoughts.”

 

Often as questions

It may surprise many of you to learn that in my first years with Quakers, I was generally pretty hostile to anything smacking of Christianity. And yet seeds were planted:

• Because America has an underlying Christian mindset, Eastern religions would have trouble taking root here. This, from Norris Wentworth while giving me a lift in Bloomington, Indiana.
• “What do you think of Jesus?” during my clearness session for membership in what turns out to be one of the most universalist meetings in America. (Our preparative meeting was about 150 miles away in the desert of Washington state.) Followed by a remark to me, “I fear that we’re losing our Christian connection.”
• “What do you think of the Bible?” as an elderly Wilburite Friend in Whittier, Iowa, drilled her eyes in my direction. I doubt my analogy of a sharpening-stone wheel satisfied her.
• “And just what spirit was thee speaking of?” Mary Hawkins, an elder at Columbiana Meeting in Ohio, before adding. “there are many spirits – anger, envy … “ I have since been careful to say, Holy Spirit or Spirit of Christ.

From STILLWATER

In the image of what?

Here, too, we can begin to sense new ways in which we may be seen as created in the image of God. Just as each seed is patterned on a universal model of stored energy that will unfurl into root and leaf, it also carries a particular identity to replicate its own kind. Likewise, each of us displays individual characteristics and abilities as we respond to divine Light.

While the opening chapter of John presents Christ as the Logos as well as the Light, it is possible to see the Logos – an ancient Greek philosophical stream that presents this variously as the principle of the universe, the means of reconciliation of opposites, the way of knowing and knowledge itself, the divine way or plan, and so on – as also working as Seed.

Thus, John’s gospel could begin alternatively as, “In the beginning was the Seed, and the Seed was with God, and the Seed was God. … All things were made by it; and without it was not anything made that was made. In it was life …” to be manifested in human form.

From RELIGION TURNED UPSIDE DOWN

Frequency of practice can make a difference

Sitting in meditation twice a day, as I learned in the ashram, allows a deeper session than does an every-other-week or once-a-month schedule.

Suitable physical exercise, charitable activity, or spiritual reading may also guide the experience.

We speak of preparing for worship, but rarely of how much easier it is to pass through that barrier when sitting with others. That is, as early Friends sensed, even when two or three gather in the Name.

From STILLWATER

There’s a psychoanalytic awareness

Unlike their mentor, Sigmund Freud’s two principal disciples, Carl Jung and Otto Rank, both looked increasingly to religion for insights. To what extent, then, can we draw on their conclusions to advance a deepened understanding of Light, Truth, and, especially, Seed?

Jung, for instance, speaks not just of Light but more crucially “the shadow.” How do presentations of the unconscious and collective unconscious work in relation to Quaker “waiting worship” or the Inward Voice?

One Friend, beginning to consider these, also adds symbolism/archetypes, masculine/feminine, and synchronicity/”as Way opens” to the search.

From RELIGION TURNED UPSIDE DOWN

Gallery window

The second floor of the Dover Friends meetinghouse was originally a gallery — or balcony — that we closed off in the 1950s to conserve heat in the worship room below. One half of the space has since been converted into classrooms, but this side is used mostly for storage.