gathering in light

Thou
Whom I do not know
But Whose I am.

Thou
Whom I do not comprehend
But Who has dedicated me
To my fate.
Thou

-Dag Hammarskjold, Markings p.214-215

I am preparing my discussion for our Sunday morning meeting for worship and am thinking a lot about what Kester Brewin calls “wombs of the divine,” and creating the necessary space for something new to be born over time (See his book Signs of Emergence) It’s kind of a preference for evolution rather than revolution, or rather it sees evolution as the slow revolutionary process of change. Then I came across this quote (which mirrors Mark 2:27): “Our structures must serve us, not us serve them.”

This is an appropriate quote for all of us in the church, but especially, I think, for Quakers to observe. With so much discussion recently on whether or not some of our more longstanding institutions, meetings, and publishing outlets up for grabs these days because of smaller numbers, smaller budgets, and less interest or energy. With so many looking at the bottom line, I can’t help but think that we need to step back, stop, and contemplate the point above. What does this really mean for us?

Brewin writes:

“Only if I am still. Only if I have stopped what I was doing to listen and hold my breath and enter some spiritual apnea and wait. The perception of the new step will come only to those brave enough to stop dancing the old. The realization that we must descend this low peak will come only to those prepared to stop and take stock of their position. We fear that if we stopped for a week, a month, a service, a moment, we might be forgotten, or lose our momentum, weaken our profile, appear ill-thought-out and failing. So we feed the ecclesiastic furnaces our burned-out wrecks: tired leaders, disillusioned ministers, fatigued congregations – marshaling them to dance longer, march faster, pray harder, cry loud in earnest for God to come, come, COME and batter our hearts into change.”

What Brewin is essentially calling for is that we return to our own practicing of silent waiting, but with a fresh perspective as to why we are doing it, what we are waiting and hoping for. Or conversely, maybe our stopping and waiting is the opposite of silent waiting, maybe we need to stop with the quiet and really say what is on our hearts and minds. In either case, something needs to give. Who has the courage to stop dancing the old?

I came across this today while I was doing some back reading from this weekend’s newspaper. It struck me as really insightful:

After the baseball steroid scandal and the disappointing news that Tiger’s a cheetah, as the New York Post headline put it, it’s time to accept that athletes are not role models. They’re just models — for everything from sports drinks to running shoes to razor blades to credit cards to peanut butter to Buicks to Wheaties.

via Op-Ed Columnist – The Lady and the Tiger – NYTimes.com.

I’ve really not followed the news/gossip about Tiger Woods because honestly I don’t really care. Not that I don’t care about the negative impact this kind of this has on his family and those connected to the scandal, I do, but another celebrity’s shocking fall from stardom is just not that shocking or interesting. I guess I am more bothered by the fact that so much of our news is based on stuff like this.

Yet, when I came across Maureen Dowd’s op-ed article in the Times this evening I was interested in what she had to say. Here she completely strips away the faux moralism we have placed on capitalism. Often “role models” in our culture are simply celebrities, people who live a glamorized life mostly hidden from the public or fabricated in a way to sell a certain kind of lifestyle and look. The only reason we know about most of these people is because they are advertising billboards for this or that brand. If bad news begins to surround them, or they become washed up, they drop completely off the radar. (I recall something like this happening to one of my favorite football players Barry Sanders.) Anyways, the discussion around role models being just models is a good one to have. Even within the church there are some many “celebrities” selling this or that brand, this or that mega-church, this or that latest and greatest book.

Hardly Normal wrote on his twitter the other day:

“unsubscribed to nearly all Christian blogs/news I used to follow bc 1) try to sell me something 2) talk about Sunday or a building more than people.” [i expanded some of his abbreviated text]

This is a sad but very true statement. Will we do anything about it? Do we even care? So I am asking, are we looking up to these consumer (role) models? Are we (The church) producing these kinds of models, or people who value the glitz and glamour and orient themselves around a moral capitalism rather than an actual morality rooted in something beyond themselves and their own brands? If our faith cannot call all of this into question, then we have a good idea what the pecking order really is. Here I am contending that the Christian narrative is powerful enough to undercut all of this, and shed light on what is true (I think Dowd has helped us here), but the Gospel has to be read a part from this kind of faux moral capitalism that we are seeped in. How we do that is certainly up for debate, but that we work together to do it should be an important part of our task.

While I was researching for a recent sermon I came across some great quotes on poverty from 18th Century Quakers. One thing I loved was that the section on plainness and living an unfettered life is right next to the section about caring for the poor. These two things, how we live and what we produce and consume, and interrelated to whether others have enough or not.

Here are few quotes I dug up from the Old Quaker Disciple on poverty:

“With respect to the poor amongst us, it ought to be considered, that the poor, both parents and children, are of our family, and ought not to be turned off to any others for their support or education; and although some may think the poor a burthen, yet be it remembered, when our poor are well provided for, and walk orderly, they are an ornament to our society; and the rich should consider it is more blessed to give than to receive, and that he who giveth to the poor, lendeth to the Lord, who will repay. Written in 1718 “(198)

“As mercy, compassion, and charity, are eminently required in this new covenant dispensation we are under; so, respecting the poor and indigent among us, and to see there be no beggar in our Israel, it is the advice of this meeting that all poor friends be taken due care of, and none of them sent to the town or parish to be relieved; and that nothing be wanting for their necessary supply; which has been according to our ancient practice and testimony. And it has long been of good report, that we have not only maintained our own poor, but also contributed our share to the poor of the respective towns and parishes wherein we dwell.” Written in 1720 (198).

What are our communities writing (and doing) today about this very issue?

Just stumbled across this in my reading this morning, it works well with what I’m reflecting on with “confession as vulnerability,” confession is what keeps us open and subject to change. Here Chesterton says it well: “Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians.”

The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait…

Suppose some mathematical creature from the moon were to reckon up the human body; he would at once see that the essential thing about it was that it was duplicate. A man is two men, he on the right exactly resembling him on the left. Having noted that there was an arm on the right and one on the left, a leg on the right and one on the left, he might go further and still find on each side the same number of fingers, the same number of toes, twin eyes, twin ears, twin nostrils, and even twin lobes of the brain. At last he would take it as a law; and then, where he found a heart on one side, would deduce that there was another heart on the other. And just then, where he most felt he was right, he would be wrong.

via Orthodoxy, by Gilbert K. Chesterton; The Paradoxes of Christianity Page 1.

I came across this old Mennonite rendering of the Disciple’s Prayer and love it.

Abba Father God, Bless your holy name.

Let your reign come now, Let your desires be carried out.

Bring your peace to birth, As in heav’n, so on Earth

Give us bread, daily; Free us, as we free.

When the way is hard, Be our guide and guard.

Your rule, power; and praise Reign supreme, always.

via The Lord’s Prayer – Mennonite Style

I’m sitting with this one for awhile:

Idolatry comes from the fact that, while thirsting for absolute good, we do not possess the power of supernatural attention and we have not the patience to allow it to develop (Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace 53).

What helps you, if anything helps you, develop patience and the power of supernatural attention?

I’m still (slowly) reading through Simone Weil’s book “Gravity and Grace” for part of my daily time of reflection. Here are a couple great quotes I’ve recently come across dealing with obedience and caring for others.

We should do only those righteous actions which we cannot stop ourselves from doing, which we are unable not to do, but, through well directed attention, we should always keep on increasing the number of those which we are unable not to do (39).

‘I was hungred, and ye gave me meat.’ When was that, Lord? They did not know. We must not know when we do such acts. We must not help our neighbour for Christ but in Christ. May the self disappear in such a way that Christ can help our neighbour through the medium of our soul and body. May we be the slave whom his master sends to bear help to someone in misfortune (40).

To be only an intermediary between the uncultivated ground and the ploughed field, between the data of a problem and the solution, between the blank page and the poem, between the starving beggar and the beggar who has been fed (41).

I’ve dabbled in the past with reading some of Weil’s writings, but it wasn’t until I heard Quaker historian Carole Spencer speak at Friends Association for Higher Education that I wanted to get back to her writings. Spencer spoke in part about the deeply Christian mystical experiences of people like Simone Weil, Meister Eckhart, and Madame Guyon and I realized that something of their spiritual experience they had I wanted.

One thing I really like about “Gravity and Grace” is the brief chapters, each with short, almost poetry-like, statements or reflections based on whatever theme the chapter explores. Some of those themes are: Gravity and Grace (as in the natural laws of the universe and how it contrasts with the grace of God), Void and Compensation, Renunciation of Time, To Desire Without An Object, Love, Evil, The Cross, The Impossible, etc. Within each of these reflections Weil takes a variety of perspectives, and dives a mysticism that is rooted in the great tradition of the via negativa and aesthetic life. I appreciate her attention to human suffering and need, and her own life story is rich enough to really ground what she writes with the weight of lived experience.

I have found her reflections to be grounding for me. I’ve often shied away from the mystical, preferring instead a spirituality of the physical. During Spencer’s talked this past summer I became even more aware of my own propensity to avoid this part of the spiritual life and slowly, meditatively reading through Weil has been one of the ways I’ve been trying to level out my own spiritual practice.

I would recommend Weil to you as well, especially if you’re interested in mystical reading. Because of the way this particular book is broken up it’s works well for this kind of reflective reading, and I continue to be challenged, refreshed, and made more aware of God’s presence in ways that are new to me.

I came across this quote in my reading of Vail Palmer’s manuscript on Friends, God and the Bible this morning. It’s Barth cautioning what we carry to the biblical text beforehand, it’s also encouragement to look for the encounter, or what I’ve been referring to as intervention.

Its searching of the Scriptures consists in asking the texts whether and to what extent they might witness to him; however, whether and to what extent they reflect and echo, in their completely humanity, the Word of God is completely unknown beforehand….The Word of God itself, as witnessed to in the Bible, is not immediately obvious in any of its chapters or verses. On the contrary, the truth, of the Word must be sought precisely, in order to be understood in its deep simplicity. Every possible means must be used (Barth 1964:29-30).

One thing that I love about this short quote is the challenge to pursue the Word.

Put in question form we might approach biblical texts with the question, “where is the Word of God being witnessed too within this passage, parable, narrative, poetry, etc. today?”

“We might also ask, what voices, ideas, and language am I bringing to this text, importing on it that may be obstructing its truth?”

Another question I have been asking as I prepare for Sunday’s is, “what does this text tell us about the missio Dei (God’s mission)? And what practices and what kind of community formation is needed in order to embody that mission today?”

“One final question is, what assumptions whether theological or practice-oriented are getting overturned, reversed, or being responded to? Whose assumptions do these belong to, how is it being reversed, and for what reason?”

There are many other questions that can be useful and get carried to the text, these are just a couple I’m holding onto for the moment.

What are your questions?

I’ve titled my sermon series on Luke “Interventions” and so was happy to see Simone Weil was (unsurprisingly) way ahead of me. Here she sums up the approach I’ve been taking with the Gospel of Luke.

We must always expect things to happen in conformity with the laws of gravity unless there is supernatural intervention.

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, 1