Quaker Pagan Reflections

One of my favorite bloggers, though his posts are not so frequent as I might wish, is Will T., of Growing Together in the Light .  Today, scrolling randomly through the lists of places my visitors came from on their way to my blog, I encountered a link to a post of Will's I hadn't read before, from 2006. I haven't anything to add to it, or any insightful comment or anecdote to carry it into some new territory.  But I feel that I must quote it here, because it is so beautiful and so true:  … I felt that we had dropped down until we had come into the gathered silence of the Meeting for Worship that has been going on since before the world was formed and which will continue on until after the world has ended. The world is being held, will always be held, has always been held, in this worship. I was blessed to step into this worship briefly but it is still going on.  Now, even though I cannot usually feel it, and sometimes I forget, I know that the world is being held in this ...

I have mixed feelings about the article Are the Quakers Going Pagan? that recently ran online. I've especially been challenged by the discussion which has followed the article, especially among Friends. Evangelical Quaker Bruce Butler's blog post A Firm and Loving "No" is probably the best example of what I mean. Cause, I gotta say, while I'm hearing the Friend's "firm," I'm not really feelin' the "love." I think I harbored some secret, painful wishes that, however heretical and perhaps flat-out wrong I might seem to the more conservative branches of Quakers, I would still be seen as a member of the family tree. Maybe in the place of the crazy elderly aunt or second-cousin who has too many cats, but still, part of the family. I mean, maybe I even knew better, but I could not help but hope. Having lived my entire life in a Christian culture that disowned me, I've found more acceptance and welcome among Friends than I'd...

I had a somewhat interesting experience with spontaneous prayer today. Heavy snow is often good for that. Our Fulbright exchange teacher, Mr. R., carpools with me to and from work each day--a very reasonable arrangement, since I'm his mentor teacher this year. I've enjoyed the exchange of educational ideas a lot, and the cultural exchange has been pretty rich, too. The initial difficulties I had , trying to communicate with him around religion, have mostly resolved since my earlier post on the subject; on a day near Samhain , he was asking about American Halloween customs, and somewhere in the midst of my multi-cultural, multi-religious attempt at explanation, something clicked. He made the connection between Hindu traditions honoring ancestors and the dead from his native India, and my family's Samhain practices. There was a brief, deeply awkward silence--as a Christian and (I thank Marcus Borg for the terminology) a Biblical literalist, he disapproves of Hindusim--and...

Another day of being too tired to blog. Yeah, yeah, I know--technically this is a blog entry, right? But it's not what I want to be writing... I'm going to go ahead and write this as a big, fuzzy journal entry--no editing, no waiting for discernment, just stream of consciousness. (I'll try to spare you thoughts about what I ate for lunch, however. I really do want to avoid becoming that kind of a blog!) Every morning, as I'm waking up and getting ready for my day, I think about the things I'll do when work gets out. Today is the day , I think to myself, I'm really gonna go roller skating again. Today is the day I'll walk downtown after work with Peter and get supper at La Veracruzana , or browse for used books at Raven or Cherry Picked, or Half Moon books. But mostly I think, maybe tonight I'll get to write. And I'll spend the time I have alone in the morning, as I'm packing up my lunch and sitting down with my breakfast, thinking abo...

Early in meeting for worship today, I was all caught up in my head--in ideas about what is ministry and what is faithfulness, and whether or not I'm "doing" Quakerism "right." And then an echo of the Song of Songs came to me: "I am my Beloved's, and my Beloved is mine." And everything changed, and the words washed away in just being with the Beloved. And the Light grew so bright and good around me and inside me, that I could just about bear it: There is an hour, every week, during which I get to drop all the hard work of trying to be something, and just be what I'm supposed to be. I don't have to be strong, or wise, or clever. I don't have to anything at all, because the Beloved is there, and it's just fine... At those times, the image comes to me, of myself as a tiny child, almost too young for speech. Have you ever seen a little girl, one just barely walking, make her way solemnly to her mother? That's me. And when I ge...

Not too long ago, I was visiting the home of a close Pagan friend of mine, and I made mention of "God" in a conversation which included Laura's very bright and inquiring son. Laura stopped me, saying, "In this house, when someone says 'God' we always ask, 'which one?'" And it's true--adopting monotheistic language can make polytheist, panenthest, animist, and nontheist points of view invisible. Laura, of course, was politely insisting I not marginalize her son's religion (and hers) in her own home. The irony, of course, is that we're co-religionists, she and I. I don't mind at all Laura calling me on apparently privileging monotheism, particularly in the context of her family life. But if I describe my experiences among Friends at NEYM this year in any detail, I'm going to wind up using a lot of words and phrases that may give my Pagan friends reason to get a little nervous about me "going native" in my time amon...

More than anything, as a writer, I seem to be driven to find words for things for which I have no words. (To "eff" the ineffable, as I sometimes think of it to myself.) And words for the experience of Spirit are the hardest to find of any. Pagans have a real poverty of writings on the subject of experienced religion, in spite of our immersion in it. Quakers have more, but it is all very hard for me to access, since most of it is couched in Christian terminology, and draws on the Bible to an extent that I find very tough sledding. Still, from time to time a nugget of gold shows up--a few words that convey something of what it is to live a spiritual experience--and that keeps me hungry and seeking both words of my own, and words from others. It helps to be present when the words are spoken. If I had not been present for the Lloyd Lee Wilson address, "Holy Surrender," I probably would have found the title alone alienating enough that I would not have read further...