Quaker Pagan Reflections

This was a sort of a breakthrough year for me at New England Yearly Meeting of Friends (Quakers). I want to write about that, but I feel that, this year, I need to allow NEYM to scoop me. Because it was a breakthrough year for Friends in New England, too; we minuted our clear sense of the right order of same-sex marriages performed among us. It is probably worth mentioning that same-sex marriages have been performed by monthly meetings for a number of years now, and that many of our quarterly meetings have affirmed this practice. We have, however, been laboring with this issue, and with our relationship with Friends United Meeting (which continues to be a tender spot) for a long time now. I mention the issue of Friends United Meeting , which has a personnel policy many of our members find discriminatory and painful, because it was grappling with our discomfort over FUM that kept pushing the matter of same-sex marriage, and of glbtq rights in general, into the limelight for us. Tr...

(Note: this entry may be of little interest to non-Quakers, unless you find the ways Quakers do business of interest. It also may make little sense to anyone who isn't somewhat familiar with the story of the tensions with and within Friends United Meeting over its position on the hiring of gays and lesbians. I have posted a separate summary of how I see that situation to fill you in if you are interested.) So, sessions is over and done for another year. Unlike in past years, I've really been unable to post during sessions. And while I'm still in Smithfield, RI, until such time as the f/Friend we're carpooling with completes her business and we can head home, the campus is quiet now--not empty of Quakers, by any means (Deb Humphries just walked past, and the Permanent Board is still in session) but quiet. I think I may have a touch of re-entry syndrome when I get home this year. This was an intense week, for me and for a lot of other people. Our theme was War: God ...

On the floor of New England Yearly Meeting Sessions, in the middle of a discussion of the ongoing controversy over NEYM’s affiliation with Friends United Meeting , someone rose and read a passage from the Richmond Declaration of Faith , written in 1887 and recently reaffirmed by FUM. It included the line, “We disavow all professed illumination or spirituality that is divorced from faith in Jesus Christ of Nazareth.” The speaker pointed out how this directly contradicts the Quaker testimony of continuing revelation. He urged NEYM to make a complete split with FUM, saying that we could continue to engage with them as we would with any other Protestant church, but they are not really Quaker. The comment was hurtful to a lot of people in the meeting who are Christ-centered and identify with FUM and also consider themselves very much Quaker. The same day, a commenter on this blog told me that “Quakerism is founded in Christ. … With respect, you can no more be a pagan quaker than a virgi...

Skip this entry, please, if you've heard all you care to for the next hundred years on the FUM personnel policy. Or read it if you'd like a somewhat simplified and subjective primer on the issue. It is intended as a companion piece, a sidebar and footnote to my first set of reflections on NEYM . Here's a mini briefer for Pagan readers and Quakers who may not be familiar with this controversy: Friends United Meeting , or FUM, is a large assembly of Quakers. It includes meetings like mine, which historically united both liberal Quakers who might or might not describe themselves as Christians and more traditional, Christ-centered Quakers. FUM also includes meetings that are wholly Christ-centered, and its mission is explicitly Evangelical. Inquiring minds might want to know why I am myself quite passionately dedicated to remaining in relationship with FUM. If you do, stay tuned: the question of "what's a nice Pagan girl like you doing in a hotbed of Christianit...

I was recently at Jeff Lilly's Druid Journal , and a post and comments thread there evoked something from me I've been trying to say since summer, though it has never come out right before. Maybe it isn't right even yet, but it's the closest I've come... As we've written before, Peter and I deliberately sought out workshops and activities at New England Yearly Meeting this past August that we hoped would be challenging to us. Obviously, we're what would have to be termed, not just liberal Quakers, but universalist Quakers. At different times and in different ways, Peter and I both have taken a look at Christianity, as it is currently practiced and understood in our culture, and determined that, to say the least, it did not "speak to our condition." I've never been Christian--Peter was at one time, but walked away. (That's a story I hope he'll share some day, so I won't touch on it here, for him.) Instead, the religious path t...

Cat and I spent a good chunk of this gathering participating in a three-day workshop on what it means to be a Quaker missionary. The woman running it, Eden Grace , is a field staff worker (a.k.a. “missionary”) in Kenya. She’s an FUM Quaker and an evangelical Christian. We signed up for this workshop specifically because it would be challenging, would push us to deepen our understanding of the current controversy over the FUM personnel policy that has been threatening to schism NEYM, and (at least in my case) broaden my perspective on what it means to be Quaker. Eden began the workshop by doing something I can only describe as headbutting the hornets’ nest. She passed out index cards and had each of us write down to things that came to mind when we heard the word “missionary,” then she collected them, shuffled them, passed them out again and had each of us read out loud the two we got. (We were, remember, a room full of liberal New England Quakers teetering on the edge ...

I arrived at my second New England Yearly Meeting (a Quaker gathering of about 600 people) right on the heels of my first MerryMeet. MerryMeet kind of sucked for me, though not through anyone’s fault. I was exhausted, and low blood sugar left me feeling cranky and cynical about Pagan politics. Very glad we took a day off before hopping in the car and driving down to Rhode Island. Very different Yearly Meeting from last year. Very different experience, at least. Just came from a Bible Half-Hour lead by Benigno Sanchez-Eppler. I can’t begin to paraphrase or even summarize it. I wish I had a transcript, so I could post it. I hear Cat tap-tap-tapping in the next carrel. Maybe she can capture some of what was said. I don’t think I’ve done nearly as much writing as I had by this point in the week last year. Partly that’s not having a working laptop this summer. More, though, it’s that I don’t want to miss anything. (Thoreau’s quote, something along the lines of “My life has been ...

There's an immense line for lunch just now, so I'm going to grab a quick blog before trying to get myself fed--again. (Didn't I just eat? Gotta learn not to take one of each as a strategy for dealing with this much food.) I had been feeling a bit flat, yesterday. Some of that may have been simple fatigue--it turned out that MerryMeet, whatever else it may have been, was ruddy exhausting, at least for me. I can't even imagine what Laura and Jennifer are feeling like today; in comparison, I hardly worked at all. That flat feeling may also have been due to arriving late. Due to aforesaid exhaustion, Peter and I yielded to reality, and did not pile our weary selves into the car until yesterday morning, almost a day later than we'd planned to leave. We arrived just in time to hear the Keynote Address, by South African Friend Duduzile Joyce Mtshazo. That was great--I had very much wanted to hear her--but not being at an event from the start may have left me feeling...