Quaker Pagan Reflections

To the many Pagans who said supportive things about my last post --thank you. Your kindness was much appreciated. That said, this one is going to be a pretty Quaker-centric post--I don't want you to think your support wasn't important, though, so I'm mentioning it first. If, to strain a metaphor I used in my last post , the Quaker family had put me out on the street, it would be difficult to explain the many supportive comments I received. I wrote that last post, " Theologically Queer ," feeling braced against rejection by the Quaker community. But almost as soon as the post went up, folks began trickling out of the house and sitting down next to me on the curb. Really kind, lovable folks. And nobody called me names, or even pointed out how silly I was being. Nope. They just came out to see how I was, and to wait patiently with me until I felt a bit better. Peggy Senger Parsons --a woman I consider to be one of the spiritual grown-ups of the world--came out and ...

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 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...

I am reading a book called "Reading the Bible Again For the First Time: Taking the Bible Seriously But Not Literally," by Marcus J. Borg. I’ve just finished chapter 1, and my pulse rate is up. If I were somebody who took blood pressure medication, my doctor would be telling me this book was bad for me. I am agreeing with Borg. His religious feelings are in sympathy with my own, and his outlook on history and on the nature of truth seem not only dead-on accurate but obvious. Yet Borg is presenting one side of a debate in our culture, and it seems to me to be the losing side. Conflict about the Bible is the single most divisive issue among Christians in North America today. And because of the importance of Christianity in the culture of the United States, conflict about the Bible is also central to what have been called ‘the culture wars.’ … The conflict is between ... a “literal-factual” way of reading the Bible and a “historical-metaphorical” way of reading it. Maybe the...

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 ...

For Quakers, the most topical part of this essay is probably going to be towards the end, where I'm going to try to say at least a little about the current contretemps about the discriminatory FUM personnel policy, and how Quakers, as a community, are dealing with it. For Pagans, the most interesting bits may be some thoughts about creating peace even in the face of injustice. I'll try not to ramble much, guys, but the issues are complex. Anyway, I'll start with a news story that caught my eye and got me writing this morning: Cruising through the excerpted blogs at QuakerQuaker , I came across this account of a visit of a group of Christian GLBT activists to George Fox University --an evangelical Quaker college with a policy that, alas, discriminates against gays and lesbians. I'm impressed with the " Equality Riders ," of course, but that's not what made this post resonate so strongly with me. Instead, it is the actions of the administration, faculty,...