A multimedia website displaying the very colorful aquarium out near Norristown Pennsylvania. The Flickr photos are cached and display with Lightbox (a Slimbox clone) when clicked. Movies are included both as optimized-for-download WMV files and on a independent Youtube account. View Site.
We suspect this might have been the one room schoolhouse where Julie’s maternal grandmother taught.
A recent article on the art and science of taste and smell in the New Yorker had a paragraph that stood out for me. The author John Lanchester had just shared a moment where he suddenly understood the meaning behind “grainy,” a term that had previously been an esoteric wine descriptor. He then writes:
The idea that your palate and your vocabulary expand simultaneously
might sound felicitous, but there is a catch. The words and the
references are really useful only to people who have had the same
experiences and use the same vocabulary: those references are to a
shared basis of sensory experience and a shared language. To people who
haven’t had those shared experiences, this way of talking can seem like
horse manure, and not in a good way.
How might this apply to Quakerism? A post-modernist philosopher might argue that our words are our experience and their argument would be even stronger for communal experiences. I once spent a long afternoon worrying whether the colors I saw were really the same colors others saw: what if what I interpreted as yellow was the color others saw as blue? After turning around the riddle I ended up realizing it didn’t matter as long as we all could point to the same color and give it the same name.
But what happens when we’re not just talking about yellow. Turning to the Crayola box, what if we’re trying to describe the yellowish colors apricot, dandelion, peach and the touch-feely 2008 “super happy”. Being a Crayola connoisseur requires an investment not only in a box of colored wax but also in time: the time needed to experience, understand and take ownership in the various colors.
Religion can be a like wine snobbery. If you take the time to read the old Quaker journals and reflect on your spiritual experiences you can start to understand what the language means. The terms stop being fussy and obscure, outdated and parochial. They become your own religious vocabulary. When I pick up an engaging nineteenth journal (not all are!) and read stories about the author’s spiritual up and downs and struggles with ego and community, I smile with shared recognition. When I read an engaging historian’s account of some long-forgotten debate I nod knowing that many of the same issues are at the root of some blogospheric bruhaha.
Of course I love outreach and want to share the Friends “sensory experience.” One way to do that is to strip the language and make it all generic. The danger of course is that we’re actually changing the religion when we’re change the language. It’s not the experience that makes us Friends – all people of all spiritual persuasions have access to legitimate religious experiences no matter how fleeting, misunderstood or mislabeled. We are unique in how we frame that experience, how we make sense of it and how we use the shared understanding to direct our lives.
We can go the other direction and stay as close to our traditional language as possible, demanding that anyone coming into our religious society’s influence take the time to understand us on our terms. That of course opens us to charges of spreading horse manure, in Lanchester’s words (which we do sometimes) and it also means we threaten to stay a small insider community. We also forget to speak “normal,” start thinking the language really is the experience and start caring more about showing off our vocabulary than about loving God or tending to our neighbors.
I don’t see any good way out of this conundrum, no easy advice to wrap a post up. A lot of Friends in my neck of the woods are doing what I’d call wink-wink nudge-nudge Quakerism, speaking differently in public than in private (see this post) but I worry this institutionalizes the snobbery and excuses the manure, and it sure doesn’t give me much hope. What if we saw our role as taste educators? For want of a better analogy I wonder if there might be a Quaker version of Starbucks (yes yes, Starbucks is Quaker, I’m talking coffee), a kind of movement that would educate seekers at the same time as it sold them the Quaker experience. Could we get people excited enough that they’d commit to the higher costs involved in understanding us?
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My friend Kevin-Douglas emailed recently about a new worship group he’s helped to start in downtown Baltimore. It sounds like some of the other Christ-center worship groups that have been popping up the shadow of established Quaker meetings. It’s consciously small and home-based, taking place at a non-traditional time with an implicit Emergent Church flavor. Experienced Friends are involved (I know KD from FGC’s Central Committee for example) and while it’s formed next to and out of large, active meetings, it’s not schismatic.
I asked KD if I could put his description up as a “guest post.’ I’m hoping a post here can let more seekers and Friends in Baltimore know about it. But beyond that, there’s a definite small movement afoot and I thought Ranter readers might be interested in the example (here are a few others: Laughing Waters and Chattahoochee (thanks to Bill Samuel for the last link, some of these are indexed in his helpful Friends Christian Renewal listing).
From KD:
Before R. got sick and eventually died, we had been thinking of
hosting an informal meeting for worship in the manner of Friends at our
house that would be explicitly Christ-centered. We aren’t talking
Christian Orthodoxy here, but rather with the understanding of all
involved that we come together to explore our faith through the
teachings of Jesus and those who came before and after him. It would
be Quaker in that we’d follow in the tradition of Quaker Christians,
gaining from their wisdom and experience.Now, the Spirit is leading me back to this.
So, what is going on?
I
very much appreciate universalism as a world view. I in no way believe
that Christianity is the only way. I do believe, however, that Jesus is
the Way, Truth and the Life. The Way being one of love and compassion,
of justice and sincere seeking of that mystery that I call God. I
don’t think Jesus was the only one who brought that way, but I do see
his way as leading to God, and that by his Way, we can get to God. It
doesn’t matter to me whether he was or is God; I do see him as a
sacrament, a way to God. For me he is the way to God. He is living. I know this experientially.So
I want to share in this with others. I want to sit in silence, or sing
in praise, or consider a query, scripture or word of advice from
Friends past with others who also want to know God through Christ. I’m
not concerned about theology. IT’s about experience for me. I don’t
mind if those who don’t “know Jesus” come, as I know God can speak
through all. If those who come and don’t consider themselves
Christian are willing to wrestle with the teachings of Jesus and his
ancestors and his followers, then I say WELCOME! I’m not set on form
either. I do prefer unprogrammed worship, but I mean that literally:
that we don’t necessarily set a program, but that there indeed may be
silence or a query, scripture or advice read at the beginning of
worship. Perhaps candles are lit, maybe even *gasp* incense! I don’t
feel the need to be bound to our puritan roots and yet I feel the
wisdom of allowing the Spirit to direct the worship is a wisdom we
should continue to follow. I believe in experiential and experimental
worship. Perhaps we have the Friends hymnal available and one may feel
led to sing from it and others can join if they too feel led. As for
now, it’s been completely unprogrammed worship as one would find in
most Conservative Friends meetings. As for community, I hope God will
gather together a community where we do recognize ministries and gifts
perhaps in the way that Friends have done so traditionally but maybe in
radically new ways! I’m so tired of Evangelical/Liberal/Conservative labels. Can we just be Friends?I do so love being Quaker. I do so love Jesus. I hope to find a community where these are wed without qualifications.
We meet third Sundays of every month at a home (Mine right now) from 5 – 6pm and are listed in Quaker Finder:
Downtown Baltimore Worship Group
Christ-centered, unprogrammed worship is generally held on the 3rd Sunday of the month at 5:00 PM in a home. Follow link for current details.
Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer is the Godfather of our age. His letter to Yahoo’s board in their unsolicited takeover attempt is the twenty-first century white collar rewrite of The Godfather’s “I’ll make him an offer he don’t
refuse”:
“Depending on the nature of your response, Microsoft reserves the right
to pursue all necessary steps to ensure that Yahoo’s shareholders are
provided with the opportunity to realize the value inherent in our
proposal.”
Are the chills going up your spine? Flickr, Del.icio.us, Yahoo Pipes, heck half my universe would suddenly be run by the boys from Redmond, coders not particularly known for their Web 2.0 sleekness or social ingenuity.
Over on Friends Journal site, some recent stats on Friends mostly in the US and Canada. Written by Margaret Fraser, the head of FWCC, a group that tries to unite the different bodies of Friends, it’s a bit of cold water for most of us. Official numbers are down in most places despite whatever official optimism might exist. Favorite line: “Perhaps those who leave are noticed less.” I’m sure P.R. hacks in various Quaker organizations are burning the midnight oil writing response letters to the editor spinning the numbers to say things are looking up.
She points to a sad decline both in yearly meetings affiliated with Friends United Meeting and in those affiliated with Friends General Conference. A curiosity is that this decline is not seen in three of the four yearly meetings that are dual affiliated. These blended yearly meetings are going through various degrees of identity crisis and hand-wringing over their status and yet their own membership numbers are strong. Could it be that serious theological wrestling and complicated spiritual identities create healthier religious bodies than monocultural groupings?
The big news is in the south: “Hispanic Friends Churches” in Mexico and Central America are booming, with spillover in el Norte as workers move north to get jobs. There’s surprisingly little interaction between these newly-arrived Spanish-speaking Friends and the the old Main Line Quaker establishment (maybe not surprising really, but still sad). I’ll leave you with a challenge Margaret gives readers:
One question that often puzzles me is why so many Hispanic Friends
congregations are meeting in churches belonging to other denominations.
I would love to see established Friends meetings with their own
property sharing space with Hispanic Friends. It would be an
opportunity to share growth and challenges together.
In a move sure to be a surprise no one, I’m shuttering up my Nonviolence.org site. Sure it’s a great domain, sure it still gets more traffic than all of my other sites combined, but I just don’t have the time to keep it going in any kind of coherent way. It’s always surprised me that I could never get substantive financial support for a project that has reached millions. It seems particularly ironic to shut it down in the midst of one of the longest wars in U.S. history.
For those wanting good activist news, the Dave the Quaker Agitator is always on top of current events and the Fellowship of Reconciliation’s new’ish group blog at FORPeace.net is a great addition to the peace blogging scene. Archive posts from Nonviolence.org have been migrated here to the Ranter.
