Throwback from 2005: “Aggregating Our Webs

September 9, 2016
One of the first iterations of QuakerQuaker, from January 2006.
One of the first iter­a­tions of Quak­erQuak­er, from Jan­u­ary 2006.

Look­ing back at a 2005 post that start­ed to lay out what was to become Quak­erQuak­er:

Maybe the web’s form of hyper­link­ing is actu­ally supe­rior to Old Media pub­lish­ing. I love how I can put for­ward a strong vision of Quak­erism with­out offend­ing any­one – any put-off read­ers can hit the “back” but­ton. And if a blog I read posts some­thing I don’t agree with, I can sim­ply choose not to com­ment. If life’s just too busy then I just miss a few weeks of posts. With my “Sub­jec­tive Guide to Quak­er Blogs” and my “On the Web” posts I high­light the blog­gers I find par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing, even when I’m not in per­fect the­o­log­i­cal uni­ty. I like that I can have dis­cus­sions back and forth with Friends who I don’t exact­ly agree with.

Hey who am I to decide anything

April 9, 2007

Over on Non­the­ist Friends web­site, there’s an arti­cle look­ing back at ten years of FGC Gath­er­ing work­shops on their con­cern. There was also a post some­where on the blo­gos­phere (sor­ry I don’t remem­ber where) by a Pagan Friend excit­ed that this year’s Gath­er­ing would have a work­shop focused on their concerns.

It’s kind of inter­est­ing to look at the process by which new the­olo­gies are being added into Lib­er­al Quak­erism at an ever-increasing rate.

  • Mem­ber­ship of indi­vid­u­als in meet­ings. There are hun­dreds of meet­ings in lib­er­al Quak­erism that range all over the the­o­log­i­cal map. Add to that the wide­spread agree­ment that the­o­log­i­cal uni­ty with the meet­ing is not required and just about any­one believ­ing any­thing could be admit­ted some­where (or “grand­fa­thered in” as a birthright member).
  • A work­shop at the Friends Gen­er­al Con­fer­ence Gath­er­ing and espe­cial­ly a reg­u­lar work­shop at suc­ces­sive Gath­er­ings. Yet as the very informed com­ments on a post a few years ago showed, the­ol­o­gy is not some­thing the plan­ning work­shop com­mit­tee is allowed to look at and at least one pro­po­nent of a new the­ol­o­gy has got­ten them­selves on the decid­ing com­mit­tee. The Gath­er­ing is essen­tial­ly built on the non­de­nom­i­na­tion­al Chau­taqua mod­el and FGC is per­fect­ly hap­py to spon­sor work­shops that are in appar­ent con­flict with its own mis­sion statement.
  • An arti­cle pub­lished in Friends Jour­nal. When the the Quak­er Sweat Lodge was strug­gling to claim legit­i­ma­cy it all but changed its name to the “Quak­er Sweat Lodge as fea­tured in the Feb­ru­ary 2002 Friends Jour­nal.” It’s a good mag­a­zine’s job to pub­lish arti­cles that make peo­ple think and a smart mag­a­zine will know that arti­cles that pro­voke a lit­tle con­tro­ver­sy is good for cir­cu­la­tion. I very much doubt the edi­to­r­i­al team at the Jour­nal con­sid­ers its agree­ment to pub­lish to be an inoc­u­la­tion against critique.
  • A web­site and list­serv. Fif­teen dol­lars at GoDad​dy​.com and you’ve got the web address of your dreams. Yahoo Group is free.

There are prob­a­bly oth­er mech­a­nisms of legit­i­ma­cy. My point is not to give com­pre­hen­sive guide­lines to would-be cam­paign­ers. I sim­ply want to note that none of the actors in these deci­sions is con­scious­ly think­ing “hey, I think I’ll expand the def­i­n­i­tion of lib­er­al Quak­er the­ol­o­gy today.” In fact I expect they’re most­ly pass­ing the buck, think­ing “hey, who am I to decide any­thing like that.”

None of these decision-making process­es are meant to serve as tools to dis­miss oppo­si­tion. The orga­ni­za­tions involved are not hand­ing out Impri­maturs and would be quite hor­ri­fied if they real­ized their agree­ments were being seen that way. Amy Clark, a com­menter on my last post, on this sum­mer’s reunion and camp for the once-young mem­bers of Young Friends North Amer­i­ca, had a very inter­est­ing comment:

I agree that YFNA has become FGC: those pre­vi­ous­ly involved in YFNA have tak­en lead­er­ship with FGC … with both pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive results. Well … now we have a chance to look at the lega­cy we are cre­at­ing: do we like it?

I have the feel­ing that the cur­rent gen­er­a­tion of lib­er­al Quak­er lead­er­ship does­n’t quite believe it’s lead­ing lib­er­al Quak­erism. By “lead­er­ship” I don’t mean the small skim of the pro­fes­sion­al Quak­er bureau­cra­cy (whose mem­bers can get _too_ self-inflated on the lead­er­ship issue) but the com­mit­tees, clerks and vol­un­teers that get most of the work done from the local to nation­al lev­els. We are the inher­i­tors of a proud and some­times fool­ish tra­di­tion and our actions are shap­ing its future but I don’t think we real­ly know that. I have no clever solu­tion to the issues I’ve out­lined here but I think becom­ing con­scious that we’re cre­at­ing our own lega­cy is an impor­tant first step.

Twenty First Century traveling ministry: of uberQuakers, selfish Friends and the search for unity

July 28, 2005

A guest piece by Evan Welkin

Short­ly after fin­ish­ing my sec­ond year at Guil­ford Col­lege, I set out to under­stand what brought me there. Dur­ing the stress­ful process of decid­ing which col­lege to attend, I felt a strong but slight­ly mys­te­ri­ous urge to explore Quak­erism in my under­grad­u­ate years. Two years lat­er, this same urge led me to buy a motor­cy­cle, learn to ride it, and set out in a spir­i­tu­al jour­ney up the East­ern seaboard vis­it­ing Quak­er meet­ings. While Guil­ford had excit­ed and even irri­tat­ed my curios­i­ty about the work­ings of Quak­erism, I knew lit­tle about how Quak­ers were over a large area of the coun­try. I want­ed to find out how Quak­ers worked as a group across a wide area of the coun­try, and if I could learn how to be a leader with­in that community.

July 26th, 2005: Clarence and Lilly Pickett Fund project report

The Trans­port: Evan Welkin as he came through South Jersey.

The pur­pose of my trip as out­lined by my let­ter of intro­duc­tion was:

“…the devel­op­ment of con­struc­tive and enrich­ing spir­i­tu­al dia­logue between all branch­es of the Quak­er com­mu­ni­ty. I plan to trav­el from South to North, speak­ing with meet­ings about how (or whether) they feel their region­al cul­ture affects their the­o­log­i­cal beliefs with the intent of gain­ing a greater under­stand­ing of the ‘spir­i­tu­al state’ of indi­vid­ual meetings.“

I was very com­mit­ted to keep­ing this vision open-ended in order to iden­ti­fy com­mon threads with­in con­ver­sa­tions I would have with Friends. I hoped in the dis­cus­sions I might iden­ti­fy whether there was some aspect of “region­al fla­vor” to a Quak­er meet­ing in South Car­oli­na ver­sus one in New Jer­sey, for exam­ple. I hoped to iden­ti­fy what these dif­fer­ences might be and some­how look for a com­mon Quak­er thread that ran beneath them I could address with all Friends. In addi­tion, I planned to take pic­tures of meet­ing­hous­es along the way to see if what peo­ple said about their meet­ings was at all reflect­ed in their meet­ing­house archi­tec­ture. In all hon­esty, how­ev­er, I was most inter­est­ed in sim­ply gain­ing a greater under­stand­ing of how Quak­erism is prac­ticed over a very large area of the US. As a Quak­er myself, I want­ed to know what it meant to tru­ly own up to and under­stand this part of my iden­ti­ty and to strength­en my spir­i­tu­al being and hope­ful­ly inspire others.

My ini­tial plans for this project were to pur­chase a motor­cy­cle, learn to ride it and dri­ve from Key West in Flori­da to Maine vis­it­ing Quak­ers along the way. I want­ed to stay near the coast, if for no oth­er rea­son than to have some kind of geo­graph­i­cal con­ti­nu­ity from the Atlantic to ground me along my way. The actu­al imple­men­ta­tion of my plan dif­fered slight­ly in it’s phys­i­cal man­i­fes­ta­tion, but I still found it to be a spir­i­tu­al­ly and intel­lec­tu­al­ly chal­leng­ing endeav­or. I trav­eled along the route indi­cat­ed on the attached map, cov­er­ing rough­ly 4,200 miles over the course of the trip. I began in Greens­boro, North Car­oli­na and trav­eled south to St. Peters­burg, Flori­da. From St. Peters­burg, I trav­eled all the way along the East­ern Seaboard more or less to New York City. From there, I returned to the South by way of Greens­boro to fin­ish in Nashville Tennessee.

The Route: I vis­it­ed rough­ly 29 meet­ings hous­es and Quak­er places of wor­ship on my trip and met with groups from 15 of them. In a cou­ple of instances, I only met with indi­vid­u­als from var­i­ous meetings.

The prepa­ra­tion for my project was sig­nif­i­cant, most notably in respect to my trans­porta­tion. Before my deci­sion to take on this project, I had only once rid­den a motor­cy­cle, and my hazy mem­o­ry of the occa­sion makes me think it was just a brief ride on the back. Pur­chas­ing, insur­ing, licens­ing and learn­ing how to dri­ve a motor­cy­cle was a very involved under­tak­ing that required a con­sid­er­able amount of com­mit­ment to over­com­ing my fear. The process helped me become men­tal­ly pre­pared for the trip, though, by test­ing my phys­i­cal self so great­ly. In addi­tion, I wrote to over 50 Quak­er meet­ings all along the East coast intro­duc­ing myself and ask­ing them to con­sid­er meet­ing with me. As meet­ings respond­ed, I gave them an idea of when I might be in their area and we set up ten­ta­tive vis­it­ing dates. The pur­pose of the trip as out­lined in that let­ter changed over the course of my project, but I will return to that. In addi­tion to these two most time-consuming aspects of my project, there were quite a num­ber of oth­er small­er details to be tak­en care of that are inher­ent to any major trav­el. Pur­chas­ing gear, tun­ing up and prepar­ing my motor­cy­cle for long dis­tance tour­ing, dis­cussing details with my home meet­ing about the trip, etc. were some of the oth­er tasks to be com­plet­ed. For the most part, I did all of this alone. While I had Max Carter to help with some of the pre­lim­i­nary envi­sion­ing and last minute con­tact pos­si­bil­i­ties, I took on most every­thing myself. My home meet­ing was far away and could prac­ti­cal­ly offer very lit­tle in terms of coor­di­nat­ing efforts from that dis­tance. I was not sure how to pre­pare for the trip spir­i­tu­al­ly but left with an open heart and a strong com­mit­ment to be as open as pos­si­ble.
I was pre­sent­ed with quite a num­ber of chal­lenges on my trip, and it appeared that those obsta­cles came either in the form of spir­i­tu­al or prac­ti­cal tri­als along my way. Some of my prac­ti­cal chal­lenges were the theft of my cam­era ear­ly in the trip, the mat­ter of food and lodg­ing and the sheer effort of trav­el­ing over very great dis­tances day after day. The cam­era was sig­nif­i­cant loss because it made the process of gath­er­ing pic­tures for pre­sen­ta­tion much more dif­fi­cult. I had to rely on the poor qual­i­ty and much slow­er pro­cess­ing of a dis­pos­able cam­era for most of my trip. In gen­er­al, I had a sense of who I would stay with city by city along my route, but it was dif­fi­cult to not know any of these peo­ple in advance beyond let­ters and to rely on them so much for their gen­eros­i­ty. I real­ize that this demand­ed quite a degree of flex­i­bil­i­ty both on my part and theirs; this, like my stolen cam­era, helped me learn to adapt and try to be as gra­cious as pos­si­ble. The phys­i­cal strain and men­tal alert­ness I need­ed to trav­el long dis­tances was very tax­ing, result­ing in my deci­sion to not go as far as I had orig­i­nal­ly planned.

A prac­ti­cal issue that did affect the out­come of my project was which meet­ings end­ed up respond­ing to my let­ter of intro­duc­tion. I only received any word back from about half of the meet­ings I wrote to. Of those, I was dis­ap­point­ed that despite the fact I wrote to a large num­ber of Quak­ers both pro­grammed and unpro­grammed, I received a much small­er num­ber of respons­es from pro­grammed meet­ings and of those I did, a num­ber ‘dis­ap­peared’ after the ini­tial con­tact. This may have been entire­ly by chance, but none the less I found my expe­ri­ences with pro­grammed Friends to be dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly enrich­ing for their being so few and I regret­ted their brevi­ty. There­fore, most of my obser­va­tions were among unpro­grammed Friends and I shy away from mak­ing com­par­isons between “unpro­grammed” and “pro­grammed” Friends in this report because I sim­ply didn’t feel like I met with enough unpro­grammed Friends to tell.

In addi­tion, the inter­nal chal­lenge all these prac­ti­cal chal­lenges brought on made it dif­fi­cult to remain spir­i­tu­al­ly cen­tered. Con­stant spir­i­tu­al dis­cus­sion left me strug­gling to be light­heart­ed. I can’t tell if this made my lat­er dis­heart­en­ment with group con­ver­sa­tions greater or whether the dis­cus­sions them­selves dis­heart­ened me. As time went on though, my frus­tra­tions with the dynam­ics I wit­nessed in meet­ings right from the begin­ning of my trip onwards increas­ing­ly affect­ed my open­ness. I relied more and more on a reg­i­ment­ed con­ver­sa­tion for­mat, lim­it­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties for spon­tane­ity of spir­it. By the end I felt like a slight­ly strange gen­tle­man who ris­es every week at about the same time in meet­ing for wor­ship with a mes­sage that seems unfor­tu­nate­ly sim­i­lar to the same thing he said the week before.

With the goal of cre­at­ing “enrich­ing spir­i­tu­al dia­logue” so promi­nent­ly placed as my goal for this trip, I spent a sig­nif­i­cant amount of time fig­ur­ing out what this meant and how it might be achieved. If I were able to cre­ate this dia­logue on my trip, I some­how felt that this would be imme­di­ate­ly ben­e­fi­cial to both Quak­ers and Quak­er insti­tu­tions by cre­at­ing a greater sense of vital­i­ty and uni­ty with­in them. I began to real­ize how sub­jec­tive uni­ty and vital­i­ty are. A dis­tinc­tion I failed to rec­og­nize in my ide­al­ized con­cep­tion was the dif­fer­ence between uni­ty of indi­vid­u­als, such as a good con­ver­sa­tion between myself and a host, and uni­ty of meet­ings, such as a group meet­ing and shar­ing con­ver­sa­tion. As time went on, I began to become frus­trat­ed in group dis­cus­sions and to try to “argue” my inter­pre­ta­tion of uni­ty and vital­i­ty in much the same way I saw oth­er Friends doing. I had hoped Friends them­selves would sug­gest points of uni­ty with­in Quak­erism, but often I just heard folks talk about what they believed in to the exclu­sion of oth­er beliefs. For instance, I asked many meet­ings what they might do as a group if some­one rose in meet­ing and brought a very evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian mes­sage to wor­ship. While at first many spoke about “try­ing to accept that mes­sage” as equal to any oth­er, it seemed that in essence many felt threat­ened by the ques­tion and that I should ask it at all. It seemed that few meet­ings had any estab­lished process of “elder­ing” or hold­ing indi­vid­u­als account­able for the group. I am cer­tain­ly not evan­gel­i­cal nor am I sure I am Chris­t­ian, but I some­how felt accused of being both in these con­ver­sa­tions and there­fore felt less wel­come. There were sev­er­al points on my trip where I strug­gled to find any hope Quak­ers could be lead to unite amongst each oth­er, and it was the dis­tinc­tion between indi­vid­u­als and groups that made all the difference.

Observ­ing group dynam­ics and look­ing for con­ti­nu­ity or uni­ty with­in Friends Meet­ings as a whole along my jour­ney was very hard for me. There were sev­er­al notable excep­tions, but as I fin­ished my trip I found myself ter­ri­bly dis­heart­ened in gen­er­al by much of the group behav­ior I wit­nessed with­in the meet­ings I vis­it­ed. In meet­ings were I felt most suc­cess­ful and use­ful the mem­bers appeared not only to care deeply about each oth­er and the vital­i­ty of their indi­vid­ual meet­ings, but were strong enough to work out­side their own com­mu­ni­ties to engage cor­po­rate­ly in the wider body of Quak­erism and the world at large. They had clear ways of hold­ing indi­vid­u­als account­able to the group as a whole and did so. I did not feel I found this sense in many of the meet­ings I vis­it­ed though, how­ev­er briefly, and could not tell how ben­e­fi­cial my vis­it might be to them. I was sur­prised to be so dis­heart­ened after see­ing folks so quick­ly, but often it appeared very obvi­ous­ly in group con­ver­sa­tions full of Friends inter­rupt­ing or con­tra­dict­ing each oth­er or from side com­ments I heard from indi­vid­u­als later.

I strug­gle to write these words because I felt cared for and looked after by folks from all the meet­ings I vis­it­ed, but I still could not help but feel sad when vis­it­ing meet­ings who steadi­ly lost mem­bers, strug­gled to take care of basic busi­ness or suf­fered from inter­nal feuds. Many meet­ings in Flori­da were in the process of build­ing new meet­ing­hous­es, and while the com­mon cause of such a large order of busi­ness seemed to bring them togeth­er, many Friends in these meet­ings expressed con­cern that it was only a tem­po­rary fix. In fair­ness, many of the meet­ings I vis­it­ed along the way were in fact wor­ship groups and not ful­ly meet­ings, but rather than this being a step­ping stone to a more estab­lished order, it seemed that many of these wor­ship groups strug­gled to keep the few mem­bers they had and seemed to not feel ter­ri­bly con­nect­ed as a group.

What appeared to be the main caus­es of this dis­uni­ty, how­ev­er, was the unfor­tu­nate fact that it seems many Friends are Quak­er for self­ish rea­sons. I’m sor­ry to say it, but that was my impres­sion of why so many meet­ing groups strug­gle to find an effec­tive group process. In many of the meet­ings I vis­it­ed it appeared that Friends not only expect­ed com­plete accep­tance of their per­son­al spir­i­tu­al path, but also their polit­i­cal, ide­o­log­i­cal and cul­tur­al ones as well. Like in the case of the evan­gel­i­cal mes­sage ques­tion, it appeared that an evan­gel­i­cal per­son was not sim­ply threat­en­ing to indi­vid­u­als in their spir­i­tu­al beliefs, but also in their inferred polit­i­cal lean­ings and cul­ture. This seemed to show me that the meet­ing was not actu­al­ly for embrac­ing peo­ple in a group atmos­phere as adver­tised but more a cul­tur­al, ide­o­log­i­cal and polit­i­cal sup­port group for like-minded indi­vid­u­als. “Quak­ers couldn’t be Repub­li­can. I can’t stand Repub­li­cans” . This is where the realm of the indi­vid­ual butted up against the cor­po­rate in my eyes.

The beau­ty of silent wor­ship, as many Friends agreed, was it’s abil­i­ty to speak to so many dif­fer­ent Friend’s con­di­tions while still being such a cru­cial­ly group-centered act. In the ear­ly days of Quak­erism, it appeared that this act of wor­ship was a cor­ner­stone for the con­nec­tion that could be felt between indi­vid­u­als in a group set­ting in busi­ness meet­ing, com­mu­ni­ty din­ners or the world at large. From what I saw on my trip, the grat­i­fi­ca­tion and ful­fill­ment of the indi­vid­ual appears more and more accen­tu­at­ed as Quak­erism pro­gress­es rather than ful­fill­ment of the whole meet­ing. When faced with a con­fus­ing or chaot­ic busi­ness process, for instance, it seems in many cas­es that every per­son wants to revert to the way THEY make deci­sions best as the ide­al way for the group. I would has­ten to add that I did not even attend one busi­ness meet­ing along my trip, and that my con­cern for the issue of busi­ness specif­i­cal­ly comes from many, many direct com­ments from indi­vid­u­als frus­trat­ed by their group’s busi­ness meet­ings. I saw on my own that many Friends have so many dif­fer­ent inter­ests and such com­plete­ly busy lives out­side meet­ing, it appears the most they can do to attend­ed worship.

So per­haps the para­dox of the indi­vid­ual and group with­in a uni­ver­sal spir­it is what Quak­erism can ben­e­fit from explor­ing today. I found my atten­tion so often turned to the great folks I found along my way who spoke direct­ly to my con­di­tion. I met so many incred­i­bly inter­est­ing, thought-provoking, eccen­tric, kind and inspired peo­ple on my trip, I can­not help but be awed and impressed. I cer­tain­ly found a kind of uni­ty between them and myself. While I can­not be sure my actions ben­e­fit­ed Friend meet­ings in total­i­ty, I know that my con­ver­sa­tions with Friends were both inspir­ing to me and the peo­ple I found along the way. I believe I bright­ened some folks’ days and gave them a chance to tell their sto­ries. The faith required to get on the road each day, not know­ing where I would end up by night­fall was awe­some and it stretched me con­sid­er­ably in a way that I think Friends appre­ci­at­ed. I am sure that I will con­tin­ue to be in con­tact with Friends I met along the way and will con­tin­ue to think about these issues with them.

In terms of this trip as a foun­da­tion for Quak­er lead­er­ship, I must say I was a put at a bit of a loss at what that might mean. Some­one men­tioned it might be like “herd­ing cats.” One lead­er­ship role I did see often, which wor­ried me, was that of the “überQuak­ers,” as we at Guil­ford like to call them. It appeared that in many instances, I end­ed up stay­ing with the mem­bers of meet­ings who were the “movers and shak­ers” of their meet­ings for their dogged ded­i­ca­tion to the meet­ing as a whole. Sad­ly, in many instances these folks seemed to bear a dis­pro­por­tion­ate amount of respon­si­bil­i­ty for the affairs of their meet­ings, spir­i­tu­al­ly, logis­ti­cal­ly and ener­get­i­cal­ly. They did not resent this role, but it appeared to me that they were rarely con­scious­ly cho­sen for that min­istry by the group but instead had the posi­tion thrust upon them. These folks were com­pli­ment­ed by an unfor­tu­nate­ly large seg­ment of Friends, often plead­ing busy sched­ules, who appeared to be unable to com­mit to the meet­ing beyond the cathar­sis of meet­ing for wor­ship. Part of wit­ness­ing this left me ques­tion­ing my com­mit­ment to Quak­erism by the end of my trip. If this is how Quak­erism works, why should I even both­er devel­op­ing ‘lead­er­ship’ to become an “überQuak­er”? While it may not have burnt out those who I stayed with along the way, why would I pur­pose­ly stick my neck out for the ben­e­fit of the group as a whole when it seems that few oth­ers are actu­al­ly inter­est­ed in any­one but them­selves at the end of the day? It is not that I begrudge self­less­ness by any means, but Quak­erism can­not sur­vive on the self­less­ness of some and depen­dence of many. Or at least it should not in my eyes.

Per­haps what wor­ries me is that with the amount of time and effort I put into this trip, I am already falling into the “überQuak­er” mind­set. “Well, if things aren’t going right I’ll just have to do some­thing myself and decide how they can be fixed.” This is my great fear. This is not the think­ing of a vital, post-authoritarian reli­gious soci­ety. I imag­ine a vital Quak­er com­mu­ni­ty that is full of folks with var­i­ous com­mit­ments, but all with a shared desire not only to come to wor­ship togeth­er but to do busi­ness togeth­er, reach out and make sac­ri­fices to bring in new mem­bers and active­ly take on projects as a meet­ing that all can agree are the Spirit’s will. I would like to see a much greater sense of group inten­tion­al­i­ty, but I know that is not some­thing one indi­vid­ual can force. I have learned that I have a great deal of per­son­al growth to go through before I am ready to con­tribute as I would like to the Quak­er com­mu­ni­ty. I think in many ways this trip made me feel more inex­pe­ri­enced and appre­hen­sive with Quak­erism but I strive for that place of faith and con­fi­dence. I am begin­ning a book about my expe­ri­ences on this trip, in addi­tion to cre­at­ing a dig­i­tal pre­sen­ta­tion fea­tur­ing the meet­ing­house pic­tures I took.

I wish I could say I knew this trip was God’s will, but the rhetoric with which many peo­ple have invoked God’s name in my life has blurred the lines between spir­i­tu­al sur­ren­der and ego­tis­ti­cal manip­u­la­tion. As one par­tic­u­lar­ly astute Friend put it “As with so much else in life, imple­ment­ing our inten­tions should allow for the pos­si­bil­i­ty of being self con­ceit­ed.” Much of what I found along my trip reflect­ed strug­gles with­in oth­ers about the will of God in their lives, some of which start­ed ear­ly in Friend’s lives and some that only began when they took Quak­erism as their own. Iron­i­cal­ly, it appears that the dif­fer­ence I was look­ing for in geo­graph­ic dis­tri­b­u­tion was actu­al­ly sur­pris­ing­ly absent over such a large area. All the Friends I talked to were in some way strug­gling with the issue of how they fit into the larg­er group, a com­mu­ni­ty of the Spir­it and of Quak­er busi­ness. As I sought to find par­al­lels in my con­ver­sa­tions with Friends, I was con­stant­ly remind­ed of the push and pull of the indi­vid­ual will ver­sus the will of the whole. In many Friends eyes, this strug­gle is fun­da­men­tal­ly a dance between the indi­vid­ual and answer­ing to the Spir­it that is with­in us all.

Some Queries I made up for myself along my trip were:

  • How do I remain secure and non-threatened in my own faith to be open to others?
  • What are my blind­ness­es or bias­es from my Quak­er roots?
  • What is self­less­ness and is it ideal?
  • How do I know what is my will and what is the will of God?

Aggregating our Webs

June 16, 2005

On Beppe­blog, Joe talks about start­ing a clear­ness com­mit­tee [link long gone]to assist him with his strug­gles with Friends. But he also touch­es on some­thing I’ve cer­tain­ly also expe­ri­enced: the impor­tant role this elec­tron­ic fel­low­ship has been playing:

Just the oth­er day I real­ized that I felt more com­fort­able being a Friend since not attend­ing Meet­ing on an ongo­ing basis. My ongo­ing “e‑relationships” via the blo­gos­phere has helped me stay “con­nect­ed”. Observe how pleased I respond­ed to Liz’s recent post (the one that I quot­ed in the post before this one). It’s as if I’m starv­ing for good fel­low­ship of some kind or another.

There’s even more talk about internet-mediated discernment/fellowship in the “com­ments to his followup.

Giv­en all this, I’m not sure if I’ve ever high­light­ed a “vision for an expand­ed Quak­er Ranter site” that I put togeth­er for a “youth lead­er­ship” grant in Third Month:

I’ve been blessed to meet many of my [age] peers with a clear call to inspired min­istry. Most of these Friends have since left the Soci­ety, frus­trat­ed both by month­ly meet­ings and Quak­er bod­ies that did­n’t know what to do with a bold min­istry and by a lack of men­tor­ing elder­ship that could help sea­son these young min­is­ters and deep­en their under­stand­ing of gospel order. I would like to put togeth­er an inde­pen­dent online pub­li­ca­tion… This would explic­it­ly reach out across the dif­fer­ent braches of Friends and even to var­i­ous seek­er move­ments like the so-called “Emer­gent Church Movement.”

As I’ve writ­ten I was select­ed for one of their fel­low­ships (yea!!) but for an amount that was point­ed­ly too low to actu­al­ly fund much (huh??). There’s some­thing in the air how­ev­er. “Quak­er Dhar­ma” is ask­ing sim­i­lar ques­tions and Russ Nel­son’s “Plan­etQuak­er” is a sometimes-awkward auto­mat­ed answer (do its read­ers real­ly want to see the ultra­sounds?). I’m not sure any of these com­bo sites could actu­al­ly work bet­ter than their con­stituent parts. I find myself unin­ter­est­ed in most group blogs, aggre­ga­tors, and for­mal web­sites. The invi­did­ual voice is so important.

And don’t we already have a group project going with all the cross-reading and cross-linking we’re doing. Is that what Joe was talk­ing about? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve found some new inter­est­ing blog­ger and went to post a wel­come in their com­ments only to have found that Joe or LizOpp had beat­en me to it. (Some of us are to the point of read­ing each oth­er’s minds. I think I could prob­a­bly write a great Beppe or LizOpp post and vice-versa.) Is this impulse to for­mal­ize these rela­tion­ships just a throw­back to old ideas of publishing?

Maybe the web’s form of hyper­link­ing is actu­al­ly supe­ri­or to Old Media pub­lish­ing. I love how I can put for­ward a strong vision of Quak­erism with­out offend­ing any­one – any put-off read­ers can hit the “back” but­ton. And if a blog I read posts some­thing I don’t agree with, I can sim­ply choose not to com­ment. If life’s just too busy then I just miss a few weeks of posts. With my “Sub­jec­tive Guide to Quak­er Blogs” and my “On the Web” posts I high­light the blog­gers I find par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ing, even when I’m not in per­fect the­o­log­i­cal uni­ty. I like that I can have dis­cus­sions back and forth with Friends who I don’t exact­ly agree with.

I have noth­ing to announce, no clear plan for­ward and no mon­ey to do any­thing any­way. But I thought it’d be inter­est­ing to hear what oth­ers have been think­ing along these lines.

Net Sightings

May 2, 2005

The Pub­lic Quak­er writ­ing about prayer
bq. Prayer is one con­stant thing for me, a reli­able base. When am I hav­ing epis­te­mo­log­i­cal doubt about every­thing, I do know that is good for me to pray.
A month ago LizOpp post­ed a inter­est “FAQ on her wor­ship group”:http://thegoodraisedup.blogspot.com/2005/03/faqs-about-my-worship-group.html which is well worth read­ing. Last week she fol­lowed it up with a very chew-worthy post on “The­o­log­i­cal uni­ty and spir­i­tu­al diversity”:http://thegoodraisedup.blogspot.com/2005/04/theological-unity-and-spiritual.html (which adds new ground to the ter­ri­to­ry we’ve been explor­ing here on Quak­er Ranter on “Non-Theism”:http://www.nonviolence.org/martink/archives/000567.php and “Lov­ing God”:http://www.nonviolence.org/martink/archives/000577.php).
“Quakerspeak”:http://www.livejournal.com/users/Quakerspeak/ is the new blog by a high-school Friend I met last week in Ore­gon. Whew, is she on fire!:
bq. I nev­er real­ly thought much about how I was sort of bot­tling up all my the­o­log­i­cal and spir­i­tu­al con­tem­pla­tions; sud­den­ly I feel like I’m pour­ing it all out on the table and exam­in­ing it all.. well, except that I’ve been exam­in­ing it all. I’m try­ing to bet­ter apply my spritu­al­i­ty to my dai­ly life and inter­ac­tions with­out los­ing sight of myself; I’m try­ing to fig­ure out where it all fits into my own life with­out try­ing to alter my per­son­al­i­ty or ways of being.
Beppe’s just start­ed a new series with a post, “The Trou­bles with Friends Part 1”:http://beppeblog.blogspot.com/2005/05/trouble-with-friends-1-too-much-of.html. This first install­ment focus­es on our fear of judge­men­tal­ism. Speak on, bro!