Everything Matters; Nothing Matters

 "I saw, also, that there was an ocean of darkness and death; but an infinite ocean of light and love, which flowed over the ocean of darkness. In that also I saw the infinite love of God, and I had great openings".  George Fox

 

"Eventually you will understand that there is an ocean of love behind all this fear and pain.  That force will sustain by feeding your heart from deep within."    Michael Singer

 

"Nor is the God-blinded soul given blissful oblivion but, rather, excruciatingly sensitive eyesight towards the world.  The sources of suffering for the tendered soul are infinitely multiplied, well-nigh beyond all endurance.  I recently had an unforgettable hour with a Hindu Monk.  He knew the secret of the paradox “Nothing matters; everything matters.”  It is a key of entrance into suffering.   The one who knows only one-half of the paradox can never enter that door of mystery and survive."

Thomas Kelly

 

"God give me the strength to change the things I can, the serenity to accept the things I cannot and the wisdom to know the difference."

Serenity Prayer

These 4 quotes come together in an interesting way for me.  As a life long Quaker I have most of my life had an outsized sense of what we have the strength to change - ie Quakers lead the Abolition movement and the suffragette movement, etc. so it seemed possible to change BIG things.  

As someone in my 20's I was very much an "everything matters" person and as Kelly describes with excruciating sensitive eyes to the suffering of the world.  I worked hard on the disarmament movement and through most of my 20s did not intend to have children as I thought they would simply be blown up in a nuclear war.  Somehow in my 30's that shifted enough to have my beloved daughter, and now I live with the irony that instead it maybe climate change that will destroy her and her peers life.  In my 2o's I also took that famous Fox quote as a powerful affirmation that love wins, that love has the power to overcome the darkness.

However, through my life I have seen much personal suffering as well as watching my clients suffer and much of the social justice gains of the 70's and 80's dismantled by the Bush and Trump administrations.   I began to feel some what disconnected from the power of love....it seemed hard to locate it in the face of so much suffering.   

It is helpful to hear Singer, a mindfulness teacher, slight twist on the ocean of love, that it is "behind the fear and the suffering.  Jampolsky famously said it is not hate that is the opposite of love but fear...it is fear that causes us to shut down and disconnect from that Divine Ocean of Love.   Recently I heard a podcast with the author of Eat, Love, Pray.   And she described her daily spiritual practice of decades - she writes a letter between she and Love.  Just hearing it my mind turned towards Love and started talking and I was amazed by the ocean like wave of Love that rushed towards me with compassion and encouragement!  It is important to me to realize that it is a Presense that is always there - and that is quite divorced from whether it "overcomes" hate or darkness or fear.   In other words - this is not a competition where one is winning.  Both suffering and Love are constantly present - it is simply how we learn to live with them.

A decade or so ago I heard a famous mindfulness teacher.  He was talking about observing our emotions, observing suffering - from a position of "just noticing"   He described his wife who he was happily married to coming to him upset and angry and being able to just observe and hear a voice that said: "and this too".   It was to me an acceptional ability to notice that everything matters and nothing matters.  That of course it mattered that she was upset - and that in the hugeness of human experience and the vast universe - it also did not matter.   It was a surrender to the fact that there are no seperate or protected parts of our life - immune from the suffering or strife.

I have been wondering if I have become numb or if I indeed are coming to some of the "wisdom" of the serenity prayer, but I have noticed in the last 5 years that as the long, ever increasing list of calmaties, system failures, irreverible man made environmental collapses occur that there is a voice in my head that just says "and this too".   This does not stop me from still trying to effect change.   But it does (usually) stop me from despair or desperation.  I remain in a calm center acting as I can and surrendering the rest to the ocean of Love.   This week I have faced that we may all soon die in a nuclear war...or we will once again skate thru another confrontation by nuclear powers with the price of the conquered Ukraine, and all the death and suffering this has brought.   Given the US invation of Iran, Iraqi and Afgahstan in the last two decades (also encased in death and suffering)....I can hardly find any difference between these acts of aggression by imperil powers.  So everything matters and nothing matters.

Benjamin Lay and Quaker Corporate Witness

I often hear Friends lament that we do not have a corporate witness currently, or try to figure out in consternation how to marshal other Friends to unify around one of the many critical and compelling issues of our time.  I think that Friends fail to understand the actual chapters of Quaker's historic witness.  For example, Friends proudly speak of the standard of Quakers "not owning slaves".   They sweep past the over 100 years it took our Yearly Meetings to reach consensus that Friends were not to own slavery (or that even after that some Friends did).   This ignores the great price of unpopularity and even expulsion that the early abolitionist experienced in their own Meetings.   It also ignores that this later standard was achieved by "reading Friends out of Meeting".  (Meaning that Slave owners were stripped of membership.)  Given that Friends have now rejected the idea of reading anyone out of membership, it would literally be impossible for modern Friends to achieve this level of conformity to any position we might take on any issue.

Take for example the biography of Benjamin Lay:  The Fearless Benjamin Lay by Marcus Redikar released this past month.  Redikar reports on the tactics of Benjamin, a small man known as a hunchback because of his 4 foot height and curvature of the upper back.   In 1738 he became the last of a very few Quakers expelled for their abolitionism.  In fact Redikar tells us Lay was expelled from two British Friends Meetings as well as Abington Friends meeting in the US. Below he describes the incident that led to Lay's expulsion: 

"On September 19, 1738, a man named Benjamin Lay strode into a Quaker meetinghouse in Burlington, New Jersey, for the biggest event of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. He wore a great coat, which hid a military uniform and a sword. Beneath his coat Lay carried a hollowed-out book with a secret compartment, into which he had tucked a tied-off animal bladder filled with bright red pokeberry juice. Because Quakers had no formal minister or church ceremony, people spoke as the spirit moved them. Lay, a Quaker himself, waited his turn.

He finally rose to address this gathering of 'weighty Quakers.' Many Friends in Pennsylvania and New Jersey had grown rich on Atlantic commerce, and many bought human property. To them Lay announced in a booming voice that God Almighty respects all peoples equally, rich and poor, men and women, white and black alike. He said that slave keeping was the greatest sin in the world and asked, How can a people who profess the golden rule keep slaves? He then threw off his great coat, revealing the military garb, the book and the blade.

A murmur filled the hall as the prophet thundered his judgment: “Thus shall God shed the blood of those persons who enslave their fellow creatures.” He pulled out the sword, raised the book above his head, and plunged the sword through it. People gasped as the red liquid gushed down his arm; women swooned. To the shock of all, he spattered “blood” on the slave keepers. He prophesied a dark, violent future: Quakers who failed to heed the prophet’s call must expect physical, moral and spiritual death.

The room exploded into chaos, but Lay stood quiet and still, 'like a statue,' a witness remarked. Several Quakers quickly surrounded the armed soldier of God and carried him from the building. He did not resist. He had made his point.  This spectacular performance was one moment of guerrilla theater among many in Lay’s life."

Now if you consider this carefully my guess is these are not tactics you could see yourself doing in your Friends Meeting or for that matter any Friends Meeting.   Yet there are many recorded incidents of him doing guerrilla theater among Friends, as well as "calling out" Friends (from the bench during business meeting) in a way that could only be described honestly as self-righteous heckling.  So maybe you say: "well no wonder he was expelled - poor social skills, really very rude....other polite Friends could have gotten the same job done."   Yet both John Woolman and Lucretia Mott made themselves very unpopular among many Friends for their calls to conscience. Lucretia Mott was almost written out of her Meeting several times, probably only spared this because of the wealth and status of her husband.  George Fox for that matter in the beginning of Quakerism entered other people's churches, stood up on the benches and disrupted the service and called the minister hypocritics, among other things.  So playing nice was not in the original Quaker play book.  Speaking the truth bluntly was.  As Quakers have through education and the protection of the right to freedom of religion become more middle class have we also learned the middle class pattern of playing it safe?

I believe if we honestly appraise our history we will see that a few Friends with vision and courage put out a call to Friends to stand for social justice.  There calls were not immediately heeded or was unity quickly or easily reached.  Most spent their lifetimes both inside and outside of the Society of Friends agitating for a vision of justice that was often many decades ahead of their time and took great flack in both arenas for their "eccentric position".  They often did not see the fruits of their labor before their death.  In fact Redikar tells us Lay was living in a cave towards the end of his life in poor health and a Friend came to tell him that the Yearly Meeting had just passed a minute to discipline and disown Quaker slave owners and he jumped up saying: "I can now die in peace."

It does apparently take a certain personality type to be dedicated to the truth above popularity or even security.   That kind of personality is it seems at times flamboyant or "rude" or aggressive and self-righteous in making its point.  As Redikar says about Lay: "His confrontational methods made people talk: about him, his ideas, the nature of Quakerism and Christianity, and, most of all, slavery."   One has to think that Lay, Woolman and Mott did not have the idea that speaking to that of God in another person means to speak gently so as to not offend.  Perhaps the confrontation with oppression will always offend the ways in which oppression has dressed itself up and justified itself.  We have also been taught that minority voices in business meeting are to be listened to because they may in fact carry a piece of the truth not visible to the rest of us.  Can we believe this even when a Friend's voice makes us uncomfortable and challenges our own choices?  Are we willing to have a called Meeting for Business to respond to a crisis rather than send all our concerns off to a lengthy many month process before action can be taken?

Thus for us to wish in the present that we would all be in unity around social concerns is to ignore the actual history of how we have come to be in unity.  There were always Friends dragging the rest of us forward.  Even once we came to unity in consensus,  the work was always done by a small minority of the Meeting.   It is not insignificant that we have a value set that asks people to listen to God's voice, that teaches the rest of us to validate and support those among us who are so led.  It did make a difference that activist Friends were (usually) eventually supported by their Meetings.   But it is a great myth to say Friends acted as one body or in one mind for these great social causes.   It is true that heeding God's call we were out front ahead of much of the rest of the population.

This leads me to ask:  Who is a Friendly nuisance in your Meeting?   How well are you listening and heeding that person's words?   What truth do you care about so deeply that you would stand on a public bench making a spectacle of yourself?  What are you not willing to risk and why?  Are you willing to offend the oppressive?  Are you willing to upset and offend others by unequivocally stating a truth that challenges the very basis of who they are and how they live?

For more on Benjamin Lay see: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/quaker-comet-greatest-abolitionist-never-heard-180964401/
or: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/12/opinion/sunday/youll-never-be-as-radical-as-this-18th-century-quaker-dwarf.html

A portrait of Benjamin Lay

I take Thee...the Radical notion of Quaker Marriage.

Earlier this month two friends of mine who have been together for 35 years married each other.  They have been together longer than any of my friends who are married.  They identify as atheists and anarchists.  Therefore they saw no reason to be spiritually or legally joined.  But as retirement came into view, and one person went over the handlebars of a bicycle and wound up unconscious in the hospital, the idea of being able to share one's social security post death with one's life long partner loomed larger.

When they went to look at the vows that the justice of  the peace would have them say they were distressed by certain verses which felt to them religious in nature.  But primarily they were distressed by the fact that the Judge would marry them to each other.   They both felt that they were marrying each other - that this is not something that another person could do "to" them.  Having known me all their adult lives and having attended my wedding they were both very aware that Quakers are married neither by a Judge or a minister which is what they wanted.   They began a dialogue with the CA Secretary of State about the fact that due to separation of state and church that the vows language could not be legal, nor could the requirement of either a Judge or minister to marry two people.   They pointed to the example of Quakers that the law did allow for an exception to those requirements, but that the exception could not fairly be applied to only one religion.   The Secretary's office wound up agreeing that this probably was not constitutional.  They were issued a license to get married and were allowed to marry each other in their living room with two witnesses.

Most Quakers I know will proudly say that nothing compares to a Quaker wedding.  I have to agree because their is something so beautiful and so democratic about any family or friend being able to speak of love, relationship, marriage, community and good wishes at a Quaker wedding.  There is something so deeply right about the couple rising out of the silence to face each other and to say in vows that have not changed over 300 years "I take thee".  What a joy to have a document hanging in one's home with the signatures of all the loved one who joined and witnessed your wedding!

But most Quakers do not know the actual history of Quaker weddings.  Since Quakers did not have ministers in made complete sense that a wedding would take place inside of a Meeting for Worship and that the intention to marry, already tested and confirmed by a clearness committee was a public witnessing/honoring by the congregation of a connection that was believed already forged by God. Thus Quakers believe a wedding is an acknowledgement of a partnership God has already created. George Fox said: "For the right joining in marriage is the work of the Lord only, and not the priests' or the magistrates'; for it is God's ordinance and not man's; and therefore Friends cannot consent that they should join them together: for we marry none; it is the Lord's work, and we are but witnesses" Therefore, when the laws of the society said that one had to marry before a preacher or a judge, Quakers saw no need to change their process to comply with marital laws.  They were  already use to going to jail for simply gathering to worship and used to being punished by the state for being faithful to their understanding of God.  They were willing, as in all things, to stand with the Truth as they knew it.

Thus Quakers would marry each other and go on with their lives, unconcerned with whether this was regarded to be legal by the cities they lived in.   But in the small towns and villages dotted across the US that they lived in, they were good neighbors and respected business people whose integrity and sincerity was well known to their fellow citizens.   It did not sit well with their neighbors to consider them "living in sin".   So not through their asking, many states passed "the Quaker exception" where instead of requiring them to be married by a minister, it was recognized that a ceremony witnessed by their congregation would be considered legally binding.  Also many states developed legal precedents of "common law marriage", for any two people who for whatever reason lived together for more than 7 years were considered to be for legal purposes married.  However, in the past decades common law marriages were swept away and domestic partnerships became a legal mechanism that allowed Gay and Lesbian couples, other wise unable to marry to share some of the legal advantages of marriage. In many states if Quakers want to be legally married they still have to go down to the court house and have their marriage officiated there.

My friends recent experience has caused me to reflect and to realize that Quaker Marriage is a case of what Gene Sharp, tactical non-violence expert, calls passive non-compliance.  Where the failure of large numbers of people to comply with a law forces the law to change or become uninforceable.  This is one  of the many ways Quakers radically changed the society around them.  The radical thing was that notion that we marry each other, that we are not married through some other authority figure.  The original radical thing about George Fox's message was that we needed no inter-mediator between ourselves and God - that we could know God directly.   And the radical thing about Quaker marriage is that it also says that we can know directly, discover inwardly God's intention for our lives and that we can live in the authority of that alone.

The Quality of Silence

Normally my posts here are addressed to a Quaker audience.   Recently talking to someone I had just met about the silence in Meeting for Worship, I realized I had something to write to those who are trying to figure out online what Quakerism is like and if it is something they want to explore further.

My tag line says I am an unprogrammed Friend.   What does that mean?  Quakerism like many other churches has had splits – the first and most significant split was between programmed and unprogrammed Friends,  or between having a minister and not having a minister.   Unprogrammed Friends (those is Friends General Conference, in Friends Conservative and truth be told almost all Independent yearly meetings) keep an hour of silence for worship as did George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, and the Valient 60 – those original Quakers that spread the new born religion.

Throughout my life when I have told someone in conversation that the format of my weekly church service is an hour of silence the most common response is amazed disbelief.   At least some state “that would be very hard”.   Others inquire about the purpose of the silence.  I explain that Friends  believe that in the silence we wait to hear God’s voice, that God can and will speak to us directly.  (that we do not need an intermediator as in so many religions.)  

This belief comes directly from the original opening of George Fox:  “But as I had forsaken the priests, so I left the Separate preachers also, and those called the most experienced people; for I saw there was none among them all that could speak to my condition. And when all my hopes in them and in all men were gone, so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, nor could I tell what to do; then, oh! then I heard a voice which said, 'There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition': and when I heard it, my heart did leap for joy. ...and this I knew experimentally. My desires after the Lord grew stronger, and zeal in the pure knowledge of God, and of Christ alone, without the help of any man, book, or writing. For though I read the Scriptures that spake of Christ and of God, yet I knew Him not, but by revelation, as He who hath the key did open, and as the Father of Life drew me to His Son by His Spirit. Then the Lord gently led me along, and let me see his love, which was endless and eternal, surpassing all knowledge that men have in the natural state, or can get by history or books; and that love let me see myself, as I was without Him. I was afraid of all company, for I saw them perfectly where they were, through the love of God, which let me see myself.”

So we sit in the silence and we wait to hear God’s voice and sometimes those hearing a message receive an inward prompting that the message is for sharing and they are moved to (stand and) share it.   Depending upon the size of a Meeting there maybe between 1 message or 6.  It is called a “popcorn” meeting when too many messages are given.  This phrase also implies that as a group we did not ground and so there was a lot of popping up and speaking, but not from spirit!  It is also possible that there are no messages given.  No messages could be just , or it represent a failure equal to the popcorn meeting for the group to ground in spirit.

Which brings me to the subject of this post: the quality of silence.   On one level we think of all silence as the same –the simple absence of noise.   Someone told me there is a language (don’t recall which) that had multiple words for snow:  snow that has just fallen, snow that is crunchy, snow that is slushy, snow that is powery, snow that is old and dirty, etc.   Certainly how many words we have says something about the cultures focus upon that which it names in so many ways.   Apparently English speaking cultures do not pay much attention to silence because we have only one word for it and yet there are many kinds of silence.   For example outside of worship think of an akward silence.   Oh yes we have all had that experience!  Think also of board silence and think of silence in nature alive with crickets or birds but also almost the sound of a branch falling.  Think of the angry silence.   And think of the rich silence that you can go into as a respite and refuge – a place of dreams, reflection and imagination. 

So the quality of silence in worship also varies greatly.  Recently I drove away from my Meeting with a Quaker who was visiting from another Meeting.   She told me that she was drawn to my Meeting because she had experience very good vocal ministry at my Meeting.  There had been none that morning, and so I said:  “Normally we have about 3 message but recently we have had a lot of dead silence.”  She understood immediately what I meant and we began to talk about the difference between a dead silence and a living silence.  For me the dead silence comes when most of the members of the Meeting for worship are not centering – when the main activity in the room is people making to do lists in their brain, fighting inside their head with their boss or their spouse, or daydreaming or problem solving.    We all probably need to do that sort of thing sometimes (That is what the drive to Meeting is for??) but it is not what Meeting for worship is for.  It is certainly not the case that all messages do come from spirit as suppose to be the case.   Quaker’s have jokes about the NYTimes message – which refers to the person who read the paper before coming and feels compelled to make commentary on current events.  There are also Friends who are known for speaking to frequently who compulsively feel the need to fill the silence and may speak almost every week with or without anything to say!

But a Living Silence is an entirely other thing:  it is a silence so rich and so centered and grounded that it is palpable to all but the spiritually dead and can be completely fulfilling even if no message is ever given.  “How interesting” the person I was telling this to said “and the place you listen from that you can discern the difference between a living and a dead silence”.

Out of a living silence can come what Friends call a covered meeting or a gathered meeting (both short for covered by Spirit or gathered in God).   In this living silence the Presence of the Holy One is so palpable that both with or without words, we can feel our connection to each othe,r and we can speak effortlessly to each other’s inward condition.  At its best I liken this living silence to a symphony where different instruments come in at different moments, sounding different notes through the unique resonace which is their instrument, and yet together they create one song, one body of work, one amazing harmony.   While on face value the messages are on different topics, one may discern none-the-less a sort of theme that runs throughout.  This is my finest experience of Quaker Meeting for worship.   In such meeting for worship it is not uncommon that at least some are moved to tears. 

Friends have the saying: “This Friend speaks my mind” which is for use in Meeting for business to indicate that one agrees with the previous speaker and thus avoid the trap of speaking simply to re-emphasize a point.   However this saying goes well also for the experience in a really Gathered Meeting where a message can speak deeply to one’s condition, or even saying what one was going to say.   I have very literally had the experience of asking in silent prayer for guidance from God and having someone rise a few minutes later in worship and give a message that I knew was the answer I had asked for!

“So what” a despairing Friend has asked me, “are we to do about a Meeting where there is repeated dead silence?”  To me that is what we have religious ed, Ministry and Worship, or Ministry and Oversite for (various names for committees in different Meetings which do the same work.)  If Meetings are becoming uncentered, it is time to spend some time in worship sharing during second hour, or to study Quaker history, or to have discussion about spiritual practice….in short it is time to stoke the fires of our collective spirit life!

It is also time to tell the truth to each other about the current spiritual condition of our Meeting.  I remember many years ago when my Meeting was writing its’ annual state of the Meeting report my suggesting we add the sentence “We have been going through a period of spiritual dryness”.   Oh my goodness the dirty looks I got and objections that this was not true.  Despite our Quaker commitment to integrity it is apparently hard for us to tell the truth sometimes about our dry spells.  I shortly thereafter went on M&W and addressed the issue that way.   So it is possible to return to a Living Silence through many means.