"Radical Inclusion"

In our Quaker meeting are folks who accept Jesus as their personal savior.

In our Quaker meeting are fervent atheists and non-theists.

In our Quaker meeting are those who have found numerous other spiritual places, each as different as the individuals themselves.

And yet, in our Quaker meeting we thrive on and even rejoice in our differences.

How is this?

Consider two Quaker practices.

Our shared spirit

We share and proclaim the undeniable experience of an inexplicable spirit. It is self-evident in each of us and in our relationships.

It is a constant. It defines life. It is life.

Some call this spirit “God.” Early Friends proclaimed it, and most still do, as “that of God in everyone.”

For me the word “God” is burdened with associations. My list is long: the “Thou shalt” Father, a flowing white beard, fear, “a mighty fortress,” cloudy thrones, retribution, etc.

I don’t want THAT within me.

So, I, and others, say there is “that of the spirit in everyone” and some add ”and in everything.”

Other Friends have successfully freed “God” of such baggage. Or it simply no longer matters. “That of God in everyone” works for them. Some Friends have told me they don’t consider my “baggage” to be baggage at all. They find it divinely essential or historically significant or quaint or compelling or curious or simply irrelevant.

Worshipping without words

And that brings me to the second reason that Quakers are, as Friends say, “radically inclusive.” In our worship we put words, and the differences they define, aside. We unite in silence. We connect and unite with the one, unifying spirit (or “God” if you choose) in stillness.

At times we are sorely tested, but we know silence leads to the healing spirit.

We return again and again to this stillness. It is our great solace. It is our guide. It compels us — as individuals and as a community — to decide and ultimately to act.

As for the rest of it, the religious part, it’s words which often fail us. But we listen and rejoice. One Friend’s description of the spirit that is true for him or her gives me joy! I shouldn’t be surprised or angered if those words don’t match my own. The ineffable spirit is the same. Why should I not rejoice?

I know the communal celebration of that joy, our joy, resides in the shared, wordless stillness and unity of our silent worship. From that centered gathering emanates unity, truth and leadings of the spirit which spread to all, both in our community and the greater community beyond.

I share all this because I believe there is a profound universality to “radical inclusiveness.” Today, as always, it urgently needs to be celebrated and practiced in a world threatened by division and strife.

Beside the still waters . . .

Quakers describe their worship as “silent.”

Nearly all of our worship is in silence. The silence is broken only when someone is compelled to “share ministry” from the spiritual depths of silence.

But the word “silence” fails to adequately describe our worship.

I prefer to think of it as stillness.

Silence is, as they say, “necessary but not sufficient” for stillness.

Indeed all kinds of “noise” inhabits silence. Physical restlessness, distractions, worries, the mundane (Did I feed the cat? Did I water the plants?).

Stillness is altogether different.

That difference swept over me in the course of worship last Sunday.

My worshipful stillness led me to the image of a still pond. No ripple disturbed its surface.

My fellow worshippers and I sat in a circle around tranquility.

I’ve seen ponds and lakes like this. In their glassy stillness, I’ve seen clearly and deeply beneath the surface. Down to the very bottom. Seen through the deep, cold currents, to the stoney bed that quivers in animated distortions of light and shadow. To reeds that sway in gentle waters.

That’s where I went in the stillness of Sunday’s worship.

Later I thought of the 23rd Psalm. “He leadeth me beside the still waters.”

At their core, Quakers believe God (or, I prefer, the “Spirit”) is in everyone. In the stillness of worship, we embrace it and let it lead us.

It was that spirit that led me beside these still waters. It was that spirit that was stilling the waters and allowing me to see into them.

There was more.

Sometimes in meeting we all have stilled the waters. We simultaneously experience the depth and clarity. We call this experience “a gathered meeting.”

I did not want to speak out of the silence of any of this to my fellow worshippers. I could feel they were, in their own ways, already at one in the stillness.

The last thing I wanted to do was to send blinding ripples — words — across the surface of our pond.

I sought only to protect the stillness, for our worship had immersed us in the sacred.

Convergence

Yesterday, our Quaker meeting and a Quaker Church across the Columbia met again, this time at our Meeting House. In April, we met at the Friends Church in Camas, Washington.

The meeting was part of a movement in the larger Quaker community. After dividing in the 1830s over doctrine (or lack of it in the case of traditional, unprogramed Friends), some of us are exploring ways to come together again.

It's an inspiring dance of beauty and the occasional misstep.

Yesterday, Christian churches celebrated Pentecost. Friends in our meeting likely wouldn't have noted it (we consider all days as holy). But the pastor of the Camas Friends Church, a wise young man, told the story of Pentecost.

How appropriate for our gathering of different Quaker voices made one by the spirit!

In the silence of worship, I was led to my own "text" and rose to speak of Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken." Frost famously writes of two roads diverging and how, by taking one, his choice has "made all the difference."

He writes of his choice and the difference:

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence

Frost purposely does not describe or judge the difference that the choice has made. He leaves us to judge our own choices.

I suggested a companion poem about two roads converging, and how that too can make all the difference. And we, Quaker pilgrims on a now merged journey, may not sigh about it, but rejoice in it "ages and ages hence."

In a discussion that followed our worship, some of us shared that we had feared what might become of exploring our views and beliefs. So far, our fears have proven groundless. Instead, we have found much to embrace in the light of the spirit.

For all Quakers, of course, the embracing of the spirit comes in the silence. In seeking the "leading" in the "Light" beyond words where there is nothing to fear.

Doubting in the search for common ground

Sunday promises to be an interesting day. Some of us from our Quaker meeting are going to visit a Quaker church to experience how it conducts its services.

At our “unprogramed” meeting, we worship in silence. Our lack of doctrine and dogma makes us pretty much a theological blank slate.

The stirrings of spirit begin in inner stillness.

At “programed” or “pastoral” Friends churches, congregations have pastors and they worship, well,...we’ll see.

For decades, the divided Quakers have been trying to find common ground, or at least reach a better understanding of each other.

The Sunday visit, and a companion exchange visit to our meeting house in May, can be seen as part of that effort.

Those of us planning to make the trip Sunday, got a hint of what awaits us when we received a welcoming e-mail from the Church’s pastor.

He called the up-coming visit “exciting.”

To prepare us for pastoral, programed worship, he e-mailed the biblical text to be discussed Sunday.

As you might imagine, we “unprogramed” Friends are not prone to Biblical quotations or close reading of Biblical text. Our “text,” such as it is, is spoken out of the silence by those who are moved by the spirit to speak.

In silent worship, anyone has the potential of being a “minister.”

So what is the text the pastor forwarded?

It is John 20:19-29 and recounts how “Doubting Thomas,” on the day after the resurrection, came to believe that Christ was risen from the dead.

The passage begins with a stunner:

“When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.”

Whoa! Hold it right there!

Wasn’t Jesus a Jew? Weren’t the disciples Jews?

Are we Quakers on the same page about that?

What’s with this “for fear of the Jews” business?

That’s a little like saying you lock your doors for fear of Americans, or Christians, or human beings.

No, Jews were on both sides of that locked door.

John is starting with a big credibility problem.

Talk about doubting!

This guy and/or his numerous translators and transcribers clearly have their own agenda. It’s called “enemy making.” Christ had some things to say about that.

Okay, with raised brow, let’s pick up on the passage:

“Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

Perhaps Jesus (or John) is saying that we should forgive the kind of prejudice we see in the first part of the passage. I’d like to think so. Could this be a candidate for common ground?

Most of what happens next in the passage focuses on Thomas, the infamous doubter. At this point, I’m with Thomas. I doubt too — not Jesus, but John.

As for the resurrection, my belief — and this could cast me into some kind of eternal damnation — is that the resurrection is no more and no less than one of history’s greatest metaphor.

In preparation for the excitement of our Sunday get together, the pastor has added “queries” for us to consider for discussion about John’s scripture:

One of them is: "What captures your attention from this passage?"

If the answers are anything like mine, they should clearly expose diversity and differences among Quakers.

Finding common ground will be exciting indeed. Not to prejudice the proceedings, but my guess is it resides beyond words, written or spoken.

Listening to Being

Recently I’ve played with the idea that I live in a spiritual bubble. Perhaps we all do. The contents are a swirling mess. Kind of like this study of mine. Bits and pieces everywhere. I keep moving ideas around.

Shuffling books and their partially tapped wisdom.

I also have in the mess notes to myself. Journal entries. To do lists.

Also, artifacts. A hand-warmer in a velvet pouch, a quill pen housed in a glazed jar, a magnifying glass, a typewriter (no, two typewriters with more, many more, in the basement), a teal ‘60s-vintage Hermes crank adding machine, slide rules.

Someday stuff. Saved for someday when I can let go.

My spiritual bubble is not “someday.” It is now. Recently I’ve been full of questions.

Being a Quaker invites them.

Quakers turn life’s (and death’s) largest questions back on the individual. No shortcuts here. At least among “unprogramed” Friends. No priests or prophets, no dogma or sacred texts. Oh sure, you can refer to whatever you like, but the questions are yours to answer in your own way.

Quakers must find their own truths. And once found, we work to live by them.

So here I am with my messy, joyous spiritual Quaker bubble.

These days my questions spin around whether I’m a Quaker atheist, a Quaker non-theist (is there a difference?), a Quaker Christian (I think not), a Quaker follower of Christ’s teachings (before the spinmeisters got to them) or a Buddhist Quaker (we Friends have more than a few of those.)

Or maybe I’m all of them. Or none. Maybe the whole “label thing” keeps us from our truth.

I’m a firm believer that putting names on things, whether tangible or intangible, makes them “other.” Sucks the spirit right out of them. Keeps us from absorbing them, and them from absorbing us.

We could use some mutual absorption these days. Not more self-absorption, but self-less absorption. The label-less kind. I find it in the silence of Quaker worship when I banish words from my being — and just be.

Some Friends say they “let go and let God.” I stop with “let go.”

That’s when the bubble bursts and the membrane between “my” spirit and Spirit dissolves. My being flows into Being. Timeless, spaceless Being. And I realize, it has always been this way. The bubble was just another label.

The bubble-label needs to burst with those around us too. How about regularly scheduled spiritual perception checks? Every 3,000 miles or every week or every day. As the operating manual says: “Whichever comes first.”

Share the messy joy of it all. Perhaps that’s why Quaker Friends worship together. Why we worship in silence, without words, without labels.

We listen in stillness to Being.

We can, and should, talk later.

An Opening between Thoughts

In the silence of our Quaker meetings, I’ve long sought to find a way to turn off my open spigot of thoughts and concerns.

I’m happy to report that, at last, I’ve found it.

Now I have to figure out a way to keep it from putting me to sleep.

Let me explain.

Recently a group of us gathered and shared how we went about “centering” or settling into the silence of our traditional Quaker worship. How we each turn off that spigot of thoughts. We shared a remarkable, if predictable, variety of methods. Focusing on breathing was popular. Some said mantras. One said she tried to connect with those in need and to “hold them in the Light.”

I offered a method I recently picked up from reading Eckhardt Tolle. What I said must have been new to the much of the group as several actually wrote notes on my brief description.

To call it a method makes it seem complex. The practice is quite simple. As simple, Tolle points out, as a cat’s riveting its attention on a mouse hole.

All you have to do is — contemplate your next thought, but never think it.

That’s it.

What has happened to me is that I fall into the deep void between thoughts.

I find myself suddenly cast into utter nothingness.

Now I’m trying to get used to it, to settle in.

I’m new to this. I’ve even thought that I should beware what I wished for. This nothingness is alien territory.

And yet, the first time I found the space between my thoughts I was hardly frightened. I fell asleep. Which, come to think of it, makes sense. Where else are we when we sleep than beyond our thoughts?

But sleeping is not exactly what I had in mind when I undertook Tolle’s exercise. That cat, despite sleeping most of the day, is far from asleep as he gazes at the mouse hole in anticipation of “his next thought.”

So where do I go in my newly discovered “nothing” space between thoughts? Perhaps I should employ the techniques the others cited. Breathe. Or learn from the cats — I have one, after all. Be alert to every sound, every movement.

Be alert to the moment, Tolle would say. Be present.

Get into the animalistic part of existence, but in a good way. Make this opening the gateway to spirituality, not human spirituality, but the over-arching spirituality of all. Of one.

I have no way of knowing where this will lead. I do know that it is important not to think about it.

My silent Quakerly leading tells me to be one with it.

The Silent Gateway

As a Quaker, I’m well acquainted with the silence of worship.

Not surprisingly, silence takes strange forms when we try to describe it, when we break our silence about it and use words to define its content.

We talk about the “depth” of silence. But why not the “height” of silence? Do we not transcend in the silence? Or, as Quakers say, do we “settle” into silence?

As someone who is hearing impaired, in the world of noise and speech, I’m at a clear disadvantage. But in silence, my “hearing” is as good as anyone’s.

Silence is the great equalizer.

I find that my “silent hearing” takes place at various levels. I try not to think of the levels as “up” or “down” although they do have a spiritual hierarchy.

The first level is “thought hearing.” The thoughts are similar to those that get me through the day except that they aren’t stimulated by my immediate surroundings. What I “hear” are reflections. Reflections on my life.

The next level is “feeling hearing.” That’s something akin to “getting in touch” with my feelings, or the feelings of others. The phrase links the sensation of touch/feeling with that of hearing. Clearly, when we get beyond words and thoughts, we begin to do more than “hear.” Indeed we are often “touched” by what we “hear” when we allow ourselves to feel. It might frighten us at first, but we should be open to being touched by what we hear/feel in the silence. It may move us to tears of sadness or joy.

Beyond feeling, is “being hearing.” It can be defined in terms of the opposite of the first two kinds of hearing. It is utterly free of both thoughts and feelings. Practitioners of Zen will recognize it immediately. It is the “hearing” of “is-ness.” It is all and nothing at the same time. And it, too, expands from the single sense of hearing. At this level our entire beings become one, all-encompassing sense organ.

I could stop there, because I know these levels and have, to a greater or lesser extent, experienced them.

But as I grow older and ponder what might lie beyond this existence, it seems to me there is a realm of “hearing” beyond thinking, feeling and being. For lack of a better word, let’s call it “non-being hearing.” Put that way, it seems to be simple “egoless-ness,” but I think (and feel and “be”) that it is more than that. It is all-encompassing. It beyond all and nothing. It is out of time and out of place. It is perceived by a “sense” beyond any senses that we know or conceive of.

Can we experience this last form of “hearing” while we are alive? Does it require the death of “being”? Can we experience that “death” while still alive?

I am certain there are those who believe they have had such an experience. It may have been drug induced. It may have been during a near-death episode. Or it may have been the result of a mystical experience.

Whatever or however it has happened — or will happen — its gateway is silence.

Plan A or nothing ...

This Sunday morning, out of the prolonged silence of Quaker worship, a Friend spoke referring to the idea of always having a “Plan B” just in case “Plan A” doesn’t work. He observed that when it came to acting out of love — which he called “Plan A” — there is no Plan B.

Different options don’t work.

And if for some reason what you are doing under Plan A isn’t quite working out (we all know the feeling), you don’t give up on love’s plan; you rework it.

I have that feeling about war and conflict too. We either love each other or we destroy each other.

It’s Plan A or nothing.

Today, brilliant with color, God’s own Plan A was on glorious display.