Conservative Friend

Friends,

I have stayed home from meeting today and I felt a need for some quiet reflection at home. Everyone else has gone to meeting and I am musing on the labels that we use to describe Quakers.

I strongly believe in what I always thought of as "traditional, unprogrammed, Christ centered" genre, feeling allied with much of what early Friends believed. But I am wary of mainstream Christianity which often shuns those that have different lifestyle choices and prefer to leave those judgments to God.

With the recent turmoil our country has been through I find labels increasingly disturbing. I find the "conservative" political label is not in line with my value system, I find "Liberal" political label to be inadequate to describe my views. My husband prefers "progressive" label politically, and I wonder about how these are received and what assumptions people make about us based on these things.

I saw Dean Frieday ( editor of a version of Barclay's Apology in Modern English) not long before he passed away. I was asking him his opinion of some Quaker colleges and he gave me a quick run down of those he felt went astray and those he felt in closest alignment with early Friends, and then called to me as he was leaving for his car, "but you see Friend, I have gone to the other side". It is ironic and bittersweet that these were the last words I had heard him speak. It was a cryptic remark but I knew what he meant. He felt that unprogrammed liberal Friends ( there are those labels again!) were losing their center and that his spiritual weight had shifted toward conservative Friends. I am not sure what label he chose toward the end...maybe no label at all and that may be the point.

I found this quote by Dean this morning and it speaks to a yearning in my heart:

"Hold fast to what Quakerism says is good, and life will have more serenity, pose fewer questions, and provide the best place to look for guidance. And you will not be seeking in solitude, but have the wisdom of a faith community to help you discern what is right in all pursuits and how to go about realizing it."

I love my meeting and the people in it. It is a vibrant community full of caring, dedicated people. I am not sure that they would all understand the conflict that I am feeling. I work for a lovely Quaker school but was cautioned by a development person that I not use the words, “blessings" at the end of my correspondence because it may offend those in the school who are not religious. I believe that to talk about being a follower of Christ will label me in such a way that would be counterproductive to my role in that community. Will anyone look past the label of Christian to see that I am a person who welcomes people of all faiths, as Christ did, am interested in many different learnings gleaned from religious writings of all genres because I see the work of the spirit in different peoples and their practices, if those practices lead to the good life that Dean described.

Being a Friend has not offered much serenity to me recently. Some of that lack of peace lies in my own failings, this I own. We create much of our reality as we live, and act. I yearn to be a community that seeks above all to provide a peaceful spiritual atmosphere for Friends to be at their best in all ways. What I find is a lot of wheel spinning and point making and I am disheartened.

I don't expect magical answers to my concerns. I thought perhaps by writing this and putting words to this hollow feeling, that it might empty it and so ready me to be filled with the spirit as fully as I need to be.

Blessings Friends,

Chris in PA

The labels are of themselves unimportant to me. None of them would have been understood by Fox, and most of them are used as short cuts to  to identify someone else based on carefully-compiled lists of orthodox faith and practice. Often they are used by people to short-cut their identifications of themselves, in that the user decides upon a label, and then studies the definition in order to conform to it from there on.

For a Friend who follows the earliest beliefs of the Society, the labels are limiting, because they sometimes reflect the accretions of history and worldly influences that are not original to the Society and would have been rejected by the earliest members. Not all paths followed by the Society have been Spirit-led, and we have held some beliefs in corporate unity for many years that reflected a mistaken view of what Jesus would have us do. The Friend's pioneering of solitary confinement as a means of uplifting the souls of prison inmates comes to mind, as do the activities of Quaker ministers as part of their responisibilities as officials within the Ku Klux Klan. Seeking corporate unity is the Friends' path, but we sometimes confuse unity with Jesus with unity with our cherished social mores, or our political agendas, with ideas that we believe first, and then assign to Jesus so that we can claim to be following him. When we do that, we crucify him again and again.

But it is still true that there are very different paths within the movement called the Society of Friends, and some of them seem to have very little in common with what Friends first thought the purpose of the Society was to be. This troubles me, because it was the discovery of the original revelations that brought me to Friends in the first place, and I find that the experiences of Fox, Fell, Penn, Barclay, Bownas, and many others best describe the journey that I have been assigned. I am sometimes accused of being a Liberal universalist by those who think I am too broad, and simultaneously I am sometimes accused of being a Conservative sectarian by those who think that I am too narrow. Christian extremists call me a heretic, and militant atheists call me a deluded fool.

I don't care what they call me, as long as Jesus Christ calls me a Disciple.

Your post reminds me of something that Hannah Whitall Smith wrote:

"At all events, my orthodoxy has fled to the winds.  I am Broad, Broader, Broadest!  So broad that I believe everything is good, or has a germ of good in it, and "nothing to be refused," if it be received with thankfulness.

I agree with everybody, and always think it likely that everybody's "view" is better than my own.  I hold all sorts of heresies, and feel myself to have got out into a limitless ocean of the love of God that overflows all things.  My theology is complete, if you but grant me an omnipotent and just Creator I need nothing more.  All the tempests in the various religious teapots around me do seem so far off, so young, so green, so petty!  I know I was there once, it must have been ages ago, and it seems impossible.  "God is love," comprises my whole system of ethics.  And, as thou says, it seems to take in all.  There is certainly a very grave defect in any doctrine that universally makes its holders narrow and uncharitable, and this is always the case with strict so-called orthodoxy.  Whereas, as soon as Christian love comes in, the bounds widen infinitely.  I find that every soul that has traveled on this highway of holiness for any length of time, has invariably cut loose from its old moorings.  I bring out my heresies to such, expecting reproof, when lo! I find sympathy.  We are "out on the ocean sailing," that is certain.  And if it is the ocean of God's love, as I believe, it is grand."

I am finding what Hannah found.... the labels are all ultimately inadequate.  Because the Reality is beyond and above and beside and below every label.  We may use them as shorthand sometimes, to help people get a quick snapshot of ourselves, but the labels never seem to actually point us to those souls who are out with us on the broad sea... who would help us hoist our sails with a will.  I have found fellow sailors in all sorts of unlikely places, and I have found,  within my own chosen official label ('conservative'), land-folk who wouldn't dream of touching the Water.

I like "radical" myself.  Has a nice ring to it.....

Many many blessings,

Chris!

Thanks Friends,

I found so much value in the replies.

I will continue reading more of your site and may weigh in from time to time.

Perhaps it is my own spiritual maturity that needs work. I may have been coasting on a plateau for too long. I thought that I had two  major choices; I could be the most radical in a conservative group or I could be the most conservative in a radical group! Certainly allowing myself to progress and challenging myself with some new readings may open me more to the Quaker Grey; not just a mid point between black and white, as I once may have thought,  but a lovely peaceful shade of it's very own.

Blessings Friends,

Chris

Friends,

I did not grow up in the Friends and I came to the Friends because I was seeking a church which believed in the intrinsic, incalculable worth of every person and believed in peace.  While contemplating on this I remembered a movie I had watched over 20 years earlier with Gail Russell and John Wayne that was titled 'Angel and the Bad Man'.  A family of Friends took in Quirt Evans (John Wayne) who the law was after and had been shot and Penelope (Gail Russell) was the one who primarily nursed him back to health.  While 

Quirt was recovering and afterwards, he was treated as if he had not been in trouble and Penelope and Quirt ended falling in love.  And from them having so much faith in him, from being treated so well, from being around Penelope's influence and from being exposed to many of the Friends beliefs; Quirt ended up changing for the good and marrying Penelope proving there is that of God in every person and anyone can change for the better.  The Friends in the show wore the 'plain dress', were farmers and read the Bible.  And some of their beliefs were:  (1.) They were a Friend to all, (2.) Every human being had a total and complete worth and was equal to every other human being, (3.) To only be benevolent to any person, (4.) To do no harm to any person, (5.) To not resist a hurtful (evil) person, (6.) To use no force, (7.) To never prosper from helping any human being but just consider it an honor and privilege to get to do so and (8.) That a person can never be truly harmed (in their soul) by another person but can only truly be harmed (in their soul) by harming another person.  Is anyone familiar with that movie and does anyone know what type of Friends the family in the movie might have been?  For I deeply respect them as I do other Friends.  After recalling the goodness towards every person of the Friends in this movie I began searching on the web for the Friends.  I guess what type of Friend (name) they held did not matter nearly as much as whom they had all become

which caused them to be a Friend to all.  But there is no way to deny, nor would I, that it was those Friend's way of life that brought me to the Friends.

Friend, Tim

Shawna at 11:20PM on Sep 28, 2009

Your post reminds me of something that Hannah Whitall Smith wrote:

"At all events, my orthodoxy has fled to the winds.  I am Broad, Broader, Broadest!  So broad that I believe everything is good, or has a germ of good in it, and "nothing to be refused," if it be received with thankfulness.

I agree with everybody, and always think it likely that everybody's "view" is better than my own.  I hold all sorts of heresies, and feel myself to have got out into a limitless ocean of the love of God that overflows all things.  My theology is complete, if you but grant me an omnipotent and just Creator I need nothing more.  All the tempests in the various religious teapots around me do seem so far off, so young, so green, so petty!  I know I was there once, it must have been ages ago, and it seems impossible.  "God is love," comprises my whole system of ethics.  And, as thou says, it seems to take in all.  There is certainly a very grave defect in any doctrine that universally makes its holders narrow and uncharitable, and this is always the case with strict so-called orthodoxy.  Whereas, as soon as Christian love comes in, the bounds widen infinitely.  I find that every soul that has traveled on this highway of holiness for any length of time, has invariably cut loose from its old moorings.  I bring out my heresies to such, expecting reproof, when lo! I find sympathy.  We are "out on the ocean sailing," that is certain.  And if it is the ocean of God's love, as I believe, it is grand."

I am finding what Hannah found.... the labels are all ultimately inadequate.  Because the Reality is beyond and above and beside and below every label.  We may use them as shorthand sometimes, to help people get a quick snapshot of ourselves, but the labels never seem to actually point us to those souls who are out with us on the broad sea... who would help us hoist our sails with a will.  I have found fellow sailors in all sorts of unlikely places, and I have found,  within my own chosen official label ('conservative'), land-folk who wouldn't dream of touching the Water.

I like "radical" myself.  Has a nice ring to it.....

Many many blessings,

Chris!

Shawna and Friends,

I too think that we are all equal and loved.  Once we get past our obsession of trying to own or control the origin of creation, our life and the lives of others

we will no longer keep nothing of what was never ours or theirs in the first place, especially that of which is negative or to fear or punishing but keep only that which was and is truly ours from our true origin, that we, our progenitors and our children are ultimately made and born to be loved and each of us will become love and have every other good thing that is beautiful and out of which life flows.   Whether or not loved, have love, or give love in this natural world with its conditions none of us made nor owns is temporary, an illusion.

Someday, that perfect Love that is void of it's own violence and therefore doesn't force, own, torture, slander, steal dignity, instill fear, accuse, imagine the worst, destroy or take lives which in turn grows the same heart in others will rule.  Anyone of nearly any age or sex can use a destructive word, knife,

gun or bulldozer to steal dignity, harm, destroy a life or take a life.  The truly brave person is that one who will not pick those same weapons up when

facing them as 'a Friend to all'.  As Fox, Woolman and Shawna have  said,

"An ocean of love" , perfect love, a love void of its own imperfection, void of its own violence, will overcome everything.  Therefore love that is nonviolent and gentle giving worth and life in every way will rule.  Shawna speaks my mind.

Friend, Tim