The Conservative Friend
An Outreach of Ohio Yearly Meeting of Friends
Talking About Christ in Liberal meetings
Shawna
Roberts is a member of Stillwater Monthly Meeting of Ohio Yearly
Meeting, and lives on a farm near Belmont, Ohio. She attended the Ohio
Yearly Meeting Friends Center retreat led by Brian Drayton on 14
through 16 March 2008. Brian is a recorded minister of New England
Yearly Meeting. Shawna is an occasional contributor to this page, and
maintains a blog at Mystics, Poets, and Fools. She reports on her weekend here.
Twenty of us from 11 states gathered for the weekend to discuss talking about Christ in a liberal context. It was a weekend of worship, and sharing, and encouragement, and inspiration.
We had many hopes as we arrived on Friday afternoon, ranging from wanting to be with other Christian Quakers, to wanting to learn the many languages and ways that Christ is made manifest in our lives, to exploring what it means for us and our meetings when we begin to be more Christ-centered, to wrestling with the confusions about what role Christ plays, to simply wanting to be present with and attend to the Spirit with an interesting group of Friends.
Brian began the
weekend with a meditation on what it means to speak about Christ, and
what is at stake. He talked about the early Friends’ ability to “stand
forth as a trumpet for the Lord with such fearlessness” because they
understood themselves to be a part of a greater story than just
themselves; they understood themselves to be “participating in the
cosmic drama of salvation and communion.” That what is at stake is
the Soul…. Individual hearts, spirits, minds, and wills… not
political/social achievements. To speak about Christ, Brian pointed
out, is to speak about the mysteries of transformation. To speak about
Christ is to invite others to a life that is “more abundant, more
loving, more fearless, more constructive.”
We had a chance to tell our own stories of our experiences within our meetings. Some of us were able to talk about the spiritual support we experienced from our meetings; some of us have found encouraging elders, nurture, and acceptance. Others of us had some sad stories to tell about being eldered about our language, being told that “speaking of Christ in meeting is considered divisive”, or about being made to feel unwelcome in our monthly meeting or wider yearly meeting because we were Christians. We talked about how important it felt to us to be supported in our spiritual lives, how good it felt to find that support and how saddened we were when we didn’t feel it.
There was a great deal of discussion about what we mean when we talk about “Christ”. What Christ are we preaching?
We shared what Christ meant to us…
“a mediator between me and the Mystery”
“source of the universe and everything in it”
“Christ is God with us”
“that self that you are destined to become”
“a force and power and spirit that delights to do no evil… our way back into the arms of the Great Spirit”
“Christ is the way home from exile into love”
“Teacher, Guide, Prophet”
“Can’t separate Jesus the human from Christ the divine”
“Spirit that is immediate, immanent, full.. Within me… but when I try to say what that is, the intellectual distinctions seem unhelpful to the experience”
“In one word, Love.”
From our discussion of what we mean when we speak of Christ, grew a discussion of some of the difficulties that we and others have with some of the terminology associated with thinking about Christ. We talked about the suspicions and assumptions that people had when talking about “Christians.” We talked about our own sadness with the way that Christ can be used as an excuse to do terrible things. How often people associate Christianity not with Christ, but with a political entity and secular motivations. We wrestled with some of the traditional Christian terminology that we ourselves found difficult; words like sin, atonement, salvation…. And we found that the traditional words meant, in essence, “abundance of life, inexhaustible life, transcendence, freedom from bondage, and trust in God.”
We talked about some of the advantages of being Christians within a Quaker context: “we can do something that a lot of other faiths have a hard time with, which is to accept people where they are” in their spiritual paths. We affirmed how important it is to listen to people… that the act of listening itself can help a person find God better than any eloquent speeches we might make: “You can listen a person into their paths; you can listen a person into wholeness. The more they can tell their story, the more they can discover their own questions…..”
We considered how our Christian testimony might affect the way we were in our meetings and our lives. How part of our calling, for all of us, is to “recognize where the Divine Seed is oppressed in ourselves and others, and being sensitive for opportunities to liberate the Seed.” How this can be seen within the context of the Lamb’s War, and how the world’s weapons (whether physical or emotional) are not of use to us. We considered the weapons of the Lamb’s War:
-Waiting (or listening)
-Obeying (or acting in promptitude)
-Suffering (or taking risks, daring, making a fool of yourself)
In all our actions, and all our relationships, first we must Wait on God and listen for our call. Then, we must be willing to obey that call, to act promptly and cheerfully. To do what we can do with joy, and not worry about what we can’t do yet. And we must be willing to suffer in various ways for obeying our call… sometimes the suffering is what the world would call suffering--physical, monetary--sometimes the suffering is simply, out of sheer love, being willing to accept the possibility of failure or of being thought a fool. A call from God does not guarantee what we would commonly call “success.”
As the weekend wrapped up, we gathered together to consider what we were called to do after the weekend. What were we going to bring home with us? We talked about projects, like organizing our home spaces to allow us more time for the Spirit, or doing building projects with our meetings, or becoming un-busy… and we talked about realizations, about discovering gifts that we hadn’t realized we had for assisting in the business of the meeting, or about discovering that our ministry was not related to our paid jobs… and we talked about attitudes, bringing home a mindfulness for supporting the gifts of others, for putting Jesus at the center of our lives, for walking with others in love and finding opportunities for joy.
It was a wonderful weekend. This report is based on my notes of the weekend, so most of the ideas and words in the preceding text (whether in quotes or not) have been borrowed or snatched from someone else’s mouth. I hope that I have not too badly misrepresented anyone’s words. I know that I have missed some things, but I hope that what I have captured is useful. I am grateful to Brian Drayton for providing the framework of ideas and the guidance that allowed this weekend to be a success, and to everyone who participated.
“Christ is well,
Christ lives.
It’s not completely up to me.”
Twenty of us from 11 states gathered for the weekend to discuss talking about Christ in a liberal context. It was a weekend of worship, and sharing, and encouragement, and inspiration.
We had many hopes as we arrived on Friday afternoon, ranging from wanting to be with other Christian Quakers, to wanting to learn the many languages and ways that Christ is made manifest in our lives, to exploring what it means for us and our meetings when we begin to be more Christ-centered, to wrestling with the confusions about what role Christ plays, to simply wanting to be present with and attend to the Spirit with an interesting group of Friends.
Brian began the
weekend with a meditation on what it means to speak about Christ, and
what is at stake. He talked about the early Friends’ ability to “stand
forth as a trumpet for the Lord with such fearlessness” because they
understood themselves to be a part of a greater story than just
themselves; they understood themselves to be “participating in the
cosmic drama of salvation and communion.” That what is at stake is
the Soul…. Individual hearts, spirits, minds, and wills… not
political/social achievements. To speak about Christ, Brian pointed
out, is to speak about the mysteries of transformation. To speak about
Christ is to invite others to a life that is “more abundant, more
loving, more fearless, more constructive.”We had a chance to tell our own stories of our experiences within our meetings. Some of us were able to talk about the spiritual support we experienced from our meetings; some of us have found encouraging elders, nurture, and acceptance. Others of us had some sad stories to tell about being eldered about our language, being told that “speaking of Christ in meeting is considered divisive”, or about being made to feel unwelcome in our monthly meeting or wider yearly meeting because we were Christians. We talked about how important it felt to us to be supported in our spiritual lives, how good it felt to find that support and how saddened we were when we didn’t feel it.
There was a great deal of discussion about what we mean when we talk about “Christ”. What Christ are we preaching?
We shared what Christ meant to us…
“a mediator between me and the Mystery”
“source of the universe and everything in it”
“Christ is God with us”
“that self that you are destined to become”
“a force and power and spirit that delights to do no evil… our way back into the arms of the Great Spirit”
“Christ is the way home from exile into love”
“Teacher, Guide, Prophet”
“Can’t separate Jesus the human from Christ the divine”
“Spirit that is immediate, immanent, full.. Within me… but when I try to say what that is, the intellectual distinctions seem unhelpful to the experience”
“In one word, Love.”
From our discussion of what we mean when we speak of Christ, grew a discussion of some of the difficulties that we and others have with some of the terminology associated with thinking about Christ. We talked about the suspicions and assumptions that people had when talking about “Christians.” We talked about our own sadness with the way that Christ can be used as an excuse to do terrible things. How often people associate Christianity not with Christ, but with a political entity and secular motivations. We wrestled with some of the traditional Christian terminology that we ourselves found difficult; words like sin, atonement, salvation…. And we found that the traditional words meant, in essence, “abundance of life, inexhaustible life, transcendence, freedom from bondage, and trust in God.”
We talked about some of the advantages of being Christians within a Quaker context: “we can do something that a lot of other faiths have a hard time with, which is to accept people where they are” in their spiritual paths. We affirmed how important it is to listen to people… that the act of listening itself can help a person find God better than any eloquent speeches we might make: “You can listen a person into their paths; you can listen a person into wholeness. The more they can tell their story, the more they can discover their own questions…..”
We considered how our Christian testimony might affect the way we were in our meetings and our lives. How part of our calling, for all of us, is to “recognize where the Divine Seed is oppressed in ourselves and others, and being sensitive for opportunities to liberate the Seed.” How this can be seen within the context of the Lamb’s War, and how the world’s weapons (whether physical or emotional) are not of use to us. We considered the weapons of the Lamb’s War:
-Waiting (or listening)
-Obeying (or acting in promptitude)
-Suffering (or taking risks, daring, making a fool of yourself)
In all our actions, and all our relationships, first we must Wait on God and listen for our call. Then, we must be willing to obey that call, to act promptly and cheerfully. To do what we can do with joy, and not worry about what we can’t do yet. And we must be willing to suffer in various ways for obeying our call… sometimes the suffering is what the world would call suffering--physical, monetary--sometimes the suffering is simply, out of sheer love, being willing to accept the possibility of failure or of being thought a fool. A call from God does not guarantee what we would commonly call “success.”
As the weekend wrapped up, we gathered together to consider what we were called to do after the weekend. What were we going to bring home with us? We talked about projects, like organizing our home spaces to allow us more time for the Spirit, or doing building projects with our meetings, or becoming un-busy… and we talked about realizations, about discovering gifts that we hadn’t realized we had for assisting in the business of the meeting, or about discovering that our ministry was not related to our paid jobs… and we talked about attitudes, bringing home a mindfulness for supporting the gifts of others, for putting Jesus at the center of our lives, for walking with others in love and finding opportunities for joy.
It was a wonderful weekend. This report is based on my notes of the weekend, so most of the ideas and words in the preceding text (whether in quotes or not) have been borrowed or snatched from someone else’s mouth. I hope that I have not too badly misrepresented anyone’s words. I know that I have missed some things, but I hope that what I have captured is useful. I am grateful to Brian Drayton for providing the framework of ideas and the guidance that allowed this weekend to be a success, and to everyone who participated.
“Christ is well,
Christ lives.
It’s not completely up to me.”
