Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Forrest Curo on 4th mo. 13, 2010 at 2:04pm

'Practice' doesn't make that great a 'defining characteristic' either. You might say that pushing the 'power' button on your tv was a defining characteristic of 'watching tv'; but first of all you'd need to be sure that the nasty machine in question was plugged in, worked via battery etc-- was connected to something. The brand name on the power source (ie 'belief-system') wouldn't matter as long as the voltage etc was compatible with the device... but without connection to actual electricity nothing happens.

Practice comes down to having what some Christians call 'sacraments', or to what's called 'a yoga' in Hindu religions, something that God has made available for people to do in search of divine connection. No number of cookies, no number of blessings on a biscuit, no number of asanas will do the trick in the absence of devotion, ripeness, willingness to have it happen.

And no number of hours in Meeting guarantees anything either. There was a response, eventually, to my first Meeting, years ago... I was an atheist then, but my best friend in high school had invited me, while giving God a chance to speak for Godself seemed like a great alternative to listening to human beings putting words in God's mouth-- but I was still an atheist at the end of that Meeting, and so I didn't return to Friends until years later. The response came outside Meeting, as I met more people with actual knowledge of God, and found Divine Fingers at work stirring up my life.

Permalink Reply by Elizabeth Eames Roebling on 6th mo. 29, 2010 at 8:45pm

My experience has been that the more spiritually grounded a person is, the less the path which was taken to reach that Spirit Centered place matters.

There are people who are plugged into the Spirit of God... whether they are Mormon or Moslem or Jewish or Evangelical... or Liberal Quakers... and the deeper their connection, the more open and loving they are.

When there is contention over ISSUES and the sound starts coming out like
YOU OUGHT
YOU MUST
YOU SHOULD

then I assume that the group .. or person ..,, is not very well grounded spiritually,

For me.. the core of Quakerism is that we all have access to the Divine,

From that, I assume that your Inner Guide will tell you what is right for you to do.

I have confidence in that process.

I will meet with you and sit and thresh and mirror and query to help you reach your own Guidance.. but that it between you and God.

I respect that each of us is our own spiritual authority.

We had occassion to deny membership to one seeker. Sadly, I had to meet privately with some of the elders to express my objections because the person was not honest in his dealings with the community,

I said that as a Meeting I thought that we had two corporate responsibilities.. Membership and Marriage.

That if I accepted this man as a Member, I would be saying to all other Friends, everywhere in the world that I personally vouched for his integrity, that they could leave their children, and their possessions in his care and he would be honorable. I could not do that for this particular person.

I know that much of our division as Friends has been over the LGBT issue and it saddens me.

For me, the issue is simply none of our business.

Permalink Reply by John Michael Wine on 9th mo. 1, 2010 at 6:35pm

Thanks, Elizabeth, for your thoughts! You seem to get at the essence of liberal Quakerism (and it is a very good essence!), at least from my perspective. Individual experience of the Spirit of God and a strong sense of Friends' process together as a meeting, a body. Mike

Permalink Reply by Cotswold Quaker on 11th mo. 28, 2010 at 8:18pm

Hi Mike, thanks for this interesting topic. As a Liberal Quaker, I tend to understand the liberal aspect as concerning the rejection of beliefs, creeds and dogmas in favour of values and principles. Robert Barclay clearly set out in The Apology, why Quakers should reject the former, as being a form of idolatry and a diversion. Adhere to a beliefs or creed as a distraction from the dialogue with god within. Of cause, that's a belief too, but all religion seems riddled with contradiction and dead dialectical! If the prime relationship is to a personal inner relationship/dialogue with "that of god within" then of necessity each persons experience is unique, hence the focus on values and principles and the discernment process to test corporate and personal witness, decisions etc.
By seeking a set of shared values and principles, no one holds to a fixed truth. "The Truth" invariably gets wielded as a weapon to condemn or deprive others in one way or another. I have also disputed the idea of Liberal friends as "unprogrammed" as we clearly have a very particular programme, structure and form. Step out of any of the proscribed ways of doing things and someone will soon pop up to explain what you should be doing!
Some people experience Liberal Quakers as believing everything and/or nothing. I don't have much personal experience of other forms of quaker practice, but I hear some Liberals bemoan the perceived lack of voracity within Liberal Friendsas a criticism of Liberal Friends. I see it rather as the problem of comfortable middle class elites making themselves comfortable by not asking much of each other and a lack of spiritual discipline within meetings which means many people do not engage in spiritual intimacy and growth with each other, little sharing or learning how to work and live with spiritual tools of quakerism. Little is asked and little is given. When I applied for membership, I felt my acceptance was being "rubber stamped". I didn't feel tested. So I refused to accept "instant" membership and engaged in a long process which meant we all had deeply examined our relationships to Quakers. There is a growing appetite to address this at present in BYM and I find in my local and area meeting a willingness to bring more of the shadow into spoken ministry. I see this reflected in real human dilemmas and concerns shared in meeting, tears, unformed sentences and so on. More process and questions, fewer polished sermons and rehashing of headlines and I also observe an increase of the crisscrossing of connections and relationships between more people and more meetings.
CQ

Permalink Reply by John Michael Wine on 11th mo. 29, 2010 at 8:26am

Good Morning, CQ! I found your post very thought provoking. It sounds as if the similarities are greater than the differences between BYM and FGC Friends. Since we're a couple hundred miles from home this week visiting our daughters and families in Columbia, Missouri, I enjoyed Meeting for Worship with the Columbia Friends, who are "liberal, unprogrammed Friends" in Illiniois Yearly Meeting. During the Meeting, I noticed that a couple of folks were reading their Bibles quietly while quietly waiting/worshipping. And, during the meeting, we listened to a message concerning the fire burning in the fireplace vs. the intensity of the fire burning in our lives with several Biblical allusions. The final message was loosely based on the Grinch stealing Christmas and whether Quakers would notice. So, it was a somewhat uneven, but still uplifting time of worship. But, it may be that, in mid-America at least, we are somewhat more "traditional" liberals? I loved hearing about the "growing appetite" to address the lack of spirituality in some of the Meetings there. One other personal difference in our experiences: when my wife and I finally requested a Clearness Committee to explore membership in our Sunrise Meeting, it felt like a pretty rigorous process! Over several months, we wrote letters and listened together to questions about the Spirit's leading, etc. I did notice that there were really no questions, however, about what might traditionally be called "doctrinal" beliefs. This was a stark contrast to the evangelical Anabaptist background that we came from. At this point in my life, I'm learning to be able to firmly adhere to understandngs of God and Life and Truth, without needing to condemn someone else who differs. Sounds so elementary! But... Thanks again for your post! Mike

Permalink Reply by Steven Davison on 11th mo. 29, 2010 at 8:30am

CQ, I agree with you that liberal Quakerism has been characterized, if not defined, by its "rejection of beliefs, creeds and dogmas in favor of values and principles." I see this especially in how we approach first day school, and in fact, Quaker education in general. We have a lot of Quaker schools here in the Philadelphia area; only two have religion faculty; only one actually teaches a course on Quakerism, and that course is, apparently, largely about Thomas Berry's new cosmology, which isn't Quakerism at all. Their religion curriculum is very good on comparative religion, though; and they do an excellent job of teaching Quaker values. So also with our conference centers, which tend to emphasize (rightly, I think) an experiential pedagogy and programs for spiritual nurture and expression over transmission of our tradition. In my experience, adult religious education programs often amount to comparative religion programs, also, and tend to emphasize values and testimonies over content.

But I want to say again that I don't think this is a good thing. For one thing, it's too either/or. Both faith and practice matter. I think we all agree about creeds and dogmas—fie on them. But suppose for "beliefs" we say "content"? By "content" I mean, what do we have to say? to inquirers about Quakerism? to our children? to new members? How do we explain our practices, our values and principles—why we adhere to them, where they came from, what we are trying to attain when we do them? A religion without content, without something coherent to say, is in danger of losing its identity altogether. And so we are, I think.

Many liberal Friends are nervous about "beliefs" because "beliefs" seem to engender strife, because they may have been wounded in the name of belief in some other community, and because they want to be free to believe what they will and still share in religious community. So they don't want the community to define itself too strongly in terms of belief. But we still need to be able to say something about our path.

I have a simple formula for what we can say that you can unpack to talk about virtually all aspects of Quaker belief, practice and experience. I say that Quakerism has four legs, a body and a heart.

The four legs: First, we believe (and have experienced) that we each have (or can have) a direct, unmediated relationship with G*d (meaning the Mystery Reality behind our religious/spiritual experience, whatever that experience is). Second, we believe/experience that the meeting—the community—also has (can have) a direct, unmediated relationship with the Divine. Third, we believe/experience continuing revelation: this direct connection with Spirit is always present, guiding us, healing us, correcting us, inspiring us. And fourth, we believe that we should live our lives as outward expressions of our inner experience of G*d, of the measure of truth we've been given, of the revelation we have received, and so we have testimonies.

The heart of Quakerism is the commandments of love: to love each other as we love ourselves, to love G*d as deeply as we can.

And the body is our experience, as both individuals and as a community—what canst we say? We believe that we should build our religious lives on what we ourselves have experienced, rather than on some inherited legacy or set of abstract notions, though that legacy of faith and practice is to be known and respected as the faithful testimony to the experience of Friends who have gone before us.

Does this work for thee?

Permalink Reply by Cotswold Quaker on 11th mo. 30, 2010 at 6:22pm

"what have you experienced and how has that defined what being a "liberal Quaker" means in your case?"

Good question Steven Davison! For me it is those fleeting moments when ego is subjugated, when I know I am listening to and experiencing the work/life of the group/gathering, not just me "beside" others, but as a part of the group and still me. Not just in MfW, but many other fleeting moments in a day. What I like to call a collective communion with "the mother matrix". It is not dissimilar to that moment when I first experienced true wilderness on this planet. Standing in a desert in New Mexico, alone, I knew for the first time, I was a child OF the planet, not the other way round. This has had an enduring effect on my life choices ever since. And is one of the experiences that brought me to Liberal Friends.

Permalink Reply by Cotswold Quaker on 11th mo. 30, 2010 at 6:25pm

You speak my mind very well Elizabeth. Thankyou.

Permalink Reply by David Nelson Seaman on 3rd mo. 4, 2013 at 2:40pm

Thank you all for contirbuting to this disscussion on Liberal Quakerism; there is much inspiration, personal testimony- and meaningful reply.   I would like to contribute a extract from the writings of Edward Grubb's  "Quaker Thought and History- A volume of Essays", 1925, New York, the Macmillan Company.  

Grubb addresses the concerns of what he termed the "Quaker Rennaissance" of the late 19th and early 20th centuries this way:

"While some Quakers held firm to their Evangelical beliefs, other, mainly in the younger generation, took part in a movment to reformualte Quakersim.  Dubbed the Quaker Renainssance, this developement....embraced the scientific and critical attacks on the authority of the Bible, and downgraded the idea of the atonement much more readily than was feasible in most other denominations.   Thiw was possible because it was fairly straightforward for proponents of the Quaker Renainssance to appeal to the Society of Friends own distinctive tradtion of the Inner Light as the ultimate religious authority, rather than the Bible.  " It is no coincidence that there was a huge revival of interest in early Quaker history and theology amoung Friends in the late 19th century....moreover, the Quaker Renainssance emphasized the necessity to revive Quakerism by making it more relevant to society and more involved with society's concerns; to perform good works, following the EXAMPLE of Christ; and to act with justice and compassion to all human beings as bearers within them of the divine spark of the Inner Light". 

There still exists something along the line of a continental divide between the Liberal, and Orthodox, Fundamental and Evangelical groups; the placement of the authority of the Inner Light above the Bible and the decreasing importance of atonement.  

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