Note: Friend Jerry Rudolph and I have exchanged a series of comments appended to his January 2nd post, "Response to Wallace Article in Friends Journal" (see comments 3 and 4). What follows is a slightly edited version of my comment number 6, which I wanted to share more widely.

--Mike Shell

Friend Jerry,

Following your January 7th reply to my Comment #3, I spent several days working over what I now recognize was merely a “defense of my defense of Wallace,” rather than a spirit-led response to the concerns which you clarified in your comment of January 7^th. Instead of continuing with that academic exercise, it seems more important to do what Wallace challenges us to do, and to voice my own convictions in the context of your concerns.

First, I believe that Quakerism is neither a theology nor a political philosophy, but rather a spiritual discipline, grounded in the Christian tradition, which aspires to ever greater objectivity about the intersection of the spiritual and the material in human consciousness and action.

Second, I believe that every imagined pair of opposites actually draws our attention to a continuum of partial truths along one dimension, and that arguing for either/or prevents us from perceiving and affirming the greater unity.

You summarize well much of what I appreciate about Wallace's criticism of tendencies he observes among some liberal Friends:

• over-intellectual focus
• over-reliance on political solutions
• lack of convictions—I would say, rather, reluctance to give public voice to convictions
• over-reliance on talk rather than on concrete, strategic sacrifice (e.g., Woolman's avoidance of slave-produced goods).

I want to emphasize two more of Wallace’s themes.

First, our tendency to “homogenize” public religious statements arises in part from our wanting "to avoid any challenge or conflict" (what I used to call practicing the "niceness testimony") and in part from our wanting to "avoid the difficult and uncomfortable struggle of seeking and finding God, and… seeking and doing God's will."

I observe both of these hesitations in myself all the time—and particularly when I am in situations in which I ought to voice explicit convictions for the sake of someone else. Two quick examples:

• non-Quakers ask me what Quakers (and I in particular) believe
• my evangelical Christian sister asks me questions arising from her own convictions.

• we fail to learn from genuine dialog with those who believe differently than we do
• we (unintentionally) insult others by the implication that they cannot deal kindly with disagreement or conflict (see Wallace's example of the Muslim student who said, "That reasoning treats people of others faiths…as bigots. It assumes we will be offended.").

As for positing that Wallace would advocate “abandoning our current world view...and adopting the world view of Paul...and some other beliefs that the Church has defended,” I don’t find that inference in the article. I do find a cautionary note about bias against self-identified Christians and other dissenters from the popular opinions which liberal Quakers tend to share.

More pointedly, I find a historically accurate reminder that the first Quakers were not polite Rufus Jones-style mystics, but folks who considered themselves to be Friends of Jesus. This brings me to the tender, growing edge of my own faith and practice.

All people are born into a native religious language. Not only the first Quakers, but also all of us modern Quaker refugees from conventional Christian upbringings were born into a community and a biblical tradition which gave our infant minds their first songs and stories and names and words and concepts for talking about our human intersection with the divine.

Unless they traveled beyond Christian realms (as some of the boldest of them did), the first Quakers had no option but to take the Christian language of 17^th century Europe with them as they settled down in despair and hope to wait for new revelation. In that refiner’s fire, as they let their home culture’s theological notions be burned away, and then as they let their own ego pretenses be burned away, they discovered—not atonement theology, but a living divine Presence which could comfort and teach them and lead them up from the darkness in which failed human religions had left them.

Furthermore, because they already knew of him from their Christian upbringing, they discovered that they could give the name of the historical Jesus—not the theological “Jesus” but the living person—to this Presence. They discovered that, beneath the learned theological notions, they had always known what this real person was like, because the reality of him is more powerful, more cleansing to the heart, than human theologies can be. In knowing him, they knew what genuine human intersection with the divine could be.

I have just described to you my own experience, over the twenty-some years I was “in the Church” and the thirty-some years since I told myself I had left. Unlike those boldest first Friends, I quested out beyond Christian realms before I was sure of the real Jesus. Yet he went along with me, because I had actually known him from childhood.

I do not believe that those born to other native religious languages need to adopt Christian language. I believe they need to settle into whatever refiner’s fire is meant for them—and, in time, to meet there the same Presence, by whatever name, that I and all those early Quakers have met.

I say the same for those born to the Christian language who have been burned too badly by the outer forms and doings of religion. I say the same for nontheist and secular folk. Whatever language, whatever purer fire they are drawn to, they should step into it boldly and let it do its cleansing work.

It does not matter what names we use, for names are mere human inventions to point clumsily to realities. Even to blesséd realities to which we long to lead our fellows.

In Jesus,

Blesséd Be,

Michael

Comments (2)

	1. 01-20-2007 13:45
	Clarifications Michael,    Your letter clearly and strongly expressed your deep convictions. It is not my intention for my comments to be construed as an attack. I appreciate your statements about opposites and shades of truth. I am not so sure, though, about the common criticism I hear about unprogrammed tradition wanting to avoid challenge or conflict, or what you call the “niceness testimony”. Sometimes that is the case, but I don't think that it is any more so than with Christians who use more traditional “god language”. I have found that some Quakers who tend to frequent use of such language become non-responsive when I speak in the manner that I am doing in this dialog. I think the distance between the two extremes is sometimes more about expectations about the type of language required in testimony than about depth of spirituality.     For example, I could say that I know of what George Fox says when he said, “There is someone, even Christ Jesus who can speak to your condition”. But I don't call it Christ Jesus. Would Wallace accept that as true, or would he say I don't know of it? I am curious.    I can also speak of a yearning for truth and to will one thing, to use a phrase from Kierkegaard. Is that what you mean by God's will? I don't think of God as something external that has a mind and will and experiences things like anger and disappointment. But I may from time to time speak of God in a somewhat metaphorical sense that could suggest that.     I used the phrase “world view of two thousand years ago” in the earlier post, not to denigrate Wallace and not just in reference to atonement theology. Atonement theology was just an example. We receive education in science and math, and learn about cause and effect, scientific method, thermodynamics, etc, and then we hear the religious language and we try to make sense of it all. But I read an article recently about Quakers doing more outreach, and it talks about “..being unafraid to communicate it [faith] in the simple language of our traditions.” It is not a matter of fear. It is a matter of using language with integrity. I have to speak from my own understanding.     I believe the dichotomies we find in current Christianity such as secular and religious, spiritual and material, natural and supernatural, sacred and mundane, are sometimes useful in talking about things, but they are just ways of thinking and understanding. They are characteristics of our ways of understanding rather than characteristics of the things we are trying to understand.    In the best case, the dichotomies are about our perceptions and the limitations of our perceptions more than about objective reality. In my view of the world, there is just one reality. We use the religious language to indicate such things as feelings of reverence or experiences that we want to communicate and words fail us. But the “simple language of our tradition” is a tool that sometimes obfuscates and in our world the context often requires a different set of tools.    In the less than best cases, the “sacred language” is used not to point to any realities so much as part of an attempt to reach more religious depth by a sort of ritual use of language. We have some idea of who we would have to be to have this depth, and this image involves some a kind of ritual use of language. The language is part of the role of how we think we need to talk and act to find the depth.     It might help to illustrate. Concepts and language fail to communicate not just religious realities but even everyday experiences. How would you communicate the color blue to someone who had never seen it, the taste of a tangerine to someone who has not tasted it, the shattering of a glass to someone who had not heard it. We can't. A child learns such things directly and learns what words we use to refer to them. The words do not communicate the experiences.    The word “God” is no nearer to truth than any other word. Like the taste of the tangerine, words do not communicate experience, they just point to it, especially if the word brings up images that are out of sync with a person's world view. The question is, “Are we pointing to truth or fantasy?” The same words can point to either, or more likely to a mixture.    But, as you say most eloquently, Quakerism is not about theology. It is a discipline and a path that we believe will lead us to a truth that is beyond comprehension. It is entirely ok for people to use whatever language makes sense to them, but when Quaker writers speak of this path in terms that seem to require a certain set of words and concepts, which I find Wallace doing, that Quaker is not convincing. It seems he is excluding. http://palmettofriends.org IP: 75.117.122.23 Registered Report

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	2. 02-07-2007 10:50
	The ritual of language Jerry,    I have found your 1/20/07 “Clarifications” comment extremely valuable and welcome. You have articulated (much better than I) what I believe are core challenges in attending to and communicating about human faith and practice in any form. I’ll write more about this below, but first I want to thank you for helping to move my own reflections on the “problem” of faith language to a new level.    The timing of your comment roughly coincided with my realizing what a trove of thoughtful writing I’ve stumbled into by exploring the Quaker blogosphere. More specifically, I have begun both digging back into and read forward through a number of blogs written as part of a growing conversation among Friends “across the schisms” (as one of them puts it), seeking to share what is being very loosely called the “Convergent Friends” movement.    You may already have seen the quotation from one of the writers, Robin Mohr, on the Second Month update of the http://seympeace.org website, together with my editor’s note referring Friends to more of the discussion at http://seympeace.org/index.html#convergent.    Liz Opp writes in “Do I have to be a Christian to be a Convergent Friend?” http://thegoodraisedup.blogspot.com/2006/07/do-i-have-to-be-christianto-be.html that she wrestles with the term “convergent,” yet she lists the following as what she unites with:    • That there are Friends, from no particular branch and from every branch, who are in love with what we understand is part of early Quakerism.    • That we love and yearn to be faithful to the Spirit and to live into God’s love, regardless of how we name that Presence.    • That integrating our faith and our practice is key to renewing and sustaining a rigorous, transformative Quakerism.    • That retelling our personal stories and sharing our historical narratives about who we are as Friends and who we have been as Friends will help convey our faith to those who worship among us.    You expressed so well that “the words do not communicate the experience.” Words can only refer speaker (or writer) and audience to mutually shared denotations and connotations. Within a community which shares a language, what is shared is the implicit, if not explicit, agreement, first, that a word sufficiently well represents for me the experience I want to communicate, and, second, that it represents the same experience (or close enough to “the same”) for you.    As you say, this might not even work well regarding objective experience (“blue,” “tangerine,” “shattering glass”), if someone in the community hasn’t had that experience (or can’t perceive it, or perceives it differently). With subjective experience, anything which we have to refer to with abstract labels (“God”) or metaphors (Sufi images such as “the Beloved,” “the Friend”), the challenge even within one community becomes much greater.    You also named a powerful insight with your use of the phrase “the ritual use of language.” I want to gather some of your key observations here:    • That the dichotomies used in religious discussion really refer to “characteristics of our ways of understanding rather than characteristics of the things we are trying to understand. In the best case, the dichotomies are about our perceptions and the limitations of our perceptions more than about objective reality.”    • That “the distance between the two extremes [of ‘god language’ and ‘non-god language’] is sometimes more about expectations about the type of language required in testimony than about depth of spirituality.”    • That there is a special case in which “ ‘sacred language’ is used not to point to any realities so much as part of an attempt to reach more religious depth by a sort of ritual use of language.... The language is part of ...how we think we need to talk and act to find the depth.”    I believe this goes right to the core of the perceived problem.     (Note: I emphasize the word “perceived,” because it need not be a real problem—if we learn how to listen as Quakers aspire to.)    In our secret hearts, each of us knows an essential and sustaining Reality, one which is greater than yet not contradictory to mundane reality. Some of us are not given to be able to talk about this Reality—to ourselves or to anyone else—with original language which “works” adequately. We therefore draw upon the ritual language of our faith community to do both this private and public talk. (This is what I have called elsewhere our “native religious language.”)    Some of us—whether we remain in our original faith communities or quest out (or are expelled)—are given to seek more personal articulation of that Reality. We find that we need to do this, because what the traditional words and metaphors connote no longer meshes well with our personal perception of sacred experience—or even confounds or contradicts our self-talk about that experience.    The perceived problem arises when we try to talk with others about sacred experience. If we or they or both of us get stuck in “expectations about the type of language required in testimony,” the conversation is in effect doomed. None of us will be able to listen past the language well enough to hear the Reality from which the other’s genuine “depth of spirituality” arises.    Jerry, I’m very grateful to you for these insights and phrases.    When I started writing a response in late January, I was still looking more specifically at the Wallace article. In a separate comment, I do think I want to draw forth from it and consider further those passages in which he appears to be advocating a specifically traditional Christian belief in his use of Christian language. I am not certain that Wallace insists on an exclusive belief, but I want to see how his language resonates—or doesn’t—with mine.    Meanwhile, I’m glad for our discussion, and I hope you and other Palmetto Friends will explore the larger conversation going on now “across the schisms.”    Blessed Be,  Michael IP: 207.69.140.36 Registered Report

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