This is re-posted on QuakerQuaker from my blog The Liberal Quaker.

I have a tendency to make friends with underdogs and critics—those who for one reason or another put themselves (or who are put) in opposition to a greater community.  When I lived at Pendle Hill, I worked in the community garden.  The young woman in charge, when considering the possible death of a plant, would often say, “Well, we’re all gonna die anyway.”  The saying extended into all areas of life—that death, being ever closer than we could possibly imagine, makes life itself simultaneously less and more significant.  Often she would return to the garden livid after a staff meeting claiming that, yet again, some people had taken, “credit for God’s work.”  She, at the same time as loving the place, deeply resented many of the realities associated with Pendle Hill. Her little phrase reflected two different understandings—one associated with ego and discontent, and the other with the basic fact that in this world, maybe, she controled one-tenth of one-thousandth of a percent of whatever happens

Another time, I sat during lunch to reconnect with a friend at the annual sessions of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (PYM). At one point she explained her intention to resign from much of her involvement with Quaker organizations. I was somewhat shocked, thinking of her as a “regular” in the committee circuit. When I inquired, she explained her frustration with what she called the behind-the-scenes, “power dynamics.” She offered no specifics, yet she decried her own participation in what she saw as the inappropriate use of power. We are often times hesitant substantively to discuss power.

I would like to suggest that we are not merely hesitant to talk about power because we want to have a little for ourselves, like we blame food-hoarders for their lack of consideration.  We also see the detrimental effects of meaning and purpose grounded in the use of power, in the holding of a position, in getting a proposal passed, in one day becoming clerk. Who one is, one’s existential validity, is so easily got when met by institutional positions. To be a tenured professor, to be general secretary, to bepresident and CEO—these are examples of power entangled with prestige and identity, fixed within an external understanding of one’s purpose in the world.

A secret litany of discontents seethes beneath the cauterized surface of community. “If I were in charge,” and, “if it were up to me,” exemplify our impulse toward existential revenge. The ego does not cease its fulsome kicking and screaming, even when community has moved with as much grace as it can. The basic violence is done—our own subjectivity is reduced to objectivity, our needs passed over for some broader understanding of an abstract thing called community. So once, “I am,” clerk, president, general secretary, I’ll do it differently. Each of us discovers a tension between being one and being one of many. Power dynamics are merely one arena within which, if we are not explicitly careful, we might discover we’ve forgotten that neither side of the tension need be our concern. The tension itself is the concern.

In discussing Rufus Jones and in bringing responses to the blog into focus, I’d like to suggest that the Kingdom of Heaven (or the Kingdom of God) is neither an over-simplified Kumbaya-singing group of white, dreadlocked hippies; nor is it societal transformation on the scale of what Marx actually meant by communism. It may be a cliché, but the transformation begins within, argues Jones, and I along with him. The transformation begins with one’s inner life, such that we could imagine not external changes per se.  We could imagine changes in the way we think.  This alone could actually change everything. The ambivalent concern with power, as demonstrated in the above stories and countless others, becomes a non-concern and a non sequitur in the posited landscape of Jones’ Kingdom of God.

…

With Adrian and Thomas Kelly, continual practice and the cultivation of presence to the nameless divine create space for right activity in the world.  We take this basic premise as we step inside Jones’ assertion that, “It is impossible to find without losing, to get without giving, to live without dying,” (1916:12).  As with my gardener friend, the same wisdom is here further articulated. We cannot find what we seek until we have lost it, we cannot get what we desire until it has been taken, and we cannot live until we have died.  The fact that two words, from a linguistic perspective, don’t make sense without their binary opposites, suggests the significance beyond linguistics. It suggests that meaning and purpose is two-sided itself. In other places I argue that meaning and purpose is a powerful drive towards which we orient our activity.  The drive is derived often from the positing of struggle subsequently to overcome.

We require struggle and we require overcoming. The two do not work without the other, and so they are constantly in tension. The tension itself is the source of greater wisdom. Jones writes: “For Christ the real concern is to get new and greater desires—desires for infinite things.  The reach must always exceed the grasp.  The heart must always be throbbing for an attainment that lies beyond any present consummation,” (1916:19). This present consummation is easily articulated in a variety of forms, one of which is power. Yet, we need orient our activity in the world towards the infinite, which is the paradox.  How could we find and lose at the same time?  In a literal sense we cannot. The paradox is infinite, and so there the divine sits. There in the mystery she waves her whispering hands but never speaks.

Jones suggests that this unceasing craving is not simply a negative thing because it can lead to power-obsession and other addictions. At a different level, the craving intimates toward the existence of the infinite.  The craving is the closest we come to empirically identifying God’s presence within us.  He writes: “We are made for something which does not yet appear, we are inalienably kin to the perfect that always draws and attracts us,” (1916:149). A bit counter intuitively, this thing that leads us ultimately to constant dissatisfaction is also the thing that can open us to unimagined realms of meaning and purpose.  Rather than orienting our struggle in the external world and associating our identity with it there, we can orient the struggle within. We can constantly strive to live inside the tension of paradox and craving, cultivating a discipline that allows us to carve deeper into it. There is where meaning rests, where God ultimately waits for us. In this alone we will constantly live and die, take and be taken, find and lose.

I am reminded of a Sufjan Stevens song: Casimir Pulaski Day

The Quaker orientation toward perfection reflects ancient wisdom when it is taken to mean an utter embrace of craving.  In Christian language brokenness or fallenness are more accurate terms, and in other traditions craving is a more accurate term. Jealousy, revenge, arrogance, and violence are understood very differently from the perspective of one who has embraced craving.  One who has embraced craving knows that this craving is the origin, the fire and fuel, for these negative affects. They result in turning external the forces that require an inward turn and an inwardly oriented discipline. When we see negative affects in this light, we all of sudden have the capacity for profound compassion. Compassion is then the first outcome of an inward turn. We cannot cultivate compassion without making sense of the inward turn.  There are at least two choices.

Kelly and Jones both emphasize the discipline of the inward turn.  Worship is not sitting down quietly for an hour a week. It may take this form (and other forms) but underlying the form, a substantive engagement with craving and the paradoxical tension surfaces. The tension and the craving are at times unnerving experiences, which threaten to destroy the whole of our egos. Such destruction, however, never comes to fruition because the tension itself does not allow the completed solution of either end.  Destruction and construction are simultaneous.

Jones writes: “In the hush and silence of the corporate group which the Quakers raised to an immense importance, they believed man could become aware of that More than himself revealed within himself,” (2001:72).  Clearly worship is meant to bring people in touch with the inner life.  Silence, then, is not the thing itself to be worshiped; it is the medium in which we open our vulnerabilities, our brokenness and grasping. When gathered with others who we know wrestle with the same difficulty, we cannot help but to cultivate collective compassion. Words are spoken to improve upon the compassion, to improve upon the silence.  (I have been unable to unearth which Quaker has made the recommendation: only speak to improve upon the silence. It is likely that many different Quakers borrowed from the Zen tradition of Buddhism. If anyone has any idea the origin of this recommendation, I would very much like to hear it.)  To improve upon the silence, among other things, means speaking to the condition of craving and brokenness in the collectivity gathered in worship. It also means to speak to the possibility of deepening and broadening the discipline of embracing the paradox of our craving—that is, it means giving advice.

In this sense meaning and purpose is a secular term for God. Where we find meaning and purpose we also find God (2001:74). God is an inward experience.  Most importantly, God is mostly a mystery—God is in tension, paradox, vulnerability, transformation.  These are abstract terms that refer to the fact that we actually have no idea who or what God is, and to surmise otherwise would be to oversimplify. When we find ourselves definitively making sense of God, we need merely to remind ourselves that God does not live inside a box. God escapes conceptual frames. Even the idea thatGod is love, although a fun idea, is an impermanent conceptual frame. However, since conceptual frames are all that we have, we must suffice with letting God escape.

I am reminded of a song by the Michael Gungor Band called God is not a White Man.

In the last post, I suggested that Quakers consider doing away with their identity as Quakers. I must emphasize that the point in making this suggestion was not definitively to recommend a new policy.  There are many useful things in the Christian tradition, in Quakerism, and in other Faith traditions that help us to cultivate a deeper experience of this inward compassion-centered discipline.  Kelly and Jones have discussed the form of this discipline, and I add that one specific policy recommendation for Quakers might be to evaluate the way worship is conducted. In worship, we are attempting to embrace the mystery of God by emphasizing our brokenness and cultivating compassion. Ultimately, however, we may have different ideas about what worship is and what happens during it. This is the mystery. It may benefit Quakers to talk about how we worship. How do we cultivate the discipline of centering down so as to pay attention to whatever it is to which we are paying attention?  I’d like Quakers to talk more about what we are doing in worship, and how we might make it a meaningful experience.

At the beginning of the essay, I discussed Jones’ use of the idea of the Kingdom of God (or of Heaven).  We are supposedly bringing about the Kingdom of God, which is akin to Martin Luther King Jr.’s use of the idea of blessed community.  Jones writes: “It is Quaker faith that war can be eliminated only by a way of life that first eliminates hate, greed, fear, jealousy, rivalry, injustice, misunderstanding, misjudging, and overreaching,” (2001:154).  This is a more extensive list of what I above called negative affects.  They are the result of an externally oriented expression of one’s paradoxical craving.  Likewise, presumably the opposite of these negative affects, like compassion, result from an inwardly oriented expression of one’s paradoxical craving.  There is a shaky foundation in world activity motivated by this faith in mystery.  Jones emphasizes the experimental quality of Quaker activity in the world.  Never quite certain, Quakers make mere attempts at bringing the blessed community, at doing the next right thing (2001:154). Any other way of characterizing such work would lack the humility that accompanies the inward turn. One can, indeed, be too certain.

Jones also writes that what people, “who have had…contact with God, do with their lives…what they endure for the truth which they have seen, is the surest evidence we can produce in support of the fact that they themselves have the conviction of objectivity…the best proof which can be adduced…that there is some objective reality to their experience,” (2001:105). Jones is not saying that these committed people are certain of their conceptual frames, of the beliefs that they hold per se.  Jones asserts that these committed people, as a result of their inward turn, have a different perception of reality, which leads them to do all sorts of things, which we would not dream of doing.  This sort of objective experience need not be confused with some idea that we base our actions on our beliefs alone.  In my research and in my experience, I have found it is almost never the case that people sustainably work as activists without some deeper understanding of their meaning and purpose in the world extending beyond mere belief content.

For societal transformation, we first need to see the world with perspectives resulting from the inward turn.  Acting for change is tenuous enough, without doing so out of revenge (“When I am in that position, I’ll do it better…”) or out of other types of rage, greed, fear, jealousy, rivalry, etc.  The outer Kingdom of God, for Jones, must reflect an, “inner kingdom of spirit, a kingdom of love,” (2001:135) and I will add, a kingdom of compassion.

Bibliography

Jones, Rufus Matthew. 1916. The Inner Life. New York: The Macmillan Company.

Jones, Rufus Matthew, and Kerry Walters. 2001. Rufus Jones: Essential Writings. First ed. Orbis Books.