Get disturbed and urged to think deeply across current theological, political, and cultural divides.
Read this bridge article promoting "progressive Quakerism"!
FAQS FOR FRIENDS– PART #9: JESUS & THE GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE
by Chuck Fager
http://afriendlyletter.com/faqs-friends-part-9-last-part/#more-6038
"...What’s Jesus Got to Do With the Golden Gate Bridge?"
"...one of the most agreeable years of my life was spent in San Francisco, from mid-1976 to mid-1977. Never mind that I was poor, even officially homeless for part of the time, because life was good. I had steady work as a reporter..."
"...a Progressive Quaker perspective, is inextricably tied up with my memories of one of San Francisco’s signal glories, the Golden Gate Bridge.
"Suppose the Golden Gate Bridge connected, not Marin County and San Francisco, but earth and heaven..."
"This idea is not as silly as it sounds. At the old Lake Street Friends meetinghouse...a large window opened on a view of the bridge. On numerous First Day mornings during that year I sat and contemplated the scene."
"Often enough the great arched span was caressed and then obscured by rolling sweeps of fog, and it was easy to imagine that the far end came down in some dimension much stranger than Marin County."
"Thus, solid as the bridge looked, and was, not everyone who set foot on it made it to the promised land at the other end. There was no guarantee: to get across, one had first to find the bridge, then walk or drive straight, stay in lane, and keep going."
"And it was not long thereafter when it came to me that the bridge could serve as a parable of the work of Christ, as understood by early Quakers, and Progressive Christian Quakers today."
With this powerful metaphor and vivid image,
so begins a very deep, insightful, and inclusive article by Chuck Fager
on the matters of reality, identity, purpose, ethics, religion, and philosophy.
I tend to be skeptical of "progressive"-labeled writing
(for a host of reasons, but that's not the 'angles'here).
And I don't much care for long hyphenated words for Quakers,
or anyone else for that matter.
But given the extreme divides and contradictions within Quakerism
(and most worldviews for that matter), it is probably necessary as shorthand.
Don't miss this article.
See if it is, indeed, one of those deep moments of witnessing in meeting.
In the Light,
Daniel Wilcox
