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Primitive Christianity Revived, Again
How Can We Practice Turning to the Spirit?
Whether we call this "the Spirit," "the Presence," "God" -- or "Decline to Say"...
This is the traditional, still-active source of whatever good we want our meetings to do or to be...
but when people think-about "How are we doing this?" or "Where do we fall short?" or "How can we make this happen the way we should?" --
that implies thinking of a method, finding a way-to-do-it -- but the thing itself is not a method, nor can any method guarantee it will be present to do "what we want."
For one thing 'what we want' may not be what we _really_ want, that is, wouldn't necessarily produce what we imagine it would be.
And besides, it isn't something we do; it's what makes our doing and our being happen in the first place.
We need to intend for this to happen -- & be prepared for it not to be what we'd expected or hoped for, but something with hopes and tasks for us... or not needing anything from us so much as our willingness to be led.
It isn't some form our experiencing might or should take.
What Jesus said wasn't: "If you're doing this right, you'll experience '_this_'!" He said, "Seek and you will find..." "Knock, and the door will be opened."
He didn't say we'd necessarily notice, right off, if and when that door does open. But that was the way into the 'Kingdom of God', the 'Reign of God' -- the state in which we can find God rightly setting the world in order.
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Keith Saylor on
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Forrest. I've been coming back to this post off and on for the past couple of days. I do not think I understand the sense of the post. When you ask "How can we practice turning to the Spirit?" I keep saying; "I just turn to the thing itself." I don't have a method. Or I could say the activity of turning is in itself the method. I don't set out to perform a particular methodology. Sometimes I may take a moment to enter into silent worship, however, most of the time it just happens in the act of turning itself even if I'm in the middle of splitting logs. The act of turning in itself is all it takes no matter what the circumstances.
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Permalink Reply by William F Rushby on
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The traditional Orthodox Friends read a chapter from the Bible and worshiped in silence for a time both in the morning and evening. When they went to meeting, it was an extension of what they practiced every day, not an abrupt change. That's how my wife was raised. (By the way, children attended the full meeting for worship twice a week. One could tell if they have been practicing at home by their behavior during public worship!)
John M. Whitall, Hannah Whitall Smith's father, was a busy industrialist and ran an evening program for the underprivileged (mainly Blacks, I guess) in inner city Philadelphia. He spent an hour, yes an HOUR, every morning in Bible reading and silent worship. That's real heavy-duty old-style Quaker devotionalism!
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By the way, children attended the full meeting for worship twice a week. Correction: twice a week if they attended a church school.
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Permalink Reply by Forrest Curo on
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An example, then? A few years back when I was leading a committee meeting to discern 'the spiritual state of the meeting', the idea of waiting for Spirit to give us some feeling about this seemed utterly foreign to people; the automatic emphasis was on searching out examples of our various activities.
"I think __" may not have been as symptomatic a typical response as it seemed to me -- but to me it showed that 'thinking about' was the automatic first choice of approaches, the thing people were sure was the right way to proceed with this kind of question.
One prominent old guy even objected to the fact that I was asking the meeting to consider its own state, that the meeting didn't want to be bothered about that or they wouldn't have made a committee to write something up & plop it down for a decision.
Worship and meeting business aren't supposed to be based on personal thinking or feeling, per se. A taboo on thinking or feeling wouldn't help, because the Spirit's influence can certainly manifest in either or both -- But there is a distinction between a perfunctuary prayer followed by systematic thinking-about, and a thoughtful, worshipful waiting for answers to emerge.
Can people always know whether they are actually "turned to the Spirit", rather than: " 'thinking that they're turned to the Spirit' while really 'thinking personally in the bad sense of the word' "?
I know no way to resolve this other than to trust God to make it happen. How each person will experience this... or describe the experience... shouldn't be the point at all. Some people find it an easy call; how nice for them. And the rest of us...?
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Thank you Forrest. This is very helpful. The content of your response is so rich that I can only respond to each paragraph separately.
Paragraph 1. "An example, then? A few years back when I was leading a committee meeting to discern 'the spiritual state of the meeting', the idea of waiting for Spirit to give us some feeling about this seemed utterly foreign to people; the automatic emphasis was on searching out examples of our various activities."
Did the Spirit give the Meeting as a whole the feeling to discern the spiritual state of the meeting and to set up a committee to discern the spiritual state of the Meeting? And did the Spirit lead you to lead the committee? Note, the first question may lead into the third paragraph. Beyond that, even if your answers to the questions are in the affirmative, I is not likely I would have participated in such a committee were I part of the Meeting. I would not have set out to block the establishment or work of the committee especially if it were the sense of the Meeting as a whole. I do not turn to the Spirit to give feelings or thoughts. Another way of saying this is I do not move into the activity of thinking to be given thoughts. The activity itself is sufficient in itself. Likewise, Living in the activity of turning to the Spirit in sufficient in itself. It is not foreign to me to wait in the Spirit itself. The "idea" of waiting for the Spirit to give some thought or feeling of, as in your example, the state of the Meeting has become more and more foreign over my lifetime. I experience the Spirit in a tactile way. It is literally movement so that leading or revelation is the relative inward motion of the Spirit in everything I do. The Spirit does not lead me to a feeling or thought, the relative movement of the Spirit guides and informs my thoughts just as the spiritually tactile movement of the Spirit leads me as I can peaches, upholster a chair, or monitor the nesting habitat of an endangered species. To settle down into a feeling of, for example, the State of a Meeting would, in my experience, undermine the prerogative of the Spirit itself to determine or discern the Meeting's state through ongoing active and fluid inward movement in the conscience of each member rather than static discernments solidified by committee or bureaucratic process. What is mean here is it is the relative inward movement and flux of the Spirit itself that will guide over time without reference to leadings, even leadings that are affirmed in the Spirit. I agree with you that " automatic emphasis ... on searching out examples of our various activities" to determine that state of the Meeting outruns the prerogative of the Spirit. However, in my life, I have found that waiting, for example, for the Spirit to give a feeling of the state of the Meeting usurps the prerogative of the Spirit once the feeling is used to state the state of the Meeting. To hold in the inward activity of the the Spirit itself in itself (without regard to feelings or leadings) is sufficient and preferable to guide and move the Meeting and an individual into a posture that at once manifests the State of the Meeting and guides the Meeting without outward pronouncements. This adherence to the movement of the Spirit itself in itself as guide is turning to the Spirit.
Forrest Curo said:An example, then? A few years back when I was leading a committee meeting to discern 'the spiritual state of the meeting', the idea of waiting for Spirit to give us some feeling about this seemed utterly foreign to people; the automatic emphasis was on searching out examples of our various activities.
"I think __" may not have been as symptomatic a typical response as it seemed to me -- but to me it showed that 'thinking about' was the automatic first choice of approaches, the thing people were sure was the right way to proceed with this kind of question.
One prominent old guy even objected to the fact that I was asking the meeting to consider its own state, that the meeting didn't want to be bothered about that or they wouldn't have made a committee to write something up & plop it down for a decision.
Worship and meeting business aren't supposed to be based on personal thinking or feeling, per se. A taboo on thinking or feeling wouldn't help, because the Spirit's influence can certainly manifest in either or both -- But there is a distinction between a perfunctuary prayer followed by systematic thinking-about, and a thoughtful, worshipful waiting for answers to emerge.
Can people always know whether they are actually "turned to the Spirit", rather than: " 'thinking that they're turned to the Spirit' while really 'thinking personally in the bad sense of the word' "?
I know no way to resolve this other than to trust God to make it happen. How each person will experience this... or describe the experience... shouldn't be the point at all. Some people find it an easy call; how nice for them. And the rest of us...?
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Did/does the Spirit create the world? Did it have anything to do with the organizational forms that led to the form Jesus' birth and life took? Or those formed afterwards as a result of his influence? Or George Fox's epiphany, or his decision that new organizational forms were needed to keep his movement going as a human movement?
Do these things ever wear out their usefulness? Unless continually renewed & revised by the Spirit, I'd say that they do... but people are continually led to do so, despite our resistance to any such revision...
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Permalink Reply by Howard Brod on
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Forrest,
Your experience with the State of the Meeting report intrigues me. When my meeting was under the Rotational Appointment structure that most liberal meetings utilize, we produced the draft of the State of the Meeting report just as the old Friend in your meeting desired. And the liberal Quaker meeting just 20 minutes down the road still does it the way your old Friend wanted. Sometimes that meeting will hold a called forum where anyone may attend in order to provide them input.
When my meeting first began the Situational Leading Controlled by the Spirit structure, we turned everything upside down. In the case of the Spiritual State of the Meeting report, discernment of the spiritual condition of our meeting was first (before anything was put to pen) an agenda item on our monthly Meeting for Business. For two meetings for business, we consider our spiritual condition as part of our Meetings for Business, and it was "advertised" that was what we would be doing with strong encouragement for everyone to participate and an explanation of why it was very important to our spiritual community. You see the process of sharing about and discerning together as a whole meeting our spiritual state became to us so much more important than putting it to pen. Since we had no permanent committee at the time to develop the report itself, at the end of the second Meeting for Business we formed an ad-hoc committee (temporary group) to put into an understandable report what we had discerned was our spiritual state. Then on the next (the third) Meeting for Business on this item, we considered the draft report to ensure it accurately reflected the sense of the meeting that had been discerned during the prior two months.
My point is that the whole meeting sought the Spirit's guidance and revelation in determining our spiritual state. Why does this matter? A big part of a Quaker meeting should be providing Friends a laboratory to show them how to seek the Spirit's guidance in every aspect of their lives once they leave the meetinghouse. They need to EACH experience the value of this constant seeking at the meetinghouse so they will have the courage to utilize the same Spirit-seeking in every aspect of their daily lives. The typical manifestation of the Rotational Appointment structure fails to do that for Friends. It's too easy to bypass the active and visible operation of the Spirit on the whole meeting too often. Under the Situational Leadings Controlled by the Spirit structure, absolutely nothing done for and at meeting that is part of our spiritual life is not taken by the whole meeting together to the Spirit for guidance.
This small difference changes the whole feeling at meeting. Having been in our meeting when it used that Rotational Appointment structure, I will tell you that having a meeting so infused with the Spirit for everything makes all the difference in the environment at meeting and in the personal lives of Friends. We have all become conscious of the 'Presence within' all day long, everyday.
At this point no committee (ad-hoc or permanent) does anything spiritually oriented without first seeking the guidance of the whole meeting. Unlike the Rotational Appointment structure, they don't arrive at a recommendation to bring to Meeting for Business for final approval. Instead, these committees USE Meeting for Business to receive initial guidance from the Spirit who is using our whole unified community to point the way.
Interestingly, under the structure we have used now for 5 years, our Meetings for Business have changed. No longer do we waste that time together on talking about "cutting the lawn", or receiving endless committee reports about the mundane things happening that used to cause us to engage in ego oriented word-smithing and pettiness. No longer do we entertain numerous committee announcements about upcoming events. The reality is that all of these things can be sent to Friends in email form anyway. The only thing brought to Meeting for business are those items that need discernment from the community; important things like "what peace and social action does the community want to come together on", "what is our spiritual condition and where does the spirit want to take us as a community", "how are we tenderly caring for one another and who needs our attention", "how can we further invite the direct action of the Spirit within our meeting life together". No longer do our Business Meeting minutes contain endless narratives of announcements, committee reports of what they are doing (that's not needed because the Meeting for Business is the source who first directed them to undertake their current activities). The minutes contain ONLY what was discerned at Meeting for Business, and these minutes are literally just several lines. If nothing was discerned (decided), the only statement would be that and why. Our Meetings for Business are now worshipful, with lots of silence and few agenda items, because they no longer resemble club or corporate meetings packed with trivia that should be handled in electronic ways. We have in our library the minutes of our grandparent meeting that was laid down 150 years ago. And guess what; for the first time in our own history, our minutes resemble these ancient Quaker minutes - in that only decisions are recorded - nothing else.
So our Meeting for Business now draws more Friends than our weekly worship, because spiritually meaningful things happen there that are important to all our Friends and they want to be part of it.
Our thought, again, is that every aspect of a Quaker meeting should be a spiritual laboratory for every Friend constantly.
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Permalink Reply by David McKay on
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This discussion is timely for me.
I decided I needed to read a little bit more George Fox and I selected attract out of his doctrinal books. I soon discovered that all George was saturating his text with allusions and metaphors from Scripture. So in my attempts to understand where he was coming from I dutifully tracked down the biblical references. Until I got to the point where he says that the word was before the letter. And he goes on to say how the careful analysis of Scripture, the institution of churches and priests are all simply ways of trying to avoid the light shining in our consciences.
And so I find myself in the ironic position of studying a text by Fox that criticizes his contemporaries for doing precisely the same kind of work on the text of Scripture!
When we place too much faith/emphasis on our methodology we might turn our methodology into God [or rather a god] and find our self worshiping technique instead of the ones the technique is designed to bring us to.
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David McKay said:I soon discovered that... George was saturating his text with allusions and metaphors from Scripture.Was Fox, then, using the Christian scriptures in the same way he was criticizing?
Or was he just mining them for language which his contemporaries could accept, to help them recognize the true source and consequent legitimacy of his conclusions?
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Forrest. As I said. I do not begrudge someone saying that they are led by the Spirit into, for example, establishing outward forms and institutions as George Fox specifically expressed. Just as I do not begrudge those (in response to Fox's attempts to impose his inspired forms on others) saying they were led by the Spirit to not participate in the outward forms and structures George Fox established.
I do not know or participate in a relationship with the Spirit wherein the Spirit gives me outward ideological constructs, principles, traditions, practices etc. to follow. In the Spirit itself in itself guiding my conscience and anchoring my conscious directly, I value no outward form, even the structures and institutions that George Fox was inspired to establish. Note, I acknowledge his inspiration. However, the inward Spirit itself in itself does not direct me to follow his inspiration. In the Spirit I am free to follow or not to follow or to half-way follow. I chose not to follow any outwardly manifested leadings; but to follow the immediate and unmediated inward Spirit itself in itself. The inward movement of Spirit itself in itself is my sufficient guide in all things, relationships, and actions on this earth. The Spirit is ever moving within me as I act in the world and that is sufficient in itself to government my actions and relationships in this life without reference to any leadings or the leading of others.
Forrest Curo said:Did/does the Spirit create the world? Did it have anything to do with the organizational forms that led to the form Jesus' birth and life took? Or those formed afterwards as a result of his influence? Or George Fox's epiphany, or his decision that new organizational forms were needed to keep his movement going as a human movement?
Do these things ever wear out their usefulness? Unless continually renewed & revised by the Spirit, I'd say that they do... but people are continually led to do so, despite our resistance to any such revision...
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Person's gotta do what a person's gotta do...
These days, I really don't feel led to much -- but do find that things go better with Spirit, so far as I can remember not to automatically rely on my own flailing smarts, or on illusions of prudence, or whatever. But I'm quite sure that these 'other' things, too, are manifestations of Spirit & serving 'Its' ends.
So it seems quite pointless to make an issue of how purely (or how imperfectly) I let that be my 'sole' guide. The world holds many pitfalls, which I often see people fall into... but all things work for good. "for those who love God"? Yes, yes, but my own output in that regard ain't nuthin to brag about.
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Obviously, I do not share your notion of the pointlessness of testifying to the sufficiency of the Spirit itself in itself as the sole guide in the conscience and anchor of consciousness. I have taken this message to those who are, by their own admission, anchored in and informed by outward political, social, and religious forms. When this message is interjected into the context of outward politics and religion, the narrative is changed and the old paradigm between human being that is governed by outward forms or the falling into anarchy is shattered and a new way of being, consciousness, meaning, purpose, and identity is born in the conscience of people. Expired (outwardly expressed) forms no longer have power because the fear of anarchy without them is lost in the direct knowledge and experience of immanent Being itself in itself moving in and illuminating the conscious and conscience so that people experience the very nature of their consciousness transformed and all outwardly expired forms become irrelevant and the professors of outward political, social, and religious forms are rendered powerless to guide and inform as the Spirit itself in itself replaces them all as the sole informer and guide. No longer do the outwardly expired prescriptions, social testimonies, structures, traditions, committees, bureaucracies, ideologies, philosophies, theologies, principles, of those who promote adherence to expired political and religious forms (Hillary Clinton, The Pope, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, Scot Walker, Billy Graham, George Fox, Ban Ki-Moon, Ted Cruz, etc.) rule and govern the conscious and conscience of people who hear of a different way and experience the shattering of the paradigm promoted by those whose conscious and conscience are anchored in and informed by outwardly expired forms.
I have witnessed this revelation experientially as have other Quakers from the very inception of the Gathering. It is ours to testify to that witness and leave it the inward Spirit to shatter human bondage to outward forms and manifest rule and governance in the conscious and conscience of people.
Forrest Curo said:Person's gotta do what a person's gotta do...
These days, I really don't feel led to much -- but do find that things go better with Spirit, so far as I can remember not to automatically rely on my own flailing smarts, or on illusions of prudence, or whatever. But I'm quite sure that these 'other' things, too, are manifestations of Spirit & serving 'Its' ends.
So it seems quite pointless to make an issue of how purely (or how imperfectly) I let that be my 'sole' guide. The world holds many pitfalls, which I often see people fall into... but all things work for good. "for those who love God"? Yes, yes, but my own output in that regard ain't nuthin to brag about.
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