FGC Gathering 2009: Shane Claiborne

At the start of my previous post, I make some comparisons between the first two plenary speakers at the 2009 FGC Gathering, Ben Pink Dandelion and Shane Claiborne.

Here I'll repeat some of the opening remarks I noted in the last post:

Both Ben Pink Dandelion and Shane Claiborne called us to greater faithfulness and greater care to looking at what we possess and what we profess.

Below, as in the previous post, are a number of quips, ideas, and stories I jotted down during Shane's plenary. Too much time has passed between having heard it and writing about it now, so I giving myself permission to type things into a list of what I noted, rather than formulating a cohesive blogpost.

Initial thoughts

In the notebook I took with me to his plenary, in the margins of the first page, I have these words:

a sort of caricature
not humble
evangelical
zeal
enthusiasm
revivalist

It's not that Shane was prideful or boastful as much as he was on fire: He believes in what he says. He professes what he possesses.

I short, I think he reflects the George Fox I carry in my mind: How accepted would Shane Claiborne be if he were to start ministering to us 21st Century Quakers out of the silence during a meeting for worship...?

But being a plenary speaker at Gathering provides the speaker with a great deal of advanced forgiveness from the audience of mostly Liberal Quakers. After all, plenary is not a meeting for worship and there must be a reason why FGC and its Gathering Committee invited him in the first place, right?

By the way, FGC will likely have all the plenaries available in CD later in 2009, through its QuakerBooks.

Shane Claiborne

When people ask me what I do, I tell them I'm a preacher. Then they look at me--Shane is a young white man, wears baggy clothes, and has long dreadlocks--and say, "They don't make preachers like they used to." And I say, "Thank God!"

What I love about Jesus is his imagination, like having the idea to turn water into wine, to keep the party going. Or healing a blind man by spitting on dirt. Jesus brings redemption in unexpected ways.

The gospels spread best not through force but through fascination. Jesus doesn't insist on who he is or isn't. When people asked Jesus, "Are you the Messiah?" he would answer "Tell me what you see, what you hear."

These are the current day perceptions of Christians by people who are outside the Church:

Anti-gay
Judgemental
Hypocrites.

The Church must do something in order for Christians to be seen by others as being connected with:

Grace
Love
Justice and peace.

After telling a story about how he bought an ice cream cone for a child in a very poor village, Shane describes how the child called around all of his friends--and the child passes the ice cream cone to each one so each child may have a lick of it. Then Shane says:

Here is the secret of Jesus: Give away the best things in life to others.

Another tidbit from Shane: Mother Teresa would wear the worst of all the pairs of donated shoes so that she would know no one would have a worse pair than she.

Christians have so much to say with our mouths and so little to show with our lives.

How can we worship a homeless man on Sunday and ignore a homeless man on Monday?

The reputation of Christianity and the reputation of America are closely linked, especially outside of America. People are seeing things done in the name of Jesus that didn't look like the love of Jesus.

American didn't invent Christianity. It only domesticated it.

An idea for a T-shirt: Everyone wants a revolution but no one wants to do the dishes.

My own afterthoughts

Less of Shane's plenary spoke to my condition than did Ben's. Some of it may have to do with the fact that I wasn't raised in the Christian faith tradition and Shane isn't Quaker. Many of Shane's stories referred to his own Christian practice and belief, not specifically Quakerism. Ben's stories and remarks, on the other hand, were more directly connected to Quakerism.

I also think social class differences between Shane and me impacted my ability to listen deeply to what he was saying. A number of his stories come from his background having grown up in the poorer parts of the South [in the States] and of his life on a farm or of experiences that his farming family and friends had.

All the words in the world can't adequately convey the experiences that we internalize in our youth, and Shane's storytelling, outrageous humor, and personal decisions about his path simply don't correspond to my own. I left the plenary wondering if Shane's voice is authentic, or if it is a ministry or gift he has to be able to share the voice of so many others through his stories?

I won't know the answer but he made me laugh. And he made me wonder about the judgments that I have about "evangelists" and whether I would have been turned off by George Fox or if the Light would have still reached me, despite the words it was cloaked in...

Blessings,
Liz

FGC Gathering 2009: Ben Pink Dandelion

I suppose I'm not ready to write about the workshop I took, Quakers & Social Class, because I'm still integrating the experience to a significant degree. That is, I'm wrestling with doing so.

Opening night at the Gathering provides the traditional welcome to the 1,500 participants, and more often than not, I've been skipping that first night, since it's usually a preview of the week, a massive "roll call" of affiliated yearly and monthly meetings, and other things that I'm less interested in.

But this year, I was especially curious to hear two of the plenary speakers: British Friend Ben Pink Dandelion and American Methodist-born preacher-author Shane Claiborne, just because their names have been around the block and then some.

Ben Pink Dandelion spoke the second night; Shane Claiborne the next. Their styles and presentations were quite different.

Ben wore a dress shirt and slacks and spoke with a thick, upper-class British accent, Enunciating Every Consonant And Every Word Completely And Clearly. Shane wore baggy pants and a loose fitting shirt--maybe an undershirt or plain white cotton T-shirt, like what I might wear for doing housework, and his vernacular was clearly "from the South," as we Yankees in the States say. He strung sentences together in a flurry and laughed easily and raised his voice regularly to make his points.

Ben had his humorous moments, to be sure, but it was an "acceptable" humor that White, middle-class, and upper-class Americans could appreciate. Shane's humor was more visceral, more graphic, more let's-get-real, this-is-how-it-is girls-and-boys. I needed to take more deep breaths when I was listening to Shane than to Ben. Chalk it up to differences in social class. (See? It's everywhere.)

Both men called us to greater faithfulness and greater care to looking at what we possess and what we profess.

Below and (hopefully) in the next post are a number of quips, ideas, and stories I jotted down during the two plenaries. Too much time has passed between having heard each one and writing about it now, so I giving myself permission to type things into a list of what I noted, rather than formulating a cohesive blogpost.

By the way, FGC will likely have all the plenaries available in CD later in 2009, through its QuakerBooks. And some of what Ben covered is in this teeny tiny pamphlet of his, Celebrating the Quaker Way, as well as in his 2003 presentation, Convinced Quakerism.

Ben Pink Dandelion

After making a few opening remarks about his background and his name, Ben launched into sharing some of his own spiritual journey, traveling from a life of hedonism to one of faithfulness.

At one point early on in his remarks, he spoke about his sense of having lived "an accompanied life," a sentiment I can often relate to, that there is a Spirit, a Principle that accompanies me...

He spoke about how the desire for a faithful life leads to a more serious life, which in turn leads to a more joyful life, and one with more laughter.

Ben described what he sees as the six stages of convincement, much of which he's also delineated in Convinced Quakerism, pp. 11-12:

1. The breaking-in of God in our lives, allowing us direct and immediate access to the Divine.

2. The Light showing us how things really are, being "convicted of our sin."

3. Our understanding that there is a choice and a possibility for change.

4. Being given the power to live that life, to be transformed.

5. The pulling together of others (Friends) into a community.

6. Sharing with one another and with others what we have found.

Since I am a "process queen"--I love how we develop and move through stages of understanding, of personal and spiritual growth--I was eager to hear more from Ben about these six stages. Sadly, as Ben went spinning into historical quotations by Fox, Penington, and others, I no longer could track which quote was related to what stage. Perhaps I'll take a closer look at his pamphlet...

Some other things Ben spoke to:

The more we surrender, the more we are given.

Fox's experience was inward, not outward and not "inner." Fox's was an interiorized experience.

Early Friends had an intimate relationship with God. We seek a sort of replacement of our old self with God's power, coming through us...

Fox believed in original sin and that all of us can be saved. That is what is meant by "perfectability."

Formal membership in the Religious Society of Friends began in the 1730s as a way to record which Quaker meetings would offer up "poor relief" to Friends who were suffering because of their convictions.

Quakers historically refused to engage in the manners of the world in order to further God's purposes on Earth (plain dress, plain speech; no hat honor, no tithes, no pagan-named months and days; keeping fixed prices... "No eBay!" declared Ben).

Today, many of us and many of our meetings are in fact caught up in the manners of the world, without accountability to our monthly meetings about what is or isn't Quaker.

These days, modern Friends "opt in and out" of certain testimonies, such as saying, "I support the testimony of simplicity but I have trouble with the peace testimony." But in the early days, Friends' Books of Discipline pointed to life as Testimony.

Once convinced, the sense of transformation continued day after day, and every day and every place was seen as sacred.

At one point, Ben spoke directly to us:

At this Gathering, we look like a luxuried people.

Ben offered a few queries, related to pulling us into community as part of the convincement experience:

How is community realized for us? How do we take the mountaintop experience into our life? How do we transcend the individualism of society?

Why are we always learning to "go elsewhere" and always going away via technology? Why talk about being a 21st Century Friend? Why separate ourselves from the past and the future?

Again, he spoke to us:

We're not Friends because we're good. We need each other to help us along in our faithfulness and activism.

Defining Liberal Friends... and our creedal ways

Ben draws on John Wilhelm Rowntree and Rufus Jones to look at the characteristics of Liberal Quakers, and these are also explained in Convinced Quakerism, p. 3:

1. Experience as primary, not Scripture.
2. Faith is relevant to the age we are in.
3. Friends are open to new Light.
4. We know more of God in each age, therefore the new Light we are given has more authority than what came before.

Today as Liberal Friends, we're cautious about what place belief has in Quakerism.

We know we don't have a creed, but we have a credal attitude toward what we believe and how we are.

It is a powerful source of our identity, to have a doctrine of seeking. The tTruth is personal, or it is somehow apportioned to individuals.

Today's Quaker message [from Liberal Friends] is that we are certain that we are a little uncertain of our belief. An "absolute perhaps," if you will.

Total "finders" will be in tension with a group of Liberal Friends. Those Friends who have been eldered [sic: admonished] for certain ministry may in fact have been [admonished] for their certainty.

It may be the "absolute perhaps" that will allow us to transcend the schisms among Friends.

What binds us together

1. Direct encounter of the Spirit.
2. Meeting for Worship for Business.
3. The priesthood of all believers.
4. Our Testimony [I'm not sure if he meant our life as testimony or "the" testimonies, or something else].

A Young Adult Friend during another presentation or discussion elsewhere pointed out that there are a few other, less pleasant things that also bind us together as a religious society:

1. Self-righteousness and pride.
2. Superficial witness in the world.
3. Ungrounded worship.

A few closing thoughts by Ben

Be careful: Quakerism is the vehicle of our life, not the object of our worship.

We need incarnational spirituality: Are we living in the Power, or are we just saying we are?

We need to be possessing while we are professing.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

In case that isn't enough to chew on, I hope to be sharing some of Shane's comments in the subsequent post.

As always, thanks for reading me.

Blessings,
Liz

July is a hard time to write...

Dear wonderful readers.

I thought I'd be long into my third or fourth post by now about the 2009 FGC Gathering.

Hah!

July has been wrought with travel plans. Followed by recovering from travels. Followed by preparing for more travels.

And in-between all that, there have been the minor things like paying bills, restocking the refrigerator, sorting through mail. Tending to Quaker committee work that has been my responsibility...

You get the idea.

Thanks for your patience. God willing, I'll return to my Gathering reflections later this month or--more likely--early August.

Sigh.

Blessings,
Liz

P.S. FGC's QuakerBooks now has Writing Cheerfully on the Web on its website.

The starfish... and babies in the river

Well now, this is strange: I could have sworn I had written this out in my journal, but it's nowhere to be found. Did I dream it...? Has it simply been so vividly alive in my head that I had only thought I had written it out...?

Well now, here it is.

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

The week before I left for Gathering in June, I found myself reflecting on two images that seemed related to each other yet were very different.

(NOTE: Embellishments to the original story and changes in gender and ages of the characters are my own.)

The starfish

There is a popular story about how we can make a difference in life, which basically goes like this:

One day, a little girl walking along the beach notices thousands of starfish just out of reach of the water. Off in the distance, she sees a person who is bending down, reaching for something, and tossing something into the waves. As she approaches, she realizes it's an old woman, tossing starfish one by one back into the ocean.

A bit skeptical about what good any of this will do, given how many starfish lay on the miles and miles of beach, the girl says to the old woman, "There are so many starfish out here, and the waves will just keep dumping more of them here all day, why waste your time, what difference will it make?"

To which the old woman bends down, picks up a starfish, and frisbees it over the water back into the waves.

"Well, I made a difference to that one."

Babies in the river

And then there's the second story, which I embellished quite a bit from a brief remark in Linda Stout's book (p. 106, with a reference to Rosie's Place in Boston).

There is a village of kind folk, living near a river. One day, as a group of children were playing by the river, they noticed something funny coming down to them from upstream.

There were babies in the river!

The children ran into the village, yelling to everyone they came across, "There are babies in the river! There are babies in the river!"

The village emptied out and everyone ran to the river to see for themselves. Those who got there first quickly started wading into the river and grabbed at the infants to pull them out, passing them by their tiny arms and legs to other villagers who had arrived seconds after them.

But the babies kept coming.

After an hour, two hours, three hours of pulling babies from the river, a few of the oldest villagers, too feeble to help with the rescue effort, fell back away from the riverside.

They didn't return to the village though.

They headed upstream instead, to see who was throwing babies into the river and what might be done about that.

I think these two images and stories have been with me because they speak to me about the many times I have taken action that amounts to tossing individual starfish into the ocean or pulling drowning babies from the river. The individual lives of those with whom I interact may in fact be changed, whether it's through a financial donation I've made for flood relief, a few volunteer hours in a women's organization, or starting a mentoring relationship with a depressed and isolated pre-teen.

But I mustn't think my work is done.

These days, I have been wondering what keeps me from investigating "upstream"? What keeps me away from coalitions that work to change policy? What keeps me away from organizations that work to change society and not just provide services that address the results of the current system?

(The other day at Meeting for Worship, I practically prayed to be changed by the Spirit intrinsically--but not by being whacked on the side of the head--just so I could get over my own ignorance and unconscious (or conscious!) privilege.)

These images and stories aren't the only things that speak to me and challenge me.

The social class workshop I took at Gathering is still impacting me, more than a week later. The conversations I'm having with my partner, difficult as they are, are stretching me to think beyond class oppression and instead to consider "internalized superiority"--a multigenerational trait of my family and of white, upper class/owning class society, that is hard to point to and harder to break.

The new discussion that has barely emerged at the monthly meeting around marriage equality--and whether to suspend serving as the state's "legal agent" for straight marriages under the care of the meeting--tests my patience as I listen to straight Friends openly talk about not wanting to give up their privilege.

At the same time, I recognize in myself that even giving up any non-unearned privilege I have would be among the hardest thing I would ever choose to do. (By this last point, I mean practical privileges to which I have access, like an iPhone, cable TV, TV in general, the car, multiple days' worth of clothing, access to food co-ops, etc.)

Living with these two stories, though, of the starfish and the babies in the river, makes me realize that there is always more to do. There is always more we can do, if we can convince ourselves and our faith community that it's worth the effort to work towards social change and not just provide social services.

Blessings,
Liz