Faith to Move Mountains

Last fall I was blessed to co-lead the Inquirers' Weekend at Pendle Hill with Emma Lapsansky.

We had a deeply engaged group of eight people on varying places in relation to Quakerism. One had attended four meetings for worship; one is an Episcopalian minister with ancestors who were Quaker, and so she wanted to better learn Quaker vocabulary and practice; one had been a member 30 years ago and eventually resigned, and now is considering joining a meeting again; and many of the others are regular attenders at meeting for worship and are considering next steps.

I had never facilitated a full weekend workshop before, though many afternoon or evening ones, plus many a Sunday morning class with children. And I've clerked 12 weekend-long Friends Journal board meetings in total over the last four years; those are somewhat similar, logistically anyway.

Anyway, it went very well. Emma was a fantastic co-leader, with her probing questions and knowledgeable answers in turn--the very model of a well-loved professor. I brought some different activities to mix it up a bit and make sure we took stretch breaks. We watched a couple of QuakerSpeak videos that spoke to the group's condition.

Afterwards, I reflected that this had been something of a "mountaintop" experience for me, but it wasn't a tiptop peak experience, either. I've had them before. I hope to have them again. The fact that I drove home every night to be with our sons while my wife was also away meant I didn't engage 24 hours a day, and that may have had an impact.

But the mountain didn't feel as high as when I was newer to Quakerism.

In considering that, I realized, that's partly because I am further up "the mountain" of spiritual experience in my daily life. I fall far short of Paul's injunction in Thessalonians to "pray without ceasing," yet I often remember to. And I've been practicing as a Quaker for 25 years now. It makes a difference.

It occurred to me that when Jesus spoke of having sufficient faith to move mountains, maybe it wasn't as literal as the words recorded in the Bible, at least as translated into English:

Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”
- Matthew 17:20, New International Version

Perhaps this passage gives us a clue that we can move the mountaintop to us. We can have a daily spiritual practice that brings us closer to God, closer to the feeling we get on retreat at the top of a mountain, a peak experience literally and spiritually. I can't believe in prayer literally moving mountains, at least not with what I understand of how the universe works. I can totally see how we can move the spiritual mountain to us - and ourselves up it - so that we are there all the time.

During the weekend, Emma had reminded us the early Quakers believed humans can attain a place, as she said, "above Adam, and beyond falling." I felt we touched a little bit of that place in our weekend together.

Written November 2015, posted May 2016.

Albert Nolan's Jesus Today

A couple months ago I read Albert Nolan's book Jesus Today: A Spirituality of Radical Freedom (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2006).

Nolan is a Dominican priest from South Africa, which very much informs his world view, in a positive way, from my experience. His first book, Jesus Before Christianity, is apparently relatively widely read.

I have finally had a chance to type up some of the passages that spoke to my condition, and reproduce a few of them here. The book starts with a review of the current situation in the world, the "signs of the times."

P. 7: In our present circumstances of uncertainty and insecurity, spirituality could be seen as yet another form of escape. While this may be true in some cases, it seems to me that by and large the new search for spirituality, the deep hunger for spirituality, is genuine and sincere. It is one of the signs of our times.
     The sign, however, is not the number of people who have found a satisfactory form of spirituality to live by. Some have done so, but the sign is rather the widespread hunger for spirituality, the search for spirituality, the felt need for spirituality. One could argue that all human beings need, and have always needed, spirituality. What is happening today is that many more people are becoming acutely aware of their need for spirituality.

Nolan then reviews what he sees as the core of Jesus's spirituality.

Page 135: Trusting God, as Jesus did, does not mean clinging to God; it means letting go of everything so as to surrender ourselves and our lives to God. There is a difference between attachment and surrender. In the end we must become detached from God, too. We must let go of God in order to jump into the embrace of a loving Father whom we can trust implicitly. We don’t need to hold on tightly, because we will be held—like a child in the arms of its parents.
     There are people who cling to God. They make God into a crutch... Clinging, even clinging to God, is the work of a frightened ego. Surrender and trust come from the depths of our true self.

p. 146: For many of us the process of unlearning or unknowing our previous images of God might include a stage of atheism or at least a period of grappling with a de-personalized God. But as our search continues, and especially if we are learning from Jesus, we will come to experience God in personal terms. This will of course be very different from the childish images of a personal God some of us grew up with.

Part III of the book is titled, "Personal Transformation Today." Nolan's goal is to outline a practical spirituality for today. The chapter titles indicate the elements of this: In Silence and Solitude; Getting to Know Oneself; With a Grateful Heart; Like a Little Child; and Letting Go.

Finally, Nolan concludes with Part IV: Jesus and the Experience of Onenes: one with God with ourselves, with other human beings, and with the universe.

p. 191: We are God’s handiwork, a small but unique part of God’s great ongoing work of art. But we are also invited to participate in the process by becoming co-artists and co-creators of the future.
     We do this by allowing God to work in and through us. When we are radically free or on the way to radical freedom, divine energy can flow through us unhindered. This divine energy, which is also called the Holy Spirit, infinitely powerful, creative, and healing. We see it at work in the prophets, the mystics, and the saints, but above all in Jesus. The Holy Spirit is Jesus’ spirit....
     God’s Work, like God’s Wisdom, is revolutionary. It turns the world upside down. We participate by adding our voices to the many prophetic voices that are speaking out boldly in our day and age. There are countless numbers of people around the world who are doing God’s Work. The challenge we face is to join them, if we have not already done so.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who's interested in what could be likened to an "emergent" or "convergent" view of Jesus, from a religious in the Catholic church.

Echoes

This year, I've been reading the books of the Bible that I've never read in whole before. That included the minor prophets earlier this year.

Just this month I've read Proverbs in its entirety for the first time. Here is the passage that stood out for me (from the Oxford study edition of the Revised English Bible):

Two things I ask of you --
do not withhold them in my lifetime;
put fraud and lying far from me; give me neither poverty nor wealth,
but provide me with the food I need,
for if I have too much I shall deny you and say, "Who is the Lord?"
and if I am reduced to poverty I shall steal
and besmirch the name of my God.

-- Proverbs 30:7-9

Could this be an echo?

Give us this day our daily bread.

-- Matthew, Chapter 6:11

Guest Post: John Pixley on Taking Back Jesus

Some thoughts by John Pixley, Claremont Meeting, 7/26/2007

Handed out at a Pacific Yearly Meeting evening discussion group, “Taking Back Jesus,” 8/1/2007; published with John's permission

Last fall, a young man that I hired as an attendant would often show up to work wearing a blue hooded sweatshirt, on the front of which he had sewn a picture of a Hindu goddess. I was intrigued by this and told him I thought it was cool. He suggested that I have a picture of Jesus Christ sewn onto the bib of my overalls. “That’d be dope!” he enthused.

Jesus on my bibs! That would be cool, if not dope, I thought. Those who know me know that overalls are what I wear, that they are very much a part of my life. Jesus is also a big part of my life. Most likely because of my significant, in-your-face disability, I have long been attracted to his message of love for the different, the outsider, even the enemy. Why not have Jesus, who I admire – indeed, love – and try to honor in how I live my life, close to me, on my bib, and for all the world to see?

But then I got worried. If I went around sporting a picture of Jesus, people would get the wrong idea about me. Never mind that they would think I was out to convert, or “save,” the world. People would think I am a right-wing fundamentalist nut.

People would see me with my picture of Jesus and think I was saying that women shouldn’t be able to get abortions, that gays and lesbians are bad, that it is not only acceptable but honorable to go to and also start war, that it is okay to torture people.

This is what many people think of when they think of Jesus – or at least of Christianity. The sad, shameful fact is that Jesus has been taken by conservative Christians, the Christian right, and used as their exclusive spokesman. This man who preached and demonstrated radical love and inclusiveness, who showed it to the world, has been hijacked and made to say that women and gays shouldn’t have equal rights, that war is good, that torture is fine.

Jesus has been made to say and condone things that he never said and condoned. How else can President Bush, who is against same-sex marriage and a woman’s right to have control over her own body and life, and who sanctions war and torture (not to mention the death penalty), claim not only to be a Christian but also that Jesus is his most-admired philosopher?

It is bad enough that this gives Jesus and Christianity a bad name. Earlier this year, I saw Jesus Camp, a documentary about a summer camp for Christian fundamentalist kids, and I was struck by how the audience at the college screening was laughing. While much of what is said in the film is outrageous and funny, I came away very concerned that Jesus has become a laughing-stock.

Jesus has also been used in other hurtful ways. Since I was a young child, people have stopped me on the sidewalk to tell me that if I believe in Jesus, I will be healed. I have even been told that I will walk if I pray to Jesus! The message is less about Jesus and more of a judgment – that, in being disabled and in a wheelchair, I am sick or not a complete, whole person and in need of healing and not worthy (at least in their eyes, if not Jesus’) until I am healed.

I have no doubt that all of these people are quite sincere and well-intentioned, which makes what they do with Jesus all the more disturbing. (Indeed, the director of Jesus Camp said at the screening I attended that Christian fundamentalists have embraced the film.) Is it any wonder that, especially as a disabled and now gay man, I have become wary of Jesus or at least talk of him? I am sad to say that I am all but ashamed to say that I love Jesus. I notice this, for example, when I’m with my gay friends, and they get frightened and angry when I mention Jesus. This is a tragedy.

I wonder how many other people who would otherwise consider themselves Christians have been scared off or driven away from Jesus by the way he has been appropriated and represented in these ways. Could this be why some or many of us in pacific Yearly Meeting feel more at home with our safe, warm universalism than with what at least I see as the old-time Christo-centric Quakerism of George Fox?

It is time to take back Jesus. I want to embrace him as the man of peace and love he truly was. Indeed, I want to wear him and show him off proudly on my gay, disabled body. I dare say that he, with his world-changing message of all-inclusive love, would like that.
- - -
[UPDATE: It turns out that Forrest Curo had already posted this piece at "A Quaker Watering Hole," along with some additional thoughts of his own: http://acitycanbemoved.blogspot.com/2007/08/taking-back-jesus.html. I'm only slowly catching up with blogreading after moving and going to Yearly Meeting, so I missed this before. -- cm]