SF Friends School Patch

This patch was designed by middle-school students at San Francisco Friends School. I quite like it.
The school also has enormous banners with one of each of these words hanging in the 3rd floor gym. It's quite something to see.

(This is a bit of an experiment. If you're seeing this on Facebook and it doesn't show an image, you can go to the original blog at http://chrismsf.blogspot.com.)

State of San Francisco Friends Meeting

Here is the annual "state of the meeting report" for 2010, as approved today by San Francisco Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers).

State of the Meeting Report 2010:
San Francisco Monthly Meeting

Approved at monthly meeting for business, 5/9/2010

Meeting for Worship

The weekly meeting for worship seems grounded and full as we wait upon the Holy Spirit. Vocal ministry varies widely in quantity, and yet the quality seems generally at a good level. One recent week we had no vocal ministry and a week or two later we had ten different pieces of vocal ministry.

The Tuesday evening meeting is small but centered; it recently moved to Wednesday evenings, to be closer to midweek.

We continue to hold an extended meeting for worship from 9:30 to noon on the fifth Sundays of a month. The longer times often lead to a greater depth of worship for Friends.

Meeting for Business

Visitors have remarked that our meeting for business seems grounded and spiritual. In a major piece of business, we took several months to discern at some length about a service project – opening a neighborhood food pantry at the meetinghouse. The time seemed right, given the recession and the increased need, and unity was reached in March. At our first pantry in April, a lot of outreach was done in the neighborhood, and we served more than our goal of 50 households the very first time. We are engaging with the SF Friends School community in finding volunteers; other people have found us through our volunteer management signup page on the internet.

A new feature at business meeting in the past year has been brief reports from ministers among us. These have uplifted us as we realize the depth and breadth of ministry among the members of our meeting, ranging from an art gallery internship program for at-risk teens, to republishing classic Quaker works, to convening the Quaker study and Bible study groups at our meeting for 20 years.

Witness

We welcomed Rolene Walker home from her Walk with Earth. It was wonderful to have her back among us, as we learned more about the lessons and learnings she gained from her time between California and Chile. Meanwhile, Rolene likes to remind us that people who have leadings to go out into the world also need people to stay home to “tend the fires.”

Several Friends have been following a leading to resist the payment of taxes to fund wars. Two of our members have spent many weekends traveling to other meetings in College Park Quarterly Meeting to raise awareness of this issue. A distant member visited and spoke of his own path, including a federal lawsuit he has filed. A minute was approved by the meeting that recognized the variety of ways people have followed this leading, and affirmed our support for this witness.

Our vigil for peace outside the federal office building continues into its ninth year. Fortunately, we have support from American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), Episcopals, Buddhists, and many others, as our meeting’s presence at the vigil is often fairly small.

Comings and Goings

Our large urban meeting is blessed with many visitors, and many newcomers, and many people who move on to other places or other activities. Efforts to welcome newcomers a few years ago have paid off in the last year as several new members joined the meeting. We still have to remind ourselves from time to time to welcome newcomers, and repeat visitors, and help them feel included. We strive to be a teaching meeting, whereby people who sojourn with us for a spell may feel refreshed or inspired or willing to experiment. We have had a number of convincements in the past year.

Other long-time members have moved away, or had their memberships transferred, and we are glad to support them in their new meetings.

Children

Our community truly feels intergenerational. We have a lively group of young children at the meeting these days, and the children’s religious education committee strives to serve children at the nursery, young elementary, and older elementary levels. It is our hope to continue to engage the older children as they mature; we will need help to do that. We are blessed to have a dedicated and talented childcare worker who grew up in La Jolla Meeting.

Finances and Building

We dealt with a budget deficit in 2009, as donations were down significantly. Our building continues to receive significant use, through tenants AFSC and Institute for Public Accuracy, and through building rentals by community groups. Our building manager has kept the usage of the building high even with the recession, and has managed several improvement projects in the past year.

As part of an ongoing effort, the Treasurer identified a baseline of funds needed for operation of the meeting and for prudent building reserves. An ad hoc committee is looking at possible uses for the funds in excess of that baseline. We hope to examine this prayerfully in the coming months.

The possibility of renovating our kitchen remains a topic of discussion. In the past year an ad hoc subcommittee wrote queries for all to consider, and convened a worship sharing session. In the coming year we will discern what our calling, if any, might be around improving the kitchen.

Community

Our sense of community is sustained by our fellowship hour; study groups; the annual meeting retreat; and other activities, such as Friendly 8’s potluck groups. Many San Francisco Friends participate in the wider world of Friends, often in leadership roles, including through organizations such as Quarterly Meeting, Pacific Yearly Meeting, Friends General Conference, Friends for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual Transgender and Queer Concerns, Friends World Committee for Consultation, Quakers Uniting In Publications, AFSC, and Alternatives to Violence Project (not officially Quaker but started by Friends).

We are not at all perfect, but we are usually able to communicate clearly with one another when our feelings are hurt or our expectations are not met. This is helpful in creating a sense of trust, and giving us a glimpse of the Beloved Community among us.

Summary

The spiritual state of San Francisco Monthly Meeting appears to be healthy and vibrant. We pray for the Spirit’s continued blessing and guidance, that it may truly be so and that it may remain so.

Respectfully submitted,

Chris Mohr, Clerk

Three good books and a query: Is it SPIJE not SPICE?

I've recently read three interesting books in a row:

1. A New Kind of Christianity, Brian McLaren


2. If the Church Were Christian, Phillip Gulley


3. The Case for God, Karen Armstrong

I'd recommend reading all three of them, at least for my Quaker friends and anyone who identifies as "spiritual but not religious." All three authors are doing their best to come up with or describe religion that encompasses the spirituality of compassion, love, and grace as foremost.

The McLaren and Gulley books are about praxis, how to form a new kind of church that would actually embody the values of Jesus, instead of just talking about him. Armstrong's is about history—understanding how we got "here," a world where many people identify religion with fundamentalism and dismiss it altogether, and where many others identify their religious truth as the only true truth and dismiss everyone else.

I hope to take time to write more, especially about the praxis books. However, my nightstand now has on it Diana Butler Bass's A People's History of Christianity, and it's beckoning to me, more than three months after Robin M. gave it to me. (In between the food pantry debut, a baseball game, Quaker Heritage Day tomorrow, and meeting for business on Sunday, it's simply going to have to wait just a little bit longer for my attention.)

One brief note from Gulley's book: He lists the desirable testimonies of a congregation as being simplicity, peace, integrity, justice, and equality—which you can abbreviate as SPIJE. I like this as an alternative to the mnemonic of "the" Quaker testimonies of simplicity, peace, integrity, community, and equality, which are an extension of something Howard Brinton originally synthesized in Quakers for 300 Years. (Here's an old post I wrote in 2006 about doing a workshop on the "SPICES" testimonies—the extra S is for Stewardship.)

News: Food Pantry and an Op Ed in the Merc

First news item: The neighborhood food pantry starts this Saturday, 4/10/2010, at the San Francisco Friends Meetinghouse, 65 9th Street, between Mission & Market Streets, San Francisco. Volunteers will arrive at 11 to sort food and set it on tables in a farmers market style. This is the SF Food Bank's preferred form of distribution, so that participants can select the items they want rather than take whatever is in a bag or a box. Distribution begins at 12:30 and is open to the first 50 people who arrive.

Second news item: The 4/8/2010 issue of the San Jose Mercury News is carrying an op ed piece I wrote about a housing issue here in the SF Bay Area -- the issue being the lack thereof. Despite the economic downturn, there is a real need for more affordable homes, especially for working families.

One newly built development, Trestle Glen at the Colma BART station, had 1,500 applicants for 119 affordable apartments. (Trestle Glen's grand opening will be a featured event during Affordable Housing Week in San Mateo County, May 8-15.)

Here is the link to the Mercury News article: Court ruling points up Bay Area's housing challenge

Neighborhood Food Pantry Coming to the Meetinghouse

Today San Francisco Monthly Meeting came to unity to create a neighborhood food pantry at the meetinghouse for the San Francisco Food Bank. The process officially began in November, when the proposal was first made to business meeting. The second month, we found unity to apply to the Food Bank to become a site, but not to actually be a site. They said yes, told us what day and time it would be, and then we had more questions.

So last month we invited a Food Bank staffer to be on hand to answer questions -- lots of questions -- and then we discussed logistics among ourselves for a while after she left. After that, I was kind of exhausted. I had hoped we might actually get to discerning about whether this was a leading or not. Well, discernment goes better if you have more energy, and you don't begin when you're already exhausted, so it was wisely suggested we had done enough that day.

As meeting clerk, I tried to reduce this month's agenda to a minimum to keep our energy level high enough for the work we had to do, but of course other things crept onto it nonetheless.

Still, we got through the other business fairly efficiently, and so came time for the food pantry discernment.

I laid out the history of this proposal, as well as the activities that had preceded it.

(I meant to mention that a person in our meeting had, as a staffer for the AFSC at the time, founded the lovely and successful Heart of the City Farmers Market in the low-income Tenderloin neighborhood, but I forgot. Robin and I used to shop there often when we lived nearby. The same person went on to found a regional food co-op called SHARE, and our meeting hosted one site for the co-op. Other people organized monthly dinners at a homeless shelter for several years in the 90s. So there is a long history of food activism in our meeting.)

I laid out the opportunities and the challenges, which had all been raised in the previous few business meetings.

I then read a section from Pacific Yearly Meeting's Faith and Practice:

The Meeting’s work of discernment is a corporate search. The Clerk does not direct the communication toward certain predetermined goals, but keeps dialogue open, promoting free and full exploration of the matter under consideration, while fostering a sense of the guidance of the Holy Spirit. The Clerk is responsible for discerning and stating the sense of the Meeting and presenting a minute when unity has been reached.Members of the Meeting may sometimes assist the Clerk in this. If a member believes that the Clerk has incorrectly discerned the sense of the Meeting, it is appropriate to speak up. Similarly, someone may propose that unity actually has been reached and suggest that a minute should be recorded.

I then asked Friends to settle into worship, to clerk ourselves, and to speak from the silence as led without waiting to be recognized, which is otherwise our usual practice.

The first period of silence was extremely long for me. What would be said? Eventually a Friend spoke, an elder of the meeting (though he's not that old!), to say he felt it is a calling of the Spirit to our meeting. He went on to list a number of practical and logistical concerns our Property and Finance Committee had identified, but they were about implementation, not any stops for having the food pantry itself.

The discussion continued along similar lines in quite a deep way, with many Friends rising to speak. Eventually, as I was about to suggest we had found unity, another Friend did it for me, just as Faith and Practice said could be done. So that felt like a good sign to me -- that I was sensing the same things others were.

One thing I appreciated was that what I had to say as an individual had been said, so there was no need for me to rise, step to the side of the clerks' table, and speak as an individual. (Yay, I clerked myself!)

I asked if Friends had a sense of unity, and there was assent in the form of nods and a few spoken yeses.

Having had numerous conversations about this topic with people in the meeting in the last month, I had already had a sense of unity emerging before this business meeting. So my last bit of preparation had been to compose a draft minute for testing if it seemed appropriate.

I read the draft, and indeed, it was pretty close to what the meeting approved, with a few substantive things added about the charge to the committee organizing the food pantry.

I asked if Friends approved the minute as amended, and they said yes.

A Friend who is visiting San Francisco from Australia for the year said, "May I do a little dance?" She then stood up, raised her hands, and did a little circle dance in place. It was in keeping with the joyous spirit of the moment.

There is undoubtedly a lot of work to do, and a lot of volunteers to recruit. But I think with God's help, and each other's, we can do it.

Our minute ended with a sentence to the effect of: "Above all, we pray for the Spirit's guidance in helping us faithfully maintain this work." May it be so.

Fingerprints of spiritual experience

Once when I was teenager, I recall thinking about religion, and realizing I was definitely agnostic if not atheist. After all, I was good at science, and especially interested in physics and astronomy. (In fact, I went on to major in physics in college.) The old images in paintings of an old man in the sky didn’t make sense to me as a true image of whatever the divine might be.

At the same time, I had the insight that religious experience is real — after all, it has been happening to humans consistently for thousands of years. So I decided that I believed in religious experience, even if I didn’t believe in religion per se.

Fast forward many years, and now I consider myself a Christian and a Quaker, though not particularly orthodox (nor Orthodox, in the Quaker sense) in my beliefs. Nonetheless, I have a deep and abiding faith and trust that there is a deeper layer of meaning and value to the universe, to all of creation. The types, figures, and forms of the Christian narrative hold great meaning for me, and when I spend time with them, they help me find a real spiritual depth within myself, and to observe and appreciate a similar depth outside of me as well.

As a side effect of my practice of both science and religion, I have a fondness for books on the science of spirituality. The advent of brain scanners has enabled researchers to study what is happening in the brains of people who meditate, who practice charismatic prayer, or the like. Of course, the question remains unresolved whether the experiences are happening solely due to brain activity, or if the brain activity is somehow "plugged in" to a spiritual dimension that remains, for now, unmeasurable by science. I find this fascinating.

I just finished a truly fine example of the genre: Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality by Barbara Bradley Hagerty. Bradley Hagerty is a reporter on faith issues with NPR. Raised a Christian Scientist, she now practices with a mainline Protestant denomination. She intertwines her personal story and viewpoint with reports about different scientists — both believers and skeptics — who are studying brain function as it relates to spiritual experience.

The final chapter of the book summarizes some of her personal findings after the reporting she undertook for the book. Frankly, she sounds like a liberal Quaker ! Below are some excerpts from pages 181-183, which spoke to my condition:

As I delved into science, I realized I need not discard my faith. Rather, I must distinguish [faith] from spiritual experience…. Unlike spiritual experience, religious belief can never be tested by a brain scanner or even by historical record. No one can prove that Jesus is the Son of God. What religious belief does is attempt to explain in a compelling narrative the unseen reality that lies at the heart of spiritual experience…. [emphasis added]

Genesis is not, and never was intended to be, a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Scripture is metaphorical, explaining the world in a way that humans could understand at the time it was written….

Embracing a particular faith is a little like hopping in a car. You can drive wherever you like [Rome, Mecca, Jerusalem…] What makes it run is under the hood. Spiritual experience is the engine that transports you from one place to another—and I believe the ability to perceive and engage God is written in each person’s genetic code and brain wiring. Religion is the overlay that allows people to navigate the world, and I came to believe that no one religion has an exclusive franchise on God, or truth….

It seems to me that Jesus’ words [“I am the way, the truth, and the life”] suggest what we do, and not what we proclaim. When Jesus says that the way to eternal life is to follow Him, that means trying to live as He did…. Can I prove that Jesus is the Son of God? Of course not. Does my instinct tell me that he is the Son of God, and that I should try to emulate Him? It does, and that instinct makes me better.

I would definitely recommend Fingerprints of God to anyone who is interested in the intersection of science and spirituality.