The Marginal Christian's Handbook.

Quaker Meeting/Silent Worship.

The experience was extremely satisfying, actually---I did not expect it.  Usually churches make me feel uncomfortable and self-conscious---and conspicuously out of place.

After I worried that I might not be able to deal with keeping still for silent worship for an entire hour, I was rather startled at how quickly that hour passed. I was quite sorry when it ended.

I have had experience with silent meditation---I read The Secret of the Golden Flower when I was still in college and I certainly have tried from time to time to apply it---but I’ve never been good at it.

My brain carries on chattering nonsensically in the background and if I just let it go on, I soon find my thoughts, such as they are, degenerating into what Kingsley Amis refers to in one of his novels as ‘thought substitutes.’ My theory is this: if you shut the left brain down---if you can get it to shut up at all without actually going to sleep or losing consciousness---the right brain then kicks in and starts pumping out the weird images that symbolize what you would be thinking if you were thinking at all. Anyway, that’s my theory and I’m sticking to it.

Thankfully, that didn’t happen in today’s meeting.

I was surprisingly unselfconscious for someone who is basically awkward and uncomfortable with strangers. It helped that the existing Quakers don’t make a fuss over newcomers or visitors. They just smiled and nodded and accepted our presence without the sort of kerfuffle that makes me feel all hemmed in by social obligations.

The local meeting is in the process of building a new Meetinghouse, and they have sold off their previous premises to pay for it, so right now they are meeting in the homes of various members or sometimes in a local synagogue.

Anticipating My First Quaker Meeting

  Some of the Quakers I’ve met insist on being referred to as ‘friends’---cf. The Friendly Persuasion---but I like the word Quaker and its attendant associations, and the websites I’ve looked at use the term, so: Quaker, Quaker, Quaker! I pray---silently, of course---that it will work out for me.  I'm running out of options, frankly.

            And I am desperate for a place to land. I feel that religion has been inflicted on me. I started out reading the Gnostic Gospels (initially via the scholar Elaine Pagels after a conversation with my friend and associate John) and somehow something sank in and took root---exactly like that parable he told; remember? To paraphrase one of the wild-eyed fanatics from one of Flannery O’Connor’s novels, it fell into rocky soil, “ but it fell in deep.” Or to quote that Bob Dylan song, also involving rocks, “I want to let go, but I can’t let go."

But I can’t go back to a conventional church.

The last time, I looked round at all the people sitting there in rows (not so many of them either, though it’s a big church) standing, kneeling, singing, listening, and I just couldn’t see what any of it had to do with religion or with the Gospels. This is a religion about a man who wandered preaching from town to town in the hills of Galilee, then in the dust of Judea. Every word he said---and you have to do some reading on the history and the context to fully get this----subtly undermined the theocracy-loving established order and their laws and mores.

Chaotic Simplicity

[published on August 17, 2005 in "The Flatland Oracles," my previous blog]           

Today I met with one of the acting clerks for the local Quaker meeting. It’s only a small meeting at present though they are hoping to increase their membership. They’re building a new meetinghouse and in the interim, are using another church’s premises as a meeting place.   

I didn’t hear anything to put me off it. Politically liberal, check; no fixed dogma, check; social and environmentalism, check; accepting of the gay community, check. These are Liberal Quakers, so-called to distinguish them from a more conservative and evangelical branch. 

          
The person who met with me has a living room that is stark in its simplicity---all beige and wood, very minimalist, very Japanese, very beautiful. “Very Quakerly,” he said. But though the house was lovely, extremely so, traditional Quaker color schemes wouldn’t do for me, whether I become a Quaker or not. I live the simplest possible life----I don’t even own a house and don’t expect to---but I like richness and complexity in color schemes. 

My favorite painter is Matisse and I try to emulate his canvases in putting together my main color schemes. One wall of my small living room is painted the richest possible yellow, verging toward but never quite reaching orange. I made a set of shelves like the ones I had in college, melamine boards separated by what the local stonemason calls ‘decorative blocks’---but I painted the blocks in layers of paint with intricate designs ‘carved’ into the forward faces. 

"Infinite and Unforeseen." Quakers, Cathars, T.S. Eliot, and Me

    [published on August 16, 2005 in my previous blog, "The Flatland Oracles"]

A friend of mine who read a couple of my blog entries was complaining about what she called the “Christian overtones.” 

 

“When did this happen to you?” she asked. “And also, why? You didn’t used to be this way. I don’t like it.”

It’s true; I wasn’t. In college, influenced by my reading of Sartre, I was an existentialist. I believed in existential nausea, freedom, and some sort of ethical duty (I forget the source since there was no God) to live an ‘authentic’ existence in the circumstances presented to me. 

Later, when I began to read Chinese philosophy, I became interested in Taoism. Buddhism interested me as well, but I liked the simplicity of Taoism. Don’t go against the flow. Accept change; learn to flow with it. When the professor asked me on an examination to describe the central tenets of Taoism, I wrote, “This:” and left the rest of the paper blank. To the disgust of the other students, I received an ‘A.’

 I have always been attracted to cosmology. While studying Taoism, I began reading the works of the great, the very great, English philosopher and mathematician, “Alfred North Whitehead.” I wanted to write a paper on his work, but of course the true meaning of Whitehead was really very far beyond me when I was in my late teens. I’m working on it now though. I find it profound and beautiful.

 

But Christianity…..no. No, I wanted no part of it. I grew up in the Bible Belt. I didn’t like the religion practiced by a large part of my family (thankfully, not my parents or my mother’s family); I didn’t like the hypocrisy---many so-called ‘Christians’ I saw were and doubtless still are unapologetic racists, just for example---and I didn’t like the fervor or the anger. I didn’t like the suspicious and---I can’t call it hatred; it was more like dread---of the religious practices of other denominations (let alone other religions). 

Catholics were strange and exotic in my town; I remember my 11 year old cousin telling me in shock and horror that the Catholics worship the Pope and Mary. And the whole family were despondent over the fact that my family attended the Episcopal Church and were therefore ‘Whiskeypalians.’

Belief-O-Matic!

If you're not really sure what religion you are, or think you might have got it wrong, I recommend the 'belief-o-matic' at Beliefnet.org.  It's quite the little aid to spiritual clarity. 

Since I am currently exploring whether it would be appropriate for me to join the local Religious Society of Friends (i.e., the Quakers), imagine my relief when the Belief-O-Matic said that my stated beliefs were a 96% match for Liberal Quaker.  (They were 100% in line with 'Unitarian Universalist,' but never mind.)  I had an 83% score for Taoist, which I 'practiced' to the extent a westener can when I was in college.  Interesting, that.

Imagine if it had come up 'Fundamentalist Christian,' 'Wiccan,' 'Roman Catholic,' 'Buddhist,' or 'Greek Orthodox.'  I'd have had to start all over from scratch. 

Anyway, it's a fun little device and there's absolutely NO obligation to convert!  What if unbeknownst to yourself you're spiritually designed to be an atheist and you just don't realize it?  Or suppose you're supposed to be a member of the Church of England and you never find it out?  No cake for you!

 

Christianity vs. "Christianity"

[published in "The Flatland Oracles," my previous blog, on August 11, 2005]

Reflections on Bill McKibben's article in the August 2005 Harper's Monthly [THE CHRISTIAN PARADOX:  HOW A FAITHFUL NATION GETS JESUS WRONG]. Christianity (as opposed to 'Christianity') is hard.  No wonder we're basically a 'Christian' nation.

 

I am indebted to Alice Cowen for directing me to Bill McKibben’s article in this month’s Harper’s, The Christian Paradox: How a Faithful Nation Gets Jesus Wrong. Bill McKibben is ‘a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College.’ The article (cited below) appears in the August 2005 issue of Harper’s Monthly.

This article---which, sadly, will never even come to the attention of the people who most need to read it because of course they probably don't read Harper's Monthly----discusses the widening gap between the ‘Christianity’ of the right wing of the political spectrum and actual Christianity based on the actual teachings of Christ.

One aspect of ‘Christianity’ as opposed to Christianity is that those who practice ‘Christianity’ base their beliefs primarily on what they’ve been told it’s about. They freely mix together elements derived from political theory and political writings that are not in fact essentially Christian in origin. McKibben states, and I am going to take his word for it that ‘Three quarters of Americans believe the Bible teaches that “God helps those who help themselves” is a a teaching of the Bible, as opposed to a teaching of that jolly old freemason Ben Franklin.

The Barbarians at Our Gates Are Us: The Duty of a Christian to Oppose the Death Penalty

  There are voices of reason still on the Supreme Court.   

Justice: 'Serious flaws' in death penalty. John Paul Stevens sharply condemned the country's death penalty system, steering the debate over President Bush's Supreme Court nominee to a new subject. His remarks also provided the first sign of internal dismay over the retirement of Sandra Day O'Connor. [CNN.com - Law]

In a speech to the American Bar Association over the weekend,  Justice Stevens expressed the concerns that he shares with all opponents of the death penalty.  Many of them are spelled out in the CNN.com article, quoted in pertinent part below:

Stevens said DNA evidence has shown "that a substantial number of death sentences have been imposed erroneously." "It indicates that there must be serious flaws in our administration of criminal justice," he said.

Death penalty cases dominate the work of the high court. Week after week justices deal with final emergency appeals, sometimes filed in the late night hours. In their last term which ended in June, justices overturned the death sentences of four inmates, ruled that states cannot put to death killers who were not at least 18 years old at the time of the crime and held that it was unconstitutional to force defendants to appear before juries in chains during a trial's penalty phase.

Justices already have four capital cases on their docket when they return to work in October, including a potentially significant issue of letting inmates have a new chance to prove their innocence with DNA evidence.

Other Supreme Court justices, including O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, have also spoken out about concerns that defendants in murder cases are not adequately represented at trial. 

But Stevens told the ABA that the problems were more dramatic. He said the jury selection process and the fact that many trial judges are elected work against accused murderers. He also said that jurors might be improperly swayed by victim-impact statements.

According to me, not a single one of the questions that the Court has recently decided should even be before the Court in a civilized country because they shouldn't have been issues in the first place.