State of the Society:
FGConnections Spring 2005
Blessed Are the Hungry: FGC Friends Today
By Michael Gibson
What is the current state of our religious society within FGC circles? Ask any two Friends and you will likely get several answers, for in opinion and experience we are wildly diverse. We are people turned off by religious tradition and people nurtured by the same, people with deep roots and uprooted free floaters, people of every imaginable condition— and we manage somehow to worship, conduct business and serve together on a regular basis. Yet I propose that what unites us more than a shared faith and practice is a restless hunger. Hunger is our primary state. One might say this hunger defines us.
We hunger for community, for spiritual connectedness to people, creation, and something more. We hunger for a gathered meeting. We hunger for peace and wholeness in ourselves and in our world. We hunger for a religious society and world marked by integrity, mutuality, justice and equality. It may be that we also hunger in some ways to be exceptional or non-conformist, for we value being different, and take pleasure in highlighting how we Friends are not like other groups, even when we are.
Many of us balance hunger for community with a fierce independence. We may have a deep appetite for reflection, particularly on our own experience. As is typical in modern Western society, we tend toward individualism. Like most people, we hunger to be listened to, affirmed, accepted and validated. We may hunger for the passion and powerful experiential knowing of the first generation of Friends. Many of us are hungry to get our Quaker process right and are honing our clerking and other skills. Many are hungry for more than is typical Quaker fare today.
Our hunger keeps us seeking. We are rightly quick to jettison some understandings of God we had as young children, but we may not have moved any further toward adult faith. Some have jettisoned the whole Judeo-Christian tradition, confusing it, perhaps, with the most horrific practices of the past or the extreme right’s agenda of today. The majority of us are biblically illiterate. Intrigued by truth as expressed in other faiths, many of us pick and choose what we find helpful or interesting from a host of familiar and exotic traditions, yet we may not have ventured deeply and consistently into any tradition. We lack spiritual discipline. We may be hungry for spiritual entertainment. We are more comfortable with seekers than with finders, whom we suspect are rigid or naïve. Many of us relate strongly to the searching period of Fox’s youth, but are less interested in what he and others found, for we sense we must find our own truth. As we seek, we may wonder if we are faking it. We may hunger to be good Friends, but not know what that means.
Nothing in the above paragraphs expressly makes us Friends. What they indicate is that however colorful and interesting we may be, we are unclear what is essential in the tradition we have inherited; out of confusion, or in an attempt not to offend Friends of diverse understandings, we have settled for a watered- down Quakerism that cannot satisfy the deepest human hunger. Not knowing what to do with faith, our religious education programs often emphasize our history, that is, dead Quakers. Our worship is too often reduced to introspective quiet time; we may idolize silence itself for its comforting and healing properties. Our testimonies, once our witness to the transforming power of the Lord in our lives, are reduced to our Quaker cultural values. We may be in good shape organizationally, but when our process is separated from faith it becomes meaningless or irrelevant, as when a group of Friends politely and orderly “discerns God’s will” together while remaining thoroughly ambivalent about a higher power. What was once a holy experiment in living in radical trust in and obedience to Christ (Truth, Light), as experienced individually and corporately, has become for many a generic quest for personal fulfillment and a better world. There may be few links between our practice and the dynamic faith that led to it. It is no wonder that so many of our young people have dropped out, hungry for more.
Friends are hungry and for this we can be grateful, for hunger is a blessing. Without it we would not be motivated to find sustenance for life and health. While not all appetites are healthy, I believe our deepest hunger, our disease, is a holy yearning lovingly planted by holy hands in our hearts. I suspect that many of us have grown accustomed to our hunger pangs, and that when we do eat and drink we too often settle for bread and water when full fare is available. Many of us are malnourished. Some, I fear, are starving. Our growth is stunted from snacking on the leftovers of previous generations.
But there is hope. As I have traveled around our meetings I have also observed signs of feasting. Many Friends have followed their hunger to its source and are dining well. Some have come to mature faith as both seekers and finders. Some, engaged in hard inner and outer work, are finding integration as both actives and contemplatives. God is raising up leaders from among us and we are becoming less afraid of the terms minister and elder. We are beginning to learn how to recognize, draw out, and support gifts of ministry and to hold Friends accountable for the right use of these gifts. More and more Friends are beginning to experience extended worship and spiritual friendships, going deeper into our own tradition with other Friends. In exploring faith issues together, we are creating environments conducive to careful, nonjudgmental listening and sharing, and to prophetic truth telling, as well. We are learning from one another how to eat well, how to be faithful, how to be Friends.
God is not finished with us. With extraordinary patience and creativity God keeps revealing Truth whether we are paying attention or not. What is our spiritual condition? We are hungry. We are undernourished. Christ invites us to the banquet table. Bountiful fare is set before us. Friends, what is keeping us from the table?
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