A version that talks exclusively about Quakerism is available: http://www.pym.org/blogs/sadie-forsythe/spring-retreat-reflection-part-1-progress-certain
I stand before you, so still. As one would, in the face of fierce landscapes or the sweaty satchel of a lover’s embrace, I feel safe and one. I am in awe, in your sublime and in your beauty. Dear God, you cradle me as a child, as a creature disposed to brokenness, and all I can be now is still.
This is the message I burned to give, and which I did not give for unclear reasons. And yet, in the last few minutes of worship at the recent Spring 2011 gathering of Young Adult Friends, I think that I am glad I did not stand. For another Young Adult Friend stood to speak: to the profound manner in which Quakers create the sacred out of the profane and transcendence from the mundane. “We have sex, and we drink, and we party, and we laugh with beautiful raucous appreciation!” We embrace tragedy just the same. These are not his words exactly, but they are my own reminiscence. God is an ever-present mystery, unraveled not necessarily from rational stances but from within a house of uncertainty. We search, that is, for the divine in all things, whilst forsaking cautiously and embracing slowly. Imagine an entire community, or an entire society, built on some of these values!
Imagine! Imagine a world without the detrimental effects of social class—without social class altogether. George Lackey challenged us with these admonishments. To what do we cling for the sake of ease rather than for the sake of mystery?
Imagine, more, a robust community not merely of Young Adult Friends! Imagine a community of all people that embraces the movements of Spirit in all its possible forms! Imagine a communal operation that is intimate, safe, beloved and beautiful! Imagine a community whose cultural categories deem humanity a broken and beautiful mess--one which suffices with everyday struggles and meaning-making over battle and war. Imagine a community whose culture altogether exits dichotomies that presuppose scarcity as a possibility, that presuppose Hobbesian states of nature, the necessity of violence, class warfare, etc.
The very things which have indicated to us, in this world, that such a possibility is mere dreaming and illusion are those things that categorically concocted them as such in the first place. For, a world that creates the categories of "barbarism," "primitivism," states of nature, cunning, deceit, etc, must also presuppose such tendencies against which society is then constructed to guard. There would be no reason to invent them, and to impute onto them such negativity if they were not to have real consequences for how we choose to live. It is akin to inventing "belief" in God so that we might possibly deny his existence--society seems to have done this very thing. We manage power so as to guard against the violent and the selfish natures of humanity (where power is defined as the influence one entity may have over the activity of another). In so doing, we create the possibility for these natures in the first place. We looked upon "primitive" societies and called them so, and thus made them what they are. We looked upon violent activity and called it inevitable, a necessity of human meaning-making, and thereby constituted this necessity. We said God must be believed-in rather than known, and thus created the possibility that his existence could be denied.
Budget shortfalls, the positions we fill, money, and the manner in which we negotiate power in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting is intricately related to the message emanating from within the Young Adult Friends movement. Young Adult Friends Program Coordinator, Sadie Forsythe quoted me, to me:
I yearn for deeply held, deeply felt, deeply important community. The PYM Young Adult Friends are at a point now where “it could go either way.” We could remain mostly disconnected, or we could settle into a well-rounded, rooted rhythm of connection that carries through from one gathering to the next. So I maintain a cautious optimism. The Winter 2011 gathering seemed to indicate that we are headed to the latter. I am anxious to see what happens next.
These things for which I yearn are characteristics of a beloved community. To me, the movement of YAF's in PYM and beyond is a message meant not hardly for Philadelphia Yearly Meeting alone. The message is meant for all of humanity's ears. Our basic attitude is one of imagination--of keeping within our hearts the knowledge that there is an alternative way of defining what we know, of constituting it, and creating a world around it. All things begin with how we think about them. Emile Durkheim (Durkheim 2009; 1965) tried to show that Kant's basic faculties of thought (Kant 1999) were socially constituted. Others critiqued these assertions, and whether such faculties were socially constituted or not, what matters is not how they came to be, but in what way they are applied.
Our progress is certain, and I am confident that the YAF community will burgeon further no matter the outcome of the recent budgetary conflicts in PYM. What has “happened next” is beautiful. More than this the YAF community in its still largely uncertain progress speaks to possibility: Philadelphia Yearly Meeting could become a place to which we go to see and to be seen; a place where we can speak with passion without having our words catch in our throats. Let’s constitute PYM in terms of nothing more than a circle of open hands that receives us, where eyes light up as we enter, where voices celebrate with us whenever we come into our own power: a circle of healing, of friends, of God, of freedom (Starhawk 1997:92-96). When I was a Young Friend, I would have defined the Young Friends community in this way. It was chocked full of drama, and it was very messy, it was broken, but it was tremendously beautiful. The Young Adult Friends community is remaking itself into something like this, but it faces the challenges of transience. How do we create such communities wherever we go? How do we build-up a system of communal organization that loves life and celebrates cooperation, and turns our current rationally constituted cultural notions on their lovely little heads? There are things we can learn this day.
Durkheim, Emile. 2009 [1963]. Primitive Classification. 1st ed. Routledge.
Durkheim, Emile. 1965. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. abridged edition. Oxford University Press, USA.
Kant, Immanuel. 1999 [1781]. Critique of Pure Reason. 0th ed. Cambridge University Press.
Starhawk. 1997. Dreaming the Dark : Magic, Sex, and Politics. 15th ed. Beacon Press.
Absolutely! How can all ages and stages of Friends come together as one? How can we take a break from the unfortunate rifts in our history and get down to the business of truly becoming one in the Spirit?
ReplyDeleteI would challenge Philadelphia Yearly Meeting to look at the secularization of its processes. It's not in the manner of Friends that was taught to me in Intermountain Friends Gathering (which later became a yearly meeting), Canadian Yearly Meeting, or even Britain Yearly Meeting.
Glad you're reading Starhawk!