My questioning falls on the purpose of worship.
Before I begin, though, I will admit that I have not taken but one class
on theology, that I have not read much Quaker theology either and that my focus
rests still primarily on the social science of Quakerism and of religion.
This said, there are some important insights to be had within the
disciplines of the social sciences. And of those, some fraction is
represented below this short essay (see after the ellipses).
What are we really doing when we worship? What
actually happens during it? Is worship actually necessary? These
are questions that run through my brain almost every time I sit down in a
meeting room with the intention of being quiet alongside others who are also
sitting quietly. Apparently, sitting quietly must be fun if so many
people do it! (Not that many people do it). But, as a student in
Divinity School, even though I will have spent two short years (and at some
point I'd like to write a diatribe on how useless this degree was for my real
education except in whatever utility having a degree from Harvard will mean), I
have encountered quite a lot of reflections on religious experience. Most
importantly, religious experience tends to be operationalized as: 1) a
feeling of satisfaction and deep connection with others and an extreme degree
of intimacy and vulnerability, 2) an extreme degree of emotional expression,
and/or 3) an existential re-orientation that involves some kind of clear view
of purpose and meaning (rarely achieved in every-day life). Such
reflections often lead to the phrase I posted in my FB status a few months
back. A friend once said, "Most of my religious experiences have not
actually been in Church." Thankfully, for Quakers, the Church was
never meant to be the meeting house. The Church is the religious and
spiritual community. So all our religious experiences
have the potential to occur inside the Church, in so far as they occur within
community. If we think of "religious experience" in the way
that I am doing (and I am open to others' views on this), and if we think of
Church in the way that I am thinking, then there is really no need for meeting
for worship per se.
Now, here is where my lack of theological knowledge shows
most beautifully. I am not at all certain about where the idea that,
"God is still speaking," comes from. So I will cite two people
who do know: Ben Pink Dandelion and Peter Collins. They, social scientist
scholars of Quakerism and Quaker theology, write that liberal Quakerism
comes with the following basic premises: 1) the primacy of experience, 2)
the necessity for faith to be relevant to contemporary situations, 3) the
requirement that Quakers be open to new forms of truth or, “new light,” 4) that
new revelation has an automatic authority over older truth claims, and 5) that
God’s truth is revealed gradually (Dandelion and Collins 2008:23).
Apparently, the ritual of meeting for worship helps to facilitate the
life of these premises within Quaker community. Yet as much as I like
meeting for worship, I wonder sometimes whether we might find a better use of
our time. The basic three functions of meeting for worship
are: to affirm community by opening a space for
vulnerability, to be in community such that these values can come to life,
and to wait on God to show us new lights. I'll work
backwards.
Focusing on the later function first, we
are essentially inviting God to speak during meeting for worship. We
sit down, and then we wait on some deep wisdom to bubble up from our inner-most
life-forces. But, God is always speaking, is she not? So, then, inviting God
to speak would be much akin to inviting the mail man to please remember to
bring the mail. This is to say, if all we are doing when we worship is
getting together to wait on God to speak, aren't we doing something
unnecessary? It seems like it would be more useful to
get together and tell each other what God has already said to us. Our new
slogan would be: "What has God said to you in the past
week?" In this sense, we would still be meeting as a community, to
affirm our aforementioned values, to connect and to love each other (getting
back to the second function of meeting for worship I listed). We would
also have a more practical view of religion and spirituality—that it is
unnecessary to create a space in which God can speak to us, because she is
already speaking to us. Much in the same way that we rejected the notion
that God only speaks to us inside a certain building, it is also to be rejected
that God only speaks to us inside the confines of a particular time-period.
Relating to the first function now, the idea that, in
worship, there is space for vulnerability and intimacy is a fun idea!
But, community is not well served in this regard by meeting for worship.
Mostly, we sit quietly when we worship. Community building,
intimacy, requires relating in a way that is usually not prevalent in
worship. Nowadays, we have to create other spaces for community building.
We have to develop worship sharing groups, active committee-life, and
other such small-group sessions. In some
cases, we develop whole bureaucracies just so we can have time to be in community. This requires a lot
of time and money. We busy ourselves unnecessarily. We have fallen prey to post-modern life—which
is understandable sense (as I have suggested elsewhere) liberal Quakerism is
the epitome of post-modern religion.
Think back to my three operationalizations of religious
experience. Can you imagine any of those
happening without closely knit community?
I suggest finally that religious experience itself requires as a
necessary condition, close-knit, vulnerable, intimate community. This fits well with the Quaker notion that
religious experience happens always within the Church because the Church is
just another word for the community. I
am merely “shepharding” this premise to its logical end.
Monthly Meetings can create worship-practice spaces, surely. We all need practice being open to God’s
messages in everyday life. But Quaker
community might need to be centered on spaces in which we share with each other
what God has already given us. This would allow us to get vulnerable and close.
It would also allow us to affirm our values, and to really dig deep into
the idea that God is still speaking. It
would probably lead to more beauty, and many more said religious
experiences. It’s also cheaper.
Meetings for worship for business, then, can be a form of the
"worship-practice session" in which we open ourselves intentionally
to the life of the divine. Are we not to be worshiping all the time? Are we not to
be praying all the time? Are we not to
be looking for God within every creak in the wood where
we step? As for me, I think I'll go to the gym on Sunday mornings. I look forward to hearing God’s breath in the squeak of the treadmills.
...
The following is an introduction for a literature review on
which I premise my research into liberal Quakerism.
People are choosing their religions rather than remaining
connected to their religions of origin (Chaves 1994:768; Hammond 1988; Cadge
and Davidman 2006). Differently from the past, “[people] can choose how
and whether to be religious, including choosing how central religion will be in
their lives…” writes Nancy T. Ammerman, “If religious identity ever was a
given, it certainly is no longer,” (2003:207). Likewise, persons
are more progressively defining who they are by the many collectivities in
which they belong—or think of themselves as belonging—rather than by membership
in one collectivity alone (Jenkins 2004:114). “I am American,” someone
might say, but she might also say: “I am white,” or, “I am a singer,” or, “I am
a Quaker.” It is quite likely that each of these statements are
associated to particular communities, respectively: one’s family of origin,
one’s a cappella group, one’s community of Quakers or one’s Quaker youth group
from High School, etc. The ground upon which communities cohere is
becoming more about the formation of “self” or of “subjectivity.” The
ground upon which religious communities cohere thereby yields no
exception. This is not to say that all communities everywhere, in every
period in history, cohere and remain coherent due to common identity formation
(if histories can even be said to have periods and communities can be said to
have particular locations). My argument applies only to the Western
world, and only to this post-modern era in which we seem ambivalently to be
fixed.
Furseth and Repstad reference James Beckford (1992) in an
attempt to define postmodernity (2006:78). They characterize it, in part,
as a refusal to allow instrumental-rational or positivist-utilitarian criteria
to be the sole standards for worthwhile knowledge; they define postmodernity as
a celebration of spontaneity, irony, playfulness, and fragmentation; and as a
willingness, “to abandon the search for overarching or triumphalist myths,
narratives or frameworks of knowledge,” (2006:78). One could supplant some
words and be able succinctly to describe the character of the liberal Quaker
tradition with this same definition. Collins and Dandelion’s articulation
of Quakerism is strikingly similar to Beckford’s definition of postmodernity—in
that both place primacy on experience, the currency of present discernment, and
the availability of knowledge through many different sources (Dandelion and
Collins 2008:23). In its emphasis on a perpetual search for truth,
Quakerism certainly retains vestiges of modernity merely in its seeming
presumption that the ultimate truth is discoverable, as long as we keep
looking. Even so, Quakerism does not proclaim triumphalist truths, nor
does it aim to discover one someday. For Quakers, searching for truth
should be very messily grounded in experience—in all its possible facets.
Hence, an emphasis on nonrational experience becomes necessarily clear.
Truth comes not merely through logic—not merely within the boundaries of reason
(Kant 1999). Truth comes through spiritual, mystical and emotional means
as well.
Because religious activity takes place in the body,
involving emotions, as Meredith McGuire argues, it cannot be analyzed simply in
terms of cognition and belief (2006:198). I therefore approach the study
of the liberal Quaker tradition in this way. I argue that religious
experience recounted as narrative is the primary mechanism through which
liberal Quakers constitute their ephemeral truth claims. In what may be a
controversial analytical angle for other religious spheres, the religious
sphere of liberal Quakerism actually calls for the sociology of narrative in
which fragmented contemporary, Western identity is always experientially
negotiated in process.
Bibliography
Ammerman, Nancy T. 2003. “Religious Identities and Religious
Institutions.” Pp. 207-224 in Handbook
of the Sociology of Religion, edited by Dillon Michele. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press.
Beckford, James. 1992. “Religion, modernity and
post-modernity.” Pp. 11-27 in Religion:
Contemporary Issues, edited by Bryan R. Wilson. London: Bellew.
Cadge, Wendy, and Lynn Davidman. 2006. “Ascription, Choice,
and the Construction of Religious Identities in the Contemporary United
States.” Journal for the
Scientific Study of Religion 45(1):23-38.
Chaves, Mark. 1994. “Secularization as Declining Religious
Authority.” Social Forces 72(3):749-774.
Dandelion, Benjamin Pink, and Peter Collins, eds. 2008. The Quaker Condition: The Sociology
of a Liberal Religion. Newcastle [England]: Cambridge Scholars.
Furseth, Inger, and Pal Repstad. 2006. An Introduction to the Sociology of
Religion: Classical And Contemporary Perspectives. Ashgate Pub Co.
Hammond, Phillip H. 1988. “Religion and the Persistence of
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Jenkins, Timothy. 2004. “Congregational Cultures and the
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Kant, Immanuel. 1999. Kant:
Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason: And Other Writings.
Cambridge University Press.
McGuire, Meredith. 2006. “Embodied Practices: Negotiation
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