A couple of days ago I received the following email from Llyn Richards (Aotearoa / NZ Yearly Meeting Clerk). I asked his permission to post it here because I found it really fascinating and thought others would too!
Dear Leith,
I was delighted to get your report and inspired by its contents!
I am very glad you have sent it to the newsletter and would have recommended that if you had not thought of that already -- the Newsletter gets to a lot more Friends than the YM Clerk's Monthly Letter. However,if the Newsletter does not want it (why not, good heavens? Space perhaps) then I will put in my letter with great pleasure. I send out 180 paper copies and 120 by e-mail.
I would like to hear you some time on how you distinguish a non-theist Q from an atheist Q. I have for a while been a 'lurker' on the USA-based Non-theist Friends' e-mail discussion list. They seem to be a very mixed bunch (typically Q, eh?!) with most contributers being very keen to talk about the route they took in becoming non-theist (jargon: spiritual journey) and in the harassment they get from their meetings -- they must be rather outspoken since I have been 'eldered' only twice for my views. They are about to put out a real book but when I asked about what sort of contibutions they wanted they were all about personal 'spiritual journeys' and not about the REASONS for non-theism or the replacement 'faith', 'godless-theology', 'philosophy', or whatever, that makes them still call themselves Quakers. You touch on those matters in your report. Hooray.
Judith and I particularly liked your quoting of Penn -- Quakers are people are trying what love can do. That may just be enough to distinguish non-theist Qs from
humanists.
However, my own reply to those who ask me why I am a Quaker (most are not asking about my funny beliefs, which they probably have not heard. Yet!) I usually reply,
'The Society is my support group.' (possibly now old fashioned pop-psychology jargon but I think you understand.)
I got fed up with the Presbyterians (both my father and grandfather were presby clergymen) mostly because the rank and file were unaware how they said they had
certain, mostly moral, beliefs but their practice denied it, also because the highly educated clergy at that time were mostly liberal if not revolutionary in theology but
they did not explain why they did not believe in virgin births, etc., to the people in the pews. So I looked around for 'church people' (an all-white Springbock tour was
looming) who would peacefull protest with all their might. 70-year-old Betty Fowler made herself a batton-proof boob-protector out of rolled up newspapers sewn into a
jacket and we, along with all those other good citizens, showed Muldoon what we thought of Apartheid. For other reasons as well, Qs fitted like a glove. But having a
bunch of people who wanted to do what I was willing to do on my own, if necessary, was a tremendous comfort. Something like your experience of belonging, ev
en among the disparate majority. 'Look how these Christians love one another."
Sorry about the spiritual journey! But it was trying to make a point. On the whole non-programmed non-birthright Friends are comfortable with making up their own minds, but they need help (who doesn't?) with their concerns.
And it was good to see you taking note of the problems of air-travel, scientific and
economic. The electronic communications are going to be a great thing when planes
are grounded by pandemics and terribly expensive oil and climate change. BUT did you
notice at Yearly Meeting that the moment it was suggested that we should cut down on
air travel by New Zealand Quakers, the excuses about how spiritually important face
to face contact is for the people getting that. I have no trouble with the importance
but morality (and this is reflected in the law) is mostly about weighing the
consequences of actions: pushing children about is generally immoral unless it is
pushing a child out of the path of a speeding car. Killing people is wrong but at the
edges the morality get blurred - euthenasia and abortion. A trip half way wound the
world by jet to a committee meeting that can be done by tele-conferencing by people
who have mostly met before is miles different from getting 200 YFs together for a once-in-a-life-time experience. But even the latter needs some payback
in working for conservation -- and this you have begun in your report.
I once wondered if (1) the recent scientific discoveries about what life was like in
the year 30 and (2) the scientific disentanglement of gospel stories so that we have
about 90 sayings which can be reasonably attributed to Jesus and pictures of what the
early Christians (despite Paul) thought about him; I once wondered if these good
solid facts could be a basis for a reprochement between evangelical Qs and those not
so inclined -- the Bible-based learning what the real Jesus was like and starting to
ignore the 'Son of God' Pauline interpretation; and the spiritually inclined learning
what Jesus was really like and finding him much more down to earth and worth
listening to than before.
But it looks like a longer job that I, or the world, has time for.
Sorry to have rambled on so.
I'll have a look at your blog soonish.
Now get back to that doctorate -- its a great boost to confidence when you get it
done.
Walk cheerfully
Llyn
P.S.
My doctoral thesis was on logic and theology -- it summed up my spiritual journey to
a non-theist quaker position in 400 pages!! Mind you, I made the journey 30 years ago
so writing it just helped me get my ideas straight: theism is too illogical to be
correct -- if there is a God he/she is not a theist. But such a conclusion is of very
little moral worth and certainly no practical use to a world bent on letting itself
go to wrack and ruin.
"It's being so cheerful as keeps me going."
Anna D: Whoa Leith, talk about the big ones! I guess we're all sitting waiting for someone else to go first (I know I was!) so here is something to get things moving - I'll try to come back later with something more but for now this will have to do... 'Love is a many splendid thing' as the quote goes and has about as many different definitions as the Eskimos have for snow if not more, yet we somehow seem to expect people to know what we mean by using just the one - which can often seem inadequate, misleading, downright confusing and sometimes scary! I love sunsets and stars, my cat, my family, my friends, hot chocolate on a winters evening, sitting contemplatively on a hillside, splodging along a beach, playing in the snow... yet none of these are the same kinds of love, nor do they cover the kind of bursting at the seams experiences of love that come from moments of shared togetherness be they emotional, physical or spiritual. They don't cover the sense of divine love (for lack of a better discription) that links us all at a fundamental (elemental?) level. Love is. It is something we have within us, that we feel, do , give and share and probably many other verbs. To narrow it down to a smaller definition is like narrowing god down to a Charlton Heston lookalike sitting someplace on a cloud - it is so much more! Apart from now having the Howard Jones song stuck in my head all kinds of thoughts on love are now whizzing around being incoherent so I'll leave this now and hope that someone else can pick up the ball and run with it! (12/17/05)
Leith: Here’s what I think about love . . .
Love is what I feel when I look for the beauty in the world around me, the goodness in another person. Sometimes their inner light shines so brightly I can’t help but see it, but often my own concerns blind me to their beauty, and I have to choose to look before I can notice and feel. It helps when I remember that every person is perfect in all the ways that are important; every person is precious regardless of what they do or say or think or look like. Every person has inherent value. Every person is mine to treasure. Sometimes it helps to live in the moment, instead of in my head.
There is never a shortage of love, because love is a property of me, not of the world. I can always make more love . . . it’s as easy as making a wish. Love is unconditional, and kind. It says more about the g (01/15/06)
Leith: okay, that's weird, it cut my comment in half. Here's the rest :0)
. . .iver than the receiver. Love is doing the right thing, even if somebody already told you to and made you want to do the opposite! Love is respecting other people’s truth. I find that hard to do all the time. Sometimes it helps to ‘consider the creative possibility that arise when there are differences of opinion’.
Love is both the most and the least selfish thing I know of. When I am filled with love for another person I can’t help but put them first. Altruism becomes inevitable. The paradox of this is that loving fills me with joy and wonder. When I love I become bigger somehow. I smile without knowing why. I am at peace with myself, and content that ‘all is right with the world’. Love is something I do, and doing it makes me see the world in a different way. (01/15/06)
Charlotte : I like that definition Leith....love is something you do. |a friend said to me once that love is a verb. To me this means that love is not a concept or an idea, it only gains reality by being put into action. I am reminded of that famous bible passage from Corinthians:Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud...Love does not delight in evil but rejoices in the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. What this says to me if that love is the bottom line, the fundamental, the thread that links up all that is good in the world. Its something to aspire to and reach for. I may have said i love you before but the love i was feeling wasn't the love described here. It wasn't patient, kind, selfless. So was it love at all? Could what we so often think of as love really be needilness, familiarity, a desire to be important to someone? The more I think about it, love that is, the more the answer keeps slipping away. (01/25/06)
Anna D: You ask can love change? I've been thinking about this a lot recently and whilst I think the answer is yes I think what happens more often is our interpretation of that love, our perception of it changes. As something people crave in it's different forms it is all too easy to see love for something/one for what you want it to be rather than for what it is. What it is may be just as precious and beautiful as what you'd rather it was but to don those rose tinted spectacles and see only what you want to see is all too easily done - I know I'm guilty of it! When it feels like our love has changed all too often it is more likely to be that we have woken up to what has really been there all along rather than what we wanted there to be - this can be either a disappointment or a great joy! But equally our understanding of someone elses love (in all its forms) for us can change. As someone who has a whole heap of insecurities I need to hear words to validate my interpretation of someones actions - to really know that I'm not getting it all wrong. It is easy for me to get caught up in this need and not see/trust the evidence before my eyes for what it is and as some people just don't use words to express such things I cause myself a lot of needless uncertainty. I guess this can be where the love is patient can come in - some of us take longer to work these things out than others... (02/01/06)
Leith: That's a really interesting comment Anna :0)
In the middle you say "When it feels like our love has changed all too often it is more likely to be that we have woken up to what has really been there all along rather than what we wanted there to be". It seems to me that you're saying the love itself hasn't actually changed . . . it was always like that, but now you see the 'truth' about the love, rather than having a faulty perception of it. Is that right? I'm not sure if I'm getting you properly . . .
If that is kinda what you mean . . . I'm not sure that that's quite how I see the world (. . . this is me trying to respectfully and lovingly disagree =) ) . . . I'm with you on it being the perception that changes, rather than the love itself, but I think our understanding of the love IS 'reality' - or as close to it as it's possible to get. So I don't think the new perception/understanding is any true-er than the old one. The example I'm thinking of is an romantic couple:
they go along thinking 'we're in love, we're in love, 'we're in love' . . . and then one day one of them thinks 'no we're not'. It's pretty easy to follow that thought with 'we were never REALLY in love . . . we just thought we were' or 'there was something wrong with our love that made it imperfect and doomed to failure'. I don't think that means the original love wasn't true, I think it's just a consequence of human beings liking things to make sense and be consistent. When they break up it becomes necessary to somehow explain how something like love could just stop. An easy way of doing that is to claim it was never really there in the first place.
I guess I think that our understandings of the world are pretty powerful, and pretty revisionist (that is, we don't remember what actually happened, we remember what 'must have' happened in light of our current understandings . . . there is actually heaps of experimental psychological evidence for memory being reconstructive like this). And I find the idea of 'cognitive dissonance' useful . . . the concept that if there is some discrepancy between our beliefs and our actions, one or the other will change so they're more consistant. So, for example, if you make somebody act really mean towards another person, they start to think that person is not as nice. Once again, there are heaps of (slightly scary) psych studies showing exactly that.
I also think that in a situation involving love, it's kind of a pity for people to limit themselves in this way. If we come to understand our love in a different way, and we assume it must have always been like that, we can lose the really cool things about our original love. I don't mean that love couldn't or shouldn't change . . . just that I'd rather have the best possible love with each person in my life, because why settle for less! (02/01/06)
Julian: All your wonderful comments have led me to thinking about some distinctions. There's love as a verb, William Penn's "Let us then try what Love will do". This is active, it eminates from us. To me it seems wholly good. It is a conscious choice to give unconditionally. Then there is love as attachment. To 'fall in love' seems like something that is being done to us, almost an accident, outside our control. To love someone so much it would cause you terrible pain if they were hurt feels similar. Is this love as a need? Or is it love as a bond? We talk about 'bonding' with people as a good thing, but bonds can be constraining too. I find this very challenging, I can see the negative aspects of this kind of love, this attachment. I don't however want to be without it. I like being attached to my friends, my family. Zen teaches us to let go of attachment, but I don't particularly want to. It seems like it's worth the risk. Maybe it is the same as 'love as a verb'. There's always a risk of being hurt, but we choose to do it because we have faith that good will come of it. (02/04/06)
Anna D: pssst, Leith! We're still on December, it's nearly March... see you at YF camp! A xx (02/22/06)