BYM Annual Carey Memorial Lecture
Friday, August 6, 1994
 
“This is my Quaker Faith”

Bruce Birchard
Friends General Conference

My opening prayer is the first of Kenneth Boulding's Naylor Sonnets, entitled "There is a Spirit Which I Feel":

Can I, imprisoned, body-bound, touch
The starry garment of the Oversoul,
Reach from my tiny part to the great Whole,
And spread my Little to the Infinite Much,
When Truth forever slips from out my clutch,
And what I take indeed, I do but dole
In cupfuls from a rimless ocean-bowl
That holds a million million million such?

And Yet, some Thing that moves among the stars,
And holds the cosmos in a web of law,
Moves too in me: a hunger, a quick thaw
Of soul that liquifies the ancient bars,
As I, a member of creation, sing
The burning one-ness binding everything.

During the winter of 1967, I had my first powerful experience of the Spirit through a special opening to beauty. I had been snowshoeing through the White Mountains of New Hampshire with three friends. We climbed Mt. Garfield, traversed a long ridge and dropped down into a narrow valley. We made camp at a place called Thirteen Falls, ten miles from the nearest road. The day had been gray, heavily clouded, but the weather was changing by evening. I left our small fire and walked alone through the dark to the stream, where it tumbled down a rock face under and over ice and snow. The air around me was calm. But high above the surrounding peaks, the wind tore at the clouds, pulling them to shreds, blowing them fiercely off to the east. Beyond the cloud remnants the sky shone a deep blue-black. A full moon rose over the eastern ridge, backlighting the cloudshreds to a luminescent white, shining brilliantly on the snow about me. I stood a long time, drawn into the world I was seeing so deeply. Awe and comfort both overwhelmed me: awe at the incredible beauty of this creation, and comfort at the sense that I truly belong here, that I am one with this marvelous, Spirit-filled, beauty-throbbing creation.

Why am I giving this lecture? When Frank asked me to give this talk, I felt it as a challenge and a call. I have experienced stretches of doubt and scepticism about my faith in my 49 years. Not desperate, dark-night-of-the-soul type experiences, but lots of questions about the reality of God and the validity of much that passes for religious experience. So I immediately said to Frank, "Yes, I'll do this. This feels like a call for me. I need to work at articulating my own faith." I hope to describe my religious experience in a way which will speak to the condition of many of you. I'll be speaking especially to those whose experience is similar to mine, and I think there are many of you here, and throughout unprogrammed Quakerland. I hope that those whose journey to faith has been different will also find some insights or blessings in what I have to share.

My faith is grounded in my experience of the living Spirit. I hold deeply to a faith in the reality and power of the Spirit acting through the creation and in our lives. That Spirit has been important to me in my life, even during the many times when I could not identify it or articulate my experience. I am in the Christian tradition, though by traditional creedal definitions of Christianity, I am not one. I am a universalist, in that I know there are many paths to God, but I have not explored other traditional paths, such as Buddhism, Hinduism, or Native American spiritualities, in any depth. I want to stress that Christianity and universalism are not mutually exclusive. Several of the most deeply spiritual people I know are Christian universalists.

I shall begin by describing some of my own spiritual experiences. I will talk about three of my paths to the Spirit: through beauty, through love, and through centering and worship. I will tell you how my experiences of the living Spirit have affected me, strengthened and transformed me. At times, I'll refer to the Spirit as "God," but you should know that my images of God are not the traditional western images of God as Lord, King, Almighty Father, and even as "person." For me, the word "God" as a name for the divine carries so much "freight" that I struggle with it – which is a good thing. In the end, I use it only with an explanation of what I mean; otherwise, what I say may be misleading.

In exploring my own faith, I have turned to some contemporary theological writings. I have found my faith validated, clarified, and expanded there, and I want to share some of this with you today. Most Friends are not fond of theology, but it helps me to understand that my faith struggles are not unique. Many Christian theologians have described new concepts of God and God's relationship to the world and to humanity which differ radically from traditional Christian dogmas. I find these relevant to the great spiritual and moral struggles of our time, and of my own soul.

I also find that my faith builds upon much – though not all – of Quaker tradition. I have been asked to "locate" my personal faith in our faith tradition, and I shall try to do this. In this context, I will say a few things about the importance of Jesus of Nazareth and of Christianity, both to me personally and to contemporary, unprogrammed Quakerism.

As I indicated, I agreed to give this talk in part because it answered a need I have felt to clarify my own faith. But much of my sense of leading comes from a conviction that we unprogrammed Friends need to be about the task of strengthening our spiritual lives. Our Religious Society of Friends is at some risk of becoming the Social Society of Friends. We need to strengthen and deepen our spiritual lives, both personally and corporately. We need to do this in the spirit of not just accepting, but supporting and celebrating a wide range of spiritual experiences and theological interpretations. At the core of our Religious Society of Friends is the Spirit, the Light; and our meetings can only be vital if we seek and find the experience of this Spirit.

My Experience Of The Spirit: Beauty And Love

I opened this talk with a description of one of my earliest mystical experiences. It was an experience of the extraordinary beauty of the White Mountains in winter. My faith, my spiritual life, is centered in part in my continuing experiences of beauty, particularly in the wilderness, on the farm where we live, in music and art, and in people.

All of you have been moved by beauty. That's God's Spirit-filled creation you're responding to! That's the Spirit in you responding! William Taber, in Four Doors to Meeting for Worship, affirms this response to beauty. He says, "For anyone who is already keenly aware of beauty in any of its multitudinous forms it is only a short step from the contemplation of beauty to the expansion of consciousness which takes place with even a momentary entrance through the Door Before" (p. 7).

A second important path to the Spirit for me is my experience of love. I experience love in very specific terms: with friends, for strangers, and even at times for my "enemies." But my most constant and intense experiences of love have been within my family. I like Rilke's definition of love, in Letters to a Young Poet: "Love is this – that two solitudes border, protect, and salute one another." In our vows to each other, Demie Kurz and I promised to respect each others' individuality, each one's soul. I confess – there've been times when I forgot this and tried to change Demie. You may be interested to know that this approach failed. But we have both changed and grown as we have entered honestly into conflicts and problems, moving through anger and tears with a faith in our caring for, and our commitments to, each other. Now we're working at building similar relationships with our teenage sons: respectful relationships of equals who can deal with honest differences and conflicts, and go on loving each other.

I want to tell you an important story from my life. This is a story about love helping me deal with the most terrible fear I have ever known. It began in February, 1982, when I asked my doctor about the lumps I had noticed in my neck. He examined them and said, "Bruce, we can't rule out a malignancy." I will never forget the thousand volts of fear which seared me, starting at my scalp and filling my body with something worse even than the tumors. Twenty-four hours later, staying with Demie and our very little boys at my parent's house, unable to sleep, unable to eat, feeling totally out of control, in the iron grip of terror, I asked Demie what I could do. And she said, "Call Stephanie."

Stephanie Judson is one of our closest friends, a neighbor on Taylor's Farm, and a skilled co-counsellor, and I had turned to her for help in moments of crisis before. So I called. On a Saturday night. And she was home. And she listened while I explained that I felt like I would lose my grasp on myself completely, so overwhelmed was I with the fear of cancer. And of a11 things, she asked me, "Bruce, what's the worst thing that can happen?"

And I cried. I sobbed for 45 minutes. Eventually, between my sobs, I got it out. "I may die and not be here while Ethan and Joshua grow up." And then my mother was calling us for dinner. And Stephanie said, "You can call me later. You can call me in the middle of the night. You can came counsel with me as soon as you get home. And we can face this together." And I went downstairs, and I ate a huge dinner, and I went to bed, and I slept all night. In the morning, I knew that I had to acknowledge and experience my fear – I had to go all the way into it. I learned that I could open myself to the fear because of the love that was around me – from Demie, from Stephanie, from the friends we soon told, who kept encouraging and affirming us, from Tom and Julie in Vermont, from Phil Mullen's mother's prayer group in Texas (I never even talked with Phil Mullen's mother!), from villages in an area of India we had visited in 1974 who were doing puja for me, from Harold and Jerry Davidson, friends of mine from the True Vine Fire Baptized Holiness Church of God in Christ which I attended for two years while in college, who, without calling or getting directions, drove all day to a place they only knew as an address, to stay with us and pray for my healing. And I did a lot more sobbing, and some terrible shaking, and the fear and grief at times seemed too much to bear, but with all that love and caring, I bore it. And I not only bore it, I grew in spirit and in strength: I was transformed. When I began chemotherapy and went into remission a year later, I started to recognize the grace I had found, for I had learned so much; my spirit was strengthened.

I have experienced such love over and over, throughout my life. And I believe it is a manifestation of the Spirit, of God, who I believe is a God of love. I understand this love as a manifestation of the Spirit of God, mediated through my sisters and my brothers, my wife and my sons. As Thomas Moore says in Care of the Soul, "...if you don't love things in particular, you can't love the world, because the world doesn't exist except in individual things." I remember my teenage brother used to wear a sweatshirt which stated, "I love [hu]mankind; it's just people I can't stand." Without denying my countless moments of anger and exasperation with fellow-hikers on my trail of life, I can say that I disagree with that statement totally. And I would paraphrase Moore and add, "If you don't love the world, if you don't love people, if you don't love yourself, you can't love God."

Sensing The Spirit At The Center In Worship

I told you that there are three important paths to the Spirit for me: beauty, love, and through centering and worship. I want to talk about this third path now. I have had to work at this. And it doesn't come for me with bells and whistles or visions of God. At times, I have even questioned the experience, partly because of the absence of a clear picture of God.

I should stress that this is relatively new for me. I sat in meetings for worship for years thinking, musing, appreciating people and things, feeling badly about the suffering in the world, and often thinking through problems. And these were good and fine things to do. But I was not going deeply into a direct awareness of the living Spirit.

I was helped very much in my efforts to go deeper by reading John Punshon's Encounter with Silence. John said something which surprised me. But it made so much sense. He said it takes work and training to experience God in the silence. He said it took him years to learn how to do this. He said – get this – he said it's like tennis. Get a good coach. Work at it. And know that you'll fail frequently, and you'll never be as good as you want to be.

So I've worked at it. I began by pushing my skeptical mind to realize that I'm often in touch with the divine, particularly through experiences of beauty and love to which I have referred. I began to understand that the Spirit is all around me, within me, if I just open myself to it. A short story may help explain this. When I studied Indonesian classical music in college, I played in a gamelan orchestra. The gamelan is a wondrous symphony of gongs, xylophones, vibraphones, plus a drum, singer, and sometimes a flute. The music is magical. Traditional Javanese music theory holds that the music is always in the air, around us; the gamelan simply brings it into the audible range.

That's how it is with the Spirit. I am always in the Presence, but I need to practice certain disciplines to help me sense it. I find that some techniques of relaxation and meditation are helpful. Repeating certain phrases helps me to center.

I often imagine the Spirit as a stream, flowing constantly around and through me. My initial task is to align myself with the current. I love to canoe, and I've learned some things about easing my beautiful Old Town out into the swift water, reading the currents and riding them through the waves and around the rocks. Now I'm learning to launch myself into the stream of Spirit, to flow with it, to feel it supporting me as I ride the rapids and face the dangers and the fears, the beauties and the wonders.

The Experience Of The Spirit Is Transforming

I have asked myself, "How do I know that this experience of the Spirit is real?" The answer is: because it makes a difference in my life. The experience of the Spirit is transforming. I like what Bill Taber says: "...the ultimate test of our response to the Inward Work of Christ lies not in what we feel during the meeting for worship, but in how we relate afterward to our fellow human beings and to all things in God's Creation" (Four Doors: 21). The inward life and the outward action make a whole; they are two aspects of the same experience.

I now see that this Spirit has always been acting on me and within me. How else to explain that I, who played every day a game which we boys simply called "Guns," and who, with these boys, formed a club we called "The Junior Marines," (this is really true confessions time), I went on to college, encountered Friends, and became a Quaker pacifist. In the spring of 1961, I placed a note to myself on the inside of the door to my room which both reminded and challenged me: "I won't go." After years of struggle with the Selective Service System, I gave up graduate school and an academic career and went to work for the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Peace Committee – thank you Local Board 1445!

In my life today, as I learn more skillfully to sense the Spirit within and without me, I find myself more often in a place of calm and peace and joy. When confronted with troubles, crises, and aggravations, even when overwhelmed by storms of anger or undermined by gnawing anxiety, I am better able to navigate them, to get through to calmer waters, to remember that "Love, sweet love gonna carry me through." I'm easier to live with when I'm centered. And I live easier with myself. Said Paul, in his letter to the Galatians, "But the fruits of the Spirit are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, fidelity, gentleness, and self control" (Galatians 5: 22-23). I have always believed, "By their fruits ye shall know them." And I think that is how we all judge whether or not others, and we ourselves, are living in the Spirit. It does transform us. And when it does, we can help transform the world about us.

In order to say more about the transforming, strengthening quality of the Spirit, I want to return to my experience of cancer and, by extension, to the problem of evil and suffering. I can't do this at any length – and it's a topic I care deeply about, having spent 18 years trying to respond to the tide of violence and war and appalling human suffering that engulfs our sisters and brothers in our world, our communities, and even our families. But it's of vital importance for unprogrammed Friends, one we too often dismiss with our almost-a-creed: "There is that of God in every one."

My deepest experience of seemingly meaningless suffering was the year I lived with cancer, understanding that there was no treatment which was likely to cure me. Why did I have cancer? And, in retrospect, of the four members of Central Philadelphia Monthly Meeting who all had cancer during the same four-year period, why did George Lakey and I live, while Olcutt Sanders and Jim Schrag died? I was helped very much in my illness, and in the development of my thinking about God, by a small book by Rabbi Harold Kushner: When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Harold Kushner went through the experience of losing his son to a rare and terrible disease. And none of the traditional explanations for how God could allow this to happen spoke to his grief and his anger.

The problem is: God is limited. If God could have prevented the Holocaust, and slavery, and the genocide against Native Americans, and the slaughter and suffering in Bosnia and Rwanda, God would have done it. God deeply loves all creation, but God is not omnipotent. God must suffer with us.

But God is able to provide other help. When we reach out through our pain and fear and grief, God is there, providing strength and courage. I do believe that some suffering is so terrible that it destroys people, making it impossible for them to find the Spirit. But I am humbled and overwhelmed by the stories of those who, in the midst of the most terrible anguish and suffering, have found incredible strength, courage, and love. And those Spirit-blessed sisters and brothers have strengthened my faith immeasurably.

Harold Kushner has such important things to say about this most important problem for people of faith that I want to quote him at some length:

The question we should be asking is not, "Why did this happen to me? What did I do to deserve this?" That is really an unanswerable, pointless question. A better question would be, "Now that this has happened to me, what am I going to do about it?" (p. 136).

Kushner begins what for me is his seminal passage with a reference to Dorothea Soelle, a remarkable German theologian who studied the Holocaust:

Soelle, in her book Suffering, suggests that "the most important question we can ask about suffering is whom it serves. Does our suffering serve God or the devil, the cause of becoming alive, or the cause of being morally paralyzed? Not "where does the tragedy come from," but "where does it lead?" is the issue on which Soelle would have us focus. In this context she speaks of "the devil's martyrs." What does she mean by that phrase? We are familiar with the idea that various religions honor the memories of martyrs for God, people who died in such a way as to bear witness to their faith. By remembering their faith in the face of death, our own faith is strengthened. Such people are God's martyrs.
 
But the forces of despair and disbelief have their martyrs too, people whose death weakens other people's faith in God and in [God's] world. If the death of an elderly woman in Auschwitz or of a child in a hospital ward leaves us doubting God and less able to affirm the world's goodness,' then that woman and that child become "the devil's martyrs," witnesses against God, against the meaningfulness of a moral life, rather than witnesses in favor. But (and this is Soelle's most important point), it is not the circumstances of their death that makes them witnesses for or against God. It is our reaction to their death.
 
The facts of life and death are neutral. We, by our responses, give suffering either a positive or a negative meaning. Illnesses, accidents, human tragedies kill people. But they do not necessarily kill life or faith. If the death and suffering of someone we love makes us bitter, jealous, against all religion, and incapable of happiness, we turn the person who died into one of the "devil's martyrs." If suffering and death in someone close to us bring us to explore the limits of our capacity for strength and love and cheerfulness, if it leads us to discover sources of consolation we never knew before, then we make the person into a witness for the affirmation of life rather than its rejection. (pp. 137-138)

Theological Reflections

I'm starting the second half of my talk now. In this part, I want to describe the support I find for my faith, first in contemporary theology, and then in Quaker tradition. In the latter context, I will say a few things about the significance of Jesus of Nazareth for me and the importance of Christianity for Friends.

I am going to talk about the support I have found in contemporary theology for my faith because this is an important part of my faith experience. In particular, these writers – some Quaker, some not – have been helpful to me as I have undertaken the intellectual task of discerning a coherent framework for my experience. I know that my framework, and the writings I shall cite, will not speak to the condition of some Friends. Moreover, to the extent that I find much traditional theology meaningless, I run the risk of offending others.

I choose to run this risk because I believe deeply that, when we hold back from sharing our most meaningful spiritual experiences and our deepest reflections about God, we impoverish ourselves, each other, our religious society, and the Spirit itself. On many occasions, I have found new insights, I have had my faith strengthened, by listening to messages from Friends with whom I disagreed on theological grounds. If we are to create a vital Religious Society of Friends, we must encourage each other to share our spiritual lives fully and deeply. Within our theologically diverse meetings, this requires a radical openness to divergent experiences and views. So I enter these perilous theological waters, not with an intention to divide us, but with the hope of contributing something to our collective experience and wisdom.

I really opened the theological discussion with my comments about the problem of suffering and my citations from Harold Kushner. I want to continue this with some thoughts about how we understand God. We cannot "know God" in the literal sense that we know each other. We can experience the Spirit's manifestations, God's actions, if you will. But we cannot describe God in any literal sense. God really is beyond our exact knowing. This is an important point, and I want to develop it.

Elizabeth Watson insists, "God is vaster and deeper than anything we can conceive of, and it is presumptuous of us to try to name God." Many names for God are used in the Old Testament: Yahweh, Elohim, El Shaddai. And when Moses was told to return to the chosen people to lead them out of Egyptian bondage, this is what transpired: '

Moses said to God, "If I come to the Israelites and tell them that the God of their forefathers has sent me to them, and they ask me his name, what am I to say to them?" God answered, "I AM that I am. Tell them that I AM has sent you to them." (Exodus 3:13-14).

God refuses to be defined by a name. So I start by insisting that I cannot name God, I cannot define God, I cannot say exactly what God is. In fact, I like the term "Spirit" because few people know exactly what this means; it is a more flexible, open-ended term than "God." We can only think and talk about the Spirit, or God, metaphorically, with images which are meaningful pointers to the Spirit's true nature, but which are incomplete, and always subject to change.

The book which has been most helpful to me in this theological exercise is Models of God, by Sallie McFague. She contends that the act of insisting on one and only one image of God, on a single correct definition of God, is a kind of idolatry. She further believes that the traditional Christian metaphors for God – King, Lord, Master, Almighty Father – are inappropriate for today. These metaphors describe God as distant from the world, holding power over and controlling the universe as would a king, and relating only to human beings, not to the rest of creation. The logical human response becomes obedience and homage, not love and joy. Says McFague, "If God is seen as father, human beings become children, sin can be understood as rebellious behavior, and redemption can be thought of as a restoration to the status of favored offspring" (p. 34).

Inherent in this model are the traditional dualisms: God-human, spirit-body, good-evil, ruler-ruled. But hierarchical, dualistic language for expressing the relationships between God and the world is inappropriate today. McFague believes that, in a world threatened with ecological collapse and nuclear annihilation, we need "ways of understanding the God-world and human-world relationships as open, caring, inclusive, interdependent, changing, mutual, and creative" (p. 13). We wonderful human beings, made in some sense in God's image, are truly partners with God, stewards, caretakers, trustees, co-creators and co-parents. All of our sisters and brothers, all species on Earth, even the Earth itself, depend upon us for survival, and ultimately, for the creation of a holy, blessed world, traditionally called "the kingdom of God."

McFague suggests that we imagine the universe as God's Body. The earth is part of God's creation, but it is not separate from God, like a completed sculpture. God cannot be reduced to the physical universe, which would imply pantheism, but the God-world relationship is an intimate one "in which all things have their origins in God and nothing exists outside God" (McFague: 71). In this model, we are indeed part of God, we are surrounded by God, we can tune in to the Presence at any time, in any place, in any person, including the last and the least. "There is that of God in everyone and everything."

Sallie McFague suggests three new images for God – not definitions, but metaphors which help to illuminate God's nature and God's relationship to creation. These images are: God as mother, God as lover, God as friend. These are provocative new images which suggest a new understanding of God's power: "not the power of control through either domination or benevolence but the power of response and responsibility – the power of love in its various forms ...that operates by persuasion, care, attention, and mutuality" (p. 85). She believes that God loves the world through creating and giving of herself (as does a mother), intimately and passionately (as does a lover), freely, joyfully, and sustainingly (as does a friend).

God's love for us is responsive. God suffers with us, unable to interfere with natural processes and human free will, but caring in a way which we, as parents, lovers, friends, so often must do – unable to make everything OK, often unable to alleviate the suffering – but standing by in love to share the pain and touch the wounds with a tender hand.

Like genuine human love, God's love is creative. I understand God in part as the creative and binding force which is somehow behind the origin and ongoing evolution of our universe. In my own spiritual life, I find myself drawn to the creative activity of God, and to the beauties and wonders of the creation itself.

Thomas Berry, in his important book on creation theology, The Dream of the Earth, contends that Christianity has placed too much emphasis on salvation and not enough on creation. The emphasis on salvation grows out of a view of the world as basically sinful. We need a new understanding of our universe, our Earth, and our sisters and brothers as the beautiful, miraculous creation of a loving God, indeed, as God's body. Otherwise, we shall drift further and further into ecological catastrophe.

I shall close these theological reflections with these thoughts. For me, God is creative, responsive love, binding together all that exists in the universe, manifest to us in the experiences which can bind us, all parts of creation, together in a blessed community. When we are separated from God, when we are separated from each other and from the creation of which we are a part, we are living in sin. Only when we feel separate from others can we hate them, kill them, discriminate against them. Only as we feel separate from the earth and all life on it can we go on destroying it.

The belief that we are separate is based on ignorance. This is the origin of evil: the ignorance of our connections to God, to all other people, and to the entire creation. When we are ignorant of the love of others, we can do terrible things to them. When we are ignorant of others' love for us, we can do terrible things to ourselves. When we are ignorant of the love of God, we can believe in this separateness. I am coming to believe that war and violence and torture, even the Holocaust and slavery and genocide, stem from ignorance, not from some terrible force in the universe which is in some titanic struggle with God. When we experience the Spirit of God, we feel a marvelous sense of oneness, of connectedness, of belonging here. Even when we are confronted with suffering, death, and evil, if we can reach out to God, we will be reconnected in God's love.

The Quaker Roots Of My Faith

I feel compelled to begin this final section of my talk by acknowledging the obvious: the faith of most Friends has been Christian, whereas I reject many traditional Christian beliefs. Yet it is equally clear to me that the core of Quaker faith is the centrality of the personal experience of God. Moreover, Friends from the beginning used a multitude of metaphors for God, most of them, incidentally, gender neutral: "the Inward Light," the "divine Light of Christ, "the Christ Within," "the Divine Principle," "the Spirit of Truth," "the Seed."

In his Journal, George Fox described how he came to understand the centrality of experience and the role of Scripture:

For I saw, in that Light and Spirit which was before the Scriptures were given forth, and which led the holy [people] of God to give them forth, that all, if they would know God or Christ, or the Scriptures aright, must come to that Spirit by which they that gave them forth were led and taught. (P. 83)

To those who put so much emphasis on creeds, Fox says, "It's not what you say, it's what you experience." Fox had much to say about Christ as savior, about sin and redemption – and this was consistent with the religious currents of his time. But his stress on the experience of the "Light and Spirit" which predated the Scriptures was a radical departure from the theology of the time. According to Alan Kolp, in Fresh Winds of the Spirit:

It was love more than knowledge which "touched" Fox and spoke to his condition. His condition was one of being separate from God; in love he felt embraced and loved for who he was. In this love he discovered a light by which he could see and a life into which he was drawn. He walked through the opening a new man. (pp. 54-55)

No Friend wrote more beautifully about the power of God's love than John Woolman. In last year's lecture at the FUM Triennial, Alan Kolp described Woolman's life as a constant response to the motions of God's love. Says Kolp, it is this motion of God's love in our heart – not adherence to a creed – which sanctifies us, edifies us, and purifies us. ("A Motion of Love," 1993).

Now it is to Woolman I turn for one of the most beautiful statements of the universalist principle within our Religious Society of Friends:

There is a principle which is pure, placed in the human mind, which in different places and ages had different names. It is, however, pure and proceeds from God. It is deep and inward, confined to no forms of religion, nor excluded from any, where the heart stands in perfect sincerity. In whomsoever this takes root and grows, of what nation soever, they become brethren in the best sense of the expression.

This universalist principle was present from the beginning of Quakerism. Said William Penn, "The humble, meek, merciful, just, pious and devout souls are everywhere of one religion; and when death has taken off the mask they will know one another, though the divers liveries they wear here make them strangers" (quoted in London Yearly Meeting, Christian Faith and Practice: 227).

To summarize, authentic Quaker faith is based upon the direct experience of God, the Christ Within, the Spirit, the Light – the name doesn't matter. Adherence to a creed is not necessary. In fact, the experience of God, the principle which is pure, is available to all, regardless of our particular faith. For Fox, Woolman, and other noteworthy Friends, the experience of God was felt particularly as an experience of divine love – an experience which was validated by the transformations it wrought in Friends' lives. In all of these respects, my faith is well rooted in Quaker tradition.

Jesus And Christianity

While Friends have always insisted that the experience of God is universally available, it is only in this century that large numbers of Friends have sought to disengage themselves from Quakerism's Christian roots. Personally, I cannot accept the Apostle's Creed, or the basic sinfulness of humanity, or the rejection of other faiths, or the condemnation of lesbian women, gay men, and those who experience the goddess as female. That is sufficient in the eyes of many to disqualify me as a Christian – though I am open to the possibility that they are wrong.

But I firmly believe that our meetings need to welcome and learn from those Friends who understand their own spiritual experiences in Christian terms, who give messages about Christ in meeting for worship, who say humbly, "I am a Christian Quaker." What kind of universalism is it that affirms all paths to God – except the Christian path. That's not universalism, that's simply anti-Christianism, often coupled with a naive view of other faith traditions.

In a 1992 talk entitled, "Meanings of the Word Christ," Edwin Staudt said: "I think one of the greatest tragedies of church history is that Christ becomes elevated to such a high extent, that he is inaccessible any longer to any of us except as an object of worship" (p. 6). So I want to look for a moment at Jesus of Nazareth as a man. I want to do so because what he did during his short life made manifest the nature of God to an extraordinary degree.

I am indebted particularly to Albert Nolan's book, Jesus Before Christianity, for much of this picture. Jesus, like the prophets before him, sought to save his people. He saw that Israel was on a collision course with the Romans, who already occupied their land. But he did not call Israel to arms. He called on his people to repent and to change. He criticized the Jewish establishment, those who cared only about the law. He knew that Israel's salvation could only come if the Israelite's returned to God, who he knew was a God of love.

And Jesus did love people – especially the poor and oppressed. He chose to associate constantly with sinners, beggars, the crippled, lepers, prostitutes, tax collectors, "the least of these, his brethren." This is one lesson we largely well-to-do Friends need to prayerfully consider. Jesus said that the "kingdom of God" was something that could be created if people would love God and love one another. And this love cannot be limited to one's own clan or one's own people: "You have heard that they were told, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But what I tell you is this: Love your enemies and pray for your persecutors" (Matthew 5: 43-44). Jesus believed that the only way for Israel to avert the catastrophe he saw looming on the horizon was to create the loving, compassionate "kingdom of God." He understood that to experience God was to understand our connectedness to God and to all our neighbors.

And so, when Jesus challenged the Jewish establishment and the Roman occupiers too strongly, they prepared to kill him. Jesus saw it coming. He had a last meal with his friends, whom he loved so deeply, and he told them that his body would soon be broken for them. He accepted even the terrible torture of crucifixion. He did so out of love and compassion, demonstrating to his people, to the Romans, and to all of us that he was prepared to suffer even the slow death on the cross to demonstrate God's love for them, and for us.

Jesus posed a riddle to his disciples: "Whoever gains his life will lose it; whoever loses his life for my sake will gain it" (Matthew 10:39)., Says Albert Nolan, commenting on this text:

To save one's life means to hold onto it, to live it and be attached to it and therefore to fear death. To lose one's life is to let go of it, to be detached from it and therefore to be willing to die.... Jesus did not die for a cause. As he understood it, one should be willing to give up one's life for exactly the same reason as one gives up possessions, prestige, family and power, namely for others .... Jesus was fully alive because he was willing to suffer and die not for a cause but for people. (p.139)

Jesus of Nazareth has so much to teach us about the nature and power of divine love. And Christian Friends – who constitute the great majority of Friends in the world today – have much to teach us also. So let us listen, seeking the deep Christian truths while letting whatever offends us or fails to speak to our condition go by.

Conclusion

I have tried to describe my faith, and to be open with you about the spiritual experiences on which it is based. There is much that I've had to leave out – particularly about the reality of evil, about my commitment to social action, about my attempts to be an ally to women, to people of color, to gay and lesbian people – all of which follow from my faith. And I have tried – in a very short time – to situate my personal faith in the context of Quaker tradition and some contemporary Christian theology.

I want to close with a few thoughts about contemporary unprogrammed Quakerism. I do believe that we are in some danger of losing our spiritual foundations, of becoming the Social Society of Friends. Yet I am heartened by evidence of a new wave of attention to our spiritual lives, as for instance in Baltimore Yearly Meeting's Spiritual Foundation Program.

There are millions of people who are seeking a meaningful faith. With our silent worship and our lack of dogma, we can be gateways for such seekers, and our meetings can grow. But we need something substantial inside the gate. We need finders as well as seekers. We need Friends who are committed to a spiritual discipline. We need Friends who have experienced the Spirit and can witness to this in their lives, their actions, and occasionally through their spoken messages. We need to be those Friends.

I believe that a living religious faith, a vital spiritual life, must be rooted in our Quaker tradition, but not constrained by it. Our faith must be consistent with the knowledge we have, including both scientific knowledge and the truths we learn as we open ourselves to the leadings of the Spirit. Our faith must be relevant to the great moral, social, economic, and political issues of our day.

But there is a special challenge and opportunity for Friends in this: that we will never have within unprogrammed Quakerism one single faith, one single understanding of the Spirit. In 1979, Kenneth Boulding wrote about this in Friends Journal:

The great diversity of people in unprogrammed meetings is by no means necessarily a liability. It creates a unique spiritual flavor of love without much unity, which could well be one of the most important messages of the Society of Friends. (10/79, p. 6)

The world needs to learn to love across religious and ethnic lines. This is difficult. Most of us like to say how much we value diversity, but when we get right down to the real nitty gritty, it's not easy. Well Friends, the good news is: we can begin in our own meetings!

I will close with a quote from Adam Curle, a British Friend active all his life in international mediation and peacemaking:

Each of us is a prism through which shines the light of the eternal and universal reality. Because the components of each prism are necessarily different we each bring a different gift to the totality of which we form an element; the light is refracted differently through each one of us, and being refracted, is part of us. The wonderful paradox is that the light is everywhere the same. It is the ground of our being, it is what binds us together in the essential unity of all things. Yet everywhere it is manifested differently, a miracle of unity in diversity; we are one, but each of us has individuality.

Bruce Birchard
Friends General Conference