The humble church

I've been sitting with Philip Pullman's The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. It's a challenging book—probably to nearly everyone. It's no atheist screed, wiping the supernatural before it with a materialistic sneer. But it does play—lovingly—with the two sides of the character of Jesus Christ: the radical millennialist and the founder of an eternal church. It does this with the device of separating the one man into two twins. Not the easy device of a Jekyll-and-Hyde, Cain-and-Abel dichotomy; these brothers complement each other, fight each other, and end up playing parts in a story they're neither of them entirely happy with. But both seek to do the best they can do, and be the best they can be, with what has been given.

The book more or less follows the narrative content of the Gospels, along with some childhood legends. And near the end, with Jesus kneels in the Garden of Gethsemane, asking one last time for God to speak to him, to make Himself immanent to him. This paragraph has embedded itself in me:

'Lord, if I thought you were listening, I'd pray for this above all: that any church set up in your name should remain poor, and powerless, and modest. That it would wield no authority except that of love. That it should never cast anyone out. That it should own no property and make no laws. That it should not condemn, but only forgive. That it should be not a palace with marble walls and polished floors, and guards standing at the door, but like a tree with its roots deep in the soil, that shelters every kind of bird and beast and gives blossom in the spring and shade in the hot sun and fruit in season, and in time gives up its good sound wood for the carpenters; but that sheds many thousands of seeds so that new trees can grow in its place. Does the tree say the the sparrow "get out, you don't belong here?" Does the tree say to the hungry man "This fruit is not for you?" Does the tree test the loyalty of the beasts before it allows them into the shade?

I don't really have much to add. I think Pullman's vision of the kind of church Jesus would have put up with is spot on, and is a challenge even for the liberal sect I belong to. I think I need to carry this around with me some more.

Sings

I love singing. I didn't really know how much I love to sing until I started hanging around morris dancers, who sing around campfires and really anytime they get the chance. Pub songs, sea shanties, labor hymns, grange songs... all kinds of stuff gets thrown into the repertoire of a certain kind of sing. That's what it gets called mostly, a "sing." No books, usually, an mostly no instruments. Harmony at the best of times, generally worked up to as the song progresses through several rounds of the chorus and the singers can fell out where to go. Or worked out over multiple singings over the course of years.

There are other kinds of sings too. Rise Up Singing is a very popular basis for sings: everyone gets a copy, and people go around picking out songs. The great advantage of book-based singing is that the selection of songs is based on preference: everyone gets to choose one, and they don't have to be good at memorizing to lead it. It is a much more democratic process than a non-book sing.

But I like the non-book sings best. It's been great seeing sings start to emerge as a regular, public, sustained thing here in the Minneapolis-St Paul area. Phil Platt of the Eddies started one in the fall of 2009, and I started another one this fall... so far so good. And Betty Tisel has been organizing others. I hope this thing continues to spread

I've tried, in sings I've been responsible for, a "pick, pass or lead" formula, where we go around the circle, and people have the option to lead a song themselves, pick a song, or pass. Everyone gets a turn. I've also learned from watching Phil a way of essentially emceeing things, which is useful balancing a set with experienced and inesperienced singers.

I've been reflecting lately on the shape of the sings I really love. The impromptu gatherings at morris ales (there was one at the 2009 Midwest Ale in a passageway outside the dining room that absolutely knocked my socks off), the after-hours sings at Old Songs Festival or Mystic Sea Music Festival, or some of the gatherings of morris folk at parties here and in Massachusetts.

Here's my theory: a really good sing needs spines, muscles and body mass. Metaphorically.

It needs spines: people who can really hold a song up as they lead it. Strong voice, consistent enough sense of notes so people can tell the key and follow along on the melody, and a good memory.

It needs muscles: people who can push and pull harmonies out of the melody. Interestingly, though I tend to try and do harmonies, I think there's another kind of dynamic that's in play here too, providing the song with dynamics. One of the weakness of many of the book-based sings I've been to, is that you lose the rich texture of call and response, solo verse and group chorus (or often, solo first line of a familiar verse, small group on the remainder of the verse, and whole group on the chorus). Instead, everyone sings everything. It feels flat to me by comparison when this happens.

Finally, you need body mass. It really makes a difference to have 30 people in the room instead of 10. For one thing, it's more forgiving of experiments. For another, the dynamics I talked about above are even more in play.

----

The thing I've noticed is that running a sing is a lot like clerking at Friends meeting: it's not about ordering people around and getting them in shape to sing on key. That's a choir, not a sing. No, it's about creating a structured space within which people feel free to take up their roles as spine, muscles and body. And then, mostly, getting out of the way. It's a lot like being an emcee in general: you can't just give over all responsibility, because people get bored by the utter chaos that ensues. But on the other hand, your job is take the spot light for just as long as it takes for the next "act" to get it together, and then make the audience forget it was ever looking at you. And in the case of a sing, it's about paying attention to the song first, then the singer. People will let themselves be swept along by a song where they would be suspicious of being swept along by a singer.

I grew up in Pete Seeger. He's someone who's spent his professional life getting people to sing. It's easy to make fun of his "lining out" style, but he took what had become a nation of passive audiences and got them—a lot of them anyway—to find their voices again. That's why he tops my list of "people I admire."

Letting the story go

An alignment of three things:

1. A comment on Facebook on stories. The original poster was commenting on how hard it was for her to talk with a creationist. Someone linked to the XKCD comic here. My response to a few more comments on stubborn ignorance was:

Methinks, as the comic points out, the issue is really an issue when it comes to power. Which it always does come down to one way or another when dealing with parents. But I don't care what my postal delivery worker or the guy at Mr Tire believe about creationism; or if I do care, its in the sense that Ingrid talked about: because it makes a good story.

It's kind of how I've come around to being able to (mostly) deal with Christian religious stories: I was raised by my agnostic/atheist parents to hear Biblical narration as part of an effort to push me to an orthodoxy—to exert power over me, in the same way that jingoism, pursed-lipped grandparents, and social conformity are. And so it's been great to be able to (for example) hear Ingrid tell our son the Easter story "from the inside," where it can live as a big powerful story, not part of some attempt to make me or Roo or anyone else into what the speaker wants us to be.

2. in Meeting this morning, a Friend rose to talk about her experience with other people's stories, with other people's baggage they bring to hearing your story. Her husband had come out quite publicly as bisexual, and she was recalling the pain that other people's assumptions and baggage brought her in that experience. There is a sense that when you speak Truth, that Truth is released from you—it is no longer yours. I think most people don't get this; certainly the idea of intellectual property works against this. But really, to release an idea is much more powerful than holding it. To try and hang on to it is mostly a salve for the ego. Or an attempt to control income—not that the experience of "colonized" musicians, who sold their songs for pennies to producers who then made fortunes on them, is a good thing. No one should starve when someone else is feeding themselves from one's work. But the idea itself benefits from truly being free to roam.

3. Christa Tippet in this week's Speaking of Faith, talked with Alan Dienstag, who wrote this companion commentary about his work getting early-stage Alzheimer's patients to write memories as part of their comign to terms with their illness. Part of what he talked and wrote about is writing not as hanging on to memories, but as giving them away.

As she neared the end of her life, my grandmother seemed to understand that if you can give something away, you don't lose it. This, as it turns out, is as true of memories as it is of objects and is yet another aspect of memory that is often overlooked. Memories are, in a sense, fungible. Writing is a form of memory, and unlike the spoken word, leaves a mark in the physical world. As a form of memory, writing creates possibilities for remembering, for the sharing and safeguarding of memories not provided by talking. The writing group gave memory back to its members. They were transformed in the experience of writing from people who forget to people who remember. A member of the writing group once said that when the group was together "— we forget that we don't remember." This is a statement of cure, not of biological and cellular disorder, but of the human disorder, the disorder of loss of personhood brought about by Alzheimer's disease.

-----

There is a scary power in letting go an idea, a teaching, a word, a picture...anything that comes out of oneself. To put your name on it keeps it somehow tied to you. It is a radical idea, to create anonymously and remain anonymous so as to be able to let the idea truly go free. It's almost a painful idea. But I feel myself drawn to it. It is an act of submission, an act of saying "these things are not mine."

I have no idea if I could do it.

Guest post: Tom Stoffregen

Tom's a fellow Friend at Twin Cities Friends Meeting, and he emailed me separately about something I said in meeting that pretty closely corresponds to a post I made here last month. He said it was OK for me to post that email here, so here it is:

------

from your blog:

In any case, we don't have kings except in church, if we go to the sort of church that still emphasizes "Lordship." Liberal Friends don't, and I'm beginning to wonder if we aren't missing something big here. Like the central point of most of the variants (Islamic, Jewish, Christian, Mormon, etc) of the Abrahamic tradition.

My question is, how to bring in this sense of submission—which historically could be described as an analogue to the liege-t0-king relationship—into a truly egalitarian world-view.

This is (as best I can recall) what got my attention in Meeting for Worship. As political animals, we now reject the authority hierarchies that kingship exemplifies. But as religious animals we continue to embrace (or aim to embrace) these same authority hierarchies.

Friends rely on the "light within", which might suggest Quakerism is compatible with an egalitarian model. Yet most Friends theologians (i.e., the few I've read) emphasize that the light within shines from a source that is not the self, the ego. So, is Friends' theology egalitarian, or is it ain't?

My main concern, however, is with some implications of your spoken comments for how we view our relationship with any/everything that is alleged to be "other". If God is outside us, then we are in an authority hierarchy in which God is above and we are below; the classical Abrahamic view of the situation.

I'm increasingly dissatisfied with this view, and I no longer regard it as the only view. I'm not an animist, but I am increasingly interested in some ideas from animism, to wit, the idea that there is not a simple, in-vs-out dichotomy between "self" and "other", whether it be "self vs. God", "self vs. other people", or "self vs physical world".

There are other types of hierarchies, ones in which a given "unit" can operate (simultaneously) at multiple levels in the hierarchy. Example: I act as an individual, call it level 1. But I also act as part of a marital unit (level 2), which does (can do) things that can never be done at level 1 (e.g., reproduce). Level 2 consists of interactions among people; the interactions are things-in-themselves that differ qualitatively from the individuals that engage in the interactions. I also act at levels 3, 4, etc., where I act as part of larger and larger social units. Baseball is a nice example; the team does things that individual team members cannot do (e.g., turn a double play, or simply play a regular game). The actions of higher level units are irreducible.

My point is that we exist and operate (simultaneously) at multiple levels of a really big hierarchy; this is a fact of life. Most religious traditions simply ignore this fact. Animism is, more or less, an exeption, in that it refers to causal interactions (rather than isolated causation).

Quakers offer a really good example of this idea as it pertains to religion. Friends believe that Jesus shows up "whenever two or more are gathered together in His name". In other words, Jesus keys into Level 2 (or higher), and disdains Level 1.

I see the up-down hierarchy of Abrahamic religion as being deeply related to western concepts of reductionism (e.g., pre-Christian Greeks); the idea that the Whole is equal to the sum of the Parts. This idea, as a description of the world and our living in it, is wrong. If we toss the reductionist tradition and look into non-reductionist views of how the world works, we may get a very different view of religion.

Its not so much "god is king, or else I am king". Rather, it may be "I participate in God without myself being God". This view seems to be pretty compatible with Quakerism.

Best,

Tom

Gaia

Friend and colleague Richard finds himself called to be a "Gaia troubadour." He has the title, and his job is to try and figure out what that means. He seeks to live into a vision of the earth as a single living unit, an idea allied with the view of "Mother Earth" that comes from ancient earth religions and their modern revivals/reinventions—Gaia is the Greek mythological counterpart, the the female half of the dichotomy in that culture, placed in counterpoint to Uranus, the sky.

The "Gaia hypothesis," which has been seized upon by some new-age and other nature-based spiritual groups, has little to say itself about the Earth being an organism. Wikipedia's summary says:

The Gaia hypothesis is an ecological hypothesis proposing that the biosphere and the physical components of the Earth (atmosphere, cryosphere, hydrosphere and lithosphere) are closely integrated to form a complex interacting system that maintains the climatic and biogeochemical conditions on Earth in a preferred homeostasis.

Basically, that the planet is a self-correcting system. So the science does not, at least in this case, go so far as to say that Earth is a single "organism."

But I do think earth-as-body is a great metaphor.

In my previous post, I talked about the problem of hierarchical submission. It seems clear to that one of the real values of a religious/spiritual approach to things, is that it gives a structure within which one can say both, "it's not about me," and, "it's not all my responsibility." Christians seek not to sin, but are forgiven their sins. "Islam" itself means "submission" to the will of Allah. And I do believe this is a very very useful thing to have in one's life. We don't "do it all" ourselves, and pretending we ought to only makes us insane.

But, the models we have for this submission in Abrahamic traditions come out of a social structure in which there are lords and there are servants. And God, in this context, is seen as "Lord of All." I would argue the model went from the human structure to the perceived divine structure; others will probably argue it went the other way. I do not believe we have the ability to view God objectively and clearly enough, beyond our own life context, to say whether God "really" is king or not. But I can say that Kings make a lot less sense to those of us who live in a democracy that overthrew kingly rule 225+ years ago, and a potentially even more twisted meaning in a Europe or Japan where the role is largely ceremonial. God is a figurehead? I don't think that's what was meant.

So. Is it possible for those of us who work within an egalitarian idea of humanity, to come up with an analagous model that also includes "egalitarian submission"?

This is why I like Gaia. One submits to Gaia not as a slave before his/her master, but as a cell before the body. We are part of this whole, not ruled from outside by it.

The only trouble is the whole Mother Nature thing. It is easy to personify Gaia, and I continue to not buy it. The analogy of ourseves as cells in a global "body" implies by analogy that there's a global cerebellum, a "mind" running the show. And while I can believe some sort of global or universal organization, the idea that it has a language center seems like projection to me.

I'll be the first to admit that it is terrifying to think about submitting to a "mindless machine" or a "mindless beast." But how much of that terror is based our the habit of thinking about all our own actions as "intentional." How much of what we human organisms do is actually cerebellum-directed? We use our cerebellums in large part as tools to get out of mindlessness's way (I had a nightmare last night about tornadoes, and finding ways to get all my elderly friends under heavy, fixed objects).

I think the biggest block is that we think of that cerebellum-self as running the show within ourselves, and we want an equivalent cerebellum running The Big Show. I would suggest that, in the egalitarian spirit that started this whole thing off, we recognize that our cerebellum is a part of us, that is provides leadership where leadership is needed, but that it doesn't have to lead like a Lord or King. What does cerebellum-as-clerk look like?

And our role in the world then doesn't have to be a choice between humanity-as-king or humanity-as-follower-of-the-World-King. What does humanity-as-clerk look like? What is our role as a species? Do species have "roles"? And what about cartographers?

...Of All He Surveys

Confession time: I want to be king. Seriously. Not the elegant, modern, bespoke-suited kings of modern Europe, or the jokey Henery-the-Eighth-I-Am-I-Am king. I want trumpets blazing a fanfare as I walk down aisle of Westminster Abbey with a heavy gold crown and an orb and scepter and boy choirs singing and all that stuff.

I just don't want to have to become the sort of person that you seem to have to be, to become king. I was reading a little last night about Louis XIV, the Sun King, and I think I would have not liked him much at all. Lots of sending former friends into dungeons or to be burnt at the stake. I like the character of Prince Hal/King Henry V, but I suspect he was deeply fictionalized. Went to war over an insult, and whole bunch of folks died to give him his victory at Agincourt. Nice.

And yet, I love high church, if it feels real. I buy into very little American high church stuff, because we're a democracy dammit. It just doesn't fly. Now, Westminster Abbey... One of my favorite things to do in England is to arrive an hour early for sung services at Westminster, and get to sit in the stalls right behind the choir. It's glorious.

In high school, I wrote a short play, and a central character of that play has stayed with me. He was the son of a king, who decided he didn't want to become what he saw his father was, and what he saw his brothers becoming. So he pretended to go mad, to go deaf-and-dumb, and everyone believed him and no-one expected anything further from him. A variant of the story got put into "Tales of the Tattoo Rumba Man," which I've discussed earler:

My father was king, and I was his son. I walked the dangerous cold halls of the palace and waited for something to happen. And while I waited, I watched them, especially my father. I watched him slip into the decay of deceiving words; I watched his hands sweep out capturing only empty space.

And so, when it becomes time for the prince to take the crown, he refuses—he walks away. Kind of like The Lion King, without a pair of wiseacre pig and meerkat sidekicks.

Why does all of this come up?

I've been pushing around the concept of leadership in my head. I'm taking on co-clerking Ministry and Counsel at my home meeting for the next year, and it's weird. Clerking is not "leading" in any modern sense of the word. It's not supposed to be, anyway. And yet there is a certain deference paid to the clerk, usually, because it's the clerk's job to watch the movement of spirit in the meeting, to keep a watch on the sense of meeting, and then test an overt statement of that sense and see if Friends agree that is where in fact they are. The clerk is supposed to be separate from the committee much of the time, and this to me feels like part of what is expected of good leadership in general.

Over the last couple years, I've been going back repeatedly to a conversation I had with an older F/friend, where she reminisced over her early years in the meeting, in the 1970's. In particular, she was remembering Mumford Sibley, who was clerk of M&C when she first served on it. Mr Sibley was formidable, a person of great authority. Gravitas, maybe is a better word. But she and I observed that this gravitas is not one we see a lot of in the current crop of elders. I think this is true across the board among liberals of the last few decades, and I wonder why.

There has certainly been a dearth of authentic "gravitas" among our national political leadership, and in religious circles, it has come to be associated with pious hypocrisy, the kind of behavior that early Quakers and other anti-establishment groups railed against in the 17th century. I think it is something we suspect, as so often it seems like a mask for something sinful or just plain ignorant. Pedantry.

I think there's something deeper though, and it has to do with the disconnect between our mythic language and the real power structures in our lives. I'm talking here about the word "Lord."

The language of pretty much all religions with personified gods includes phrases like "Lord Jesus," or "Lord Krishna," or "Kingdom of Heaven." But for the last century or two, we have lived in a world where old-fashioned lord-liege relationships simply don't exist. You can see formalized remnants of them getting blown to bits in World War I, but even by then they were pretty stale.

Institutionalized slavery was gone by then too, replaced by wage-slavery. I'm reading David B Davis' Slavery and Human Progress now (thanks Marshall!), and I'll be curious what I find out about the cycle of slavery as in institution in the modern West.

In any case, we don't have kings except in church, if we go to the sort of church that still emphasizes "Lordship." Liberal Friends don't, and I'm beginning to wonder if we aren't missing something big here. Like the central point of most of the variants (Islamic, Jewish, Christian, Mormon, etc) of the Abrahamic tradition.

My question is, how to bring in this sense of submission—which historically could be described as an analogue to the liege-t0-king relationship—into a truly egalitarian world-view.

Maybe it's like clerking: submitting and allowing yourself to be submitted to, round and round.