Tag: Politics

WHAT ABOUT TURNING THE OTHER CHEEK?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Looking at the political scene, I’m wondering about a wide spectrum of Americans who seem to put their faith in arms – meaning gun ownership, at a personal level, and bloated military expenditures, on the global scene.

Both outlooks are driven by fear, and both are extensions of death over life.

They’re the opposite of Jesus’ life and teaching, in my experience. As he said repeatedly, “Fear not.” Not that it’s easy in practice.

~*~

For more on faithful practice, see my Seasons of the Spirit observations.

NOW, TO LOOK MORE CLOSELY AT A TWO-EDGED SWORD

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

If you want to see out-and-out prejudice by people who think themselves to be open-minded, here’s a good litmus test. Raise a matter of Christianity. Or, as a woman, wear a cross necklace. Then ask if it’s the same response you’d get had you presented something from another religion.

Put another way, I’d long ago been appalled by an assumption many of us liberals took in regard to Christians – and to be candid, I was once one who was self-righteously disparaging. Quite frankly, it’s out-and-out judgmentalism that hurts our progressive causes. It’s ignorant of the important support radical faith gave to many movements through the centuries and can still give to the future. It’s a point for dialogue with our opponents, if we’re willing to engage it.

Two common assumptions spring to mind here.

The first involves intelligence. There’s more to life, let me point out, than materiality. Think of love, music, morality, for starters – people with knowledge of ways of empathy, too. Extend that, then, to a recognition that to be a person of faith does not automatically mean stupidity, even if we do see way too many examples in the public arena – not just those of the Christian label, either. Nor do Christian do not come in a one-size-defines-all homogeneity – some denominations, for instance, refuse to bear arms or participate in war as a consequence of Jesus’ command to love our neighbor, while other churches rally around the troops. The ways of thinking and the emphases vary widely, from Fundamentalists to Evangelicals (yes, there are differences there) to Pentecostals to various strands of Calvinists or Lutherans (yes, again some key differences) to various Wesleyan (Methodist) and Baptist and Anabaptist (Amish, Mennonite, Brethren, Quaker) and on to the Unitarians. And that’s just among the Protestants. Add to that the Anglicans (Episcopalians), Roman Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox and you have a very rich mix, indeed.

Within those are some very intelligent and sensitive people, along with circles of personal growth and ethical accountability.

The reality is that religion is capable of engaging our innermost motions – our hopes and fears, especially. It’s a power that can run many ways, challenging the status quo as well as establishing community. The state and the establishment have many reasons to desire to curb it, as history attests. Even at a personal level, it can be scary stuff.

Pointedly, progressive movements have sprung from this source. For centuries, up through America’s civil rights revolution, social change has grown from radical Christianity. A central thread of the Bible has been the evolution of justice and then radical peace and equality. Read it closely, and what emerges remains a challenge to the status quo. Let’s not lose it now!

As the prayer goes, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth …”

Many of us see that as a more loving, just, and peaceful society. Mock it if you wish, but think of the alternatives. Are they really progress?

All of that, of course, leads to my second point: the so-called Christian right, of the political sort, hardly owns the mantel of Jesus. And since any religion has the potential of engaging those most soulful endeavors of human existence, we see across the spectrum instances of appealing to fear and oppression, on one side, as well as forgiveness and oneness, on the other. Religion in this dimension presents an opportunity for conversation and growth, if we allow it.

~*~

For more on radical faith, see my book, Religion Turned Upside Down.

MAYBE IT STILL COMES DOWN TO MEANS VERSUS ENDS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

In the aftermath of the recent national elections, trying to make sense of the American scene today is, well, downright scary. The fact we have one party so willing to risk constitutional crisis rather than work cooperatively on solutions to common problems strikes at the very heart of democracy. And that’s before we get to the divisions revealed geographically, demographically, and economically.

Several of the phrases floating around the campaigns continue to ring in my ears. Describing one party, we have an “echo chamber” of “misfits,” which begins to look far larger than would be healthy for any society. And for the other party, the race came down to a “technocrat” versus “activist,” in itself suggesting a division between an appeal to the brain versus the heart.

Much of this situation, I’ll contend, springs from a lingering state of denial involving the encounters of those of us who came of age during the 1960s and ’70s. Coming across a summary of William Clark Roof’s 1993 A Generation of Seekers: The Spiritual Journeys of the Baby Boom Generation, I had to sit up and take notice when he noted that a low level of community involvement accompanied our search for personal meaning. It’s something that’s certainly happened across American society over recent decades, although I’d say increasing demands on our careers and suburban family lifestyles have taken their toll, too.

As Douglas Gwyn comments in Seekers Found: Atonement in Early Quaker Experience:

Roof’s study confirms many impressions of baby boomers in the ’60s, but adds a new perspective. Many tried drugs, were sexually active, and went to rock concerts and political protests. But many did not. Half of those surveyed say they did not try drugs; a third never attended a rock concert; and 80% were not politically active in that period. On the whole, Roof finds boomers to be nearly evenly divided between traditionalist and countercultural affinities.

A conventional view might look at this split along the lines of the Vietnam war issue, with the traditionalists joining the military and the hippie side in full opposition. But Roof’s criteria turn the angle: more than a few servicemen experimented with pot and other drugs in ‘Nam, along with free love, and moved easily into hippie circles on their return. Meanwhile, I sense more than a few hippies never did drugs, out-of-wedlock sex, or political protests. For them, maybe it was all about the music?

As Gwyn continues his reflections on Roof’s study, he prophetically notes:

But in subsequent decades, with a tightening of the American economy, the assumption of abundance often turned from utopian to belligerent, as Americans vented their frustration over lowered or failed expectations. Given their expanded subjective and expressive registers, boomers are already more likely to consider themselves wounded by defects in their religious upbringing. When religious institutions or leaders fail their expectations today, boomers are all the more likely to feel cheated, wounded, or even victimized.

It’s not just religion, let’s be honest. This cuts across the entire society.

Gwyn makes one other argument that lingers, one that involves the kind of association each seeker is drawn to. One is process driven, and the ways we can become captive to the mechanics of a particular system. (He names capitalist democracy as an example.) Here, the procedures outweigh results. I love his observation, “If civility is too strongly identified with democratic processes, then true seeking and conversation to one’s neighbor will tend to be subverted. Caucus politics or the contest of interests may usurp the conversation.”

The alternative, goal driven identity, can override the process altogether, in which the ends justify any means of getting there.

The vital tension Gwyn encourages “requires a disciplined and sustained dialogue between seriously considered and passionately held positions,” a “drama of faith, which is played out upon a level civic stage of public concern.”

Quite simply, where is that dialogue today? And where is the open exchange in questioning and refining the factual essence of the positions? An “echo chamber,” on either side, simply cannot do the job.

~*~

More of my own reflections on alternative Christianity are found at Religion Turned Upside Down.

IT’S COMFORTING TO FIND OTHERS ALSO INTRIGUED BY THESE HISTORIES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

A common version of the rise of the Quaker movement has George Fox wandering north from the English Midlands, receiving a vision atop Pendle Hill in 1652, and soon after finding welcome among a radical group known as the Seekers. As his message then ignites them, the Society of Friends is born and spreads amid a flurry of controversy and persecution.

Many contemporary Friends are quite fond of the term, “Seekers After Truth,” another name for those English radicals, by the way – and that serves to reinforce this view of history.

I’ve leaned toward a somewhat different take, especially in regard to the Mennonite-tinged General Baptists in England who shaped Fox’s growth in the half-dozen years before his 1652 Pendle Hill epiphany.

While history can be quite fascinating on its own terms, my bigger interest is on the continuing impact on thought and action in the present, and that’s where I find myself quite intrigued with  Douglas Gwyn, Seekers Found: Atonement in Early Quaker Experience (Wallingford, Pa., 2000), now that I’m finally getting to it.

While I’d been influenced by some of his earlier writings, this one somehow flew past my must-read pile – in part because it was published just as I was entering my second marriage, along with all of its challenges, and in part because of the ways the title seemed to focus on the Seekers version of the story.

Ah! To leap ahead all these years!

Now that I’ve finally read the book, let me say, it’s far-reaching and profound – much different from my expectations of being focused exclusively on the Seekers. Along the way, he engages topics I’ve written about extensively, adding many welcome insights and prompting me to rethink some of my assumptions and conclusions.

The opening chapter, “A Looking-Glass for Seekers: The American Culture of Seeking Today,” looks at the counterculture of the ’60s and ’70s as parallels to the revolutionary upheavals of the mid-1600s in Britain, a position I’ve long argued. If anything, the conflicting differences in the kinds of hippies he identifies have grown in the 17 years since the publication of his book.

Gwyn then moves to a sequence of Spiritualists he identifies as “seekers” and the ways their thinking and practice evolves to a point that many key Quaker tenets are already in place before Fox and his colleagues. These chapters explore Caspar Schwenkfeld and Sebastian Franck in northern Europe during the Protestant Reformation of the 1520s and ’30s before shifting to England, with its own powerful voices in John Saltmarsh, William Erbury, William Walwyn, and Gerrard Winstanley, among others. To be candid, I was familiar only with Winstanley, along with a passing knowledge of the five Schwenckfeld churches in Pennsylvania.

From there he plunges into the more familiar chronology of the early Quaker movement itself and its rivals, albeit with his own insights and welcome details.

For one thing, he gives more information more on the short-lived General Baptists than I’d uncovered elsewhere, as well as on the Calvinist-leaning Particular Baptists, the kind who now exist widely throughout America.

While it is easy to perceive this work as a history, I’m more inclined to view it as an exploration of an emerging theology, especially as Gwyn tackles one of the thornier issues that’s long spurred critics of Quaker thought – atonement. Or, more broadly, the crucifixion, resurrection, and atonement. While I’ve long argued that early Friends did not dare to fully articulate their understanding in face of the Blasphemy Acts of the time and then declined to do so once they’d gained respectability, Gwyn sees them experiencing the historic events of Calvary within their own actions and suffering for faith. As I’ve contended, their failure to clearly state their alternative theology then set the trajectory for misunderstandings that would rip through the Society of Friends in the early 19th century, something that Gwyn confirms in his examination of the controversy surrounding George Keith in the 1690s as Gwyn turns to struggles that beset the Quaker movement as it coalesced into a disciplined organization out of its many radical, freethinking strands:

Clearly, there are major dangers on both sides of this schizoid split between orthodoxy (right belief) and orthopraxis (right action), between gospel and gospel order. For American Friends, the theological questions fended off in the 1690s would come back after 1800 to wreak havoc on them in the Hicksite controversy, leading eventually to separation in 1827.   

~*~

On a personal level, I’ve come to value Gwyn as a fellow traveler in arcane investigations, Quaker and counterculture. Turns out he lived in Bloomington, Indiana, the same time I did, and we have similar leaps to both coasts (seminary in New York, for him, while it was Upstate New York and then the yoga ashram in the Pocono mountains for me) and then the Far West (his Berkeley, California, as a Quaker pastor, while I was in the Pacific Northwest). We’re both in New England these days and have had close conversations with both Asian practices and Friends rediscovering the writings of George Fox.

I intend to draw much more from his Seekers Found volume over the coming months. His insights are too pertinent to be overlooked.

~*~

For my own reflections on alternative Christianity, take a peep at my new book, Religion Turned Upside Down.

 

WHEN OUR LIVES OVERLAP

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

I never intended for my blogging to take the place of personal journaling.

What I’m posting is, after all, far more public, drawing on a deep archive of writing on all fronts now augmented by current happenings in my life and the world around us. What’s emerged is a kind of collage roughly defining the boundaries of my life and thought. I was about to say “normal” life and thought, but not everyone would agree.

Over the past few years, the blog’s also evolved into a showcase for my literary writing, even during a politically overcharged year like the one we’ve just encountered. Remember, I live in the Granite State, which remains a political bellwether as well as the home for many well-known writers. After all the years of having to keep quiet about these concerns, it’s been a relief to be able to air my feelings.

That said, let me admit I’m never quite sure what will turn up here. Maybe that’s why your likes and comments, especially, are so welcome. It’s nice to know when our hopes and dreams and experiences overlap or when there are alternatives to what I’m thinking or even presuming.

Now, back to work …

CARPE DIEM

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

Among the historic divisions among Friends, none were more traumatic than the Hicksite-Orthodox separations, 1826-27. While New England and North Carolina were spared, most other American yearly meetings were torn in two. The reasons were deep and complicated – often along socio-economic and geographic lines. Subsistence versus commercial farming, artistan-craftsmen versus industrialists, rural versus urban, traditional versus forward-looking, tensions between having the polity of Friends lodged within the monthly meeting or at the yearly meeting level, even language itself, one holding to old expressions versus those wanting to embrace a new evangelical ecumenism.

We were not alone. The Puritan legacy, for instance, splintered into Congregationalists and Unitarians about the same time we Quakers split, theirs ostensibly over naming the president to head, first, Dartmouth College and then Harvard. The Dunkers (or German Baptist Brethren), meanwhile, managed to hold together, although their tensions would finally reappear in the 1880s, leading to a five-way split, producing the Church of the Brethren – about the same time many Friends began turning to pastor-led programmed worship. Curiously, the Brethren, laboring under a single yearly meeting, faced major tensions between the Eastern, old-fashioned members and the “Western” (west of the Appalachian Mountains) progressives – the same lineup that Friends would see in the quietist versus pastoral worship styles, with our Western Yearly Meetings going programmed and the Eastern ones largely holding to tradition.

These tensions were fueled by and reflected in many larger societal issues. In politics, the Jacksonians reflected the emergence of westward expansion. In religion, the Great Awakening first blazed through New England (sometimes as the New Lights movement) before igniting in Kentucky and the newly settled regions. In the economy, the industrial revolution was well under way.

For Quakers, the divisions essentially shut down the itinerant ministry from traveling Friends, which had kept the central messages of the faith and practice intact. That loss no doubt played into the emergence of the pastoral system in places where Friends were settling, rather than long settled. Another loss was a breakdown in the sharing of epistles and other written material. We no longer had a common vision to express or unite behind.

I reflect on these not so much as history but as a recognition that our larger society is in one of those watershed transitions – as our presentations and discussions on envisioning the future have suggested. How do we parlay what’s been entrusted to us into the future? Will Friends, as a whole, respond with radically new worship, organization, expression? Will we be sufficiently open to be led where we are needed? Of course, Israel under Roman occupation turned out to be another of those watershed moments, spreading both Judaism and the newly emerging Christianity across the empire. But that’s a much larger and more complicated story, except for the fact that we’re Friends as a consequence.

Or, as old Quakers would say, “Christ is come and coming.” It’s more than “Season’s Greetings,” after all.

BEYOND THE SUPERSTITION AND BLAME

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

How do we deal with a segment of the public that has no interest in factual reality? Where belief, unsupported by critical reasoning, crosses into outright superstition? Too often, alas, it’s even wrapped in religious trappings – tainting both church and state with irrational fervor or madness.

And that’s what we have in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s campaign. The lies and half-truths will be hard to wash clean. The stench will remain even longer.

Yes, the underlying hurt runs deep, but Bernie Sanders tagged the causes of the problems accurately and pointed to joint collective action to repair the damage and heal the common good. Not so Trump or his legions.

There was nothing pragmatic or even logical in Trump’s babbling, no matter how many were deluded by his initial snake-oil charm. He was not telling it like it was but rather how they imagined life that might have been had they not been passed by. And then, toward the end, he was denying so much of what he’d told them in the first place or that his words had been just a joke. Locker room banter, as he claimed, not that many of us white guys recognized anything of the sort.

Now, no matter the outcome of the election, the nation’s divided by what he’s encouraged.

It’s not just racism, though those who think it’s fine for police to murder unarmed citizens is justifiable go about stealing Black Lives Matter lawn signs and then are alarmed if blacks take up the right-wing’s interpretation of the Second Amendment in self-defense. Folks, what would you do in that situation?

I’ll return to Bernie’s to-do list. I don’t think he was the administrator to push the goals through, but he certainly did an admirable job in articulating them. May he continue, building a base to take both houses of Congress in 2018.

Meanwhile, I’ll lament for what passes for national debate these days in all the tumult. We need honest dialogue to advance. And that will include admission of fault where it’s dues, rather than more blaming others.

HOW ABOUT MAKING THIS A DAY OF PRAYER AND FASTING?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

After reading a post by Jonathan Caswell of the blog, A Mighty Mumford,  I’m wondering about reviving a practice from Colonial America – a day of prayer and fasting.

The idea would be for people of faith in America, across religious denominations and faiths and political identifications, to set aside time to pray for the future of the country. Not in negatives, but in visions that call for greater love, justice, peace, and compassion throughout the land. (No “Smite My Enemies,” for starters.)

Prayer, as Caswell observes, is difficult, for many reasons. And done truly, it leaves each of us exposed and humbled. To which I would add, praying truly also means listening and waiting rather than ordering the Holy One what to do.

There’s much to be done, including turning swords into ploughshares. I’d say, Let us begin.

VOTING WITH SAM

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Usually, I’m tight-lipped about how I’ve voted. But once, my now ex-father-in-law (the retired colonel) and I (still the hippie in the workplace) compared the ballots we cast. To our mutual surprise, we discovered we supported the same candidates – some Republican, some Democrat.

Our reasons were identical: we turned to individuals of character who were interested in solving problems rather than acting on ideology. It helped that we knew many of them – pro and con.