Lessons From My Horse, Part 1

So I have this horse. She doesn’t actually belong to me, but I see her all the time, and I'm pretty sure I love her more than anyone else, and I hope someday she gets to be mine.

Working with a horse has been a frustrating, eye-opening, and remarkably rewarding experience. Horses are powerful. They can break your bones or kill you if you're flippant or foolish around them. And yet if you know how to ask, they will do anything for you. They will trust you, and the trust of a horse is no after thought.  It is a trust that says, I know I will not die as long as you’re here. 

Training a horse especially when you've never trained one before, is challenging for a very specific reason. The horse can't speak. She can't understand English. And I can't speak horse. And yet, horses can be taught to do the most incredible things. Why? Because horses can learn from non verbals. In fact, that's the only way to teach them. And they learn surprisingly fast. They learn so fast, that you better know what you're doing before you ask them to do it or you could end up teaching something you have to un-teach and fix at a later date.  Like, next week when you realize you didn’t mean what you taught.  Or is it that you didn’t teach what you meant? 

Working with a horse has taught me a lot about action. I can stand in the middle of the round pen and look at my horse and say, "Okay, it's time to lunge,” (which means exercising on a lead rope in a circle around the trainer) and she'll just stand there and look at me. But if I step to the right so I'm in line with her hip and simultaneously move my left hand, with the lead rope in it, out and point to the left, she'll instinctively start walking. I don't have to say a word. I may train her to understand the words "walk," "trot," "run," but she will only understand those words because they were connected to non verbals as she trained. 

Working with my horse has taught me that what I do matters a lot more than what I say and what I say MUST be connected to what I do, and I don't think this is any different than with people. The difference is, people can understand what I say and if I say something that is disconnected from what I am doing, they can judge me for it.  

In a place and time where people throw words around like healing balm and gyuto knives all at once, perhaps we would do well to hold our tongue and consider a different way of understanding one another.  I think it would do all church leaders some good to connect with someone who truly understands the equine species and learn a little of what it means to work with a horse. Who knows? It just might do wonders for the church. Maybe even miracles.

Horses are incredibly forgiving.  They fill in places we're not capable of filling ourselves.

--Buck Brannaman

The dilemma of Quaker time

Quakers have a lot of terminology that can be overwhelming to convinced Quakers.  It can be daunting even for birthright Quakers.1  See what I mean?  We have our own terms for all kinds of things such as the Inner Light, after the manner of Friends, weighty Friend, open worship, recording, meeting house, and so many others, not to mention our many acronyms.  But a new term was introduced to me this week that I really like.  After one of the evening services at yearly meeting this week, the young adults invited the board of elders to come and listen to a great discussion that didn’t end until nearly midnight.  I was tired and still had to drive the forty minutes back to Forest Grove on entirely unlit backroads with someone else’s car.  On my way out, I mentioned to a friend to say a little prayer for safety and he responded, “Take your time--Quaker time.”  Immediately understanding the joke, I laughed.  But as I thought about it more, I considered the pithiness of that phrase, and I have decided it’s time to introduce this term into the lexicon of Quaker vocabulary.

Quaker time means taking the time you need to do something well and without unnecessary rush.    More like the kairos of time versus the kronos, to use old Greek examples.  In short, and slightly in jest, it means we take a long time to make decisions.  Indeed, one of my friends earlier this week compared Quaker decision making to the Ents of Lord of the Rings lore.  I had to agree and responded, “That is so true!” And then went on to quote Lord of the Rings because it’s always worth lingering on for just a little bit longer.

In Quaker tradition, we don’t vote on church decisions.  Church-wide decisions, local or yearly meeting level, are reached by consensus.2  This is no longer the case for all Quakers today, but it is still the way of doing business for many yearly meetings, including mine.

Consensus takes time.  Yearly Meeting annual sessions meet for a collective five days with the business meeting gathering for three hours a day on all but one of those days.  Easier decisions can be made over a course of a few days.  Harder decisions, ones with great potential to breed divisiveness, discord, damaging conflict and that come with an element of fear are approached lightly and with great deliberation before even reaching the floor of the business meeting.  These discussions can take years.  Sometimes the process does not feel so unlike the gathering of the Ents, and those who are unaccustomed to it, may feel much like the young hobbits desperate for the Ents to make a decision to fight.  “Our friends are out there!” they cry to Treebeard.  They need our help!  They can not fight this war on their own.”  Yet, Treebeard responds, “But you must understand, young hobbit, it takes a long time to say anything in Old Entish, and we never say anything unless it is worth taking a long time to say.”  That is not so unlike the Quaker passage of time.  It takes a long time to say things in Quaker-speak.  

And yet, some of these discussions come with a paradox, a sense of urgency, and the great quandary is discerning when to be urgent and when to be slow.  The paradox arrives when the sense of urgency and the need to be slow simultaneously hold incomparably dire importance.

This year, my yearly meeting has come to discover that we as a whole are not in unity over our feelings and understanding around homosexuality.  It was known that one church in particular held a different view than our conservative Faith and Practice statement, but that was about it until the conversation was broken wide open last year due to an outside concern from a mixed group of Quakers and non-Quakers.  When that portion of our Faith and Practice was brought to the floor of the business meeting this year, we discovered great disunity throughout our yearly meeting and recognized a need to have much longer conversations about it, especially with our local meetings.3  Because we don’t want a divide to happen, and because we recognize that God values time, too, that minds can’t be pushed to change, we know time is our only option.

Yet, equally paramount is the reality of the lives of gay children.  As a gay friend/Friend, who both stupidly and very bravely and wisely attended the sessions this year, stated in that above mentioned young adult discussion, children are dying at an alarming rate.  They are harassed, beaten up, disregarded, thrown out of their own homes, and given the absolute opposite of the love of Jesus.  With no where left to feel any sense of goodness about themselves, they take their lives.  And the worst contributor to this is the Church.

And so here Northwest Yearly Meeting sits, as with so many of the big questions in life, in a paradox.  We also rest, somewhat precariously, on the edge of a precipice we can’t yet see out over, wondering what we can offer to our youth, perhaps unaware of just how much our youth will end up offering us in this discussion as the years pass through.  

Many of us Christians are baffled by the strange story of Jesus’ progressive healing of the blind man, when it seemed to take him multiple times to accurately sharpen the man’s vision.  But that story carried a new kind of weight for me this week, a descriptive power I had never seen before.  Change and shift in thoughts and ideas don’t happen suddenly.  Life is constantly evolving; our thought processes are not exempt.  Like this man’s sight, clarity in our understanding of faith and issues comes slowly as we gather more information and stories so as to, as one of my seminary professors once said, give the Holy Spirit more to work with.  When a sizable group of people with differing opinions come together and desire to reach consensus on an issue, we have to recognize the time it will take for true clarity to come, and we have to be prepared to see in ways we never could have guessed.  

And yet, on an issue as urgent as the one before us, I am left holding a morass of questions.  We discuss homosexuality as an issue as if it can be shelved at inconvenient times, put on hold while we eat dinner and go to work.  But the LGBTQ community is more than an issue; it’s people.  It’s real human lives, and so many of them are hanging in the balance desperately wishing that someone would simply love them.  How many more children will die during the lengthy amount of time--years, I assume--it will take to begin making significant movement in this area as a yearly meeting?  But then how many lives would be lost if we rushed a decision and forced a gulf to open up between our churches and people?  Patience is a virtue, we know.  Yet when children are dying from utter despair, patience feels more like a necessary evil.  

It does, indeed, take a long time to say what needs to be said and to make decisions in the Quaker world.  We try our best not to do either unless we believe they are worth doing.  But we can’t deny the cries from those who continue to tell us their friends are out there, that they cannot fight this on their own.  What does it look like to be faithful to the Holy Spirit’s leading for the Northwest Yearly Meeting?  It’s hard to say.  Time will tell.  Quaker time.

1. A convinced Quaker is one who came into the Quaker church from elsewhere and chose to become Quaker.  A birthright Quaker is one who is born into the Quaker tradition. 

2.  Consensus doesn’t mean everyone agrees wholeheartedly with a decision.  It means all are given the chance to be heard, the holy spirit is given the time to speak, and a general trust is built around the community and the subject at hand so that if an agreement is reached to approve an action and there are still a few dissenters, these dissenters have come to trust the community even if they, themselves, do not agree.  If they strongly disagree, they have permission to put their names on the official minute stating so.

3. individual churches

My Quaker Soul part 1

On Tuesday, at 5:28am, I hopped onto my first of four buses that would make up my sunrise journey from Vancouver to Newberg. At 8:30, I stepped off the final bus and wandered on over to the business meeting going on in Bauman Auditorium on the George Fox Campus.

I have not been to yearly meeting in four years. In August of 2008, I packed up my car and drove 2,500 miles to central Kentucky for seminary. With that, I left behind the only kind of church I had ever known and I stumbled into a vast wilderness of baptists, methodists, christians (the restorative movement, not the general religion), baptists (did I say that already? There are SO many different types of baptists!), and countless others. When I finally found a church I decided to settle on, I ended up driving by nine other churches every Sunday before getting to mine. I had certainly landed in the Bible belt.

I loved that church, still do, but I longed for quiet. I longed for room in worship, moments of silence and stillness in transitions, prayers without musical soundtrack, and long spaces of communal silence and centering. Lexington has a local Friends meeting house, and I attended a few times. It was the friendliest group of people I met in Kentucky, and I loved it, but desiring a common denominator of faith in Jesus Christ drew me to the nearby Christian and Missionary Alliance church which I discovered because the pastor's wife was the campus pastor at Asbury. Even as I grew to love that church, I really grieved the lack of a church that understood how to marry distinctive Quaker ideology and disciplines with a Christocentric view of faith and practice.

By a landslide, the United Methodist church is the most represented denomination at Asbury Seminary. Other historically Wesleyan churches make up the next largest representations. As a Wesleyan/Holiness based school in the South it was a foreign world to me culturally and religiously. It turned out to be an impressively painful and incredibly healing and life-giving experience, but one of the things it taught me, or perhaps reiterated for me, was the reality that I am a Quaker in my soul. No matter where I live and what church I may be attending, I will always favor the Friends way of being, and I will always call myself a Quaker when people ask.

Asbury is not officially affiliated with any denomination. It is an institution controlled by a dusty hierarchy which has no real structure of accountability. In 2008, I arrived at a school that was in the midst of administrative turmoil that had reverberated to every sector Asbury touched and had left nothing unscathed. A president had resigned on the day of orientation the year before, and the divisive weeks and months around that event had left a spirit of contention on the campus so clear that I felt it even a year later. Far beyond the time it should have taken, Asbury finally found a new president in the Spring of 2009, and when he and his family began work in July, the school seemed to exhale for the first time in a few of years and was finally able to really heal.

For the first time in my life I was able to place my experiences with George Fox University, where I had received my undergraduate degree and begun my seminary degree, and with the Northwest Yearly Meeting, where I was born and raised, in a larger context. We college students liked to complain about Fox, and there are certainly things to complain about, but after moving, I saw what the accountability of George Fox with the yearly meeting meant and why it mattered. I thought about who that accountability really was to--not to the paid administrative powers that be in the yearly meeting, but to every member of the yearly meeting, because Quakers believe all have a voice that matters. I imagined the uproar in the July yearly meeting business meetings, where everyone is encouraged to attend, every voice is given the chance to be heard, and no decision is made until common ground and consensus is reached, if this had happened at George Fox. I began to understand in a deep way the spiritual wisdom of the Quaker way of business and why it's necessary, and I discovered the sandy foundation of power without accountability.

Despite these issues, Asbury is full of broken people whose greatest desire is to seek out the truth and freedom of Jesus Christ. I do not regret my time there, and made some of my best friendships at Asbury. Though it took my stubborn and willful soul three years to finally be comfortable with it, I find myself reflecting warmly on the high church liturgy in chapel and wondering at the tangible vulnerability of receiving communion from my peers and mentors (I'm so thankful it wasn't the sterile disposable-plastic-cup-and-single-wafer-wam-bam-thank-you-ma'am way of communion). But there were countless times when I wanted to sit there in silence in my Quaker practice of communion, a communion where we all partake in the quiet together and invite in the presence and voice of the holy spirit in community. At the very least, I wanted them to turn off the music. Imagine the heightened awareness of vulnerability if communion were given and received in silence. I still would like to see that happen.

Being at Asbury taught me just how foreign my common Quaker understandings and practices are to the greater protestant world. Seminary was the first time I saw discernment discussed as an individual practice. I couldn't understand the idea of healthy personal discernment without a stronger value on community discernment. I still don't believe it's possible. And the idea of having a rich faith without practicing bread and wine/juice communion was absolutely incomprehensible to some. My world was as strange to many there as their's was to me.

Learning about the different facets of Christianity was eye opening for me. Attending a capital "H" Holiness school while coming from a background that pre-dated it exposed me to what it must be like when outsiders come into the Friends church which is full of practices, structure, and language that is unknown to people outside of the Friends world. In the end, I found myself simply wanting to teach everyone the value of Quaker theology (because its Biblical basis makes it really more than just an ideology), and I admit I delighted in telling people that Richard Foster was a Quaker and had, in fact, pastored my church at one time, albeit before I was born.

I left Oregon with no plans of coming back. The only reason I did was because I ran out of money after graduation. I came back kicking and screaming, really. On my return, I wanted to try to plug into a new church, make my own new start. I found a place in Portland, but after a few months I discovered no matter where I tried, I craved my Quaker worship. I ended up getting a job that worked me on most Sundays, but on my first Sunday off, I gave into my need for some good Quaker silence and fellowship and made quite the nutty trek via bicycle and bus to one of the Northwest Yearly Meeting churches in Portland. Even though I had never been there before, it was like finally coming home. My soul really rested for perhaps the first time in nearly four years. I love my Methodist friends, my Catholic family members, my second home CMA folks, among others, and I find great value in their traditions, but my heart will always be with my yearly meeting Friends.

This past week, walking up River Street heading to my first business meeting since 2008 was a homecoming I hadn't realized I had longed so much for.