Saturday, August 1, 2015

NWYM and human sexuality: to remember or to forget?



Let me begin with a true confession. I am a member of the board of elders of Northwest Yearly Meeting. Just a week ago we “released” West Hills Friends Church to follow the way they’ve discerned that God has been leading them, in acknowledgement that NWYM can’t tolerate this level of diversity, at this point in time, without breaking apart.
I am also a blogger and, as such, enjoy being a member of the wider community of Friends. But this month (I’m writing on the last day of July) is the first in which I have not been able to write a single blog or, more seriously, a single poem. The agony preceding, in the midst of, and following our decision has drained the words. Before yearly meeting, I found that the only way I could pray was, “Lord, have mercy.” And in the first four days following the announcement, all I could pray was, “I’m so sorry.” Over and over and over.
Eventually I sensed the voice of God—and definitely heard the voice of my husband—saying, “Enough, Nancy. You’re forgiven. Stop saying, ‘I’m sorry.’”
I want to acknowledge the other voices, the voices of care and compassion that have reached out to West Hills Friends. And to me. Many people from my own congregation, North Valley Friends, divided on the issues of human sexuality, have approached me with concern and love, even while they are agonizing over the decision.
I especially want to acknowledge the attitude of WHF. Throughout the two-year process we’ve recently gone through, and during and after yearly meeting, believers from this congregation have been so gracious and respectful. That continues, in spite of the grief and pain. I’ve had emails from individuals at WHF this week, asking if I’m alright, expressing concern and encouraging me. One said, “Yes! Of course we’re still friends!”
Soon after the decision was released, I was invited to a meeting of young adults of NWYM, those who were especially concerned (read, “outraged,” or “anguished”) by the decision. They included many members of my congregation, extended family members, and young people who were MKs when I served as a missionary in Bolivia. They also included several members of WHF. Most of these came up to hug me at the close of the meeting.
Back to West Hills, I think that if I were still in my idealistic little girl stage of life, I would look to these sisters and brothers and think to myself, “That’s how I want to be when I grow up.”
I also want to acknowledge my fellow and sister members of the board of elders. We went into yearly meeting week mindful of the differing perspectives we represented, matching the whole gamut of positions in the wider yearly meeting. But throughout the week we managed to proceed with love and respect for each other. And we did indeed come to a new place. We found we could not find fault with WHF for not “being in compliance” with a section of Faith & Practice that the yearly meeting no longer holds in consensus. We realized that we had a deeper level of theological discernment ahead of us. And we also sensed the pain of the whole yearly meeting, coming from both sides of the issue, and our sense of the possible results of any decision. We came to the language of “releasing” WHF out of our growing respect for the way these brothers and sisters were moving forward, our desire for their spiritual prosperity and our hope for a future reconnection. Individual members of the board grieved our decision for different reasons, but we all grieved.
 I realize that what I write here may meet with cynicism. I’ll take it as it comes and probably keep silent. (That’s a prediction, not a promise.) I do find hope in the movement of young adults and others to appeal the elders’ decision. This brings more people into the discernment process and perhaps will lead to a better way forward, although getting there will continue to be hard.
While I’m more inclined to short blogs, and this one has already leaped the bounds of that ideal, I want to reflect on a section of Scripture that is guiding me as I reflect on the deeper issues of human sexuality. Some time ago I ran across several parallel passages in the book of Isaiah that amazed and delighted me. I love biblical contradictions that in time tell me I’ve gotten their name wrong. Not “contradiction” they insist. Our name is “paradox.” So, here it is.
In Isaiah 46:9, the word of the Lord comes through the prophet to tell the people of Israel, “Remember the former things, those of long ago; I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me.” The passage goes on. And in many other places throughout the Scriptures, God encourages us to value the old ways, the holy traditions and understandings that have been faithfully handed down to us, as we also remember God’s loving acts toward God’s people in the past.
Here’s the parallel passage, a few chapters distant, but coming from the same historical context. Hear the word of the Lord, through the prophet Isaiah: “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wilderness” (43:18-19).
So which is it? Are we facing the threat of straying from the ancient path of God, giving in to ungodly pressures from our surrounding context? (This often has happened in the history of the Christian church.) Or is the Spirit of God showing us something new, something that includes new light on the meanings behind the Scriptures? (This often has happened in the history of the Christian church.)
I find myself right-smacky-dab (as my Grandma would have phrased it) in the middle. I hear truth from both sides. I did get a word from the Lord recently that I feel is sound and real. I asked God to show me which way was true (remember or forget?), and I sensed the Spirit saying, “I’m not going to tell you as an individual; I will reveal this mystery to the gathered body.” But I have no sense of how long this revelation with take. I’m sure God can speak faster than the speed of light, but we’re not always so quick at hearing.
I do have the advantage of my personality type. I’m a poet. I love mystery and am highly tolerant of ambiguity. I can wait my way through pain. But not without the hope of an answer. One of my pastors reminded me this week of a quote by Rainer Maria Rilke (already underlined in my own copy of his book), writing to a “young poet”:
“…I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything that is unsolved in your heart and to try to cherish the questions themselves, like closed rooms and like books written in a very strange tongue. Do not search now for the answers which cannot be given you because you could not live them. It is a matter of living everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, one distant day live right into the answer.”
The only part of that I find issue with is the injunction not to search now. We don’t dare stop searching. Only God can help us live the answers.
In the meantime, I would encourage all of us to drop the language of “villains” and “victims.” We can turn the “meantime” into a kinder time by the way we treat each other and talk about each other.
Here are some prayer requests for the larger body of Quakers, ways to hold NWYM in the light:
--Pray for the LGBTQ people in our midst, as others have pleaded, that they can understand they are not being rejected once again.
--Pray for a way for us to stay together and do the hard word of discernment required of us.
--Pray that we can, even now, reach out with compassion and be Friends of Jesus right where we are—and anywhere else in the world God sends us.

23 comments:

  1. The contradiction is superficial because neither of the two passages are really about the importance of old traditions or about the importance of new perspectives:

    Both are rather about the need to make turning to God our primary value.

    The 'things of old' to be remembered are cited as evidence of God's power and patient accomplishment of God's true purposes, not as practices to be followed for their own sakes.

    The 'new things' God does are cited as evidence that God and those purposes transcend whatever images people construct of God, inadvertently rendering God as a creature of human tradition. God subverts such understandings by breaking new ground: "lest you should say, 'Behold, I knew [these things]' "

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  2. Thank you. I have been wishing to have a some insight of where the decision came from.

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  3. Thank you. Being from afar but being concerned, I was hoping you would blog about it to give insights that others are not in a position to; to complement the expressions of pain from those in WHF and those who feel very close to WHF. And your post is helpful. And it was appropriate to suggest how folks might pray.

    There certainly is a big difference between those who are within the institutions of Quakerism and are trying to deal sensitively with the tensions within them, and those like me who have stepped out of those institutions and are trying to be a part of a new thing which is an expression of God's love and power in the world. We all need to pray. Those of us not feeling called to walk within the old structures of Quakerism are still pained about what the tensions are doing in several places in the Quaker world. Sometimes we wonder if there is a place for us to do or speak anything about that more directly, or if we need to be clear our role is to provide a place of renewal outside those structures and avoid the temptation to insert ourselves in the struggles.

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    1. Yes! I envy your success in finding/making a new structure where you and others are able to enhance one another's worship... The old structures aren't 'wrong'; they just don't serve those functions for us anymore -- but serve other functions for another population.

      What's working for me is a nightly prayer/meditation with my wife.

      (I'm out of the Meeting proper until I fix my bike tires and can afford a new pump. As we don't quite inhabit the same world, my efforts to do God's job for them -- are better left to God!)

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  4. Thank you Nancy for these heartfelt and helpful insights into the process by which the NWYM Elders came to their decision to "release" WHF. I appreciate your transparency and thoughtfulness in sharing how excruciating the process was.

    And yet... Asking that the language of "victims" be dropped, and hoping that the LGBTQ people in our midst "understand they are not being rejected once again," smacks of the insensitivity that comes with being in a position of privilege. It is easy for us who are ensconced safely within the folds of what has been deemed acceptable to have difficulty seeing through the eyes of those kept on the margins.

    There are, in fact, victims here. They have, in fact, been rejected once again, and this rejection has brought anguish. To gloss over that only adds insult to injury.

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    1. Through forgiveness victims are turned into victors. Jesus is the forgiving victim and opens the way in which we, too, can walk.

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  5. There is something you state it in the first paragraph of this blog that confuses me " ,,,in acknowledgement that NWYM can’t tolerate this level of diversity, at this point in time, without breaking apart." Are not the Elders by submiting to the demands of a few meetings and releasing West Hills Friends in itself shattering to North West Yearly Meeting? It reminds me of the comment by an unknown major in Vietnam, "We had to destroy the village in order to save it" Consider: The elders have released a meeting that: 1) By my personal experience works very hard at being Quakerly, following where the Light leads and embodying the core messages of love and tolerance put forth by Christ. . 2) Is growing and prospering 3) Has deep roots both in NWYM and to Quakers across the globe 4) Who carefully, deliberately in a Quaker manner over the course of years addressed the sexuality of a marginalized segment of society and their right for inclusiveness in that society and access to Christ's love.
    With these facts in mind I fear that through this action the vision of shattering NWYM structure embraced by the Elders when some meetings threatened to leave if WHF did not change or release themselves (in effect an act of coercion and violence) ignored a deeper component of shattering. One between individual Friends some of who now wonder if they are welcome or will be the next ones forced out, others who are angry because they see WHF as being thrown under the bus and still others who may now harbor some resentment towards both the meetings that forced the issue and the Elders who did their bidding. I fear in the act the village will not in truth be saved.
    I for one am holding a profound sadness for those who closed their hearts to fellow Friends in Christ and felt it necessary to use force when they decided that theirs is the only path to the light for by doing so I fear they have strayed from the path and so I for one will be praying for them so that they might one again discover the light of Gods unconditional love. Respectfully Kevin Melvin WHF member since 2012

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    1. Sometimes people serving clerk-type functions are simply stuck in a bind, between God's long-term purpose and the limitations of the actual people involved that make them incapable, for now, of agreeing to that ideal resolution.

      But God continues in the process of accomplishing all such purposes, slowed by consideration for human weaknesses -- but by no means blocked forever.

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  6. It is one of the signature forms of passive aggression among Friends to hold a meeting hostage to your opinions or feelings. "If you do [x], then I'll do [y]." Or "If you don't do [x] . . . "

    When a Friend or a meeting acts this way, they are essentially pitching over the side their submission to the work of the Holy Spirit in the meeting, believing that they already know what God wants the meeting to do. In this case, I imagine that the meetings threatening to leave the yearly meeting rest their certainty on their reading of scripture, just as earlier Friends might have done when they defended their practice of slaveholding. And here I am mostly referring to an interpretation against homosexuality.

    But that's not why they drove West Hills out. This they did from an insistence on a form of purity, that a meeting that flouts God's will as they see it poses a threat, an infectious presence of sin that cannot be tolerated. The scripture usually used in this instance is "Yoke not yourself to an unbeliever."

    But—assuming you're going to follow Paul in this—West Hills Meeting is not an unbelieving meeting. It may be a sinful one, though I personally think just the opposite. But we all are sinful, aren't we? And is the "sin" of embracing the love manifest in all people, regardless of their sexual orientation, contagious? Is purity one of our key moral paradigms as Friends?

    I feel that clerks faced with this kind of extortion should urge the aggressors to rethink their aggression, and if the aggressors do not reconsider their actions, the meeting should move on to some other business, hoping that the aggressors will rediscover their discipleship, their surrender to the living, moving of the Holy Spirit among them rather than to their fear of infection.

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    1. In fact, purity was a key moral paradigm of early Friends. They were declaring people not to be Friends who claimed to be decades before the formal membership process was established. There were many infractions for which Friends could be thrown out of membership. William Penn was thrown out for being in debt after his money was embezzled by his financial manager, not Friends' finest hour but not atypical of early Friends.

      So there are deep roots in Quakerism of a purity culture in which standards, sometimes unreasonable ones, are held out and Friends are judged who do not live up to them. Many of the things Friends struggle today have roots in faults (of which the purity culture is not the only one) which go back hundreds of years.

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    2. Not to contradict, but to amplify on what Bill says here —

      Purity is also a strong theme in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. It’s the basis of the so-called Holiness Code. It goes back a good three millennia further than the time of the early Friends.

      The early Friends were (it seems to me) picking up on something in the Puritan culture that surrounded them, out of which their own movement grew, which was a tendency to take up Holiness values and practices from the Old Testament without fully registering the ways in which Jesus modified them. Notice that “Puritan”, as a word, derives from “purity”. The Puritans wanted to hold their world to purity, to Holiness standards. But they are remembered for their frequently unreasonable harshness.

      Jesus upheld the theme of purity from Leviticus and Deuteronomy. But he relocated it from a concern with external dirt and defilements to a focus on defilements of the heart and mind. We see this for example in Matthew 23:25-28. And it’s worth noting that this critical passage in Matthew comes immediately after another passage (vv 23-24) in which Jesus says, “Woe to you...: you ... have neglected the weightier matters of ... justice and mercy and faith.” The danger of failing to see and obey the full meaning of justice, mercy and faith is an eternal problem for us all, but here Jesus ties it particularly to those of us who fall in love with external signs of purity.

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  7. Our beloved LGBTQ Friends WERE "being rejected once again " through the action of the YM Board of Elders. So, why is Nancy asking us to pray that god might pull the wool over their eyes to prevent them from perceiving that fact? Instead, let's conside praying that the board will recognize that it behaved cruelly, largely for the sake of expediency, and that it votes to overturn its decision? We might also try praying that board members recommend changing the text of our F&P to welcome everyone into our hearts and congregations.

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    1. Please pardon the typos; I posted from a phone.

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    2. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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  9. When our feeling, after doing something, is to say to God, “I’m so sorry,” over and over again, perhaps we need to understand that this is a response to God telling us in our heart that what we did was wrong.

    I have admired NWYM from afar for a number of years because of its Samuel School. What would the leaders of Samuel School have to say about this feeling, “I’m so sorry”?

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    1. If the Equality testimony is too diverse for your Meeting to handle, the Meeting should be broken apart - it is broken. The actions of NWYM shame us all and will drive our children from the faith.

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  10. Whenever I am inclined to take an action out of fear - fear of contamination, fear of rejection, fear of failure, fear due to coercion - I try (often unsuccessfully) to let pure unconditional love enter my heart so it (and not fear) can rule it. To err due to unconditional love is much more Godly than to err due to fear.

    The thing I pray is that the elders of NWYM reconsider their position in the light of unconditional love. It may just take ONE courageous elder (perhaps you, Nancy) to say to the others, "I made a mistake and have been convicted to change my mind". Then enter silence with them to see where the Holy Spirit leads you.

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    1. Perhaps the bottom line is that functionally the principal job of the elders, it appears to this outsider, is to protect the institution. And their decision may well have been appropriate from that perspective. If institutional protection isn't your thing, you may see the decision differently.

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  11. It is the furthest thing from institutional protection even, if that is a goal. The people who cannot handle Equality in the Meeting will not outlive the young Friends who are being driven away by their bigotry. This destroys the institution.

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  12. Friends, I think that this is a really good discussion about the meaning of Quakerism, the role of Quaker institutions, etc. There is a lot of understandable frustration with decisions made in NWYM. But I want to offer a Friendly reminder that this blog was not shared by an institution but by a human being. Nancy is my friend and a gentle, discerning Friend who seeks to love others deeply and follow Christ completely. She shared openly and vulnerably in this post and I imagine it would be hard to read some of these responses. Speak truth and seek justice, but do remember that "our struggle is not about flesh and blood" and it's certainly not against gracious human beings like Nancy.

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    1. There simply is no way to ensure that "No human beings were mangled in the making of this decision." Even the seemingly neutral "We have not reached unity" kind of nondecision is going to be painful for people who feel that their values are urgent and being wrongly denied by delay -- which I suspect would apply to people on all sides of this issue (which seems to me like an absurd nonissue, something resolved decades ago by the group of ex-military folks I hung out with during the late 60's: ie Gay folks among them was gay; and straight folks was straight; everyone acted accordingly and it weren't nobody's business but their own. They got along just fine; but of course their idea of perfection was fairly simple: Everyone should smoke pot and take acid and stop killing each other. And the first two criteria were a lot less important to them than the third.)
      So it looks like the big question is: Why do people get so personally-attached to having their religious organization support their ideals...? Yes, I too hate to see us fall short -- but human beings and our organizations are like that, you know!

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  13. Thank you Andy. Nancy is wise and discerning. She loves God and people and creation. You won't find a more Spirit-filled and faithful disciple of Jesus.

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