The Christian's Secret to a Happy Life

I’ve just started reading The Christian’s Secret to a Happy Life by Hannah Whitall Smith. She was a famous Quaker in the late 19^th/early 20^th century. In fact, she may still be one of the most famous Quaker writers outside of liberal Quakerdom. (You can read a little more about and by her in Jessamyn West’s The Quaker Reader.)

The first part that really struck me, since I don’t care as much as some people whether or not her ideas are truly Scriptural, although I’m happy to report that it mattered very much to her and she quite certainly proved her point, was this:

It is our job to trust that God will transform us into what or whom we are called to be. It is God’s job to do the transforming. The trick is that we have to take the means that God chooses to transform us: we don’t get to choose. We might have liked to study and preach great words but instead God gives us elderly parents to comfort and read to. We might have liked to quietly write at our computers but instead God asks us to witness in the streets of Baghdad. Some of us thought we might become Quaker nuns but instead God gave us husbands and small children to teach us patience, forbearance and forgiveness.

Smith says it is our completeness of trust in God that marks our spiritual progress.

To those who worry about this kind of trust being just an excuse to keep women housebound and submissive, I’d say that the difference is in submission to God’s will which is not the same as submission to cultural norms or human oppression. It is truly a tragedy when any person hears God’s call and is prevented from responding fully by human conceptions of gender, race or class roles.

What I’m (always?) struggling with is the concept of God’s will for us. I think I believe that God knows us and wills the best for us.

Do I really? Do I really believe in that personal of a God/Goddess/Divine Presence? If not, why not?

Does God really have a Jesus face? This I know experimentally.

Or a Jesus heart? This is one of the metaphors that feels right to me, but not on any rational knowledge basis. It's more like an anthropomorphic way for me to comprehend something more vast and mysterious than I can quite wrap my human brain around.

And how does this fit with the Quaker process for corporate discernment of God’s will?

I don’t believe that God controls the outcomes for us. I believe that we live with the consequences of our choices, and of the choices made by many humans all along the course of history. For Smith, these choices would include whether we willingly enter into and learn from the path we are given or we chafe against it, becoming either apathetic or bitter and mean along the way. For Friends more generally, this would include the consequences of the discernment of earlier Meetings.

I’m also wondering about how this relates to another book more famous outside of Quaker circles than within, Celebration of Discipline by Richard Foster. Do the classic disciplines simply enable us to trust more fully? Or are they about enacting our own transformation? Hmmm.



P.S. This blog post was brought to you courtesy of an hour of waiting outside yesterday for the UPS truck since our intercom/doorbell system doesn’t work yet. I brought my book, my tea and my notebook down and sat on the edge of the planter box, listening to the sounds of the construction site on one side and the artificial waterfall on the other. I can’t decide whether this was more an example of discipline or of indulgence. Or a delightful congruence of both.

A good enough reason to pray

My Friend Brent Bill has a series going on his blog that he calls, "Quaker Wisdom for Today"

I commend it to you on a regular basis. But last Friday's quote was just so good that I want to copy it here to remind myself.

“A feeling of real need is always a good enough reason to pray.”

-Hannah Whitall Smith

For more on Smith, I commend to you my series of posts related to her book, The Christian's Secret to a Happy Life.

Sacred Compass Interview

This is the “interview” I conducted with J. Brent Bill, author of Sacred Compass: The Way of Spiritual Discernment. I am not confident of winning the contest, but I am impressed with Brent’s willingness to engage with the somewhat random questions that inquiring minds might send.

Because my life is so crazy this week that I don’t really have time to write anything else, I’m going to publish this interview in installments. One question per day. Great blog fodder for ten whole days. Subject to interruption if I have something more urgent to write about…

In each case, I have listed the question, as I sent it to him: these are in italics with an R. Then I have given his answers, marked with a B, and then my replies marked with an R but not in italics. Brent hasn’t seen this third part yet, but I hope to open up the conversation to you, my dear blog reader, to be part of this dialogue too. I can not promise that Brent Bill himself will answer your questions here – or even read them here – but I will try to continue the discussion if you’re interested in one of the topics.

As a final point to this introduction, I want to be clear that I’ve already read the whole book and I really liked it. I’ve already started recommending it to people in San Francisco. I commend it to your attention - ask for it at your local library or bookstore or order it from Quaker Books.

R: How/why did you decide to use a compass as your central metaphor?

B: The decision to use "compass" came about three weeks before the due date. Prior to that, the themes were of pilgrimage, discovery, and as way opens. But they needed something to hold them together. A reader I didn't know came up with the thought that a compass seemed to be the metaphor that could hold it together -- and they were right. As I began to think about it, a compass seems exactly right in this GPS age. A compass is never exact about how to get somewhere -- it mostly just points to true north. In the spiritual sense, to God. And a compass does not really help us avoid obstacles. When reading a compass, it doesn't say, "Watch out for that tree!" Instead, you have to walk around the tree, the swamp, the cliff, or whatever and then look at the compass to get back on track or pick up the trail. That idea really resonated with my experience of spiritual discernment and a life of pilgrimage.

R: One of my favorite insights, not original to me, about the spiritual path is that if you realize you’re off track, you can just decide to get back on the path and you’re there. I think that came from Hannah Whitall Smith. I really like the idea of having a spiritual compass to help you figure out which way to go from where you are.

Holiness: The Soul of Quakerism

A review and further reflections on Holiness: The Soul of Quakerism by Carole Dale Spencer

I’m trying to remember where I first heard of this book, and I can’t recall. I do know that I asked for it for Christmas in 2008, and thanks to my beloved Chris M., it’s been sitting on my shelf ever since, waiting for me to finish it.

I finally did it, because Spencer is coming to Quaker Heritage Day in Berkeley next week. It’s a tough read, if you’re not used to the academic style, but it gets easier near the end. And I’m really, really glad I read it.

A lot of the book is Spencer running through a series of individuals through Quaker history and showing how they are or are not exemplars of Quaker holiness. There’s more than 20 of them over 350 years, so if you want to know who they all are, read the book. Some of the history doesn’t agree with what I’ve learned – but then I only know what others have said about most of them. I agree with her interpretations of the ones I’ve read first hand: Hannah Whitall Smith and Richard Foster and Thomas Kelly. Elias Hicks, Joseph John Gurney and John Wilbur, these are three I’d like to read more of. (I’ve got the new version of Hicks’ Journal, which I understand addresses some of her criticisms.) I wouldn’t call myself a Beanite Friend, partly because I think that sounds silly, partly because I don’t think of myself as a follower of a particular Quaker ancestor, and partly because I don’t know enough of Joel Bean’s actual work to have a valid opinion. More and more I think I should read his work myself.

But I’m less interested in the historical aspects than in my own affinity for the key elements of Quaker holiness. I think this could be a key to what holds convergent Friends together in my mind. Or maybe it’s just the key to my own spiritual journey.

I think it’s important to separate the current iteration of non-Quaker holiness movements from what Spencer and I are talking about. Apparently, Quakers have always had a slightly different definition of holiness from the religious mainstream. Meaning we don’t have to equate holiness with American rightwing politics and religious fundamentalists. Actually quite the opposite, in some cases.

Spencer teases out eight separate elements of traditional Quaker holiness. I’ll list them here, because I’m copying them from the book: Scripture, Eschatology, Conversion, Evangelism, Charisma, Suffering, Mysticism, Perfection.

Spencer also explains how these elements relate to evangelical concepts like justification and sanctification, but I can’t keep them straight. Frankly, I think that Conversion and Evangelism are two parts of the same thing, and that Suffering and Perfection are another inseparable pair. And if you’ve got an hour or two, I’d be happy to sit down and explain why I think so and discuss it with you. I could use the help in working it all out in my own head. But for the purposes of this book review, let me just encourage you to read Spencer’s explanations of what each means.

Personally, I can only manage to keep three aspects in my head, in part because I think they are all inter-related and they all cycle around to each other.

1) Perfection, meaning holy obedience, spiritual growth, acting like Jesus, living up to the Light we’ve been given, actually doing what we know is right
2) Mysticism – listening to God, hearing Christ Jesus speak to my condition, cultivating and holding close to the intimate relationship with God
3) Witness, which in my mind includes spreading the word, sharing the Good News, working to improve the world, teaching and healing like Jesus.

The desire for holy perfection and faithful witness, the understanding of their meaning, and the strength to accomplish them come from our mystical relationship with God. I think that when Friends have kept close to that guide, then we have avoided falling into the rigid and rulebound forms of religion. I think that scripture is a tool to be used with our mystical interpretation. The Bible may not be perfect, but it’s the best description of Jesus’s teaching and actions that we’ve got.

I have three examples of how perfection and witness are related, but none of them comes from Spencer’s book so don’t blame her if they don’t speak to you. One is that we know that having a low flow showerhead isn’t going to save the world, but it helps to have your own house in order before you try to change farmers’ wasteful irrigation practices. Second, you can’t effectively protest factory working conditions while wearing clothes made in sweatshops. Third, people are more likely to listen to you tell them how Jesus is a blessing in your life if you are a blessing to your family and friends.

Now I know that these aren’t strict rules, and it’s not true that we can’t say anything about the wrongs of the world until we’re free from all our sins. But we have to be actively examining our own lives for the seeds of war and continually doing something about our own lives as we go along. And then we can speak with Truth and Power. Part of this is the confidence that comes with not feeling like a hypocrite and the recognition from one’s opponent that one is walking the walk. But I truly think there is something divinely inspired that makes a person a better advocate who has removed the beam from her own eye without getting bogged down in that process. Jesus offers us some good examples of looking at rules, and acting with love, even if, on occasion, that contradicts a generally useful rule. (Like healing on the Sabbath, for example.)

I think Spencer is right that our various forms of worship are culturally and temporally specific, not divinely mandated. What’s important is that our worship enables us to achieve communion with God – to hear God speaking to us. Hours and hours of silence seem intensely important to me, and absolutely fruitless to others. I’m willing to accept that other people experience God in other ways. (I don’t believe this is divided along lines of race, class or geography, but I know that what we’re used to makes a big difference.)

What is missing from this book is the growing holiness movement among unprogrammed Friends in the last ten to twenty years. That’s probably because we don’t call it that usually. But I think that Lloyd Lee Wilson’s book, Essays on a Quaker Vision of Gospel Order, fits all of Spencer’s criteria for Quaker holiness. I think some (not all) of our Quaker environmentalists are actually part of a holiness movement. In my local world, I think that the reason that Chris Moore-Backman’s and Carl Magruder’s ministries are so attractive to some and so off-putting to others is because they are actually preaching Quaker holiness. They’re just not using that word.

And then there’s me. Not that I am such a stellar example of Christian perfection. But I want to affirm that I’m really trying, on all these points. I’m just now understanding that this Quaker holiness is what calls to me in the Friends that I would call convergent. Do you feel the same way?

In all the branches of Friends, in all eras, there have been examples of Quaker holiness, real people who have touched the lives of the people around them, even if they didn’t publish any books or start any new movements bearing their names. Think about who you know that you admire as a Quaker. In what ways do they exemplify Quaker holiness? In what ways do they contradict my theory? You don’t have to name them here on this blog, but I’m really curious whether this idea resonates with other Friends or not.

Companions on the Journey

This morning, I felt blessed to sit in worship with both my sons at their school. Along with a few hundred other people, some of whom are also good Friends of mine. But to be able to look across the gymnasium and share a smile with my “baby” and to feel the presence of God in the room – this is a joy I have never known before.

Last week, I had lunch with Karen Sloan. Presbymergent party coordinator is perhaps her unofficial title. We first met in June at the Spiritual Ecology conference organized by the Re-Imagine folks and it took us this long to arrange another meeting. We connected pretty quickly in June and last week’s three hour lunch date confirmed the grace of this beginning friendship. Our spiritual connections and personal connections complement and reinforce each other. Including our mutual leading to bring people together around the emerging motion in our traditional denominations.

AND she gave me a book: An Emergent Manifesto of Hope, edited by Doug Pagitt and Tony Jones, featuring essays by Karen, Mark Scandrette, Carla Barnhill, Adam Walker Cleaveland, Ryan Bolger, Brian McLaren and a host of other people I hadn’t heard of. Now, I didn’t really need another must-read book right now, but it’s been good to interweave this consciously postmodern text with Hannah Whitall Smith’s 1870 text.



The weekend before, we were graced with a visit from Jeff Hipp of NEYM. We made arrangements via Facebook and met up at SFMM. Meeting for worship was relatively quiet, maybe one or two brief messages. Jeff said he didn’t know a large urban meeting could be that silent, and he meant it in a good way.

We went out to lunch at the SFPL cafe with my Friend Stephen and my family. It’s not every tour of SF that includes a visit to the children’s collection at the Main Library. Then we gave Jeff a ride out to Golden Gate Park where we attended a kindergarten soccer game and Jeff went exploring in the park and back toward the center of town.

I first met Jeff at the FWCC Annual Meeting last March in Providence, RI. He gave me a ride up to Boston for the convergent Friends dinner at Will T’s house. It was lovely to have the chance to chat and connect again. Intervisitation in its simplest form.

Thank you, Karen, Jeff, Henry and Silas, for being my friends, for sharing your spiritual journeys with me.