In late 1992, I was earning more than I ever had. Yet every week I felt the urge to dump it all, move far away and do something else. I also often found myself asking, “So what?”
When you get to the “So what?” part of life, at whatever age – whether you know it or not, or use the same words–you’re looking for Wisdom.
But “where,” to quote an earlier seeker, “is Wisdom to be found?” (Job 28:12)
One place I looked for it was in the Bible. Others may find it in different sources; this is where I looked.
One reason was that for me the “So what?” question had been asked more urgently, wrestled with more memorably, and expressed more tellingly than I ever put it, in one phrase from a short book more than two thousand years old.
This phrase is, or should be, familiar to us all:
“‘Vanity of vanities,’ saith the Preacher, ‘all is vanity and a striving after wind.’”
For many of us, a time comes when reading a verse such as this, in the first chapter of the book of Ecclesiastes, is like having something reach out and grab you by the throat.
One result of my wrestling is a short book. It’s based on a series of lectures I gave at William Penn House in Washington DC in 1992.
Maybe it was reassuring that, with the crisis past, the Saturday afternoon session seemed to revert to annual routine: reports from Quaker Lake Camp, the ongoing work trips to Jamaican Friends, and more– fascinating to some, tedious to others.
My attention soon wandered. Which on this day, was likely a good sign. Even though this blog will likely have competition from a Greensboro daily paper, following up on the Quaker “Civil War stuff” here. Is it good news when what old-time Quakers called “The World” starts to follow our inelegant internal travails?
Scarcely an hour after loudly overturning its Executive Committee’s over-reach, the NorthCarolina YM session agreed to have distributed among its meetings a new “Plan” to “deal with” the divisive issues that have dogged the body, a plan that is highly like to stir more dissent.
“Orthodoxy and heterodoxy cannot coexist in one and the same person or organization,” evangelical Quaker leader Edward Mott thundered in 1946, as New England Yearly Meeting adopted its reunification proposals. “It has been, and is being attempted, but the result is always the same, namely failure.” And again: “All such interminglings should be canceled in the interest of truth and vital influence for Christ and His Church.”
Does this sound familiar? Seventy years later, the arguments have not really changed. Yet the reconstituted New England Yearly Meeting is still around (as, for that matter, is Oregon, now Northwest). And the verdict of experience points in a different direction: dual affiliation, in specially conducive circumstances (as in Philadelphia’/New York) can be very healing. But usually it is no big deal. When it serves a meeting community’s interests, it can work; if it doesn’t, it will eventually be set aside.
And crusades against it are little other than part of doctrinal purges, which are much more like the biblical plagues, as NCYM ought to be figuring out.
I won’t dissemble here.
Have we had enough of attempted doctrinal purges yet? I hope so. And if we have, then let’s also hope that North Carolina Friends will push this minor, manufactured problem of dual affiliation off the YM agenda.
More Carolina Quaker Turbulence: One Meeting Stays; Two Quit
All three of the Friends Meetings expelled from North Carolina Yearly Meeting (FUM) have now issued formal responses to this action, which was taken by the NCYM Executive Committee on August 20 (they called it a “release.”) Among them, the statements go in exactly opposite directions.
Continue reading More Carolina Quaker Turbulence: One Meeting Stays; Two Quit