The Friendly Funnel

It is now only two hours before I will put my beloved Siamese, Sugar, to sleep. She has taught me so much about love, trust, compassion… She has been there for me when I needed a friend, someone to cuddle with until the tears stopped. And she’s taught me a surprising amount about God.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the good times I’ve had with Sugar, and about what a good friend she’s been to me over the years. I’ve remembered how she could always help me find the strength to continue when life was really hard. She didn’t make things better — the problems were still there — but she showed me I had the strength to live through them.

I’ve never been comfortable about the idea of a “fairy Godmother” type of God, the kind who just takes away problems and makes things better. Sugar has pointed me to what God could be, if I’d let Him: He could help me see that I have the strength to make it through.

The treatments for my beloved Siamese kitty Sugar are starting to fail. She is feeling worse and worse and there’s nothing more I can do for her. My husband and I’ve made the appointment to have her put down this Thursday at 5:30 PM.

I ask that you all hold me in the Light. She is very precious to me and I am really not doing well.

I’m taking a hopefully brief hiatus from this blog. There’s just too much going on in my life right now (briefly: my kitty Sugar is dying, and I’m looking at left wrist surgery in the next couple of months) for me to have the energy to post in any sort of regular fashion on here. I do have ideas for future posts, so I will be back. I’m just not entirely sure when that will be.

In the meantime, you all can check out my livejournal (http://funnel101.livejournal.com) or email me at thefriendlyfunnel@quakerism.net .

I have a dream that one day Quakerism can live up to its testimonies: all of them, not just the Peace testimony (which is about so much more than just being antiwar). I have a dream that we will continue to struggle for unity and not give up if it doesn’t come easily and not reduce the dream of unity to an excuse for passive complacency. I have a dream that Quakerism will be known for its message that any one can speak and have God not only hear them, but reply. I have a dream that Quakerism will one day be known more for its testimonies than its oatmeal.

I have a dream that Quakers won’t just cling to one testimony, one that they already believed in and that is easy for them to accept, but that we will accept all the testimonies and really try to live our lives by them; otherwise, we’re just using them as trophies for our egos. I have a dream that one day no Quaker meeting will feel stifling, that no Quaker meeting will make anyone feel unwelcome, because we’re all children of God. I have a dream that Monthly Meetings will view themselves not as stagnant protectors of history, but living streams of Spirit, especially when it would be easier to be stagnant and complacent.

I have a dream that Quakers will take seriously the inward work required of our religion, that each of us will come to Meeting as prepared as we would if we were a priest or pastor or a rabbi, etc. I have a dream that Quakerism will be known as the religion where all are clergy, instead of being known as the religion that has none.

How far we have come, Friends, and how far we still have left to go.

You might want to turn up the volume, my singing voice isn’t loud. The lyrics are “Dona nobis pacem”, which means “Give us peace”.

One of the reasons I haven’t posted much in the last month is that I requested a Clearness Committee partially about the purpose of this blog. The meeting was yesterday. I still don’t have clearness about whether this blog should be used for ministry only or as a means of spiritual journaling, where I vent my questions and share my thoughts.

But the heart of this Clearness Committee was about my concern about the state of the Meeting with regards to gay marriage. This concern has two parts: first, I am concerned that where the Meeting is makes us not as welcoming as we should be to GLBTQ people; second, I am concerned about the damage done to the Meeting during the stage of conflict that led up to our current position and that time alone won’t adequately heal these wounds. (For the record, our position is that a gay couple can have a commitment ceremony with individual members taking that commitment under their care.)

Without going into too much detail about the inner workings of my Monthly Meeting, I discovered during the Clearness Committee meeting yesterday that even just defining what the letters GLBTQ stand for can be seen as stirring up controversy. This discovery occurred after the statement was made that I would have been treated exactly the same by the Meeting if my life partner had been a woman instead of a man; and that the Meeting has no problem welcoming GLBTQ people specifically. I asked: “How can our Meeting be truly welcoming to people when we can’t even discuss what their letter stands for?”

If we are so uncomfortable discussing sexuality that even the most general information can be seen as controversial, how can this not affect how we treat people who challenge our perceptions of “normal” sexuality and gender?

This saddens me greatly, because I had hoped that my Meeting was past this. And it saddens me to know that there must be people who don’t or won’t feel as welcome as everyone else in my Meeting community.

I went into the Clearness Committee meeting with one question first in my mind: what am I being called to do? It had become clear that my concern was not something I should lay down: because I’ve tried that in the past and it just keeps coming back. By the end of the meeting, I didn’t feel I had the clearness I’d been seeking. But it came to me last night, as I was trying to process what happened during the Clearness Committee meeting, that I do know what I’m being called to do and to say that I don’t know is just an excuse to give me the option to choose not to do it.

I am, quite simply, being called to speak. I am being called to break the silence that smothers my Meeting with regards to non-heterosexual people, loves, sexuality, and even faith. I am being called to stand up and challenge heterosexism whenever and wherever I see it.

I am being called to honor silence when used in worship, but to reject silence when it is oppressive. I am called to respect the comfort levels of other people, but only when they do not deny a part of my being.

I would prefer to keep silent. Anyone who knows my history well knows that I would rather be the one solving a conflict than stirring one up. By speaking up about an issue that will make others uncomfortable, I risk being called or thought of as an attention seeker, a troublemaker, or a drama queen. I am none of those things.

I’ve been struggling with the testimony of Integrity for a while. The only way I can truly live my life with Integrity is by speaking up when being silent would be denying part of who I am. I have to admit, though, that I am terrified.

In this month’s Friends Journal,  there are several articles written about withholding the percentage of our taxes that get used for the military. In Elizabeth Boardman’s article on page 20, she states:

The Prince of Peace preoccupies some of our attention in December, when we celebrate his birth and life — a divine savior for some of us and a radical leader for others.

A month later, year after year we find ourselves torn between his teachings and the demands of our government.

But the uncomfortable fact is, Friends, Jesus’s teachings are pretty clear about the matter of paying taxes. When asked by a disciple if he should pay taxes, Jesus replied: “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.” 

To make the argument that Jesus was the Prince of Peace and thus wouldn’t want us to pay the portion of our taxes that goes towards the military is flawed. Jesus did not say: “Only give to Caesar what is his when you agree with his policy”. And it’s pretty clear that Jesus wouldn’t have agreed with all of Rome’s policies at the time. After all, those policies had him crucified.

I am not necessarily against the idea of Friends withholding some of their taxes, but using the argument that Jesus’s teachings require us to do so is incomplete at best and wrong at worst. If Friends feel called to withhold some of their taxes, then they should do so. But don’t try to convince others to do so by saying it’s what Jesus would have wanted.

Instead, be honest and clear that you have been called by God to follow this leading and that you wish that Friends will stay open to this possibility in case God calls them as well.

Last Sunday’s Meeting for Worship was very powerful for me. I went into the Meeting hoping to hold the Meeting in the Light, for there is healing that needs to be done within our Meeting. There are people who have been hurt in the past; and those who feel they should not have stepped aside when they did. There are those, like me, who cannot be at peace with what happened and want the Meeting to find true unity. This is what I brought with me to the Meeting, and what I held up to God.

The 2nd Query about Meeting for Business in our Faith & Practice was read shortly after the silence settled and before the children left for First Day School. Usually this Query, in my experience, sparks nothing within the Meeting for Worship. But this Sunday, it was different.

The first person who rose to speak spoke about a desire for unity in understanding, giving examples of Native American decision-making processes. The next person rose to tell an illustrative story about a previous conflict in the Meeting that had been very divisive, with half of the Meetings for and half against. The irony was the subject matter seemed trivial; it was about how high a rhododendron plant should be allowed to grow. Then a new attender who seems destined to become a member rose and spoke that, if he’d been responsible for making that decision, he would have focused on what was best for the plant and tried to take the “human-ness” out of the equation altogether. This reminded us to remove ourselves from the center.

Somewhere in the midst of these messages, my thoughts wandered. I wondered why the frequency of my vocal ministry had decreased so drastically. For my first few year of attendance, I spoke very frequently, about once a month. But in the last year or so, I’d only spoken maybe 3 times. I wondered what had changed. Were my original messages not Spirit-led? Maybe I was becoming better at discernment. My thoughts jumped from this subject back to the conflict at the Meeting.

And then I got a message, one I thought was just meant for me: “No matter how much you dislike someone, you are still called to answer that of God in them.”

The message kept coming back, but I was still worried maybe it was from me and not from God and didn’t want to stand up… especially because I couldn’t see how this message related to any of the previous ones. (In retrospect, it seems obvious; but at the time, I couldn’t see it.)

Finally, an old member of the Meeting who is a bit senile but very lovable stood up and told of a problem she was having at the group home she lived in. There was a particularly difficult woman who lived there who no one would sit with at meals. The staff had paired Lila up with this woman, forcing her to share meals with her. And she was struggling, because this woman was so angry and spent so much time screaming and she just didn’t know what to do.

By this time, the hour was nearly up. I got one more nudge, and the sense that if I didn’t stand up and deliver this message, that He would just stop talking to me. This was the third time I’d gotten the nudge to stand up and speak, complete with heart racing and feeling like my body was shaking. Finally, I got the message, and I stood and delivered His ministry, that:

We are all called to do something very difficult. We are called to answer that of God in every person, especially those people we don’t like. Though we may not be able to immediately recognize that of God in them, it is there… somewhere.

This turned out to be exactly what Lila needed to hear. She came up to me after and gave me a big hug. And as much as I also needed to hear this message, what I really needed to hear was that nudge from God telling me to stand up and speak. I’ve been so cautious since I stood up once and delivered a message I knew, deep down, wasn’t Spirit-Led. And I realized that the way I’d been thinking about discernment was wrong. I was assuming that it was better to not stand when you’re not certain than to stand and speak when you’re not sure. But reflecting on it later, it became clear to me that I was being too hesitant and that I hadn’t been standing when He was calling me to. If one stands in Meeting for Worship and delivers an ego-led message, what’s the harm? Usually it just disrupts Meeting for a few minutes, and then we return to our worship. But if one doesn’t stand when the Spirit is urging one to, one is disobeying God. One is saying to God, “No, I don’t want to speak,” or, “No, I don’t think that message needs to be shared.”

Friends, as important as discernment is, I urge us all not to use it as an excuse to disobey God. If any of us receives a message that is to be shared, don’t hesitate.