I came across a new understanding of "idols" this morning--not completely new, just nuanced.  It was in the New Living Translation that my daughter uses.  John 5:21 says:

          "Little children, keep away from anything that might take God's place in your heart."

Both the King James Version and the New International Version translate that verse as "Keep away from idols."

If an idol is something that takes God's place in my heart then...

     by what standard am I judged?

     by what rules do I live?

    by what principles am I guided?

    by whom am I taught?

    by what am I guarded?

In the end, where am I safe?

Perhaps there is a clue to the importance of this right above this verse, in 1 John 5:19. 

    "We know we are children of God but the world around us is under the power and control of the Evil One."

I think this is what all that early Quaker talk about the "offices" of Christ is about.  Christ is our priest and our minister and our teacher and so on.  The Spirit serves these functions for us, present to us and to others through us, as it is present to others and to us through them.  (That's what the community is about--another way that God is manifested to us.  We cannot look to things other than that immanent Spirit for our guidance.)  Those things, things apart from that Spirit are of the world, of the flesh and not of the spirit.  Those things come to control us, they become the standards by which our lives are judged , the source of the rules we follow, the principles to which we look to guide our lives, the teachers to whom we look to make sense of our experience, the means to security, to means to guard ourselves.

All of this the world is pleased to do for us, all of this we are pleased to let the world do for us--because it claims to speak to our needs.  But in all of this there is really but one, Christ, the Living Spirit left with us, who can accomplish this in such a way that the result is life and not disappointed, bitter and alienated frustration.

To remove the mystical, present, conscious seeking of God and replace it with "common sense" or an understanding of "the way the world works" is to worship an idol.  We are misled when we think of idol worship as dancing around a statute.  Idol worship is taking place every time someone says "Well, no one will ever know..." or "If I don't take advantage of this person's vulnerability someone else will..."  It is not the flashy car that is the idol, or money.  It is not the car or the money we worship.  Rather, we worship (and fellowship with) the spirit that tells us--convinces us--that the car or the money will bring us happiness.  If that spirit, that idol, had not replaced God in our hearts, we would not be misled.

 

 

 

4:46:42 AM    

Works don’t work—but they do.

The paradox. We cannot manipulate God into favoring us. We cannot control God, we cannot bend the Transcendent Reality to our will, by what we do or do not do. Sacrifices and rituals and magic do not obligate the Spirit to bend to our will or to our desires. How many people in how many places and in how many times have learned this through experience? How many spell books have been thrown down in defeated disgust and frustration?

All of us, as children, grew through a phase of magical thinking. Although the incantations we wove were idiosyncratic the chant about avoiding stepping on sidewalk cracks, for fear of breaking our mothers’ backs, for my generation, in my culture, epitomizes them all.

We don’t wholly grow out of this. Aside from sports fans, who true believe that whether or not they watch their favorite team play on television will control the outcome of the game, our culture is riddled with superstition. It is often apparent when people talk about a God who intervenes in our lives on a daily basis that such theology can contain elements of magic and superstition.

Mine does. I believe that if I observe a "practice" or a "discipline" that the Holy Spirit will change me into the creature that God wants me to be, with the explicit promise of salvation here and now as well as there and then.

How is that different from someone who believes that he can make a volcano stop rumbling by throwing a virgin into its fire pit?

Isn’t the practice, the discipline, isn’t that a "work?" Isn’t it something I do for the same reason that some people make and save money? Aren’t we both doing what we think our experience teaches us, what our magic assures us, will "save us" from what we fear?

Aren’t I actually trying to manipulate the Transcendent Reality with my Bible reading and worship and my participation in the life of the meeting?

Perhaps, I tell myself, I am trying to manipulate myself, trying to bend myself to the will of God rather than the other way around. It’s what I tell myself, it’s what I believe. "Not my will, but yours…"

In the end, or at least what looks to me, today, to be the end, it’s about faith—faith in the works, faith that produces works. It’s faith that all this counter-intuitive stuff that the Spirit leads us into produces the works—the condition—to which we are exhorted in the Bible and other spiritual writings, exhorted by God/the Spirit as we walk our walk, avoiding the sidewalk cracks.

6:13:22 AM    

Trials can clear up our mistaken impressions about ourselves.  Trials can show us who we are.  Good times allow us to rest on our illusions about ourselves and about the world.  Trials show us what we are really made of, how far we have come and how far we have to go. 

Blessing comes from enduring temptation.  Trials change us, or give us the opportunity to be changed. 

 

4:48:36 AM    

My own thought is that temptation is driven by the lie that some need of mine will be satisfied if I do what I have been told not to do and if I do not do what I have been told to do. 

The truth is that this need, whatever it is, will actually be made bigger if I do what I have been told not to do, if I do not obey the exhortation to behave righteously.  The need will actually grow in the way that a hole becomes deeper when, rather than putting dirt into it we shovel more out.

We have been shown the way to satisfy our needs, the greatest of which is, contrary to our conditioning and our culture, being loved.  Sin seems to me to be either a wrong approach to seeking to be loved or trying to put something in our lives to replace it.

 

5:02:13 AM    

Quaker writings (eg Penington) often speaks of "forms" and how things once "of the Spirit" degenerate into hollow or rigid forms.  The Balby letter, after laying out what seem to be some fairly rigid rules about how to do things warns Friends about accepting these as "forms" although apparently exhorting them to accept these as something else.  Mostly we understand this talk of forms in terms of ritual, empty ritual, the going through the motions, even with the best of intentions, rather than living the experience that the ritual (the form) is intended to be.

 

I found an intereting example of this in regared to the meaning of "The Law" as that phrase is used in Psalm 1.

                               ²But his delight is in the law of the LORD; and in his law doth he meditate day and night.

"the law," in my Hebrew-Greek Key Word Bible, is designated with the number 8451 and is, in the Hebrew, Torah.  And exerpt from the discussion of this word is:

                "So Torah was much more than a law or set of rules.  It was not to be perceived as restrictions but the very means by  which one could reach a spiritual ideal.  If Israel would keep the Torah, then Israel would be kept safe.  However, the people came to understand it as something which was imposed for its own sake rather than what God intended them to become."

The Law, once seen as a spirit filled way, becomes the form that Jesus condemns in his day.  He does not condemn the law, but the way it is responded to, the practice it has become.  For in the sermon on the mount he says:

¹⁷Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. 

    
   ¹⁸For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.  

   
   ¹⁹Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but

whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. 

    
   ²⁰For I say unto you, That except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom

of heaven.

 

It is not the observance of the Parisees, the going through the motions, the adherance to the form, that would lead to the entrance into heaven.  It was the righteousness, the product of the The Law, the product of actually living The Way. This is what he came to fulfill.

 

5:13:57 AM    

I am taken with how different it is to read the Bible from a Quaker perspective, about how things jump out that did not, before, about how much richer the experience is.  All of the stuff about the Spirit being the inward teacher, about a God who is available to show us what is right and empowers us to do it was always in there but I never saw so much of it as I do, now.

 

The phrase "waiting on the Lord" is an example of this.  It's so common in the Bible but before the Quaker experience the phrase had a one dimensional meaning to me and was little more than an admonition to have patience with the mysterious but undoubtedly slow pace at which things unfold in God's realm.

 

But with a perspective on waiting that says that work is being done in that period, that the transformative power of God is bringing about change in us as we wait, and that the waiting is a necessary part of the change, it all means something more.  Understanding that we are to wait is an instruction to abide in the discipline that cultivates, in us, this change, this process, this transformation.

 

For example, 1 Corinthians 4 seems to say that we have to wait to see whether or not people who are have been given trust are worthy of it.  And it does say that. 

 

"Judge nothing before the appointed time but wait until the Lord coimnes.  He will bring to light that which is hidden in darkness and will expose the motives of men's hearts."

 

Sooner or later if someone is pulling our chain we are going to know it because that person's actions will reveal that to us, the spirit that animates that person will lead them to telling actions, the Spirit will cause people to do convicting things no matter how hard they try to hide their weakness.

 

But it says more than than.  Aside from judging leaders and teachers it guides us in discerning our own response to every day life, discerning our leadings and movements as we respond and react to people and situations around us. 

 

When we set about things we are often moved to act from some place other than than which takes away the occasion of all war, to act in a way we have been conditioned to act by a world built on the false premises and illusions of earthly wisdom.  We are often motivated, at least in the first place, by fear or greed or hurt feelings or lust or pride.  But the Spirit will, if we wait, work on these things and over come them, show us what is going on and show us the way out of the destructive control of these motives.  The Light will expose these to us when they are in us, when they are moving us, and, once exposed, give us the strength and the power to withstand this temptation to be animated by them.  The transformative power of God will enable us, if we give it time and attention, to act in a way that edifies us and comforms us to that power. 

 

And it is in waiting on the Lord/Spirit/transformative power of God that the snares are melted away in us, in which the dross is burned away, when the scales are caused to fall.  Waiting...

 

 

 

 

6:49:11 AM    

On SRQ it was posted:

> But I dare to hope that convinced Friends will recall
>our obligations to non violence and individual liberty.

To which I replied:

While these two values are a part of the creed of a certain type of
contemporary libertarianism, Friends have no obligation to either.
They are both at variance with the traditional Quaker discernment that
developed in the mid seventeenth century.  This is a discernment that
still survives so as to form the basis of spiritual aspiration for
some Friends, despite the workings of various impulses that have moved
others away from it, in one direction or another, through the years.

Thus it is that among those who call themselves Friends, at the
beginning of the 21st Century, there are many beliefs and one is
challenged to find some thing, any thing, that can be said to be
common to all who self identify with the Religious Society of Friends.

Some Friends have embraced political, economic and social creeds, and
the ideologies that are developed from them.  The fact that some may
do so does not create any obligation on the part of other Friends to
adopt those creeds, to conform to the orders these creeds espouse or
to abandon the guidance of the Spirit in favor of rationalistic
ideologies.   While Friends are certainly free to walk these walks it
is confusing (at least to outsiders) to refer to the creeds that
underlie them as something to which Friends in general have
obligations.  As I say, I am a loss as to what, precisely, it is that
Friends, in general, have an obligation.

The term "liberty" that was so freely used by founding Friends had an
entirely different meaning than what "individual liberty" means in the
libertarian ideology of today.  As another current thread in this
newsgroup makes clear, the definition of a word can "drift" over a
period of time.  This drift makes it possible to ascribe beliefs to
people long ago that would distort their message, even with a complete
absence of malice.

The peace testimony, as developed at the dawn of the Quaker covenant,
was not, and for some Friends still is not, a synonym for what
contemporary Americans mean by "non violence."

"Friends are not opposed to all forms of coercion.  Proper police
activities, incidental to carrying out the rightful purposes of the
state and directed solely against persons who refuse to abide by the
law, seem necessary and helpful.   From its earliest days, however,
the Society has held that war is contrary to the will of God, and it
has counseled its members to refuse to bear arms or to accept
membership in military forces."  (Faith and Practice, North Pacific
Yearly Meeting)

socialism--libertarianism--capitalism...although some Friends have
embraced these ideologies, and other ideologies, some other Friends have
continued to find unity in the traditional Quaker discernment that
there is but one, Christ, who can speak to our condition, both that
condition as it is and what it can become under the guidance and the
transformative power of God, the Spirit, the Light, The Word. 

6:53:07 AM