Place of Privilege (abridged)
[The following article was abridged from a version published online at: https://westernfriend.org/place-privilege-unabridged]
Department:
Keywords:
[The following article was abridged from a version published online at: https://westernfriend.org/place-privilege-unabridged]
I have noticed that more young adults have been coming to our meetings for worship since we reopened our meetinghouse after COVID. Perhaps the pandemic gave them time to reflect. Young adulthood is naturally a time of choosing the values one will live by. I think the young people who visit our meeting are looking for ways to practice their values with other people.
Within the circumstances of our lives, the Light meets us. As we recognize the Light’s presence in the events of our lives, we see the lived testimony of the Light in our experience.
In the late 1960s, a researcher named Frank Barron explored the relationship of religion and creativity and whether being religious and/or spiritual had an effect on the artist. He interviewed Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and a Hindu, as well as a number of others. The interviews were quite straightforward until he talked about the Quaker artist.
“Evangelical” is now officially a dirty word with progressive people of faith. This story has been decades in the making and is now accepted fact: The Evangelical wing of modern American Christianity is all about White Nationalism.
I met Rachel Heisham Bieri in Missoula, Montana, four months after she had been given a terminal cancer diagnosis. She was forty-five then, only fifteen years older than I was, though she was already a grandmother. Doctors had given her two months to live.
We met through a Facebook hiking group and built a friendship based on outdoor adventures and a shared love of barefoot hiking.
The test for membership should not be doctrinal agreement, nor adherence to certain testimonies, but evidence of sincere seeking and striving for Truth, together with an understanding of the lines along which Friends are seeking that Truth.
– Friends World Conference (1952)
Quaker membership is important. Mutual commitment matters. Membership is a relationship, not an achievement.
Oh, great creator,
who is in and around all of us,
rejoicing in the life you so wondrously made;
oh, lover of life and love, all love,
who celebrates all that is good and joyous,
who dances and sings along with us;
your name is praised throughout.
On December 14, 2018, I walked into the Multnomah Friends Meetinghouse for the first time. I felt enveloped in a circle of Light, at one with it and with everyone in the room. I had been searching, longing for this my entire life. I was Home.
