I Wanna Know What Love Is...

I want you to show me.

I'm having a lot of trouble these days with a document our Yearly Meeting [sick (sic)] printed that pretends to explain Who We Are (you can download it at the EFCSW website- it's the first menu item in the upper right).

Firstly, we don't have a Yearly Meeting, we have an Annual Conference. That's right. For those of you reading this far from me and familiar with Friends- here in Southern California and some points nearby, we are no longer a Yearly Meeting. We are an Annual Conference. Do you find that laughable or does it burn in your throat like bile? I want to scream from my humanity, "That's bullshit!" From elsewhere, I feel sympathy and sorrow for those who are so lost and spiritually frustrated that they think a handful of name changes and new buildings will finally satisfy them. And then, maybe, meta-me says, "That's kind of condescending, jerk."

Secondly it wasn't put out by the Annual Conference as a whole, that is, it was written by an individual but given an EFCSW imprimatur.

Thirdly, only a handful of folks find its origin and existence troubling so caring about it at all is probably a sad lesson in wheel spinning.

Fourthly, it's a statement of faith and values and, as such, falls victim to the many problems associated with written statements of faith and values that Friends have historically had the good sense to avoid (I mean Big Picture history- not recent history).

Fifthly, it seems to have been produced in a way that belies the broadly Christian tradition of creeds as collective statements and the specifically Friendly practice of cooperatively doing ecclesial business.

I guess my fifth concern is just a restatement of my second concern... Is it? No, my second concern is that it claims to speak for a body when it, at best, speaks for a handful while my fifth concern is more about this act suggesting a primus inter pares.

Sixthly, it's bad- I guess that's assumed by 1 through 5.

I really appreciate the historic Friends practice of not trying to put God wholly into words. Friends have said and do say things about God. That's not a problem itself. Imagining that saying something about God says anything about God is the problem. I mean we must do more than just say something- and Friends seem to have known that. What accompanies those words seems to be a sense that our words are just that- or my words are just that- my words. I use them and they mean something but the sense is not fixed in the word. The actions that go with the word not only reveal what I mean but enrich the meaning that it can have.

Por ejemplo, The Qweenbean and I always say, "I love you," but if we were separately asked what that word means we would give similar but different definitions. That doesn't mean we don't know what love is, it means love is something that is not fixed and clear but is revealed in actions that we say correspond to love. It makes sense to do certain things and not do others in light of love. If I say I love The Qweenbean and then punch her in the back of the head that doesn't make sense. We also say we love other people. I say I love Clutching is Hugging, Sergeant Jesus, and others and what we mean by love is revealed in how we live with those others. It means more than what it just means to me and The Qweenbean and those relations and the acts in those relations reveal and deepen its meaning. I think marriage is like that too. We have a sense of what marriage is before we enter into it, but as we go on in marriage we have a richer sense of what it means- especially as we come to points where it transcends what we thought it could or did mean. If I stood alone and said, "This is what love means," or "This is what marriage means," apart from what I see love and marriage mean in the communitarian acts of love and marriage, I would be an idiot. I may be an idiot regardless- but I can be an idiot that has a better sense of love and marriage only in working at love and marriage in a context where I understand love and marriage.

So similarly, if there is some such we are calling God- it doesn't seem necessary to say creator and sustainer... wait I mean Creator, Sustainer, etc... That's what God would be by being God so a lot of that nonsense can just be passed over. But also, by being God- it would be something that is transcendent and beyond the world. It would be set apart, set apart, set apart. That's one thing to always bear in mind. But then we go to loving, compassionate, and such. That's stuff we know in our existence- we simultaneously see that God is set apart, and existentially know God in heaven and earth, almost like they are filled with God's glory. But all that has to be understood via acts. We can say something like God is love because a book says so, but like the idiot standing alone saying, "This is what marriage is," without an existence that relates to it, it makes as much sense as hudda zeeta baa daa waaahh. The words aren't meaningless- they mean something, but they might be senseless to us- we need to see more done to know what their sense might be.

It's silly to just say, "We believe in the one holy and loving God, who exists eternally in three persons- Father, Son, and Holy Spirit," without recognizing that saying it is a practice in relation to a bunch of other practices that clarify that. We, unfortunately, as an Annual Conference, are lacking practices that would make sense of this statement. To be fair, there is a section in this pamphlet that lays out a vision of what people who believe these things might be like. But it seems like this vision could be fulfilled by people who believe in the Rotary Club, or the Boy Scout's motto, or a chamber of commerce mission, more easily than those who believe the wholly transcendent God was revealed to us in the person Jesus and we now are his body. Our practices seem to betray a faith in a God that desires people know how to say the right things and infect other people across the globe with the ability to say the right things.

So I find traditional statements of faith generally problematic- especially if they are meant to gloss over a whole slew of disparate, non-corresponding practices.

But wait! There's more!

This document/pamphlet represents more belief. Not in what it says- the words in it even as they are explained... or especially as they are poorly explained are largely senseless. I don't mean meaningless. Unity, Liberty, etc... have meanings, but as I explained above, the sense we find in them comes from how we live, or the things we practice that correspond to the words that we use to describe what we're doing. There is a huge gap between the sentiments expressed in the pamphlet and the actual practices of our churches and the leadership displayed recently. That's one thing, but the act of writing this document in what can charitably be described as a cut and paste fashion, sharing it with a handful of reviewers, and then giving it a corporate stamp without corporate consideration or approval and imagining that it can say anything substantial is itself a statement of belief. It says something about what we think God is, what we think is required of us, what belief is. It does say something about Who We Are- but not so much in its words as in the act of conceiving, creating, and propagating it. So this is some act that says something about who we are and what we think about God. It says we believe in this triune relational God that made us in his image, but here we are not being relational in the act of creating the document itself; here we are not being a body. We say we believe somehow Jesus lives in us but that our lives will go on much as they always have, indistinguishable from anyone else because it's what's inside that counts. We say we believe there is a distinction between the world and the kingdom of God but just like the world we build 14 million dollar sanctuaries to our lords.

...

We are told that this is just a pamphlet of thoughts, and not really a statement of faith or a "binding" document. But it is binding in that it represents a practice in action. It shows us to what we have already cleaved.

And practically, it does come before Faith and Practice on the EFCSW website... but maybe that's because the same people who edited the document for substantive and mechanical clarity think "W" before "O" followed by "P" is some type of alphabetical order.

That's my jerky way of saying it's poorly written. To wit: "visa versa" is not what you write when suggesting the elements of the proposition previously stated are now in reverse relation. If you mean that, you write "vice versa." You write visa versa if you don't know better. Not knowing better is fine- but hopefully you are in cahoots with others who do know better and they in turn help you to know better. There is a good deal in this document to suggest this type of progress and relation- not knowing becoming knowing through practice among knowers- is strange or scary. There is a whole lot of confidently stated not-knowing in this pamphlet. Confident not-knowing is fine in conversation or a lame online weblog diary journal. It's not so fine for a tri-color, glossy, multi-paged denominational statement. So add bad editing to the theological caca that it is.

Whatever...

This may be the only time I reference Foreigner so cherish it. I wonder what this does for my Aging Hipster status. Foreigner is uncool- so is that ironically cool? But then if it's cool doesn't that make it uncool- but just uncool not campy or subversively uncool? I don't know. I am wearing a black t-shirt and will be going to Skylight Books today, so maybe it is cool- or I'm cool- so my Foreigner reference is cool too. But then that's probably overstating my cool influence- or ability to make things cool- and then even thinking that I might be cool or anything I might do is cool makes me horribly uncool. But then maybe my being horribly uncool makes my entire life ironically cool. I don't know- I need someone to tell me if I am cool or not.

You May See There Is a Section Within The EFCSW Website For Latin Churches- They Mean Spanish Speaking. This Is The Kind of Thing That Happens When You Have No Sense of History or Context
Frank Black Catalogue