I Am Just Like You, You Are Just Like Me, We All Stand Or Sit When We Pee

I don't imagine that anyone anywhere could or should be exactly like anyone else in a community. I would say it's an impossibility but that would perhaps be too strong given my sense of how much I think one can say about certain things.

Even in some sense of community, none of us can respond faithfully to some call of God by saying, doing, or being what someone else has said, done, or been. I would say that is impossible, but that doesn't stop us from pretending we can overcome difference or imagining faith is self-reproduction. It seems we live in an era in which we attempt to overwhelm difference through the imposition of identity or by clinging to the illusion of common features. Well, it seems a lesson of history that humans do that always, but I suppose I can only speak for now, and say that now, we attempt to overwhelm difference in our own particular way. That is a tragedy insofar as any good news of the Good News is concerned.

Fortunately, it seems less and less tenable. Unfortunately, as it seems less and less tenable, I'm sure we will make more desperate moves to preserve some common sense.

Anyway, I think we are meant to be together in our difference through the unity of the Holy Spirit, not through what amounts to nothing more than the dominance of one human tradition or another. We ought to be committed to what and how we, as real existing individuals in different communities understand the leading of God, and we ought to remember that how we are led is not to be confused with how another ought to be led. As someone more high-fallutin' than I said: "Even in the Apostles' days, Christians were too apt to strive after a wrong unity and uniformity in outward practices and observations, and to judge one another unrighteously in these matters; and mark, it is not the different practice from one another that breaks the peace and unity, but the judging of one another because of different practices… For this is the true ground of love and unity, not that such a man walks and does just as I do, but because I feel the same Spirit and Life in him, and that he walks in his rank, in his own order, in his proper way and place of subjection to that; and this is far more pleasing to me than if he walked just in that track wherein I walk." That was Isaac Penington, so I guess you can't argue against it; an old quote proves everything.

Wait, that's not true.

Anyway, I don't say this as a lesson to anyone, only as background to what follows.

This:
I see limits to that unity- real, existent, historic, practical limits. I don't mean there is a limit to the unity in the Spirit or that this limit requires division. I think there is an incredible beauty and value to difference- especially as we attempt to live with it, but perhaps as a result of the possibility of sin, or the nature of some Hegelian dialectic,* we can only go so far.

It is one thing to say, "I am such and such and they, way over there, are other, but I am okay with that and I need not make them like me for them to be fine." That's more of a "live and let live", which is an unusual decency in our world, but still not the unity in the Spirit. I am writing about being different but being together, the kind of together in difference for which a marriage, a good marriage, is an apt metaphor.

In this unity, difference is a blessing. The "other" is a gift. In the unity of the Spirit we are moved beyond ourselves and are better than we would otherwise be- if we are indeed in a community wherein we are free to be different. In this unity, even with difference, there is a sense of "us" and a sense of what can be. But there is the practical limit. Even at our most subjectively responsible, I mean even as we most honestly confront the reality of our humanness and submit to transcendence, we can only be what we can be. We can only go as far as we can go. To return to the marriage metaphor, there is only so much difference I or The Qweenbeen could live with. Even if we need to attach a negative value to it and say it is a failure, there are actual things, actual practices or ways of being that would push us in different ways.

In a communal way, there may be moments of divergence.

Long-time readers of my interweb diary have unenvied social lives but may also have observed that I may seem a strange fit in my Evangelical Friends community. I am deeply committed to it even as I see us distancing ourselves from what it might mean to be either. Seriously- we have an Annual Conference. We are not a Yearly Meeting. No one would confuse any of our Southern California meetings for peace churches. We disdain our Quaker intellectual and spiritual heritage. We are broadly seduced by the promise of "attractiveness" and "relevance". We seem to desperately want to be Free Methodists (not that there's anything wrong with Free Methodists), and aggressively deny or qualify anything that might be called Quaker.

Strange.

Well, not so strange if I want to invest these phenomena with cosmic or spiritual significance, but someone else can do that.

As I said, we ought to be committed to what and how we understand to be the leading of God, but it seems that it is possible two or more cannot always remain together in that. I would suggest that my own commitment to that understanding, an understanding that I express as an Evangelical Friend- as a Quaker- makes me less and less suitable to be a part of one community or another- many communities actually. It may even make me unsuited to be a part of some people who want to at least call themselves Quaker. Funny, no?

For much of my cognizant spiritual life, I have thought there is a value to being committed, in difference, to becoming more than we presently are. There has been a reason to confront frustration, my own limitations, our collective foibles, to speaking, perhaps prophetically, about concerns we might otherwise ignore. But we can only be what we can be. For some time now, I have struggled to know where and when a point of difference makes for incommensurate difference. As condescending as it sounds, it's a helpful question: ought one spend time explaining math to a dog? That points two ways.

As noble as it sounds to be committed to being a voice of conviction and unpopular opinion, there is a matter of confession to it. It is quite possible that I am excusing myself from being what I am led to be, from doing those very things that I feel compelled to do as a matter of faith because I am not a part of a larger body that values those things. As an example, I have said no one would likely confuse any of our EFCSW meetings for peace churches. It is good to be a reminder to what we say we value, to being a remnant. But might the resources spent being a reminder be spent better or more faithfully applied elsewhere? Isn't there a taint of cowardice in staying away from or not deliberately creating a community wherein peacemaking, as an example, is valued and done? I have to admit that facing a resistant community becomes the path of least resistance when the alternative is pursuing the unknown or creating something new.

If I am supremely committed to the idea that a people of God ought to be X, and I know that a people, given their real existent historic conditions, cannot possibly be X, then doesn't it seem I've let myself off the hook if I choose to be among that people? Doesn't it seem like I've made it possible to never have to confront the challenge of being X?

I am not deceiving myself that the presence of difference would be avoided in any other community- even one with resonant values and commitments. I am more trying to not be seduced by the beauty of difference itself, especially if its shininess distracts me from living in the Kingdom of God.

So... fish or cut bait.

*Ugh- I don't really think that.

Hang On To Your Ego
It Ain't Me Babe- Bob Dylan
Oye Como Va- Tito Puente
The 59th Street Bridge Song- Simon and Garfunkel
I Got a Home In Dat Rock- Paul Robeson
Sex and Dying in High Society- X
Jumpin' At The Woodside- Duke Ellington
Nitemare Hippy Girl- Beck
Here We Go Again- Ray Charles
My Funny Valentine- Chet Baker
Communication Breakdown- Led Zeppelin