Feeling Antsy; A Thought on the FUM

The frogs were back last night, peeping away after what seems to be an eternity of the most foul April weather in my memory. And during my walk yesterday along the railway I saw one quail (which flew away, and being a poor flier, promptly crashed into a sugar maple, a la Monty Python) ; an osprey lording over the Little Ouse River, looking for little silvery fish; a tom turkey and his harem of 5 hens. So I'm glad, but I have that spring restlessness now:

Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring
The Winter Garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To fly -- and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing.

Not very Quakerish, I guess, but spring does that to you: makes you giddy with delight in the thought of new grass, the smell of mud, the feel of earth in your hands. Spring is doing what Love demands after a winter of contemplation and reflection.

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I received a note today from an old friend today, one I haven't heard from for years, a Carmelite Tertiary with whom I shared an interest in Teresa de Avila. (A Friend said to me: "Aren't they all interested in Teresa de Avila?") Enclosed with the note was a pack of prayer cards and bits of Catholic inspirational wisdom on 4 x 5 inch pieces of paper, including one with the somewhat dubious remonstration that "Christ didn't come to take away pain and suffering in the world, but to lead us into salvation." My friend doesn't know I've jumped ship, as it were, from Roman Catholicism's luxury liner to a rickety old Quaker sailing craft, with a mutinous crew and a hull evidently leaking.

Honesty demands I reply to her; I started a letter, but it began to sound like a rather self-centred and condescending apologia than anything else, so I threw it away. And who am I to lecture a follower and devotee of Spanish mysticism about silence, the Inner Light and seeking the will of God?

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I've been writing a little and thinking a lot about the apparently imminent disassociation of the dually affiliated yearly meetings from the Friends United Meeting (including my own, the Canadian Yearly Meeting), a move the seems both inherently stupid --- because we all know that Friends will be left weaker afterwards and that we all need the leavening of our very different gifts --- yet inevitable, as the normative forms of worship and belief between the programmed and liberal unprogrammed branches widens into a chasm.

How curious that the issue of same sex marriage and the role of gay men and women within Friends will be the issue that breaks unity. Of all the theological and doctrinal points separating us, this seems to me be the most trivial: we could begin with some heavy-duty dispute, like the Richmond Declaration, if real meat was wanted. Or the role of continuing revelation. Or being led by the Inner Light without reference for Scripture.

I have been writing a longer post on the whole issue, which I may or may not post --- I might need to tone it down a little. But in the end, I keep coming back to this question (which might well be addressed to Anglicans and United Church members or anyone else): in a hundred years, which side of this debate will be seen as having the prophetic voice?

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As I finish writing this the sun has actually appeared. O glorious!

Random Notes

Last posted here 8/10/07. And already it's spring, or what's passing for spring in these parts: the weather is either cold and cloudy or cold and sunny or cold and snowing. My tomato seedlings froze in my greenhouse when a power failure cut off the tiny heater which keeps them above freezing. Spring --- real spring --- seems an eon away. On the other hand, the geese are laying eggs in odd corners of the farmyard and the dogs are feasting on them. Kingston, the eldest, can ferret them out like no other dog, and now he sleeps beside me as I write, belly bloated, contentedly farting goose egg farts, which (pardon the pun) are foul beyond belief.

My lack of posting had less to do with lack of time than lack of anything to say. Or rather, I've read what must be the equivilent of a graduate course in Quaker studies over the past winter and I'm still digesting what I've read: as they say, the more I read, the less I know.


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Last night, despite being cold was stunning for stargazing. I'm a bit of an astronomy geek, albeit a fairweather one: I don't like the cold, and my telescope stays firmly parked inside during the winter. Nevertheless, when I walked the dogs last night the sky was gorgeous, and I took a few minutes to look. The constellation Orion, the brightest in the sky, was just setting; it was ornamented on one side by Venus passing just above the Pleiades and other the other by Sirius: altogether a memorable sight.

I reflected that when George Fox was alive cosmology was an entirely different animal: Copernicus and his revolution were scarcely a hundred years past when Fox took up preaching. The universe, according to Copernicus, was heliocentric, limited in size and certainly comprehensible. Imagine the universe as a sphere or even a plane extending to the orbit of Saturn: until the early 19th century, that was all there was. It's easy to imagine God in this small universe being centrally concerned with the fate of humanity, with doctrines, and vicarious substitution of sin and all the rest: a small God concerned with small matters. Now we perceive the universe as nearly infinite in dimension, so vast in space and time it can only be expressed in terms of nearly esoteric mathematics. We are indeed very small, our concerns trivial.

But, as Carl Sagan said, that makes God very big.

There are some troubling questions about this, too large for me to answer. For example, why would God in an infinity of stars and planets, trouble about us in particular? If the end purpose of Creation is humanity, why would God bother to create this immense universe over such time?

Fundementalists have one answer, which reduces God to tinkering in something in size and time like the Copernican universe. Personally I prefer the wonder of an infinite God working in a nearly infinite universe in time scales beyond comprehension. And if you believe Fox's central insight, that God can be experienced directly by anyone, we should be flat with humility and awe.

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The spring peepers (before the freeze-up) appeared this year on 27/03/07. ( I heard a few brave frogs again last night.) Last year, they were first heard on 1/04/06. Generally they aren't heard in this part of Ontario before the second week of the Fourth Month.