Spokane Friends Meeting

Allowing ourselves to become captive to Christ’s spirit, to allow oneself to be apprehended, taken into custody like a Sheriff would an escaped inmate, is as close a description as we can imagine to the meaning of utter, complete and unreserved commitment of oneself to Christ. 

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I’ve got this notion.  Well, it is more than a notion, it is a piece of my theology.  It is that as a Meeting, as a worshipping community, Spokane Friends consists of those people Christ calls to come through those front doors. As a community of faith we have no choice in who those people are. There is no dress code, no philosophical or economic litmus tests to pass or fail. I think the technical language is ‘Whosoever will…’.

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The birthplace of the modern prison system, the Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia, was the first institution in the United States designed to both punish and rehabilitate criminals. It was built by Quakers in 1773. When expanded in 1790 each cell block had 16 one-person cells. In the wing known as the “Penitentiary House,” inmates spent all day every day in their cells. Felons would serve their entire sentences in isolation, not just as punishment, but as an opportunity to seek forgiveness from God. It was a revolutionary idea—no penal method had ever before considered that criminals might be reformed. … Solitary confinement was conceived by Quakers as a humane and evangelical alternative to the penal system of the day with its overcrowded jails, squalid conditions, brutal labor chain gangs, stockades, public humiliation, and systemic hopelessness. Instead, it drove many men mad.

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As I began to try and wrap my mind around this spice we are calling “Equality” it soon became clear to me that the concept might work relatively well for cereal in cardboard boxes, commercial sweeteners or commodities subject to technically described measurement. But with regard to human beings, tangible equality doesn’t exist. As to physical stature, none of us are the equal in height and weight, and that’s true clear down to the thickness of our toenails. Intellectual ability? We don’t even know how to measure it. Giftedness? Even in the parable of the talents Jesus’ disregards equality. Matthew 25:15 says that he gave to every one according to his ability. When it comes to the circumstances of our personal pedigree, what we have inherited in the way of ancestry, cytology, character, capacity, and capital there exists no equality. Solely in the uniqueness of our creative being can declare that we are equal.

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As I began to try and wrap my mind around this spice we are call “Equality” it soon became clear to me that the concept might work relatively well for cereal in cardboard boxes, commercial sweeteners or commodities subject to technically described measurement. But with regard to human beings, tangible equality doesn’t exist. As to physical stature, none of us are the equal in height and weight, and that’s true clear down to the thickness of our toenails. Intellectual ability? We don’t even know how to measure it. Giftedness? Even in the parable of the talents Jesus’ disregards equality. Matthew 25:15 says that he gave to every one according to his ability. When it comes to the circumstances of our personal pedigree, what we have inherited in the way of ancestry, cytology, character, capacity, and capital there exists no equality. Solely in the uniqueness of our creative being can declare that we are equal.

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Quaker Spice IV Community

The first glimpse we have of what we could call Christian community, according to John, occurred behind doors which had been locked out of fear. Jesus returned and blew his breath on those gathered, imparting his grace and granting his spirit to this disillusioned, disappointed and dismayed body of desperate individuals. Up until that moment that is what the disciples were, a bunch of individuals, each with his or her own purposes for following the Master. And here they changed. Jesus is said to have said to them “’As the Father sent me, so I send you.’ Then he breathed on them, saying, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit!’”    From its inception, the Christian faith has existed as community. The resurrected Jesus gave to those assemble his grace and his spirit. To be a Christian meant that one belonged to the community. No one, as an isolated individual, would be a Christian by his or her own self.

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In November of 2008 a Times article answered the question: Why Sasha and Malia will go to Sidwell Friends School? Among other reasons listed was that “in a Puritan culture that viewed children as evil miniatures corrupted by original sin, Quakers treated them with respect, as Children of the Light: no whips, no paddles, no coerced belief.” The article went on to say that long before the days of women’s suffrage and equal rights crusades, Quakers were unique in integrating women fully into the ministry, the schools were not only coeducational, but they focused on equipping girls with all the same spiritual and intellectual apparatuses that boys had. It’s no accident that Susan B. Anthony and Lucretia Mott and any number of leading suffragists were raised in Quaker homes.”

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We’ve got to become more conscious of boundries. But not just those that are terrestrial, international, industrial or electoral. I’m suggesting that just as potentially flammable are personal boundries. It is a big issue, I googled ‘respecting personal boundries’ and got 4, 330,000 hits in a third of a second. Most of the web sites I looked at were about how to establish and defend your personal space.

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A week after the extravagance of Christmas it’s good to ask who among us has immunity from our cultural disease of “affluenza”? Hermits would tell us that, first of all, consumption is a very social phenomenon: keeping up with one’s neighbors or colleagues, a jealous and envious competition, is essentially a social and contrived behavior; and secondly, most consumption is psychological: to assuage a hurt, to relieve stress, to serve as self-reward, or to indulge a desire for pleasure or greed.

Many of the books written today on simplicity tend to focus on cutting out coupons, attending cheaper matinee movies, or hosting pot-luck instead of dinner parties which makes frugality an end in itself. These are great formulas for tightwads and eccentrics. They are not necessarily advice for someone who is seeking deeper roots to simplicity.

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Christmas has turned into a time when, typically, we re-tell the beloved story of Mary and Joseph, who, on a mission to pay their taxes, turn a Bethlehem barn into a birthing suite complete with farm animals, shepherds, angels, camels and three gift bearing travelers representing science, sorcery and scholarship. Like any pregnancy, it is the natural culmination of a period of expectant waiting.   And as we ooh and awe over a new born and rejoice in the health of mother and child we sing joyful carols. We decorate our home, our business and our place of worship. We give and receive presents to our loved ones. With compassion we look to those around us whose needs are unmet. And I enjoy it. Most of us do.

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