A bit about my faith - how I ended up a Quaker

I have spending more time thinking about and explaining my faith path because my oldest son chose exploring his faith as the focus of his major term project.  I am going to express some of personal views on what it means for me to be a Quaker.

For me being a Quaker is much more than just a faith, it is an all encompassing lifestyle and personal ethic.   The Jethro Tull song Wind Up from Aqualung really sums up where I come from and here are a few words from that song:

So I left there in the morning

with their God tucked underneath my arm

their half-assed smiles and the book of rules.

So I asked this God a question

and by way of firm reply,

He said - I'm not the kind you have to wind up on Sundays.

This is a somewhat obscure song from their 1971 Aqualung album, but it has resonated with me since I first heard it when I was a teenager.    At heart I think I have always been a crpyto-Quaker.

I was in my youth a Lutheran and even was confirmed in that faith but it was only a Sunday thing.   The act of going to church on Sunday and taking communion as not connected to the rest of my life.   It did not resonate with me because it, like almost all traditional Christian churches, was a religion first and foremost and a personal path of faith as a secondary after thought.   The services either felt like something from rote or performance.    There was no mystery, there was no deep ongoing engagement of the mind and soul, it did not touch my faith.   I could not describe this at the time, it was just not right and I drifted away.

From the late 1970s till 1998 I was a seeker.   I was never a regular attender of any church but did go to services in all manner of churches over the years hoping to find the spark that was missing for me.   I did spend some significant time with two churches, but that was much more about the community than the faith.

Some people may wonder why I have a faith at all, most people these days spend very little time thinking about faith at all because that old idea of some old guy up in the sky is so clearly ridiculous.   I have a faith and follow a faith path because I am not certain about everything in the world.   Most people think doubt is the opposite of faith, but it is not, the two are actually quite similar.   The opposite of faith is certainty.

I know no one that operates their life without some element of faith.  You have faith that your kids are at school when they say they are, you have faith your family is there for you, you have faith that the car or computer will start.    These are all banal and simple things but they are everyday expressions of faith.  Having faith is very much fundamental to being a human.

I tried the idea of being an atheist, but it never worked for me because there is something small and diminished about the tidy and neat arguments of atheism.   I honestly do not believe in the idea of God in any sort of a traditional sense, and I will talk in a later post about what God means to me.   In my heart now I see that what did not work for me was the sense of certainty of atheists.   It is only when I heard Harold Kushner, a rabbi, on the CBC program Tapestry last year that this fell into place for me.  He made it clear to me that faith and certainty were the opposites.

While I was at University I often went to an Anglican church, St David's by the Sea in Cordova Bay.  I did this because several friends did go this church and it felt like faith community close to what I grew up with.  Andrew Gates, the priest running this church in the mid 1980s, engaged me in some interesting discussions about faith.   Ultimately it did not meet my faith path, as nice as they were there.

The strangest feeling church service I ever went to was the first time I went to a Baptist church.   I was invited by my Catherine to join her for a service at Emmanuel Baptist.   It felt like I was at a concert and not in place seeking the mysteries of faith.  I have been to some evangelical churches since then and they all seem to be like that.   The less I say about them, the less I will insult people.

When Catherine and I moved to the UK in 1990 we actively sought out a church to go to.  We first tried a Catholic church close to where we lived, St Dominic's Priory.   We both left there not feeling like we were in the right place.

Catherine came upon St James Piccadilly, an old Christopher Wren church that had Donald Reeves rebuilding the congregation.  We found a community of like minded people there.  It is also was likely the most liberal Church of England church in the UK.   It attracted numerous clergy as regular attenders, there were about six of them btu I can only remember Norrie Mccurry's name. Trevor Huddleston lived in the rectory.

The church was open to exploring all manner of faith paths.  It was also a hot bed of political action and the centre for the movement to ordain women.   I got to know Ulla Monberg at St James.

Norrie was very good at recruiting us younger people to help with the church, there was a group of about 15 or so of us that attended and were in our 20s.  We were pulled into being part of the community and helping build a stronger congregation.  

In a beautiful church with a vibrant congregation and priest open to exploring faith, I still did not find a place for my faith.   I remember sitting in the pews a number of times and wishing there was more silent prayer and less talking and singing.

The funny thing is that Catherine half considered to going to the Hampstead meeting of the Quakers.  It was only a short walk from where we lived.   But the idea of the Quakers seemed too odd for me, that was really only down to my ignorance about Friends.  Catherine continued to express an interest in teh Quakers but we did nothing about it in London or Vancouver.

It took close to another six years after leaving St James that I came to the Quakers and that was in Lillooet because I met Sarah Chandler and she introduced herself as a Quaker.

The decline of the traditional churches

My apologies how this goes, it may ramble.

This week the Anglican Diocese of released the Diocesan Transformation Team report. The big news coming out of it is the call to close many churches with low memberships. But for myself it is the whole report that is interesting to read because of how it examines the church itself.

The Anglican church is not a populist church governed by the members, it is a top down hierarchy that accepts some input from the members. I think they are coming to terms with the fact that the world is changing and they need to adapt. The report strikes me as good ground work for making the change, but it will only work if there are people behind it willing to make it work.

The Anglican church in Canada is rapidly declining. In 1961 they had 1.36 million people on their membership rolls, in 2001 this had declined to 642,000 in 2001, another estimated 100,000 to 120,000 fewer people are on the rolls now. These numbers are the people on the rolls with the church as members, not the census numbers. In 2001 two million people identified as Anglicans, though this is a 7% decline from 1991. To say they have to do something is a wild understatement.

The report sets out 150 people at the minimum:

Where possible, a congregation averaging 150 worshippers per Sunday is
the ideal minimum size that promotes mission and fosters growth

This begs the question, if all these congregations had more than 150 worshipers in the past, why did they decline?

I worry about us Quakers that we are so few and not increasing quickly, but compared to the Anglicans, United Church, Lutherans, and Presbyterians we are doing OK. The main stream protestant churches are dramatically falling in numbers. The census also shows they are older than average.

People with no religion has grown quickly and it is a young group. In 2001 no religion was the second largest group in Canada at 16.2%, only the Catholics were ahead with 43.2% of Canadians. In BC 35.1% of people had no religion in 2001, by far the largest group in the province. People with no religion has been growing very quickly.

John Spong makes a good case for what the church needs to do in his book "Christianity must change of die". We are well educated intelligent people and generally do not accept the mythology from the Bible as being true. Why do people continue to go to church?

One set of people go to church because they are trying to escape modernity. People who want to be in denial about the world and seek simple black and white answers to everything. I see this in the rise in evangelical Christians and Mormons.

In the past the church was an important place for community for people. It has been a long time since any church has really been the focal point of a geographic community of people. It still happens in some small towns, but in those towns the Post Office is a focal point for community as well.

There are few places for thoughtful and open minded people to go to for spirituality. Most of the mainline churches continue with idea that the myths of the Christian faith are true and that the literal stories are important. They continue to offer a fossilized faith for a time long gone.

The mainline churches are in a real problem spot as they have existing congregations that are not going to be keen to change to new Christianity that is part of our current era. The people that would be interested in that are no longer in any Church and likely will not come back quickly. I have seen one church make this transition, St James Piccadilly in London.

When Donald Reeves took over as rector in 1980 the church was on the verge of closure. He came in and took it from a stuffy dieing Church of England congregation to a vibrant and alive community of people.

“Jesus wasn’t exactly into garden parties, He was regarded as a nuisance,” Reeves says. “The churches shouldn’t be creating little managers of sectarian communities but should be places of dissent.” His own dissenting challenge to Thatcherism was overt. He sparked lively debate by preaching against the invasion of the Falklands, and he helped the miners’ wives during their husbands’ bitter strike. But debate across boundaries was encouraged — invited speakers included Norman Tebbit as well as Tony Benn, non-believers as well as believers. And, in anticipation of later work in the Balkans, he began to explore the idea of peace-building, inviting Chinese and Russian visitors. Bishop Trevor Huddleston, a veteran campaigner against apartheid, who lived in the St James’s vicarage for many years, was another significant influence.

I went to this church from 1990 to 1992 and it was a lively community of intelligent young people. I even ended up on the PCC for a year. There were about seven or eight Church of England clergy that went to St James as their parish church. People like Norry McCurry, Trevor Huddleston and Ulla Monberg. St James showed me that faith and the modern world were not in conflict.

As much as I liked the church for the community that it was, I ultimately had problems with the form of worship. I found no space among the words to contemplate the concept of God - you can see I really needed to be a Quaker.

The mainstream churches need to connect again with the communities and they must build communities. It can be done, but I do not expect it will happen soon enough. I wish more people honestly seeking a spiritual path try out the Quaker form of worship.

Faith focused on process and not perfection

Since I came to the Quakers in 1998, I have not always been able to put into words why I chose this faith path over all the others available to me. Over the long weekend I had a chance to really put some words to why Quakerism and not something else.

Lynne Phillips led a special interest group into Quaker theology at the spring Western Half Yearly Meeting in Sorrento BC on the Victoria Day long weekend. It was during this session of all of us trying to talk about what a Quaker theology might be that it became to clear to me what it is about Quakerism that works for me.

The Quaker faith path is a really a journey of exploration of spirituality, it is not a destination.

Most religions hold out some manner of a promise of perfection. Either the faith is perfect or you will achieve perfection in the afterlife. So often there is someone in the faith that has the keys to heaven, is a learned person who has all the answers. I am not looking for someone to give me the answers. I am smart enough to know that there is no such thing as perfection. I want to understand inside of me on an emotional and fulfilling way the importance of faith in my life. I am not interested in being handed the answers and told what to do.

My spirituality is a process. I am not looking for quick answers to questions, I am looking for ways to conceive of the depth of such questions as "Is there a God?" and "What is God?". Every human civilization has had the need to have some sort of faith. To say there is no God denies everything we have been as humans up until now. I need to understand and know about that within all of us humans that makes faith so fundamentally important to us all.

Most mainstream religions have chosen to cement the idea of God into to something that comes to us from thousands of years ago. They allow no real growth for the idea of God and new ways to express it. They are hung up on a perfection that was thought up millenia ago.

In Quakerism I have a process that lets me explore the idea of faith and God. I have come out of meeting for worship at times with head almost ready to explode because I caught a momentary glimpse in my mind's eye of how huge God could be.

The faith path I am on is one that will be with me for the rest of my life and there is no end goal, no end station, no nirvana. I will never know who or what God is while I am on this journey, but I will gain an insight into my life and others as to what makes us human and why we need to cooperate as a society and build naratives we share.

Growing Alienation in Society

On Saturday I went to listen to Richard Louvs, author of Last Child in the Woods, Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, talk last Saturday at the Victoria Conference Centre. Much of his talk resonated with me strongly. I have been concerned and worried about the disconnection in our society from the natural world, from a world were it is not all dominated by what it is possible for human comfort.

I have my boys in Scouting so that they do will grow up camping, that they will do works to make our world a better place and so that they will not fear the outside. I see the alienation of the outside among so many people now. There is a tangible fear of the outdoors and of all animals in people.

My hope is that all the boys will have the skills at age 15 or 16 to be able to look after themselves in the wilderness if something happens. I also want them to have the confidence to be able to undertake real adventures as young men. With that confidence comes a respect for the power of the wilderness.

Building a shelter to survive the night and make a fire are skills that every person should know, but these days less than 5% of people can do it. I know that there are a lot of people out there who think this is no longer something important to know, they are distainful of the need to know this. But to learn it takes so little that only a fool would not try and learn how to survive a night in the wilderness.

I also raise chickens so that the boys will see where food comes from. The chickens will also instill some thrift in the boys, it is cheaper to keep chickens than to go to the store and buy eggs. Meanwhile in Vancouver there is a strong backlash against people keeping chickens. The agruements against the keeping of chickens are all fear or disgust based, they are responses coming from alienation from alienation.

My children know that chickens shit, that they are dumb birds. They also know that the omletter they have from breakfast is from their yard and their chickens. They know the feeling of picking up an egg still warm from being laid. They can see the weird habits the birds have.

Someday they are also going to have kill these birds when they reach the end of their lives. Our society expresses alienation with animals by anthropomorphizing them. Much of our food comes from animals that we eat, being squeamish about killing them yourself is a complete disconnection from life, it is alienation extended to the point of mental illness.

They will never in their life look at a dozen eggs and not have an emotional and intellectual connection to where this food has come from and what it takes for those eggs to be in their hands. They will know that chickens lived and died so that those eggs could be laid.

I would like to hunt with them as well. They need to know the process involved to get meat, they need to know that killing animals is part of how we eat and ethically you have to be able to kill to be able eat meat.

The funny thing is that the most alienated and disconnected people tend to be urban dwelling, univiesty educated professionals. It is very clear to me that the highest density neighbourhoods in Vancouver are the ones with the people most alienated from the natural world. The alienation is primarily expressed in sarcasm, disgust, and being dismissive.

The human soul requires a connection to other people, to a society, but it also requires a connection to the seasons and the natural world. The urban people have become disconnected on many levels from what it is to be a human being.

Knowing seasons means we know what foods in our stores are fresh and local. People that shop for produce at places like Save-On-Foods, Costco or Safeway live in a world that is disconnected from seasons, they buy without thought to where and when or even flavour.

Knowing seasons means being in touch with the cycles of a year and being able to mark and note the passing of year. Stores and society do a better job of promoting Valentines Day, Christmas, Halloween and other shopping events than spring, summer, fall and winter.

People need to go out and hike in all weathers and at all times of the year. Urban people need to go camping on a regular basis to reconnect to something real and ageless. Our schools need to take the kids into nature on a regular basis. The human soul needs to be in the sort of places that our ancestors lived in 200, 2000 and 20 000 years ago. Our human soul requires us to know the ageless and ongoing power of the world outside of what we build for our comfort.

Incident on BC Ferries on Sunday

Last Sunday evening I was on my way back to Victoria with Sheila and the kids after spending the weekend emptying my mother's house in Tsawwassen so that it can be sold. A weekend that sucked because my family home is no longer there, the only family home I have known for my 43 years. It was very good to have been doing this with my brother and sister.

We got into the line for the ferry and missed the five pm sailing. We were about to get onto the 6 pm sailing the the truck was dead. Very stressful and very embracing. Not a great way to end a depressing weekend.

Sheila and the boys managed to walk onto the 7pm and I got the truck towed into Tsawwassen to the Husky. I also got BC Ferries to refund the ticket, the problem is that the refunded the whole ticket including the boys and Sheila. They got on for free.

I got back to the ferry terminal with lots of time to spare for the nine pm sailing. When I was buying the ticket for myself, I pointed out that they had refunded me too much money, $39 to be exact. This confused the ticket agent - he obviously was expecting a complaint. He did not know what to do with this and so called for the manager.

The manager got there and was also at first confused, he was expecting a hostile person and not this problem. He said "the sailing is on us"

The agent, manager and another staff person there thanked me for being so honest.

I felt good because I did not have a low grade stress from getting something for free by accident - it is important to my faith to be truthful. I could see I also brightened the day of the three guys I dealt. It was also a chance for them to differentiate this day for all their other work days.

Just a small story to remind people that being honest and doing the right thing improves the lives of everyone it touches.

November 11th

As a Quaker I come up to November 11th with mixed feelings, I am a pacifist but I would never want to do anything to denigrate the people that chose to fight in the wars and lost their lives.

I also have very mixed feelings because the side of the wars my family was involved with from 1905 to 1945 was normally on the side of the despots. I had family members involved in the following wars:

• Russo-Japanese war on the Russian side
• World War I on the Russian side
• The Russian Civil War on the White side
• The Estonian War of Independence on the Estonian side
• World War II on the German side
• The Russo-Finnish War on the Finnish side.

My grandfather, August von Schulmann, was an officer in four of those wars and was executed at the end of World War II.

World War II alone killed one in ten people from my ethnic group and displaced 99.99% of us from our homeland.

I grew up in Canada learning about the sacrifice Canadians made to defeat the Axis powers in World War II, but could not talk about or mourn the losses of my family.

The men I knew in my family when I was growing up that had been to war were all decent, kind, good men who wanted a better world for their families and their community. They also all fought for Nazi Germany in World War II or the Russian Czar in World War I.

So I am a religious pacifist who grew up only knowing the personal story of the people that fought on the wrong side of the war. I am also someone that respects the decision of others to go to war to fight for what they believe in.

Remembrance ceremonies have always been very hard for me to go to because of all my mixed feelings. I have not been to one since I was a youth and went as part of Air Cadets. I have been seeking something to do on November 11th because it seems morally wrong not to pay attention and show respect. My fear of the cenotaph ceremonies is that they will not touch me in a way that honours what is going on or means I will act in a disrespectful way. Sitting alone in the house and quiet has never really been meaningful enough.

I believe I have found something I can do that will work for me. Shelbourne Avenue in Victoria was planted with trees in the 1920s and 30s as a memorial to all of the men from BC that died in World War I. Tomorrow I will spend an hour or two walking along the street and contemplating that each trees is a living memorial to a man that died.

In the end what matters most is:

• How well did you live?
• How well did you love?
• How well did you learn to let go?

Short, to the point and I saw it on a poster/banner for sale on a BC Ferry, God works in weird ways and in strange places, but I always try to remain open to the spirit and what it says to me.

Faith and War

I am a Quaker and a core belief of the faith is that there is that of God within everyone. To kill people means to kill that of God within them. This, together with the teachings of Christ such as turning the other cheek, means I am by faith a pacifist.

I also live in this world. I know I am safe in part because the police exist and ultimately have the ability to keep order with force. I also live in a country where I do not need to test my faith because I am like almost all Canadians and I am not in danger of ever being in a situation where I would need to decide to take a life or not.

From my faith point of view, there is no war that is justified from a faith base. This means I would have been opposed to fighting Hitler in World War 2. I also recognize that he had to be stopped and he had to removed from power. Ultimately I did not have to make decision on that war. Quakers were very divided by it. There were many Quakers that joined the military to fight against fascism. There were others that chose to help by filling positions in non combat roles to allow others to fight in the war. It was a morally a very difficult decision. We are ultimately human and we can not live up to all of our ideals and live within a world where living up to them can at times be impossible.

This brings me to the wars we have had in the last few years. As far as I can see, the war in Iraq and Afghanistan are broadly similar to the war against Hitler. The wars are about core civil values - either for an open and free society or for the modern fascist equivalent to Hitler.

Canada is Afghanistan fighting against religious fascists. If war is in any way justifiable, I can think of no wars more justifiable than the ones against the fascim in the middle east.

I have been reading Terry Glavin's blog a lot lately. His take on what is happening among the left and in Afghanistan is quite amazing. The left in Canada is sounding more and more like the isolationists before world war 2. They are like the people who interned the Canadians that fought in the Spanish Civil War because they were pre-mature anti-fascists.

The latest is the writings of now former Liberal candidate Lesley Hughes. The revisionist views of the attacks on September 11th 2001 are becoming this centuries holocaust denial stories.

The modern fascism we see in the middle east and central Asia is coupled with a virulent and horrid antisemitism on the left in the first world. I may not like the government of Israel, but then I dislike a lot of governments people elect in a lot of countries. What I do see is that Israel is the most open and democratic country between Greece and India. They have managed to maintain this even though they are surrounded by antisemitic fascists bend to killing them.

I want to see a peaceful resolution to what is going on in the region, but how far are we willing to go to achieve that? Leaving Afghanistan is an admission that the Taliban will rule the country. What crime have the people in Afghanistan done that we would condemn them to live under the Taliban? Do we not have a responsibility to all the oppressed people of the world to support them to become pluralistic and open societies with free elections? If we have a military, is it not right for that military to be used to free the oppressed?

I remain a pacifist and would prefer there to be no military. Could we change things if several hundred thousand of use pacifists went to Afghanistan and were willing to be human shields for the nation against the fascists? We would be willing to die to allow people in Afghanistan to live? I am not there and that is a testimony to my fear of where my religious pacifism should take me.