Allen’s Neck Friends Meeting 739 Horseneck Road Dartmouth, MA Meeting House Phone: 508/636-8910 Pastor: Peter Crysdale Parsonage: 643 Horseneck Rd. Dartmouth, MA 02748 Parsonage Phone: 508/636-2756 Clerk of the Meeting:Burney Gifford

Parsonage Ramblings

In 1994 I left Pendle Hill and went back to graduate school at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. This institution is made up of a number of theological schools: Episcopal, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Unitarian Universalist, Congregational, Methodist, Jesuit, Dominican, Franciscan, Baptist, Jewish, and Greek Orthodox. Students preparing for the ministry take classes with others of very different back grounds. This gathering of differences made for a fascinating conversation, and a truly unusual religious learning experience.

I came back to study after years of working with Friends: the American Friends Service Committee; Pendle Hill; and as Pastor of Durham Friends. For much of my work life I was too busy to think through and spiritually examine what I was up to. Picture this: I took a course called, “Gods Passion: the Thought of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel”. It was taught by a Jesuit from Italy in his thirties, who wore his baseball cap backwards, and dressed like a skater punk. He spoke five or six languages, sometimes all at once. Often he would begin to speak in English and end up in Hebrew. He loved Heschel so much that once he fell over while he was teaching. In his enthusiasm he had forgotten about breathing.

In his class I learned about Quaker concern as an essential element of faith. Heschel called it Pathos, the wise passion of God that the Prophets knew so well. Concern for ourselves, others, the earth, peace, justice, truth; this is the Spirit of God that guided the early Friends. In the huge dictionary in the library there is a special notation under the word “concern” , that describes the unusual way Friends used the word. So a contemporary Jewish rabbi and an Italian Jesuit who knew very little about Quakers, called me to a new and deeper understanding of Quakerism.

Later I took a course from Bill Short, a Franciscan friar and priest, entitled: Franciscan Spirituality. In his book on the Franciscans, Short talks about the ways that early Franciscans approached God. Believing was one of a number of ways. Most of us have become lulled into thinking that believing is the only way. For early Franciscans, believing was the approach of understanding. Affect was the approach of love. The love approach was less rooted in notions and thinking and based in the heart-hunger, the desire for God that we all experience. As a people we have devalued experience. Yet the basic sense of being alive that each of us has is an experience.

I realized that the Quaker approach to God mostly involved the hunger of the heart, the listening-waiting worship in which we are found and loved by the Spirit. Quakers de-emphasized beliefs. Rufus Jones speaks clearly to my condition on this matter: George Fox called all these formulated beliefs, “notions”. George Fox finishes with theories and notions and finds a real presence, a force of spiritual life, operating within himself, closer than breath.

Peter