Forum, January 2025

Are sacraments merely distractions?

Did Andy Stanton-Henry’s professor not explain the theological position behind our stance on the so-called sacraments? (“More Spiritual than God” by Stanton-Henry, FJ Oct. 2024).

The mainstream churches focus on water baptism because they believe that the one who can baptise in the Spirit is not available to do so: early Friends found that He is. The mainstream churches established a system of ceremonial magic and a body of trained magicians to create a conduit, a medium, for making contact with a God that they believed to be remote: early Friends found that their contact with God was, quite literally, immediate, without mediation or medium. Mainstream churches celebrate a memorial meal for one that they believe is absent: early Friends found that He was present! Christ had come, they came to believe by experiment, to teach His people Himself.

Which of these theological positions does Stanton-Henry disagree with?

The Quaker tradition is a blessed relief to those of us who find sacraments at best a distraction, at best an unnecessary nothing, maybe even an impediment. Let us not repeat the mistakes of the mainstream churches and add in what is not required.

Keith Braithwaite
Glossop, UK

Love and obedience

That line toward the end of Adrian Glamorgan’s “The Devoted Path” (FJ Dec. 2024) that “We speak truth to power and mean it, but we do so with a compassion that knows that improvement is possible and that the powerful can be won over” reminds me of Martin Luther King Jr.’s classic sermon where he says, “I’m so glad the good Lord did not ask us to like our enemies . . . but I will love them, and we will both be winners.”

It’s too easy to hate governments, the rich, the powerful, the influencers, and especially toward those who appear to be doing something wrong in our eyes. I personally remain convinced that annual general elections, where “we the people” get to vote on budgets put forward by our government, opposition, and any other candidates, is the way forward to a “new creation.” I know that I (and everyone!) should always hold the knowledge that I/we may be mistaken.

One year at a time, sweet Jesus.

David Tehr
Perth, Australia

Long-term, love only works as a voluntary choice not inspired by fear or desire.

One tiny-yet-significant quibble is with the word obedience, even in the context of God, as such a word is too easily twisted and abused to apply to imperfect and unequal human relationships. Obedience perpetuates our winner-take-all, majority rules systems excluding most of us and preventing mutual governance via full equality of consensus/spiritual union.

Fortunately, climate change will be quickly addressed by global governments when costs rise too high, just as it was with the ozone hole a few decades ago. When major coastal cities start routinely flooding and grinding to a halt, then the billionaires will more quickly shift investments to clean, green energy solutions, and press central bankers to raise interest rates to slow global economies to reduce carbon emissions. No need to fear, just keep listening to our neighbors so we may have a chance to mutually share our insights.

Thank you again for a very insightful and inspirational article highlighting ancient ways to improve ourselves to better help our world.

George Gore
Chicago Area, Ill.

Rethinking economics

I am really intrigued by the video “How Quakers Can Rethink the Economy” (QuakerSpeak.com interview with Alicia Mendonca-Richards, Oct. 2024). I am indeed myself depending more and more on my connection to what I call the “flowing of love” as I decide how to befriend each moment. It is often amazing to me how well things work out. The books I am finding most compelling are Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer and Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul by John Phillip Newell.

I wish Mendonca-Richards had been able to share at least one example of what she was proposing, though I know she didn’t have much time. I also wish she could have spoken a bit more slowly. She is charming and I certainly wish her well!

Sarah Campbell
New York, N.Y.

Acquisition and distribution of resources to sustain life (i.e., economics) have always been central to human societies (and in a sense all forms of life). Cooperation and mutual aid and support have generally been the most successful paradigms. But as humans developed increasingly more abundant paradigms for life sustainment, they often diverged into more uncharitable and exploitative ways of organizing their societies. The currently most pervasive paradigm in Western societies is capitalism, which has been described as “the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work together for the benefit of all.”

Janet Nagel
Greensboro, N.C.

Do not remove

Over 25 years ago I, a lapsed Protestant, attended St. Benedict’s Feast Day at the Benedictine Priory in Weston, Vt. (“Catholic to Quaker” interview with Roberta Bothwell, QuakerSpeak.com Apr. 2021). During the picnic after the service, one of my friends approached me in an agitated state. “Sandy,” he said, “God spoke to me. He said you have to find a church.” I thought for a moment and said, “You’re right.” He replied, “Don’t tell me. Tell God.”

On the ride home I talked this over with another friend. She suggested I try the Friends meeting near her old house, which I was now renting. I knew of Quakers, but nothing about them, so she offered to accompany me.

We sat in the meetinghouse, which had been built in the 1700s. The bench was hard, and as I sat I wondered what the heck I was doing there. Then a man stood and spoke about his experience of returning to meeting after some time away, describing what I later learned was a “gathered meeting.”

After meeting several members spoke to me. One forever endeared himself to me by grabbing up a copy of Faith and Practice with a cover marked by bold words, “Do Not Remove from Meeting,” and saying, “Here. Take this home and read it.”

I was hooked.

Sandy Hale
Villas, N.J.

A Friends meeting with family history

I was very interested in Cheryl Weaver’s article about discovering Quakerism at the Orchard Park (N.Y.) Meetinghouse (“Silent Steadfastness,” FJ Aug. 2024). My grandparents lived about 200 yards east of the meetinghouse on East Quaker Road from 1937 until my grandmother died in 2004. My father and his sisters used to skate on the little pond on the other side of the road from the meetinghouse. Quakers were a big part of the early settlement of Orchard Park. Right across the road from Nana’s is the Obadiah Baker Homestead, with the historical marker out in front noting that it was a stop on the Underground Railroad. My aunt Susan used to say that the creek that ran parallel to Quaker Road was called “Smokes Creek” because of the people who would hide along it.

I visited my grandmother a lot and in the years since I became a Quaker in 1991. I would usually go to worship there on Sundays. I tried to get Nana to go with me, but she never did. I’m not sure she ever actually went into the meetinghouse. My father’s younger sister Wendy remembers that the various other churches in Orchard Park would occasionally have services in the meetinghouse—she told me she had been to church there herself but as a Presbyterian!

The Quaker meeting was revived around 1990. I really felt close to the old Quaker settlers who had gone to meeting there. Weaver writes about looking out the window at the trees in the graveyard. That’s a view I often contemplated when I worshiped there. Thanksgiving was a frequent time to visit Nana, and I remember looking out the window into the gray morning (fall and winter around Buffalo can be pretty bleak), the view livened only by the fall colors of the leaves. Thank you for this wonderful article.

Daniel Read
Durham, N.C.

Correction: 

In “Hope’s Many Answers” by Sharlee DiMenichi (FJ Dec. 2024), the photo caption on page 28 for the School of the Spirit Faithful Meetings program incorrectly identified the location of the group of Friends shown in one of the photos. The retreat pictured on the left took place at the Red Cedar (Mich.) Meetinghouse, not Chattanooga (Tenn.) Meetinghouse.