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Nov. 21st, 2005 03:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zana16I've been having a religious crisis lately.
See, I'm a Quaker. ...Except I'm not.
To my mother, it was very important that her children be members of Santa Cruz Quaker Meeting, so my brother and I were Junior Members. Santa Cruz Meeting does not have Junior Memberships, so they had a threshing session and eventually an exception was made. For us. So: I was a Quaker. Until my Junior Membership ended at the age of 18, at which point I'd not lived close to Santa Cruz for over a decade. I attended San Antonio Monthly Meeting with my family, usually leaving worship after half an hour.
For those of you who don't know, Quakerism (at least, liberal Quakerism) consists of silent worship, meditation while one tries to hear the voice of God/the Light speaking.
Most of my teenage years, I was an atheist. I didn't think a whole lot about it; I just was. I'd never experienced God, and the bible-thumpers turned me off so bad, I went to the other extreme.
Except I did experience something Other. It has never really mattered to me whether it was just in my mind or not. My spirituality is, has always been, and will continue to be entirely for me; it doesn't matter whether other people believe me or my experiences or my way of looking at the Light. Quakers have never liked to be told what to think; that's why they try to listen to the inner truth, the Inner Light. Quakers do not have ministers; each person is a minister--both to him/herself and if needed to others.
So what happens when Quakers are wrong? Because they are. Friends United Meeting--not a part of the liberal Quaker tradition I'm part of, but still Quaker--has an abysmal policy on homosexuality. The Yearly Meeting that used to run Olney Friends School, Stillwater Meeting, kicked Cleveland Monthly Meeting out for having a lesbian wedding. They no longer run the School because a few years ago they ordered the Head of School to fire a lesbian staff member for being a lesbian. The Head and many of the faculty resigned in protest, the school almost closed, and eventually the alumni took up the school. Much of the grounds are still owned by Stillwater, and their Meetinghouse is adjacent to the school property. There is still bad blood. Even amongst the faculty, some of the oldtimers still disapprove. In faculty orientation, we were told that if we had significant others over, we were to hide it not only from the kids, but also from the older faculty who would disapprove of sex outside of marriage. This sort of judgmental stuff is not supposed to happen in Quaker communities. We're supposed to try to accept each other, despite differences in beliefs, and try to find the good in people. And I have a hard time doing that when those people, who profess to be accepting, are judging me for something as trite as my sexuality. I got angry. I got passive aggressive when in diversity training nobody wanted to talk about sexuality in a concrete way beyond "we have this model gay student, things are working for him so we must not have to work on how we deal with sexuality." As the only member of the girls dorm staff who didn't live full-time in the dorm, I was elected the person to be "out" to students. The other two would answer only if directly questioned. I had never encountered a Quaker community that wasn't completely supportive of my sexuality before--in fact, my sexuality had never mattered before. Nobody particularly cared about it.
I guess it was the first disillusionment I had with this lovely religion I thought was as close to perfect as humanly possible. Learning about FUM's policy broke my faith in these people.
Not many people have the experience of growing up in a perfectly supportive community. Not many people get to know they don't have to come out to their parents because love is the only thing that matters and their parents have always let them know that, not explicitly in a "I'd still love if you were gay" but "I love you, and I want you to find love however it comes to you, and any issues I have with the person you love will not have anything to do with their gender". [I should insert here that my dad is always happier when I'm dating women; he has issues with there being other men in my life, but while that's based on gender it's not based on sexuality.]
So no religion is perfect. And I reached the limits of my own religion's perfections. And got disillusioned, and got angry, and now I'm sitting at this crossroads not really wanting to have to choose my next step. Do I become a member of a Quaker Meeting, make change from the inside? Do I continue to stall about committing to membership because it's (to me) a big responsibility, and instead look for a more perfect group to join [fat chance]? Do I whine more to LJ about how my perfect illusions have been taken from me and it's not faaaaaaaaair?
See, I'm a Quaker. ...Except I'm not.
To my mother, it was very important that her children be members of Santa Cruz Quaker Meeting, so my brother and I were Junior Members. Santa Cruz Meeting does not have Junior Memberships, so they had a threshing session and eventually an exception was made. For us. So: I was a Quaker. Until my Junior Membership ended at the age of 18, at which point I'd not lived close to Santa Cruz for over a decade. I attended San Antonio Monthly Meeting with my family, usually leaving worship after half an hour.
For those of you who don't know, Quakerism (at least, liberal Quakerism) consists of silent worship, meditation while one tries to hear the voice of God/the Light speaking.
Most of my teenage years, I was an atheist. I didn't think a whole lot about it; I just was. I'd never experienced God, and the bible-thumpers turned me off so bad, I went to the other extreme.
Except I did experience something Other. It has never really mattered to me whether it was just in my mind or not. My spirituality is, has always been, and will continue to be entirely for me; it doesn't matter whether other people believe me or my experiences or my way of looking at the Light. Quakers have never liked to be told what to think; that's why they try to listen to the inner truth, the Inner Light. Quakers do not have ministers; each person is a minister--both to him/herself and if needed to others.
So what happens when Quakers are wrong? Because they are. Friends United Meeting--not a part of the liberal Quaker tradition I'm part of, but still Quaker--has an abysmal policy on homosexuality. The Yearly Meeting that used to run Olney Friends School, Stillwater Meeting, kicked Cleveland Monthly Meeting out for having a lesbian wedding. They no longer run the School because a few years ago they ordered the Head of School to fire a lesbian staff member for being a lesbian. The Head and many of the faculty resigned in protest, the school almost closed, and eventually the alumni took up the school. Much of the grounds are still owned by Stillwater, and their Meetinghouse is adjacent to the school property. There is still bad blood. Even amongst the faculty, some of the oldtimers still disapprove. In faculty orientation, we were told that if we had significant others over, we were to hide it not only from the kids, but also from the older faculty who would disapprove of sex outside of marriage. This sort of judgmental stuff is not supposed to happen in Quaker communities. We're supposed to try to accept each other, despite differences in beliefs, and try to find the good in people. And I have a hard time doing that when those people, who profess to be accepting, are judging me for something as trite as my sexuality. I got angry. I got passive aggressive when in diversity training nobody wanted to talk about sexuality in a concrete way beyond "we have this model gay student, things are working for him so we must not have to work on how we deal with sexuality." As the only member of the girls dorm staff who didn't live full-time in the dorm, I was elected the person to be "out" to students. The other two would answer only if directly questioned. I had never encountered a Quaker community that wasn't completely supportive of my sexuality before--in fact, my sexuality had never mattered before. Nobody particularly cared about it.
I guess it was the first disillusionment I had with this lovely religion I thought was as close to perfect as humanly possible. Learning about FUM's policy broke my faith in these people.
Not many people have the experience of growing up in a perfectly supportive community. Not many people get to know they don't have to come out to their parents because love is the only thing that matters and their parents have always let them know that, not explicitly in a "I'd still love if you were gay" but "I love you, and I want you to find love however it comes to you, and any issues I have with the person you love will not have anything to do with their gender". [I should insert here that my dad is always happier when I'm dating women; he has issues with there being other men in my life, but while that's based on gender it's not based on sexuality.]
So no religion is perfect. And I reached the limits of my own religion's perfections. And got disillusioned, and got angry, and now I'm sitting at this crossroads not really wanting to have to choose my next step. Do I become a member of a Quaker Meeting, make change from the inside? Do I continue to stall about committing to membership because it's (to me) a big responsibility, and instead look for a more perfect group to join [fat chance]? Do I whine more to LJ about how my perfect illusions have been taken from me and it's not faaaaaaaaair?
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(no subject)
Date: 2005-11-21 08:18 pm (UTC)I will never say that you shouldn't attempt to foment change from within. That's a good and noble thing, utterly characteristic of you. What I'll say instead is, I understand the conflict. Fomenting change like that can be emotionally draining and a real spiritual challenge- not the sort of thing to take up casually.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-07 07:40 pm (UTC)And that's just it: I don't think I do have the time, energy, etc to commit. But I feel guilty just leaving it alone. Hm.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-11-21 09:05 pm (UTC)Being told how to live my life and who to love or not love by people who were following rules written by someone whose society was so completely different from ours didn't make sense to me, and was why I stopped going to church as a teenager. Now it's just one of many reasons why I no longer identify as Christian.