Why Are We Converging?
I have had many conversations with people about their experiences with church or civic religion or atheism and I keep hearing people say similar things. Basically, people are looking for something more. And it’s not just young people - it’s older folks and parents. I hear the sentiment from grandmothers in walkers to kids in high school. The forms we have for religion (or lack thereof) just don’t satisfy.
What I found most intriguing about Robin’s term, Convergent Friends, is this idea that at the fringes – at the edges – we find ourselves at a place that we instinctively recognize as not quite right. It’s not just that we find ourselves uncomfortable – we find ourselves in circumstances that just seem wrong. So we converge. We come back from the edges and bring with us an experience, a narrative that we pass along to others from the fringes and we begin to reconcile whatever it was that drove us to the edges in the first place.
Part of the conversation at Quaker 2.0 should be why we find ourselves converging. Why do you see yourself coming to a point where you’re looking for more than a faith that fits in some 300-year-old box? Why is Evangelical Christendom not enough? What is your story?
Type your comment heChristopher and crowd, dear fFriends in the light:
The whole question of finding identity in old forms in new times… well, it is an old social trend. I am becoming convinced that we are, most of the people of the world, drawn to tribal identity, and those tribes for eons, changed, generally due to a traumatic influx of others, or gradual immigration. Now, we are arrived at a time when our “tribes” are caught in a swirl of change.
So, we are forced to look at who the “we” in our tribe is. Thee, Christopher, hears my voice as a life long Hicksite, and because it is a voice slightly different than the “we” that thee seeks for comfort in the new “us” of Quakerism assumes right off that I come from a different religious background, not Quaker at all, in thy April 20? posting. I do live in a city where there are new multi cultural challenges every day. The divisions in our faith, are completely predicable from the point we leave are nearly monocultural roots in the west of England and spread out over the world. It is a funny thing about people, most humans crave the comfort of a monocultural existence and yet, no place on the planet is truly remote enough to be truly monocultural, so many feel… something is not right.
Fox questioned the complexities within himself, even. He asked why does he still have sinful thoughts…? All these complications are not - something not right. Again and again as we enter times of real and difficult challenges, there is a rise of a new evangelism, some scholars point to this as the third great evangelist period in the US, and American Quakerism is responding, some by saying… it’s OK… relax, worry that thee is right with God, and thy life will speak… others leave our faith, seek to isolate our faith in hard and fast fundamentals… but, really, really, I think all is OK. This is how the world is meant to be, a balance between seeking the comfort of orthodoxy, and the reality that orthodoxy is impossible in human beings… even in a single mind like Fox’s, there is the growth which is the gift of turmoil.
Thine in the light
lor
PS… I lost track of this blog, so I just responded to thy question in the earlier post. My apologies… there are so many wonderful blogs these days, yours (pl.) among them.re.