This page is a work in progress. We will add to it from time to time, and want to continue to share with you thoughts of Friends, both local and beyond. We are providing you these thoughts in hopes that you can get to know us better, and perhaps they will promote discussion from you as well.
I would like to offer a thought—a metaphor if I could, one that occurred to me during our our Meeting one day. In addition to my work as a musician, I also work a good bit as a piano tuner. If you can bear with me through the music talk, I'll try to explain the metaphor that tuning a piano can provide for our Conservative Friends communities (and others as well).
No piano that uses white keys and black keys (meaning all pianos) can ever be completely in tune. Some intervals (pairs of notes) may sound perfectly in tune, but as a necessity, others will then be out of tune. Around 300 years ago, someone came up with an idea called Well-Tempered Tuning, and this totally changed the world of music. Because of this, pianos could play in any of 12 keys, something that was impossible before. Somewhat as a result, the wonderful European music of the last 300 years, so rich in its wandering in and out of keys, sprang into being.
Well-tempered tuning became equal-tempered tuning, and that's what we all use today. But there's an interesting thing about equal-tempered tuning--all tuners have to purposefully tune certain intervals slightly out of tune, or else the whole piano would sound very bad. I think you would all agree that a well-tuned piano provides a beautiful overall sound, but that sound comes as a result of many compromises. Because of the physics of sound, you can tune octaves in tune, but once you get to 5ths and 4ths, if you try to put them all in tune, you will have nothing but a mess, especially by the time you get to the black notes. God gave us a system of sound--we have to deal with these sounds the best we can, and do things according to what's there, not what we think should be there.
Perhaps our communities are like this as well. If we try to have absolute harmony on every issue--maybe that can cause chaos in the big picture. If we begin our approach to issues and problems with the undestanding that we can't all be the same, and perfectly in tune with each other, then perhaps we can understand that the big picture remains intact. If we strive to glorify God, then we can contribute greatly to all communities and people, even if there are slight dissonances in our midst.
Keep in mind that these compromises piano tuners make are very small. The out-of-tune intervals are only slightly out-of-tune. So therefore we can't have holy wars amongst ourselves and think that the big picture will still remain intact. But the key to this metaphor is that the piano tuner starts out with the understanding that he or she must make these compromises, and accept the harmonic imperfections. Perhaps we might also consider this as well, as we try to discuss things that we do not agree on.
God, is generally depicted as all-loving, all-knowing, and all-powerful. As we know, materialists point out the incompatibility of all those adjectives, given the fact that there is horrendous suffering in the world.
What came to me in meeting was this: The all-powerful part is perhaps a very wrong description of God. Sure God has infinite power (energy), but the leading that came to me indicated that we've connected the power of God with the same power people use in politics, war, etc. If there is anything we know, it is that the acquisition of power usually brings evil, always corruption, and a host of other unpleasant things. By depicting God as all-powerful, we've erroneously connected God with our human desire for control.
Consider the Holy Spirit—It nutures, It inspires, It chides us when we take the wrong path, It does a lot of things—but as far as I know none are by force. It allows us to move with our own free will and the Holy Spirit has no "ambitions" or ever seeks to dominate. Our concept of power as attached to the Holy Spirit is as irrelevant as to say the Holy Spirit is the color red, or blue.
Therefore when Friends oppose capital punishment and war, we are opposing the use of state power to inflict violence on others. To use violence is to act in a way contrary to the manner of the Holy Spirit, and to use violence is to act in a way that is irrelevant to the nature of the Holy Spirit. Therefore it pulls us further and further from the truth, and any sense of God-centeredness. In short, the use of this kind of power (control) is irrelevant to the hand of God. We need to extricate our desire for power from any association with God's power.
And finally—in our desire to solve the misery in this world, we seek the "power" to do so. For centuries people sought the hand of God to change their state, and to bring them relief from famine, rain in times of drought, victory in war. Instead of power, we were given Jesus. That was either a great disappointment (for many), or the very revelation of the hand of the Holy Spirit.
This response to the above posting came from our Friend Raye Hodgson, a conservative Friend in Connecticut. She attends Litchfield Hills Meeting.
"Not too long ago, some time this summer, I was given something to say in meeting. This is a paraphrase:
When we think of power, we think of the ways that people try to get what they want. And many times, as Americans, we are raised to reach automatically for these sources of power. They include money, physical attractiveness, intellect, rhetoric, emotional manipulation, outward physical weapons, social status. These are not the weapons that Friends are to use. We must use the spiritual weapons given to us such as prayer, love, forgiveness, and faith."
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