Your post reminds me of a “mixed wedding” I went to, where one partner of the couple was Quaker and the other was from the UCC–and a minister, at that.

I didn’t mind the initial rituals that were leading up to the Meeting for Worship, given the one partner’s religious practice…

But where the rubber really met the road for me was when the person presiding over the programmed part of the afternoon–another UCC minister?–invited all of the attenders to “break bread” and participate in a secular form of communion.

There was a long and careful explanation of what the couple’s intention was in offering this ceremony as part of the wedding, and I watched Quaker after Quaker rise to accept this form of communion.

But in the end, I just couldn’t do it. A lot of it was because I had a Jewish upbringing, not a Christian one.

It was one of the most difficult things I’ve had to do among Friends, and I often worry that my deep regard for Quaker tradition–including the stripping away of empty forms in order to keep a clear path between ourselves and God–sets me apart from many Friends.

But sometimes, rituals or not, it’s the only way I know how to be me, deeply.

…I think I’ll expand on this comment in a post of my own. Thanks again for addressing this topic.

Blessings,
Liz Opp, The Good Raised Up

I am thankful for the honesty of Friends Meetings for Worship, the lack of empty ritual. In Friends Meeting, I have to be engaged. A couple of times since I began attending Friends Meeting a decade ago, I’ve been in situations in which I had the opportunity to participate in communion. Because it was something I considered seriously and choose to partake in, I found it moving and meaningful. I don’t know if I ever would have come to feel that way if it were an activity I partook in on a monthly basis as part of the routine. I fully understand eschewing ritual which quickly can become proscribed and meaningless.

1) Chapter 6 of John Punshon’s book, Encounter with Silence, is titled “Symbols and Images,” and he explicitly grapples with the symbolic meaning of silence.

2) I am a firm believer in one of the tenents of Communication Theory: You can’t not communicate. Aj, you write that, “To abstain from symbol is to cut off a powerful means of communicating with and worshiping God.”

Above, Craig writes that, “without symbols, how do we know spiritually and theologically anything?”

I question the possibility of EVER abstaining from symbols. Aj points to this with the comment that, “the lack of physical symbols is a symbol in itself,” however it is worth being explicit about: we understand the world by placing meaning on things. In the landmark text, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, the cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner wrote that it was through narrative that individuals ordered experience and constructed reality. I think this is doubly true in the field of theological experience.

3) I have found that religious/theological problems pertaining to “either/or” duality are usually ripe for the picking in terms of insight. In particular, I have found that our cultural normative default of fixed, logical, scientific, Western thought often impairs my ability to enter into a deep immersion in the Divine. God simply doesn’t play by our rules, and when we try to impose our educated critique on the movement of the Spirit, we get funny results. Conversely, when we accept that mystery is part of the mystic, prophetic path, we can more readily allow fluid definitions and continually revealing aspects of truth. For those interested, my pet project at theopoetics.net directly addresses these issues.

When I was clerk of a small East Coast Quaker meeting we never had to wrestle with communion (an obvious no-no for us) but some of the dynamics were the same. Whenever someone asked why we did something the way we did, I could count on half the meeting membership to answer “that’s how we do it” and think the case closed. The other half came from academia and would want to launch into a symposium, stripping away all calls to the authority of tradition to find first principles with which to decide the question anew. I thought both approaches were ultimately flawed and only lasted a year as clerk!
Martin @ Quaker Ranter

Great fuel for further conversation!