By God’s Mercy We Are Engaged in this Ministry

…Since it is by God’s mercy that we are engaged in this ministry, we do not lose heart. We have renounced the shameful, underhanded ways; we refuse to practice cunning or to falsify God’s word, but by the open statement of the truth we commend ourselves to the conscience of everyone in the sight of God.

(2 Corinthians 4:1-2, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)

Like many Quakers, I admired Pope Francis.

I grew up in the Roman Catholic Church and maintained a varying degree of involvement until my early twenties. My disenchantment had little to do with anything in the Apostles’ Creed—on such matters, I remain skeptical yet hopeful. Mostly, my blossoming queer sensibility became irreconcilable with the church’s attitudes toward gay and lesbian folks, and women’s rights issues from ordination to abortion. So I just… moved on, and eventually found my way to the Religious Society of Friends.

I still cared enough, though, to feel some frustration when the highly conservative Joseph Ratzinger became Benedict XVI… and then, eight years later, a curious optimism when Benedict resigned and his successor, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, chose the name Francis.

Over the last twelve years, I’ve found that many of Francis’s public utterances resonated with my understanding of Quaker faith—possibly a result of his Jesuit training, with its emphasis on spiritual discernment. In the encyclical Dilexit nos (“He loved us”), for example, he discusses the vital role of compunction in spiritual formation. “Compunction is ‘not a feeling of guilt that makes us discouraged or obsessed with our unworthiness,’” he explains, quoting one of his own homilies:

“…but a beneficial ‘piercing’ that purifies and heals the heart. Once we acknowledge our sin, our hearts can be opened to the working of the Holy Spirit, the source of living water that wells up within us and brings tears to our eyes… To shed tears of compunction means seriously to repent of grieving God by our sins.”

I hear strong echoes in this passage of the earliest Quakers’ understanding of repentance. 

“There is a day of visitation given to all,” Friends like Robert Barclay believed, “during which salvation is possible unto them,” and at that time one would encounter “that inward Grace and Light… by which they forsook iniquity and became just and holy.”

When something like that happens to you, you don’t just carry on with your life as usual. “Having the experience of the inward and powerful work of this Light in our hearts, even Jesus revealed in us,” Barclay declared, “[we] cannot cease to proclaim the day of the Lord.” (Barclay uses even in a sense more common to seventeenth-century English; replace it with namely and you’ll grasp his meaning more clearly.)

Proclaiming the day of the Lord includes actions as well as words. George Fox exhorted Quakers to “let your lives preach, let your light shine, that your works may be seen, that your Father may be glorified.” Francis encouraged a similar enthusiasm; “to be able to speak of Christ,” he wrote in Dilexit nos, “by witness or by word, in such a way that others seek to love him, is the greatest desire of every missionary of souls.”

“What kind of worship would we give to Christ,” Francis went on to ask, “if we were to rest content with an individual relationship with him and show no interest in relieving the sufferings of others or helping them to live a better life? Would it please the heart that so loved us, if we were to bask in a private religious experience while ignoring its implications for the society in which we live?”

God’s mercy bestows on us the freedom and the obligation to introduce others to that mercy. 

Quakers embrace that paradox—with the understanding that we can all carry out this ministry. God’s call requires no ordination, no certification. We reject the separation of the Beloved Community into priests and laity, and the abuses of power that can result.

I’ve met several Friends who started out as Catholics, some of whom still carry a heavy burden of bitterness and resentment toward the church. I understand how some of them got to that place—even people who didn’t personally experience abuse by a religious authority figure probably know someone who did, whether or not they’ve discussed that trauma openly. Yet no faith community, including the Quakers, has the purity to throw the first stone at the Vatican over that. So it still pains me to witness Friends inveigh broadly against Catholicism in casual conversation and even, at times, in messages during worship.

Francis reminded Quakers that we can find “friends of the truth” in any religious community. He didn’t always get it right; though he moved the needle on acceptance for gay and lesbian people within the church, for example, only a handful of trans people who knew him personally could take the same comfort. Then again, the Religious Society of Friends could do better on that front as well. We all have a ways to go, in one respect or another—but, through the mercy of God, we do not go it alone.