Yet anoth­er group of Friends (does­n’t mat­ter which, it could be any) is plan­ning a pro­gram on “com­mu­ni­ty.” They quote a snip­pet of a 1653 epis­tle on George Fox – you know the one about “Mind that which is eter­nal…” Fine enough, but there’s so much more to the epis­tle that we would fear to quote, like:

We are redeemed by the only redeemer Christ Jesus, not with cor­rupt­ible things, nei­ther is our redemp­tion of man, nor by man, nor accord­ing to the will of man, but con­trary to man’s will. And so, our uni­ty and fel­low­ship with vain man are lost, and all his evil ways are now turned into enmi­ty; and all his pro­fes­sion is now found to be deceit, and in all his fairest pre­tences lod­geth cru­el­ty; and the bot­tom and ground of all his knowl­edge of God and Christ is found sandy, and can­not endure the tempest.

Inter­est­ing ideas, but not ones most lib­er­al Friends would like to tack­le. It’s a shame. I wish we would more more active­ly engage with our tra­di­tion and not just selec­tive­ly edit out a few words which makes Fox sound like a sev­en­teen cen­tu­ry Thich Nhat Hanh. I think we can simul­ta­ne­ous­ly wres­tle with and chal­lenge our tra­di­tion with­out hav­ing to either capit­u­late to it or aban­don it.

After writ­ing the above, I went for a neigh­bor­hood walk with baby asleep in the back­pack. And I real­ized I had­n’t explained why it mat­ters to engage. I did­n’t quote the sen­tences about human will­full­ness to show that I’m more sev­en­teenth cen­tu­ry than thee, or to prove I can use the “C” word.
No, I quote it because it’s a rockin’ quote. George Fox is map­ping out for us twenty-first cen­tu­ry Friends just how we might get out of the predica­ment of super­fi­cial “com­mu­ni­ty” we’ve got­ten our­selves into. Every­one from Wal­mart to Wal­green’s, from Hillary Clin­ton to Oprah, is try­ing to sell us on some dream of com­mu­ni­ty com­plete with a price tag from cor­po­rate Amer­i­ca. Buy our prod­ucts, our polit­i­cal par­ty, our lifestyle and we’ll give you the nar­cot­ic of con­sumer tar­get­ing. Wear the right right sneak­er or dri­ve the right car and you’re part of the in-crowd.

But these com­mu­ni­ties built on the sand just dis­solve in the tide and leave us more strand­ed than when we started.
We poor humans are look­ing for ways to tran­scend the crap­pi­ness of our war- and consumer-obsessed world. Quak­erism has some­thing to say about that (more than ways to recy­cle plas­tic or stage a protest faux-blockade). We’re toss­ing out the future when we throw away the past, just to live in our TVs. George’s epis­tle men­tions this too:

Let not hard words trou­ble you, nor fair speech­es win you; but dwell in the pow­er of truth, in the mighty God, and have salt in your­selves to savour all words, and to stand against all the wiles of the dev­il, in the mighty pow­er of God.

(Quotes from Epis­tle 24, reprint­ed here.)