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We Quakers should be cooler than the Sweat Lodge

Jul 5th, 2004
by .

How did Lib­eral Friends get to the place where many of our our younger mem­bers con­sider the sweat lodge cer­e­mony to be the high point of their Quaker expe­ri­ence? The sweat lodge has given a gen­er­a­tion of younger Friends an oppor­tu­nity to com­mune with the divine in a way that their meet­ings do not. It has given them men­tor­ship and lead­er­ship expe­ri­ences which they do not receive from the older Friends estab­lish­ment. I want to get to the point where younger Friends look at the sweat and won­der why they’d want to spend a week at a Quaker event play­ing Indian when they could be div­ing deeper into their own faith tradition.


I have just come back from a “Meet­ing for Lis­ten­ing for Sweat Lodge Con­cerns,” described as “an oppor­tu­nity for per­sons to express their feel­ings in a wor­ship­ful man­ner about the can­cel­la­tion of the FGC Gath­er­ing sweat lodge work­shop this year.” Non-Quakers read­ing this blog might be sur­prised to hear that Friends Gen­eral Con­fer­ence holds sweat lodges, but it has and they’ve been increas­ingly con­tro­ver­sial. This year’s work­shop was can­celled after FGC received a very strongly worded com­plaint from the “Wampanoag”:google Native Amer­i­can tribe. Today’s meet­ing intended to lis­ten to the feel­ings and con­cerns of all FGC Friends involved and was clerked by the very-able Arthur Larrabee. There was pow­er­ful min­istry, some pre­dictable “min­istry” and one stun­ning mes­sage from a white Friend who dis­missed the very exis­tance of racism in the world (it’s just a illu­sion, the peo­ple respon­si­ble for it are those who per­ceive it).
I’ve had my own run-in’s with the sweat lodge, most unfor­get­tably when I was the co-planning clerk of the 2002 Adult Young Friends pro­gram at FGC (a few of us thought it was inap­pro­pri­ate to trans­fer a por­tion of the rather small AYF bud­get to the sweat lodge work­shop, a request made with the argu­ment that so many high-school and twenty-something Friends were attend­ing it). But I find myself increas­ingly uncon­cerned about the lodge. It’s clear to me now that it is of another tra­di­tion. I am a Quaker and it is not. The ques­tion remain­ing is whether an orga­ni­za­tion that will spon­sor it is a dif­fer­ent tra­di­tion.
How did Lib­eral Friends get to the place where most our our younger mem­bers con­sider the sweat lodge cer­e­mony to be the high point of their Quaker expe­ri­ence? The sweat lodge has given a gen­er­a­tion of younger Friends an oppor­tu­nity to com­mune with the divine in a way that their meet­ings do not. It has given them men­tor­ship and lead­er­ship expe­ri­ences which they do not receive from the older Friends estab­lish­ment. It has given them a sense of iden­tity and pur­pose which they don’t get from their meet­ing “com­mu­nity.“
I don’t care about ban­ning the work­shop. That doesn’t address the real prob­lems. I want to get to the point where younger Friends look at the sweat and won­der why they’d want to spend a week with some old white Quaker guy who won­ders aloud in pub­lic whether he’s “a Quaker or an Indian” (could we have a third choice?). I’ve always thought this was beyond stu­pid, and I want the sweat lodge to wither away in recog­ni­tion of it’s inher­ent ridicu­lous­ness. I want younger Friends to get a taste of the divine love and char­ity that Friends have found for 350 years. We’re sim­ply cooler than the sweat lodge.

* * * *

And what really is the sweat lodge all about? I don’t really buy the cul­tural appro­pri­a­tion cri­tique very much (the offi­cial party line for can­celling it argues that it’s racist). Read George Price’s _Friends Journal_ arti­cle on the sweat lodge and you’ll see that he’s part of a long-standing tra­di­tion. For two hun­dred years, Native Amer­i­cans have been used as mythic cover for thinly dis­guised European-American philoso­phies. The Boston pro­test­ers who staged the famous tea party all dressed up as Indi­ans, play­ing out an emerg­ing mythol­ogy of the Amer­i­can rebels as spir­i­tual heirs to Indi­ans (long dri­ven out of the Boston area by that time). In 1826, James Fen­i­more Cooper turned that myth into one of the first pieces of clas­sic Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture with a story about the “Last” of the Mohi­cans. The Nineteenth-Century Boy Scouts claimed that their fit­ness and social­iza­tion sys­tem was really a re-application of Native Amer­i­can train­ing and ini­ti­a­tion rites. Quak­ers got into the game too: the South Jer­sey and Bucks County sum­mer camps they founded in the nineteen-teens were full of Lenape motifs, with cab­ins and lakes named after dif­fer­ent tribes and the chil­dren encour­aged to play along.
Set in this con­text, George Price is clearly just the lat­est white guy to stick a feather in his cap and pro­claim that the spirit of Native Amer­i­cans will save us from Old World Euro­pean stodgi­ness. Yes, it’s appro­pri­a­tion I guess, but it’s so trans­par­ent and clas­si­cally Amer­i­can that our favorite song “Yan­kee Doo­dle” is a British wartime send-up of the impulse that defines our national char­ac­ter.
The _Friends Journal_ arti­cle makes clear that the “Quaker” sweat lodge owes more to Karl Jung than Chief Ock­an­ickon (much less George Fox). It’s all about “lim­i­nal­ity” and ini­ti­a­tion into mythic arche­types, fea­tur­ing the cribbed lan­guage of Vic­tor Turner, the anthro­pol­o­gist who was all the rage circa 1974. Price is clear but never explicit about his work: his sweat lodge is Jun­gian psycho-babble over­laid onto the out­ward form of a Native Amer­i­can sweat. In ret­ro­spect it’s no sur­prise that a birthright Philadel­phia Friend in a tired yearly meet­ing would try to com­bine trendy Euro­pean pop psy­chol­ogy with Quaker sum­mer camp decor. What is a sur­prise (or should be a sur­prise) is that Friends would spon­sor and pub­lish arti­cles about a “Quaker Sweat Lodges” with­out chal­leng­ing the author to spell out the Quaker con­tri­bu­tion to a pro­grammed rit­ual con­ducted in a con­se­crated teepee steeple­house.
(Push the influ­ences a lit­tle more, and you’ll find that Vic­tor Turner’s anthro­po­log­i­cal find­ings among obscure African tribes arguably “owes as much to his Catholicism”:http://www.cla.sc.edu/socy/faculty/deflem/zturn.htm than it does the facts on the ground. More than one Quaker wit has com­pared the sweat lodge to Catholic mass; well, Turner’s your miss­ing philo­soph­i­cal link.)
* * * *

Yes­ter­day I had some good con­ver­sa­tion about gen­er­a­tional issues in Quak­erism. I’m cer­tainly not the only thirty-something that feels invis­i­ble in the bull­dozer of baby boomer assump­tions about our spir­i­tu­al­ity. I’m also not the only one get­ting to the point where we’re just going to be Quaker despite the Quaker insti­tu­tions and cul­ture. I think the ques­tion we’re all grap­pling with now is how we relate to the insti­tu­tions that ignore us and dis­miss our cries of alarm for what we Friends have become.

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  • Melynda Huskey

    Dear Mar­tin,
    I find myself want­ing to qual­ify your head­line (not that I have any right to do so!) by say­ing that we Quak­ers should be cooler than any “Cul­tural Appropriation-Quaker sweat lodge” could ever be. I’ve been in lots of dis­cus­sions about this very issue with lots and lots of peo­ple, and the point that I seem most often to make poorly (judg­ing from the total lack of com­pre­hen­sion in my inter­locu­tors) is this: Meet­ing for Wor­ship is not nec­es­sar­ily cooler on some absolute scale than any other reli­gious practice–but it OUGHT to be cooler *to Quak­ers* than any other reli­gious prac­tice. We know we’re not doing sweat lodge right–we can’t, no mat­ter what excuses we make about cul­tural cross-fertilization, and “really respect­ing” those peo­ple whose reli­gious prac­tices we bor­row for day trips to exotic “spir­i­tual sen­sa­tions,” and how close we feel to Nature when we smudge or take vision-quests. But why in the hell (if you’ll for­give me) are we not doing Meet­ing for Wor­ship right?
    Melynda Huskey

  • http://www.nonviolence.org/martink/ Mar­tin Kelley

    Hi Melynda,
    The pop­u­lar­ity of the sweat lodge among younger Friends should be a fire alarm to the Quaker estab­lish­ment (maybe it is, maybe we’ve responded by just evac­u­at­ing the build­ing!). I’ve been amazed at how many seemingly-solid Quak­ers seem obliv­i­ous that most of their chil­dren just don’t care about Quak­erism. Older Quak­ers are so grate­ful to have young peo­ple around that they don’t even want to acknowl­edge that the kids are par­tic­i­pat­ing in altar– and ritual-based reli­gious prac­tices totally at odds with 350 years of Quak­erism.
    I some­times won­der if this isn’t a repeat of nine­teenth cen­tury Revival­ism. There too the kids all started jump­ing on the hot reli­gious fad, one that promised them more instan­ta­neous reli­gious excite­ment than they found in Meet­ing. As I under­stand it, the lead­ers then were younger birthright Friends from pow­er­ful Quaker fam­i­lies who didn’t want to rein their own kids in. Being a next-generation leader was more impor­tant than being a faith­ful Friend and enough weighty Quak­ers looked the other way and were obliv­i­ous to the seeds of schims their actions were sow­ing.
    Just because an expe­ri­ence has brought some­one to Quak­erism doesn’t make it Quaker. Here’s a fas­ci­nat­ing account of “Quaker con­ver­sion after LSD use”:http://​www​.csp​.org/​n​i​c​h​o​l​a​s​/​A​1​4​.​h​tml. I recently heard a respected Friend give his spir­i­tual story to a Quaker audi­ence: the first half hour was a detailed cat­a­loging of seri­ous drug abuse back in the 1970s and the spir­i­tual insights he gained while high. It ended up work­ing for him, but how many rela­tion­ships did he man­gle and how many of his friends died or never came out of the spir­ial of self-abuse? Revivals and sweat lodges are non-chemical ways to get a spir­i­tual high. You can see and smell the King­dom from their van­tage point and some do come back down to retrace the jour­ney by foot. But these easy highs aren’t a par­tic­u­larly good way into Quak­erism; it’s too tempt­ing to keep using them over and over in lieu of the hard work (“jus­ti­fi­ca­tion” and “sanc­ti­fi­ca­tion” in Quaker-speak) and to never get to the unmedi­ated expe­ri­ence we Friends celebrate.

  • Melynda Huskey

    I was talk­ing with Joan about this on the way home, and as usual, she came up with an expla­na­tion in song (she’s melo­di­ous that way).
    Why do these young Quak­ers want to build sweat lodges? As you sur­mised, it all boils down to this:
    “We want the funk / Gotta get the funk / We want the funk.“
    Once upon a time, of course, Friends *were* the funk. The Young Friends of Bris­tol and Read­ing kept Meet­ing for Wor­ship while their par­ents were in jail for conscience’s sake. Then the funk shifted–it was all about Evan­gel­i­cal revival, the Sabbath-School move­ment, and some funky, funky creeds. And then again, it was funky to build a New World Order full of Kingsley-style Chris­t­ian Social­ism, all mus­cu­lar and vision­ary.
    And now, sadly, Quak­erism has come to this: the funk is in faux-sixties spirituality–white peo­ple in dread­locks, macrame hemp chok­ers and Zen power bracelets, roam­ing around the world seek­ing what we may devour of other faith traditions–without even *try­ing* to be faith­ful to our own.
    Melynda
    P.S. I’m a big crank. So in the inter­est of bal­ance I will say that the last issue of Friends Jour­nal had some pro­foundly mov­ing and thought­ful arti­cles in it, and I didn’t throw it across the room once. And I will also say that the Oxford Study Bible using the Revised Eng­lish Trans­la­tion is superb, and has really great maps. And we had really great sparklers this year, cour­tesy of our friend C. on the Nez Perce Nation, where Catholic and Pres­by­ter­ian and Seven Drum folks all go to sweat.

  • http://www.littlebits.org Ann

    So much of this blog is why I am reluc­tant to apply for mem­ber­ship. Granted, I’ve only been an atten­der for a year, but while I want to be a Quaker in the reli­gious, spir­i­tual sense, I don’t feel like I want to be a part of the actual Meet­ing. I don’t want to be an activist. I want to be just plain old, some­what spir­i­tual, con­cerned, reg­u­lar me. Can’t I be just a Quaker and a mom? Or do I have to defend abor­tion clin­ics, too? (That is what the focus on a Quak­ers and Activism talk seemed to be, it was run by some­one who worked exten­sively with Planned Par­ent­hood, a group that tried to talk me into abort­ing my first born.)
    Quak­erism is what I thought I was look­ing for — it may still be. But not the Quaker CULTURE and much of the com­mu­nity. :(
    If it mat­ters, I am a 35 year old mar­ried mother of 3. How bor­ing. :(

  • Chris Segal

    Have you ever heard George Price explain his train­ing and his under­stand­ing of the tra­di­tion? Hav­ing done mul­ti­ple sweats with George, I am entirely con­vinced that a) the sweat lodge is a legit­i­mate spir­i­tual expe­ri­ence along the lines of Quaker meet­ing b) George has appro­pri­ate train­ing from Native Amer­i­cans c) FGC should not be cav­ing in to demands of other Indi­ans that there be no Quaker sweat lodges (so long as the dif­fer­ences between the Quaker sweat lodge and the real Indian sweat lodges are made clear) and d) the sweat lodge is entirely com­pat­able with Quak­erism and Chris­tian­ity.
    I should men­tion that I am a (for­mer) young friend from Philadel­phia, a con­vinced Friend, and a Chris­t­ian, so I feel that I at least am a counter exam­ple to your fears.
    Chris

  • http://www.nonviolence.org/martink/ Mar­tin Kelley

    So much com­men­tary!
    Chis, Yes, George Price’s sweat lodge is a legit­i­mate reli­gious expe­ri­ence. It’s just not a Quaker reli­gious expe­ri­ence. _This is not how we Friends reach out to the divine._ I’ve heard a num­ber of sto­ries of how young Friends first touched the divine through the sweat lodge and then came into Quak­erism. This also hap­pened when Revivals became pop­u­lar with nineteenth-century young Friends. From Thomas Hamm’s excel­lent “Trans­for­ma­tion of Amer­i­can Quak­erism”:http://www.quakerbooks.org/get/0–253-20718–5
    bq. But most of the mid­dle party…tried a del­i­cate bal­anc­ing act. Ini­tially favor­ing the revival, and in many cases actively par­tic­i­pat­ing in it, they became increas­ingly skep­ti­cal as the revival­ists seemed bent on over­throw­ing all of the old land­marks. At the same time, the con­tin­ued to appre­ci­ate the new energy and vital­ity it seemed to cre­ate. Thus they tried to carve a mid­dle way. They would accept “orderly” revivals. They would accept con­verts, if they were schooled in Quaker prac­tices after becom­ing mem­bers. They would accept singing, if “done int he spirit.” But they eschewed second-experience san­tifi­ca­tion and feared the arro­gance they per­ceived in the revival min­istry.
    A few months ago I met Thomas Hamm and thanked him, explain­ing that _Transformation_ had helped explain present-day Quaker dynam­ics. He replied, “the script doesn’t change, just the actors.” Any­one want­ing to under­stand the sweat­lodge move­ment in modern-day Quak­erism should read _Transformation_.
    ———
    Ann: well I’m just a mar­ried 37 year old father of one. Pretty bor­ing too, poten­tially. Yes, there are a lot of Friends for whom activism is the extent of their Quak­erism. I find it sad, and kind of use­less, for their activism gen­er­ally seems futile and self-serving. Being both an activist and a Friend, I’ve found that my own work has been most effec­tive in the world when I was fol­low­ing the spirit’s call­ing and doing dis­creet, non-dramatic actions. I.e., when I was being pretty bor­ing!
    ———
    Melynda: yea, the June issue of Friends Jour­nal was pretty good, wasn’t it? I need to read through it more…

  • http://beppeblog.motime.com/ Joe Guada

    Mar­tin,
    This was such a great post; and look at all of the responses you got. Seems to have struck a nerve.
    I com­pletely agree that a sweat lodge can be a legit­i­mate, authen­tic sprir­i­tual prac­tice; but it isn’t par­tic­u­larly from our tra­di­tion. You hit it on the head when you sug­gest that adults feel the need to look out­side of our tra­di­tion to keep the youth engaged. Actu­ally, a lot of adult Friends do the very same thing: sup­pli­ment­ing their Quak­erism with all sorts of other spir­i­tu­al­i­ties and activism.
    And Ann — thank God for being bor­ing. Some of the most bor­ing peo­ple in the world have made incred­i­ble dif­fer­ences in other people’s lives!

  • Jef­frey Hipp

    I never took part in the FGC sweat lodge, so I can’t speak per­son­ally of its awe or its asinin­ity. How­ever, I spent the past week at the Gath­er­ing dis­cussing the tra­di­tion with a good num­ber of other young adults who found the expe­ri­ence to be one of the most pro­found reli­gious expe­ri­ences in their lives.
    To me, this is not a sign that the sweat lodge (leav­ing aside the issues of cul­tural appropriation)is a detrac­tor to the spirit of Quak­erism. Rather, it should serve as a wakeup call that we have absolutely failed to engage young peo­ple in spirit of Quak­erism and the power of silent wor­ship.
    From ele­men­tary to high school, young Friends are whisked away from a meet­ing for wor­ship after the first 15 min­utes — many have never expe­ri­enced an entire meet­ing for Wor­ship, much less the awe of a gath­ered meet­ing. Of course, many older adult Friends haven’t either — we have low­ered our expec­ta­tions for the Silence — rather than expe­ri­enc­ing the power of Christ in our midst, we — at best — hope for a nice, peace­ful escape from the fran­tic pace of life beyond the meet­ing­house. We quelch true prophetic min­istry — “elder­ing” those who rise to speak from the apoc­a­lyp­tic power the early Friends basked in, or even (in worst cases) those who speak a bit too con­fi­den­tally about the exis­tence of God.
    Our first day school pro­grams are much more com­fort­able with field trips to Bud­dhist silent retreats than appli­ca­tions of Jesus’s teach­ing in our lives, and writ­ings from early Friends are cut apart, pasted together and rid­dled with ellipses so that they will flim­sily sus­tain the illu­sion that we are doing things today just like they did back then. An dis­turbingly large por­tion of young adults raised as Quaker who I have spo­ken with tend to view the Reli­gious Soci­ety of Friends as a salad bar reli­gion that has lit­tle to do with faith in God or a cor­po­rate set of beliefs beyond paci­fism and Quaker rit­ual. In short, first day school is far too often a pro­gram for find­ing the reli­gion they can enter into once they leave their par­ents’ house and aban­don Quak­erism.
    So if cer­e­monies like the sweat lodge are where young Friends find the oppor­tu­nity to expe­ri­ence God, so be it. They cer­tainly aren’t find­ing the Spirit in our intel­lec­tu­al­ized, sec­u­lar­ized and elit­ist meet­ings. But if we are to con­tinue to acqui­esce to this fact, why are so many lib­eral Quaker lead­ers wring­ing their hands in agony, won­der­ing why these young peo­ple are leav­ing our meet­ing­houses in droves?

  • George Price

    Mar­tin — It is sad that you have to make inac­cu­rate char­ac­ter­i­za­tions of me or what the Quaker sweat is or is not. Your ideas that some­how we shouldn’t do sweats bor­der on racism (if not a total embrace — albeit uncon­scious). I have found that Native Amer­i­can ideas about the nature of our rela­tion­ship with the divine are a pro­found. If you would read Black Elk Speaks you would find that there is an evan­gel­i­cal power in Black Elks vision that speaks increas­ingly to us today.
    I have never pre­sented myself as any thing other than a Quaker — it is hurt­ful of you to say that I am pre­tend­ing to be an Indian — wear­ing feather and beads — I don’t know where you got that idea other than from you own imag­i­na­tion.
    Many Friends have got­ten incred­i­ble insight which has fed their meet­ings for wor­ship from Yoga, Zen, Judaism, and many other dis­ci­plines. The nature of religous expe­ri­ence is syn­cretic, ever evolv­ing and chang­ing. In years past reac­tionary Friends tryed to stop peo­ple from danc­ing and singing. I don’t think you would get far try­ing to tell Friends that singing is unQuak­erly — but peo­ple think­ing like you are have in the past.
    To call Jung psycho-babble reveals your lack of under­stand­ing. Many Quaker psy­chol­o­gists use Jung as a guide. Jung by the way thought that Native Amer­i­can ideas about the nature of spirit held great wis­dom.
    The sweat­lodge is much more pow­er­ful than your small ideas. FGC can can­cel it, at its own loss, but the sweat will con­tinue. Chris­t­ian mis­sions cen­turies ago tryed to stop the Russ­ian Ban­nia and the Finnish sauna, which both had a lot in com­mon with the Native Amer­i­can sweat, but those rit­u­als keep rais­ing them­selves from the dust. The Navajo sweat was made ille­gal by the U.S. gov­ern­ment and Quak­ers were asked to lead it in the early twen­ti­eth cen­tury.
    The sweat was for me the thing that made me more of a Quaker — before you dis­miss this idea you should ask oth­ers — hun­dreds of whom have had the same expe­ri­ence. It is a gift of life the stodgy Quak­ers who think Quak­erism is some kind of his­tor­i­cal arti­fact that we must be vig­i­lant in guard­ing.
    Quak­erism is above all a com­mu­nity and a method — It is sad that some Friends have reduced them­selves to damming oth­ers for the places they have found light.

  • http://www.nonviolence.org Mar­tin Kelley

    Hi George,
    I’m glad you’ve found a gift of light. And I’m totally with you in want­ing to break down the walls of the “stodgy Quak­ers who think Quak­erism is some kind of his­tor­i­cal arti­fact that we must be vig­i­lant in guard­ing.” But I want to be a Quaker. And prac­tice Quak­erism. And no, that’s not about Jung. And it’s not about hymn singing, which is usu­ally dis­tract­ing and kind of lame. That doesn’t mean I’d want to stop any­one from singing or play­ing Indian. You’re not an embat­tled eth­nic or polit­i­cal minor­ity, my friend, and com­par­ing your­self to the Navajo being beaten down by the U.S. cav­alry is just tad bit ridicu­lous. To call me a racist for some­thing I didn’t say is par­tic­u­larly silly: you do know read­ers can just scroll up the screen, don’t you?
    No one’s try­ing to keep you from con­duct­ing sweat lodges. I’m sure the smell of burn­ing sage will never depart the camp­fires of Camp Onas and Camp Ock­an­ickon and that you will lead nom­i­nally Quaker chil­dren in artic­u­lated rit­u­als there for the rest of your life. But is Quak­erism so irrel­e­vant that we have to ditch it for a pro­grammed rit­ual just to keep the kids inter­ested? I don’t think so. There’s an ocean of young seek­ers out there yearn­ing for what Quak­erism promises to offer. There still is a great peo­ple to be gath­ered together, and we don’t need a barker out­side offer­ing them some recy­cled spir­i­tu­al­ity as a door prize.
    As long as you insist that the Reli­gious Soci­ety of Friends endorse the sweat lodge rit­ual (and its altar, priestly func­tions and con­se­crated spaces), your truest pre­de­ces­sor will not be Black Elk, but David Brain­erd Upde­graff. He tried to sell us Quaker sprin­kling water and you’re offer­ing up burn­ing sage but in the end all we need is to stand still in the Light. Those of us who have tasted of its honey know that every­thing else is empty calo­ries.
    I think Friends have some­thing spe­cial and the more we pre­tend to be some­thing else, the less we are who we are. There’s no rea­son you have to call your sweat lodge “Quaker.” Just because you grew up as a Friend (and yes, I’m assum­ing you’re part of the ancient Quaker Price fam­ily) doesn’t mean that the spir­i­tu­al­ity you’ve embraced needs to be shoe­horned into the spir­i­tu­al­ity you inher­ited. Some of us are embrac­ing Quak­erism and we’re on fire and we want to sing joy­ously of our bap­tism of the Holy Spirit, a free­dom that doesn’t fit into stodgy rit­u­als _whatever their origin_.

  • George Price

    What is the “Quak­erism” you are prac­tic­ing? If you prac­tice enough maybe you can take it on the road (sorry I couldn’t help myself). For myself and most of the Friends I know our “Quak­erism” isn’t just some­thing we do Sun­day morn­ing or just in meet­ing for wor­ship. It extends into every aspect of our lives. What I learned from Native Amer­i­cans helped me to under­stand on a vis­eral level a deeper mean­ing of that idea. It deep­ened my meet­ing for wor­ship. It helped me become a bet­ter Quaker. I couldn’t dis­agree more with your state­ment that wor­ship isn’t enriched by our quests for knowl­edge in other areas.
    I can’t fig­ure out how by cit­ing a fact about Navajo — Quaker rela­tions you inferred that I was com­par­ing myself to the Navajo. Either I am miss­ing some­thing or you are twist­ing my words. That is nei­ther a truth­ful or “Quak­erly” activ­ity.
    I glad you are not into ban­ning the sweat lodge. Oth­ers are into ban­ning the Quaker sweat and it has been can­celed at FGC.
    Your objec­tion to us call­ing it a Quaker sweat seems ana­ly­gous to straight peo­ple say­ing that gay mar­riage is hurt­ing them. There is a bound­ery prob­lem with that idea. We have been accepted by dozens of Quaker insti­tu­tions, many see that what we are doing is nur­tur­ing to par­tic­i­pants and has strength­ened the Soci­ety of Friends.
    Your reli­gious parochial­ism serves nei­ther you or the Soci­ety of Friends. Meet­ing for Wor­ship will not be less­ened or diluted from encour­ag­ing Friends to under­stand the uni­ver­sal nature of God. That all religons have at base an idea that ever­thing comes from one source. What­ever tools we use that take us closer to that under­stand­ing of a uni­ver­sal source will only help the human race. The world is at war today mostly because of per­ceived religous dif­fer­ences. As Friends we should be lead­ing the way in peace mak­ing through respect­ful lis­ten­ing and tol­er­ance.
    I am glad you feel a fire in your spirit. I won­der why you also feel the need to den­i­grate oth­ers’ lead­ings. “Nom­i­nal” Quaker chil­dren? Your igno­rance of the nature of rit­ual and the dif­fer­ence between liv­ing and dead rit­u­als is unfor­tu­nate. Meet­ing for Wor­ship IS a RITUAL. Whether it is dead or alive is up to the par­tic­i­pants.
    Your claim to the exclu­sive­ness of your spir­i­tual expe­ri­ence (“empty calories”?)is a sym­tom of your unrec­og­nized racism. Now care­ful here — I didn’t say you are a racist. All of us have racist ten­den­cies in our uncon­scious — those of us who under­stand that can come to grips with them and learn to grow beyond them. Those of us who don’t are con­demmed to make ever more clever jus­ti­fi­ca­tions of them (Its my peo­ple). Born again Chris­tians think that the only way to find God is their way — so do fun­dal­men­tal­ist Moslems. If there is some­thing that we as Friends have that is spe­cial it is our peace­mak­ing and tol­er­ance for a vari­ety of spir­i­tual expe­ri­ence. Like I said the sweat and improved my access to the “gath­ered meeting”.

  • http://www.nonviolence.org Mar­tin Kelley

    Hi George,
    Quak­ers believe that the best way to God is to strip away the rit­ual. It’s what makes us Quaker. I think Quak­ers going off and explor­ing other reli­gions is fine. William Penn par­tic­i­pated in a sweat lodge and found great soli­tude in it. John Wool­man sought reli­gious oppor­tu­ni­ties with the Lenape with whom he came in con­tact and real­ized the power of the God in the intere­ac­tions. These very deep Friends real­ized, as you do and as I do, that we are one in the Spirit and that we are enriched shar­ing spir­i­tual oppor­tu­ni­ties with oth­ers. But nei­ther of them returned to their meet­ings to say that the children’s pro­gram should now fea­ture a sweat lodge. As Friends, they knew that the rit­ual would become dis­tract­ing. If this cen­tral learn­ing of Friends is some­thing you don’t agree with, why stay?
    >Your igno­rance of the nature of rit­ual and the dif­fer­ence between
    >liv­ing and dead rit­u­als is unfor­tu­nate. Meet­ing for Wor­ship IS a RITUAL.
    >Whether it is dead or alive is up to the par­tic­i­pants.
    No George, actu­ally it’s up to Christ in our midst. You’re right that Meet­ing for wor­ship is often a dead rit­ual, but what makes it real is God. And our path to God is through still­ness. Spir­i­tual con­vic­tion and racial eth­nic­ity are two dif­fer­ent things and you mix it up sim­ply to play the race card (thanks for the clar­i­fi­ca­tion though: it’s good to know that Doc­tor Price doesn’t think I’m a racist, just that I have uncon­scious racist ten­den­cies). I’m not a racist for think­ing you’re wrong. And I’m not a reli­gious fun­da­men­tal­ist in say­ing that reli­gious tra­di­tions have lim­its and bound­aries. There are some “big gen­er­a­tional differences”:/quaker/emerging_church.php at play in your charges that any lim­its to indi­vid­ual expres­sion con­sti­tute a form of big­otry. “Are we all ranters now?”:/quaker/ranters.php
    Any­way, thanks for post­ing (I guess), but two long and hos­tile mini-essays are prob­a­bly enough on my site, thanks. I’m being more than fair post­ing these two. If you start a blog, let me know and I’ll put a link from this page.

  • Paul Land­skroener

    I’ve become a reg­u­lar reader only recently and am enjoy­ing your blog immensly; I am in sym­pa­thy with most of your views and am glad to find oth­ers here of sim­i­lar feel­ing (includ­ing a cou­ple from my own meet­ing … you know who you are).
    On my first peruse of this thread, I found myself much more agree­ing with your posi­tion, Mar­tin, and have cringed at many of the non– or barely tan­gen­tal Quaker activ­i­ties and groups that I see at Gath­er­ings, activ­i­ties that I man­age to tol­er­ate but with a mix­ture of bemuse­ment and sad­ness.
    But as I thought more about it, it began to hit closer to home and won­der whether I’m part of that prob­lem.
    I have led twice on shape note singing from the Sacred Harp. A lot of Quak­ers sing from the Sacred Harp; many of us do so from time to time in the meet­ing­house after meet­ing. Some reg­u­lar singings are hosted in meet­ing­houses. There’s been an after­noon Sacred Harp singing at FGC for at least 20 years now; and oth­ers besides myself have offered work­shops on it. Occa­sion­ally songs from the Sacred Harp find them­selves being sung in meet­ing for wor­ship (by an indi­vid­ual min­is­ter, not a group).
    But Sacred Harp singing is not from the Quaker tra­di­tion. Indeed, although Sacred Harp singers do not pur­port to be a church or demo­ni­a­tion, there is a coher­ent, iden­ti­fi­able, grow­ing, and vital com­mu­nity of Sacred Harp singers (trac­ing its con­ti­nu­ity back to at least 1844) and has its own com­monly devel­oped mores and tra­di­tions and which func­tions in many ways like a church, par­tic­u­larly with respect to pro­vid­ing pas­toral care of each other. (Inter­est­ingly, it has also — like Friends — had its schisms and dis­agree­ments over ortho­doxy and the intru­sion of moder­nity into the tra­di­tion.)
    More­over, while the reli­gious beliefs of singers is at least as diverse as those among Quak­ers, Sacred Harp singing is explic­itly reli­gious in nature. While the songs express a range of the­o­log­i­cal beliefs, the major­ity are cer­tainly cen­tered in a difficult-to-label-accurately the­ol­ogy more com­pat­i­ble to Pri­ma­tive Bap­tists’ or Methodists than Friends’. (Iron­i­cally, though, the diver­sity of — and gen­uine respect for — reli­gious beliefs among Sacred Harp singers is much wider than among Friends.)
    Yet I am one Friend who has found my way back to Jesus, the bib­li­cal nar­ra­tive, and Quaker-Christianity through singing this music. It has refreshed and reawak­ened my inner life and has given me insight and a vocab­u­lary from which I can bet­ter under­stand the writ­ings left us by George Fox and other early Friends. It has thus been an aid to my reli­gious life as a Friend. (And I am not alone in this; many singers have found their ways back to their church homes through singing these songs; singing these songs is a very pow­er­ful prac­tice.)
    So my ques­tion is, how does your (our) cri­tique of the sweat lodge con­tro­ver­sey apply to Sacred Harp singing at Quaker events? In my own mind, I see a clear dif­fer­ence, but I’m not sure how to artic­u­late what it is. Is it because it’s MY sacred cow being gored?
    (I know of no objec­tion by tra­di­tional Sacred Harp singers to its being sung at Quaker gath­er­ings, which is one dif­fer­ence, and there isn’t any sig­nif­i­cant cost to FGC of spon­sor­ing a Sacred Harp work­shop as there is to a sweat lodge, but I’m won­der­ing about more prin­ci­pled dif­fer­ences.)
    What do you think? Is singing from the Sacred Harp an inapro­pri­ate activ­ity at a Quaker gath­er­ing? (or, put dif­fer­ently, another piece of evi­dence of mod­ern Quaker decadence?)

  • http://www.nonviolence.org/martink Mar­tin Kelley

    Hi Paul: first off, thanks for post­ing. Glad to know you’ve been enjoy­ing the blog.
    And what a debut in the comments–you don’t mess around! I think if we start look­ing at a lot of prac­tices, we’ll start ask­ing our­selves these kind of awk­ward ques­tions. First off, let me repeat that I’ve never called for a ban of the sweat lodge: I don’t want to get into this sit­u­a­tion where we’re decid­ing what’s orth­dox enough. Because there’s a lot of things we do that don’t nec­es­sar­ily really fit Quak­erism. I pre­fer to take a pos­i­tive atti­tude, to share the Spirit and open­ings that I’ve received.
    The sweat lodge has become a focal point partly because it’s the front line of an unac­knowl­edged gen­er­a­tion gap in FGC Quak­erism. A lot of teens and twenty-somethings brought up in Quak­erism just got totally ripped off by years of reli­gious edu­ca­tion that was too chicken-shit (par­don my French) to tell the good news or teach reli­gion; that focused on char­ac­ter build­ing exer­cises and accul­tur­a­tion into hippie/lefty cul­ture. I think character-building is fine and I’ve got more than a lit­tle left/hippie in me but there’s more to Quak­erism than this.
    I don’t think the prob­lem is occas­sion­ally vis­it­ing other reli­gious prac­tices. You run into trou­ble when you just too involved in the minu­tia of the prac­tice or start think­ing that it’s Quaker.
    About ten years or so ago, a few peo­ple in the adult young Friends pro­gram at Gath­er­ing did a Brethren-style “love feast.” That first AYF feast was rev­er­ent and focused on how the group was re-enacting the dis­ci­ples’ last meal with Jesus. Some­how, within just a few short years this became an essen­tial AYF rit­ual. At the last one I attended (a few years ago), the high point seemed to be shoot­ing whipped cream into each other’s mouths and doing sug­ges­tive things with bananas; the idea that we were shar­ing a meal with Christ was kind of lost. It’s not that shar­ing a Brethren rit­ual was a prob­lem, it was that we now thought this some sort of Quaker or AYF rit­ual. And isn’t that the Quaker warn­ing: that we should be wary of rit­u­als but sooner or later we will take them too seri­ously or not seri­ously enough and get into trou­ble?
    Well, all this isn’t nec­es­sar­ily a sat­is­fac­tory answer. You’re rais­ing real ques­tions: how do we stay open to the fas­ci­nat­ing diver­sity of mod­ern Quak­erism but also put for­ward some vision of iden­tity that has (tra­di­tional) Quak­erism as its influ­ence and God as its architect?

  • http://thegoodraisedup.blogspot.com Liz Opp

    Mar­tin, I’m glad I took the time to review more of your early entries.
    First, I feel sad read­ing the exchanges between you and Friend George. I sense that each of you present a piece of the Truth, but the Light is dimmed by the sting of your lan­guage towards one another. Being firm in one’s belief and con­vic­tion is one thing; using one’s beliefs and con­vic­tion for what feels to me to be a type of one-upsmanship is another. And it makes it harder for me to read through the exchange as a result.
    A part of the Truth that I under­stand George lifts up is that there is a Power that for some is more read­ily accessed through the rit­ual of the Quaker sweat­lodge expe­ri­ence. On the other hand, a part of the Truth that I see you lift­ing up, Mar­tin, is that for oth­ers, a liv­ing Quaker faith is weak­ened when the mem­bers of the faith com­mu­nity look out­side of their direct rela­tion­ship to the Spirit and covenant com­mu­nity for guid­ance.
    What I see in the exchange is that George speaks to his expe­ri­ence as a con­tem­po­rary Hick­site Friend, and that you are speak­ing to your expe­ri­ence as a con­tem­po­rary Con­ser­v­a­tive Friend. Part of the trou­ble from where I sit seems to be that each of you wants the other to accept your view as the Right One. “Quak­ers become stodgy if they stick to their old ways” is sim­ply the other side of the coin of “Quak­erism is weak­ened if they bring in too many ideas from other places.” And “Quak­ers are fed by being exposed to new ways to con­nect with the Spirit” is the other side of the coin of “Quak­ers are fed by dig­ging deep into their tra­di­tion of strip­ping away so that only the Spirit remains.“
    From my own expe­ri­ence, I know that I get the most defen­sive, most pro­tec­tive, and most aggres­sively crit­i­cal when that which is dear to me is chal­lenged or con­tested. It is clear to me that you and George each dearly love the Quak­erism that best speaks to your con­di­tion. And you see that same Quak­erism speak­ing deeply to the con­di­tion of other Friends as well. Is it a won­der that you’d defend, pro­tect, and crit­i­cize, based on that con­vic­tion?
    This exchange seems to high­light for me the essen­tial dif­fer­ence of (at least) two branches of Friends: Hick­site and Con­ser­v­a­tive. Yet nei­ther has the access to all the Light, which is why we need to dis­ci­pline our­selves to lis­ten to each other, even in dis­agree­ment.
    .….….….….….….….…
    Paul L, you raise an inter­est­ing ques­tion about a pos­si­ble par­al­lel between the Quaker sweat lodge and the place of Sacred Harp singing among Friends.
    One dif­fer­ence is that it seems as though Sacred Harp singing did not emerge from an oppressed peo­ple and there­fore is not con­tro­ver­sial among the indi­vid­u­als and groups con­nected to it (Sacred Harp).
    Another dif­fer­ence is the ques­tion of whether or not young adult Friends and oth­ers con­nected to Sacred Harp are hav­ing pro­found, col­lec­tive expe­ri­ences with it: if Sacred Harp singing were dropped last minute at the Gath­er­ing, would a lis­ten­ing ses­sion be called? Would young adult Friends or some other sig­nif­i­cantly large group be dev­as­tated?
    (Cer­tainly you would be, I don’t doubt that!)
    There is a dif­fer­ence, then, about the power given by the community–or a sub­set of that community–as to the weight of a cer­tain activ­ity within Quaker prac­tice. You speak openly of how your spir­i­tual and Quaker life have been trans­formed by your par­tic­i­pa­tion in Sacred Harp singing, and you share your joy enthu­si­as­ti­cally with oth­ers. But I have never felt or feared that your expe­ri­ence would become the basis of oth­ers’ hunger for being in touch with the Divine. And so it is less con­tro­ver­sial in that regard as well.
    (Maybe I should check back with you on this, though, after the next Gath­er­ing. smile)
    I feel as though this com­ment to you, Paul, is not com­plete, but I can­not come to clear­ness at this late hour, so it will have to be left as is.
    Bless­ings,
    Liz

  • http://www.nonviolence.org/martink Mar­tin Kelley

    Hi Liz: well we’ll just have to agree to dis­agree on this. I think it actu­ally is okay to say a prac­tice doesn’t come out of the Quaker tra­di­tion. Part of the rea­son the Reli­gious Soci­ety of Friends has such an iden­tity prob­lems is we’re too afraid to talk about what isn’t Quaker. To say some­thing isn’t Quaker isn’t to say it isn’t legit or isn’t use­ful, it’s just to say it isn’t our way.

  • http://thegoodraisedup.blogspot.com Liz Opp

    Hmm. Some­thing in my inten­tion got lost in my post.
    I agree that it is nec­es­sary to point out if a prac­tice doesn’t come from Quaker tra­di­tion. I can­not be a more faith­ful Quaker if I seek the Spirit through read­ing Torah, for exam­ple: it is counter to a basic tenet of Quak­erism, about how we come to know God.
    Of course I’m want­ing to be cer­tain I’m clear with you, given what you raise as iden­tity prob­lems and what I am prepar­ing for the Gath­er­ing. I don’t wish to rehash what has already been shared: instead, I’ll affirm that I do see you and me on much the same page: draw­ing on and nam­ing Quaker tra­di­tions helps strengthen one’s Quaker iden­tity, as does strip­ping away and not rely­ing on the prac­tices of another tradition.

  • Julie

    Ummm, not to cre­ate too much of a dis­trac­tion here, but actu­ally read­ing “Torah” (if by Torah you are refer­ring to the Hebrew Bible or the Old Tes­ta­ment) *IS* part of Quaker tra­di­tion. As Chris­tians, Quak­ers his­tor­i­cally have read the Bible and all parts of it, includ­ing the OT. They wouldn’t have referred to it as “Torah,” of course. So on this level a com­par­i­son between read­ing tra­di­tion­ally Jew­ish (and Chris­t­ian) Scrip­ture and par­tic­i­pat­ing in a non-Christian indige­nous reli­gious prac­tice and call­ing it “Quaker” is hardly a use­ful one. But I real­ize this is an aside…
    Julie

  • Petey

    My con­cern with the sweat­lodge issue comes from one of process. I have lost all faith in FGC cen­tral com­mit­tee as well as all faith in the ad-hoc racism com­mit­tee. It seems as one got duped, and the sec­ond exists as a McCarthy­is­tic com­mit­tee to pres­sure peo­ple whom the lead­er­ship finds trou­bling.
    If we as Quak­ers want to dis­cuss racism, let us dis­cuss it in an actual com­mit­tee — approved by a meet­ing — not an ad-hoc shadow com­mit­tee that meets only when and with whom it chooses, and lis­tens to only whom it chooses.
    Fur­ther­more, if we are to con­sider the claims of those out­side the com­mu­nity against the sweat­lodge, is it not rea­son­able that those mak­ing alle­ga­tions have actual knowl­ege of that which they are offended by. Merely read­ing a descrip­tion does not begin to describe the Quaker sweat in terms of tra­di­tion, his­tory and prac­tice. That the accuser has not taken the time to visit gath­er­ing and make her claims before those she brands racist — really all who have par­tic­i­pated in the quaker sweat — shows con­tempt for our tra­di­tions of open process. That we have yet to have an open and trans­par­ent deal­ing with this mat­ter is a mas­sive fail­ure of FGC lead­er­ship and needs to be dealt with. The con­ver­sa­tion of Gath­er­ing this year amongst the AYF com­mu­nity was about the sweat. Had the com­mittes come to the same con­clu­sions fol­low­ing a more just, trans­par­ent and open process I have a feel­ing we would be more easy with it’s lead­er­ship. As it stands right now, I am about as easy with the lead­er­ship on this issue as a pas­sen­ger on a busted roller­coaster. Process hasn’t been fol­lowed, and we need to find lead­er­ship who can speak to the truth of this issue within actual quaker process — not merely quaker pol­i­tics.
    If we get rid of the sweat for good, what other groups will be next? Some peo­ple don’t like heal­ers at gath­er­ing — will they be gone? Some don’t like GLBT folk, will they be next? Where will it end? Where then will we find the unique spir­i­tual space that is the meet­ing­house where tra­di­tions meet eachother under the ban­ner of God. The polit­i­cal mar­gin­al­iza­tion of one groups ulti­matly mar­gin­al­izes the spir­i­tual power of the gath­er­ing as a whole because it says to peo­ple that their gifts are not wanted. This in con­trast to our long held belief that there is “that of God in everyone”.

  • http://www.nonviolence.org/martink Mar­tin Kelley

    Hi Petey: first off, don’t post mul­ti­ple posts under dif­fer­ent names or I won’t let your com­ments through. You can cam­paign for the sweat lodge on your per­sonal blog.
    That said, the pro-sweat lodge orga­niz­ing I saw hap­pen­ing this week (the 2005 Gath­er­ing) was orches­trated by a cou­ple of white-haired old men with long-standing axes to grind against FGC. It feels very oppor­tunis­tic to me to hear old men speak­ing out on behalf of young peo­ple, “espe­cially when they rou­tinely ignore young Friends with real gifts”:http://​www​.non​vi​o​lence​.org/​m​a​r​t​i​n​k​/​s​e​l​l​i​n​g​_​q​u​a​k​e​r​i​s​m​_​t​o​_​t​h​e​_​k​i​d​s​.​php. There’s a lot of dema­gaugery going on, with the whole para­noia about secret committees–Petey, if you both­ered to be more involved with FGC (like, actu­ally vol­un­teer and par­tic­i­pate in com­mit­tees) you would have spent dozens of hours talk­ing about this over the past few years. The young peo­ple respond­ing to the gray-hair’s orga­niz­ing about this all tend to be cul­tural Quak­ers at best.
    That said (again), I agree with a lot of what you write. I don’t think the can­ce­la­tion of the work­shop has much to do with racism (lib­eral Friends are hid­ing behind racism for a lot of our the­o­log­i­cal debate right now, e.g., renam­ing of “over­sight com­mit­tees”). If I’m right and the motivi­a­tions are not hon­est, then this is all going to come back at us and bite us on the ass.
    The real prob­lem I see is twenty years of FGC Friends not sup­port­ing youth lead­er­ship. Twenty years of tokenism. Twenty years where the only qual­i­fi­ca­tions con­sid­ered for com­mit­tee mem­ber­ships have been one’s par­ents (lead­ing to some very unqual­i­fied com­mit­tee mem­bers indeed). Twenty years where bold vision­ary young Friends with gifts for prophetic min­istry “have been cut off and marginalized”:/martink/passing_the_faith_planet_of_the_quakers_style.php. Twenty years of lib­eral Quaker lead­er­ship that is scared shit­less to talk about the­ol­ogy or Quaker iden­tity.
    Even now, the whole sweat lodge debate is largely between sixty-something old codgers play­ing out long-standing rival­ries. If it weren’t the sweat lodge, they’d all be fight­ing over some­thing else. If you need Chuck Fager and George Price to fight your future for you, then there is no future.
    I’m glad you’ve found your voice (this post hits all the Fager/Price talk­ing points yet doesn’t resem­ble any posts you’ve writ­ten on your own blog). I look for­ward to read­ing more on that site.

  • Petey

    That you insult peo­ple who hold dear the Quaker Sweat and call me to use my blog for the same pur­pose that you use yours for (the­o­log­i­cal cam­paign­ing) is both sad and wrong. Please, friend — name­call­ing is unquak­erly. You can choose to let this through to your blog or not, I don’t really care — this is more for you than for your audi­ence. Please, don’t insult peo­ple, don’t com­plain when peo­ple respond to your cam­paigns with counter-campaigns of their own, after all — at the end of the day, it’s just ideas, and if ideas are so scary that they war­rant name­call­ing then what of God in con­ver­sa­tions can be found here?

  • http://www.nonviolence.org/martink Mar­tin Kelley

    Hey Petey: I have no inter­est in get­ting into a flame war with you. Any­one who wants can scroll up and see that I didn’t call you names or insult you. “Quaker Ranter” is a per­sonal blog. Like any per­sonal blog I write about the things I’m inter­ested in. In my case its Quak­erism. I like talk­ing about it, its iden­tity, its bound­aries.
    I don’t par­tic­u­larly care about the sweat lodge. I think its silly and has lit­tle to do with Quak­erism but I’m not wast­ing my time cam­paign­ing. This was a sin­gle post a year ago–that it’s one of the few things that came up when you typed “quaker sweat lodge” in Yahoo isn’t my fault. If you think I’m full of it then just hit the back but­ton and fare thee well.
    Your Friend, Martin

  • Keith_wb

    hey folks, i’m from man­i­toba and have been invited by a cree friend to expe­ri­ence sun dance with him. not as wor­ried about the min­gling blood or exhaus­tion in the sun thing as much as how to respect his expe­ri­ence with­out com­pro­mis­ing quaker con­cerns about forms being dis­tract­ing of substance.