Howard Brinton: Quaker Journals

Howard Brinton’s Quaker Jour­nals: Vari­eties of Reli­gious Expe­ri­ence Among Friends

One of the great joys of Quak­erism is that it is an expe­ri­en­tial reli­gion, an atti­tude more than a for­mal­ized the­ol­ogy. While main­stream Chris­t­ian doc­u­ments like the Apostle’s Creed may be a good guide to the reli­gious con­tro­ver­sies of Fourth Cen­tury Europe, weekly recita­tion doesn’t do much to tell us how to live as faith­ful min­is­ters in a bro­ken world cry­ing out to be reborn. Quak­ers have a sim­ple approach to the divine: we believe min­istry should be directly inspired and ever new. Through long expe­ri­ence and heart­break we’ve learned that we must wait for direc­tion from Christ’s Spirit before act­ing out.

How then do we teach a reli­gion that can’t be defined? We can try to cat­e­go­rize lists of reli­gious behavior–what we call our tes­ti­monies. But even these can become rote lists and they soon enough turn into their own dead ortho­doxy. A reli­gion that depends on the ever-refreshing inspi­ra­tion of the Holy Spirit can’t be pinned down.

So instead Quak­ers have learned to tell sto­ries. Faith­ful Friends were asked by their Meet­ings to write down their life sto­ries into the body of work we now call the Quaker jour­nals. These weren’t like the celebrity bios that grace every modern-day new­stand. They were spir­i­tual biogra­phies stripped of the juicy gos­sip of daily life and focused on strug­gle to be true to God. Through them, the jour­nal writer share their glimpses of the Divine but also the strug­gle to get there.

One of the out­stand­ing Quaker fig­ures of our era wrote a guide to the old biogra­phies as he neared the end of his life. Howard Brinton’s Quaker Jour­nals (pub­lished in 1971) is a roadmap to the form: he dis­sects dozens of jour­nals famous and obscure and traces the themes. The steps he out­lines are the steps toward faith­ful­ness. They are the guide to becom­ing a Friend.

Any­one who’s started down this path will rec­og­nize the land­marks of his chap­ter titles: “youth­ful friv­o­lity,” “the divided self,” “uni­fi­ca­tion through silence,” “adop­tion of plain speech, plain dress and sim­ple liv­ing.” While these steps would be famil­iar to gen­er­a­tions of faith­ful Friends (includ­ing today’s) they are rarely talked about today. One cer­tainly won’t find them taught in most First Day Schools.

The Quaker cul­ture at large always threat­ens to adopt the con­cepts of our sur­round­ings. We think of self-actualization instead of self-abnegation when we run around try­ing to craft iden­ti­ties. We applaud the faux-rebelliousness of alter­na­tive fash­ion. We pat our­selves on the back when we let our chil­dren mess their lives in the name of exper­i­men­ta­tion. At its best Quak­erism doesn’t con­demn these prac­tices so much as lift up the alter­na­tive: a path to God that requires lis­ten­ing to and obey­ing a force out­side of ourselves.

Read­ing jour­nals reminds us of that Quaker path. And that’s pre­cisely what they’re intended for.

Read­ing the jour­nals gives a thou­sand lessons in the atti­tude nec­es­sary to being a faith­ful Quaker. These are time­less. When a witch scare threat­ened to over­take Quaker Penn­syl­va­nia, William Penn asked an accused witch if she trav­eled by broom­stick. When she informed him she did, Penn just replied, “Yes, I know of no law against it” and let her go. Thomas Chalk­ley talked about find­ing a job that left time for min­istry: “So I went to my call­ing, and got a lit­tle money (a lit­tle being enough) which I was made will­ing to spend freely, in the work of ser­vice to my great mas­ter Christ Jesus.” Job Scott described the spir­i­tual hang­over from mind­less par­ty­ing: “Thus I went on frol­ick­ing and gam­ing, and spend­ing my pre­cious time in van­ity. Often at night… I have returned home from my merry meet­ings griev­ously con­demned, dis­tressed and ashamed; wish­ing I had not gone into such com­pany, and resolv­ing to do so no more.”

The book has its flaws but they too are inter­est­ing and instruc­tive. In his zeal to make Quak­erism acces­si­ble, Howard Brin­ton some­times stretches a claim of resem­blance to a present-day spir­i­tual move­ment. A few of the later chap­ters of Quaker Jour­nals reach out to mid-Century fol­low­ers of Gandhi and Freud and these pas­sages have aged the least well. He weaves his argu­ments from the mer­est threads and it shows: early Friends didn’t think in terms of rein­car­na­tion or the id and you just can’t build a sat­is­fy­ing argu­ment out of conjecture.

There’s a les­son that even Howard Brin­ton could only con­vinc­ingly pop­u­lar­ize Quak­erism so far. In my writ­ings I fre­quently reach out to the “Emer­gent Church” move­ment and other Friends do a sim­i­lar out­reach min­istry to Amer­i­can Bud­dhists, rad­i­cal envi­ron­men­tal­ists, the ecu­meni­cal move­ment, etc. I sus­pect our work in these fields will also feel dated in thirty years. The Spirit from which Quak­erism springs forth is eter­nal and will out­live any of our trendy move­ments. We can only pan­der to spir­i­tual fash­ion too much.

For­tu­nately, most of  Quaker Jour­nals is good old fash­ioned Quaker sto­ry­telling. Which is a rad­i­cal act in itself as it reminds us that we too are liv­ing our sto­ries. The Quaker approach to jour­nal writ­ing and read­ing is the ulti­mate inter­gen­er­a­tional expe­ri­ence: these accounts allow us to become friends to long-dead Friends. When I read old jour­nals I often have a wry smile on my face in the recog­ni­tion of some com­mon issue. Despite all our moder­nity, the strug­gles to being a faith­ful fol­lower of God today are not so dif­fer­ent from what they’ve always been. Through exam­ple, the jour­nal writer is con­sol­ing us, under­stand­ing us and let­ting us know its okay to suf­fer from non-recognition, set-back and doubt.

For the truth is that there was never really any “golden age” to Quak­erism. We’ve always been strug­gling, bum­bling about and mak­ing mis­takes. Long-dead Friends remind us even that those heroic Quaker acts of the past were made by peo­ple as flawed as we are–and as ready to live into Christ’s way as we are.

Quaker jour­nals remind us of our approach to other spir­i­tual writ­ing. Brin­ton starts off his chap­ter on “the divided self” with an account from Paul. The Bible can be seen as a col­lec­tion of jour­nals: within its pages are hun­dreds of sto­ries of peo­ple seek­ing (or flee­ing from!) the Divine. I don’t expect John Wool­man to be per­fect or com­pletely right about every­thing and I don’t expect Paul to be either. Friends don’t read the Bible for its lit­er­al­ness or to glean spe­cific rules, but to con­nect with those who have come before us. Their story is ours too. The Bible and the Quaker jour­nals are read with the same atten­tion to the Light. The jour­nals them­selves are a kind of scrip­ture: addi­tions to the story of a peo­ple engaged in a great spir­i­tual journey.

Brinton’s Quaker Jour­nals is a great intro­duc­tion to one of our old­est form of reli­gious edu­ca­tion. He’s a engag­ing writer and his fre­quent extracts from jour­nals is at turns inspir­ing and funny.

One has to won­der at the renais­sance of writ­ing our spir­i­tual lives down that is hap­pen­ing with these inter­lock­ing net­works of blogs. I don’t think we’re writ­ing jour­nals. But with Quaker Ranter I’ve got­ten much more expe­ri­enced in shar­ing my open­ings and I’ve exer­cised the part of my soul that longs to share the joy I’ve expe­ri­enced. Might we see a renewal of Quaker jour­nals twenty to fifty years from now when we start reach­ing our twi­light years?

There’s a funny bit of coin­ci­dence in me read­ing this book at this time. Last week I got a call from Geof­frey Kaiser, the faith­ful Friend who put together the amaz­ing “Quaker tree” poster of our his­tory and the same faith­ful min­is­ter who labored with FGC Friends in the 1970s to help forge our accep­tance of gay and les­bian Friends as full mem­bers of our reli­gious body. Geoffrey’s deac­ces­sion­ing some of his pos­ses­sions. One is the chart, unavail­able for about five years and now given to FGC (it’s at the print­ers now!). The other col­lec­tion he gave way was about nine feet of mostly-nineteenth cen­tury jour­nals. We drove the 180-mile trip to his and his part­ner Bruce Grimes’s house on First Day and it was a hoot. Geof­frey went through every book with me, essen­tially giv­ing me a syl­labus. His books are full of mar­ginal notes (yes, luck­ily he scrawled on even the ancient ones!) so it will be like hav­ing him there over my shoul­der as I read! It’s quite a gift. My “now read­ing” list might get a bit obscure for awhile.

PS: One thing that Geoff men­tioned a few times was that there’s a book to be writ­ten about the early gay rights move­ment among Friends. He and Bruce took metic­u­lous notes, now housed at Swarth­more. This isn’t just an issue for Quak­ers: many of the chal­lenges they faced echo the debates now hap­pen­ing on the national stage, espe­cially the so-called Defense of Mar­riage Act. All Amer­i­cans could learn a lot by under­stand­ing how FGC Friends wres­tled with this land­mark change.