Hanging with the high schoolers

At the PYM High School Friends retreat, Fall 2009Had a good time with Philadel­phia Yearly Meet­ing high school Friends yes­ter­day, two mini-session on the tes­ti­monies in the mid­dle of their end-of-summer gath­er­ing. The sec­ond ses­sion was an attempt at a write-your-own tes­ti­monies exer­cise, fueled by my testimonies-as-wiki idea and grounded by pas­sages from an 1843 Book of Dis­ci­pline and Thomas Clarkson’s “Por­trai­ture”. My hope was that by reverse-engineering the old tes­ti­monies we might get an appre­ci­a­tion for their spir­i­tual focus. The exer­cise needs a bit of tweak­ing but I’ll try to fix it up and write it out in case oth­ers want to try it with local Friends.

The invite came when the pro­gram coor­di­na­tor googled “quaker tes­ti­monies” and found the video below (loose tran­script is here):

08/26/2009 – 9:58 am | By Martin Kelley | Posted in Quaker, Religion | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (3)
  • http://robinmsf.blogspot.com/ Robin Mohr

    Nice work — yes, please do write it up, because I think this kind of exer­cise could be used in a vari­ety of settings.

  • Kath­leen Karhnak

    Mean­while, what tes­ti­monies did they come up with? Or at least, what was the gen­eral fla­vor of what they came up with?

    • http://www.martinkelley.com/ Mar­tin Kelley

      @Kathleen: one of the improve­ments I would make is to be clearer about what I wanted them to end up with at the end of the ses­sion. If I get a chance to do it again I’ll get a writ­ten para­graph or two out of each of the groups, a sort of draft tes­ti­mony to present.

      As it was, responses were all over the place. Where they had already spent time think­ing about an issue as Friends they were very artic­u­late (Rela­tion­ships group: “Are you treat­ing the other per­son with respect? Are you hon­est?”). Where it was a trendy cause they had trou­ble get­ting out of the stock indi­vid­u­al­ist answer (Trans­porta­tion group: “Hybrid cars are good, but it’s even bet­ter to use pub­lic trans­porta­tion and ride bicy­cles.”) Most groups were some­where in-between and maybe a third stayed close to shore with tau­to­log­i­cal answers (“X is good except when it’s not”).

      It’s all good, of course. The offi­cial take-away mes­sage is that behav­iors can bring us closer to God or push us away, and that it’s okay for a group to set com­mu­nity expec­ta­tions of behav­ior. The “medium is the mes­sage” mes­sage is that there are weird-dressing Quak­ers who crack open 1843 Books of Dis­ci­pline to see what they say. Who knows what might stick. This was a blip in a week of late-summer fun and as I left the smell of burn­ing sage wafted out of the din­ing hall in prepa­ra­tion for the sweat lodge. It was nice being in the space where I played a wacky game of pick-up vol­ley­ball game with Kody way back when he was a high schooler!