clothes Posts

I feel I'm being called to be profoundly non-strategic these days. What do big words add to understanding? Our message is simple. All we need to do is love God and care for one another. Our task is not to know all the answers but to simply follow what small leads we've been given and trust in the Lord that this is the work of the Kingdom. It is too easy to adopt the clothes of a professionalism that hide a predatory motive and mask the unspoken fear at the root of our labors.

But love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be the children of the Highest: for he is kind unto the unthankful and to the evil.Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful. Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be forgiven:Give, and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over, shall men give into your bosom. For with the same measure that ye mete withal it shall be measured to you again.

I will worry less about those who seem intent to push houses across sandy soil. I will dig down looking for the bedrock and I will invite others to join with their shovels. I will stop worrying about the specks in my brothers' eyes.

And why call ye me, Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say? Whosoever cometh to me, and heareth my sayings, and doeth them, I will shew you to whom he is like: He is like a man which built an house, and digged deep, and laid the foundation on a rock: and when the flood arose, the stream beat vehemently upon that house, and could not shake it: for it was founded upon a rock. But he that heareth, and doeth not, is like a man that without a foundation built an house upon the earth; against which the stream did beat vehemently, and immediately it fell; and the ruin of that house was great. Quotes from Luke 6.

Over on my design blog, a post about trying to get a refund from Yahoo Music. It's buyer beware in the online world where even finding a customer service phone number is a victory. I'm surprised that a division of Yahoo would stoop to such customer-unfriendly tactics. Unmentioned on the blog: that 4yo Theo spent the hour I was on the phone quietly playing in his room where unbeknownst to me he had smuggled bathtime paint and was squirting it over run, clothes, bed and himself in re-enactment of Thomas the Tank Engine crashes.

I usually skip out on meme games but I thought I'd try out Jeanne's class one. Bold are the privileges I can claim from my youth, italics are ones that I'm unsure of or that are more "yes but" kind of privileges. My mom's Lutheran pride kept her from wanting us to look or feel poor. Yes, I didn't have second-hand clothes but the rich kids often did. While they might wear scrubs from their parent's doctor practice or vintage clothes scored from a thrift-store outing, I was in striped button-down shirts from the respectable department store whose teen department was always empty of teen customers. Yes, respectable people on TV sound like me but that's because my mom dropped her childhood Pennsylvania Dutch accent and was hyper-aware of non-standard accents (a trait I've unfortunately picked up, I correct/mock Julie's "wooder" pronunciation for water before I can even think about it, it's like I have a very specificTourettes Syndrome that only applies to non-standard accents). Julie tallied up and commented on the quiz here in Jeanne's comments. It's fascinating to realize that although I grew up significantly poorer and have less than half Julie's "steps" she's much more culturally working class than I'll ever be.

Father went to college (he was secretive about past, he might have done a semester at St Joe's)
Father finished college
Mother went to college (two year secretarial program)
Mother finished college
Have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor.
Were the same or higher class than your high school teachers
Had more than 50 books in your childhood home
Had more than 500 books in your childhood home
Were read children's books by a parent
Had lessons of any kind before you turned 18
Had more than two kinds of lessons before you turned 18
The people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed positively (because we're good assimilationists)
Had a credit card with your name on it before you turned 18
Had to take out less than $5000 in student loans in order to go to college
Didn't need student loans to go to college out of high school
Went to a private high school
Went to summer camp (day camp at the Y for a few summers)
Had a private tutor before you turned 18
Family vacations involved staying at hotels
Your clothing was all bought new before you turned 18 (pride kept us out of second-hand stores until we later crossed that class boundary where thrifting is cool precisely because its not a necessity)
Your parents bought you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them
There was original art in your house when you were a child
Had a phone in your room before you turned 18
You and your family lived in a single family house
Your parent(s) owned their own house or apartment before you left home
You had your own room as a child (I was the only child at home after age 7)
Participated in an SAT/ACT prep course (my mom thought they were cheating)
Had your own TV in your room in High School (mostly as monitor for Radio Shack Color Computer she bought me junior year of high school)
Owned a mutual fund or IRA in High School or College
Flew anywhere on a commercial airline before you turned 16
Went on a cruise with your family
Went on more than one cruise with your family
Your parents took you to museums and art galleries as you grew up (we were more zoo/county fair/Independence Hall tour types (hey, they're all free/low-cost!))
You were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family (n/a: included in apt rent, besides my mom would never let on that things were tight)

A list like this can never be all inclusive but it seems there are some big omissions. Where's anything about family structure and finances, like "You had two parental figures living in your house" and "Both parents contributed to family income" or "One parent stayed home or worked part-time"? In my own instance, my father had a secret other family and never paid for anything other than the occasional trip to Roy Rogers (secret family to "Little Marty" at least, the women and older children presumably noitced he was only around half the time and constructed some mental run-around to explain it away).

The other omission is social networks. I have no memory of family friends. I cannot name one friend of my father and my mother's friends were limited to a handful of "girls" at the office. By the time I got to high school I started to see how certain classmates were able to work the system to get the best teachers and classes and this was mostly accomplished by parents swapping notes after Hewbrew class or at church or at hockey practice. Friends are rightly noted for the strength of their social networks and I suspect these provide a social privilege that is far more valuable than parental salary.

Jeanne promises to write a part two to her post explaining what this all means to Friends. I'm looking forward to it though I'm unsure just what easy generalization can be made if we're looking at origins. One of the few surveys trying to be comprehensive found Philadelphia-area Friends don't reflect American averages yet for many convinced Friends our participation has mirrored (and perhaps been unconsciously motivated by) an upward class mobility. Keep an eye on Social Class & Quakers for more!

I'm reading Bill Taber's fascinating history of Ohio Conservative Friends called The Eye of Faith. Like any good history there's a lot of the present in there. There's a strong feeling of deja-vu to the scenes of Friends in conflict and various characters come to life as much for their foibles as their strength of character (there's more than a few bloggers echoed there). I'm now a few years into the second great separation, the Wilburite/Gurneyite split that brewed for years before erupting in 1854.

I'm not one of those Friends who bemoan the various schisms. The diversity of those calling themselves Friends today is so great that it's hard to imagine them ever having stayed part of the same body. Only a strong authoritarian control could have prevented the separations and even then, large masses of the "losing" party would have simply left and regrouped elsewhere: the only real difference is that one party stops using the Quaker name. Here in South Jersey, where the only Gurneyite meeting wasn't recognized by either Philadelphia yearly meeting for almost a hundred years, we've got dozens of Methodist "meeting houses" with graveyards full of old Quaker family names. Fascinating histories could be written of Friends who didn't bother to squabble over meetinghouse deeds and simply decided to congregate under another banner.

One concept I'm chewing on is that of the "remnant." As I understand it, the doctrine comes largely from Revelation 12 and is used by small theologically-conservative Christian sects to explain why their small size isn't a problem; it's kind of like Mom saying it's better to do the right thing than to be popular. When the remnant community is a relatively isolated locale like Barnesville, there's also the image of the Land That Time Forgot, the place where the old time ways has come down to us most fully intact. There's truth to the preserving power of isolation: linguists claim the Ozark hillbilly accent most clearly mirrors Shakespeare's. But Ohio Friends aren't simply Jed Clampett's Quaker cousins.

Like most rural Quaker yearly meetings, Ohio Yearly Meeting Conservative has lost much of its membership over the last hundred years. I don't have statistics but it seems as if a good percentage of the active members of the yearly meeting hail from outside southeastern Ohio and a great many are convinced Friends. This echoes the most significant change in U.S. Quakerism in the past fifty years: the shift from a self-perpetuating community with strong local customs and an almost ethnic sense of self, to a society of convinced believers.

The keen sense of self-sufficiency and isolation that held together tight-knit Quaker communities over the centuries are largely non-sustainable now. In our media-saturated lives even Barnesville teens can get the latest Hollywood gossip and New York fashions in real time. Yes it's possible to ban the TV and live as a media hermit in a commune somewhere, but even that only gets you so far. Once upon a time, not so long ago, a Friend could situate themselves in the wider Quaker universe simply by comparing family trees and school ties but that's becoming less important all the time. For those of us who enter into the Society of Friends as adults--majorities in many yearly meetings now--there's a sense of choice, of donning the clothes. We play at being Quaker until voila!, some mystical alchemical process happens and we identify as Quaker--even if we're not always quite so made-over into Quakerness as we imagine ourselves.

At the Ohio sessions a few Friends really loved Wess Daniel's statement that "A tradition that loses the ability to explain itself becomes an empty form" (see his wrap-up post here). One Ohio Friend said he had heard it postulated that isolated and inward-focused communities like Ohio Conservative were God's method of preserving the old ways against the onslaught of the modernist age (with its mocking disbelief) until they could be reintroduced to the wider world in a more forgiving post-modernist era. Looked at that way, Quakerism isn't a quaint relic in need of the same botox/bleach blond "NOW!" makeover every other spiritual tradition is getting. Think of it instead as a time capsule ready to be opened. An interesting theory. Are we ready to look at this peculiar thing we've dug up and reverse-engineer it back into meaningfulness?

Update:

Kirk W. over at Street Corner Society emailed me that he had recently put the Journal of Ann Branson online. She features heavily in the middle part of Taber's book, which is the story of Conservative Ohio finding its own identity. Kirk suggests, and I agree, that her journal might be considered one of the artifacts of the Ohio time capsule. I hope to find some time to read this in the not-too-distant future.

A possible addition to my page of odd search phrases that bring people to my site is this one from early this afternoon:

Why Men Shouldn't be Allowed to Buy Clothes for Children

There's QuakerRanter.org at number eleven. Oh the shame of it! I'm going to run to W*LM*RT right now, well I would if only I kind of knew the kid's sizes, ummm... I could call Julie at work and ask her I guess...

It's said that John Woolman re-wrote his Journal three times in an effort to excise it of as many "I" references as possible. As David Sox writes in Johh Woolman Quintessential Quaker, "only on limited occasion do we glimpse Woolman as a son, a father and a husband." Woolman wouldn't have been a very good blogger. Quoting myself from my introduction to "Quaker blogs": http://www.quakerquaker.org/quaker_blogs/::

blogs give us a unique way of sharing our lives—how our Quakerism intersects with the day-to-day decisions that make up faithful living. Quaker blogs give us a chance to get to know like-minded Friends that are separated by geography or artificial theological boundaries and they give us a way of talking to and with the institutions that make up our faith community.

I've read many great Woolman stories over the years and as I read the Journal I eagerly anticipated reading the original account. It's that same excitement I get when walking the streets of an iconic landscape for the first time: walking through London, say, knowing that Big Ben is right around the next corner. But Woolman kept letting me down.

One of the AWOL stories is his arrival in London. The Journal's account:

On the 8th of Sixth Month, 1772, we landed at London, and I went straightway to the Yearly Meeting of ministers and elders, which had been gathered, I suppose, about half an hour. In this meeting my mind was humbly contrite.

But set the scene. He had just spent five weeks crossing the Atlantic in steerage among the pigs (he doesn't actually specify his non-human bunkmates). He famously went out of his way to wear clothes that show dirt because they show dirt. He went straightaway: no record of a bath or change of clothes. Stories abound about his reception, and while are some of dubious origin, there are first hand accounts of his being shunned by the British ministers and elders. "The best and most dubious story is the theme of another post":.

I trust that Woolman was honestly aiming for meekness when he omitted the most interesting stories of his life. But without the context of a lived life he becomes an ahistorical figure, an icon of goodness divorced from the minutiae of the daily grind. Two hundred and thirty years of Quaker hagiography and latter-day appeals to Woolman's authority have turned the tailor of Mount Holly into the otherworldly Quaker saint but the process started at John's hands himself.

Were his struggles merely interior? When I look to my own ministry, I find the call to discernment to be the clearest part of the work. I need to work to be ever more receptive to even the most unexpected prompting from the Inward Christ and I need to constantly practice humility, love and forgiveness. But the practical limitations are harder. For years respectibility was an issue; relative poverty continues to be one. It is asking a lot of my wife to leave responsibility for our two small boys for even a long weekend.

How did Woolman balance family life and ministry? What did wife Sarah think? And just what was his role in the sea-change that was the the "Reformation of American Quakerism" (to use Jack Marietta's phrase) that forever altered American Friends' relationship with the world and set the stage for the schisms of the next century.

We also lose the context of Woolman's compatriots. Some are named as traveling companions but the colorful characters go unmentioned. What did he think of the street-theater antics of Benjamin Lay, the Abbie Hoffman of Philadelphia Quakers. The most widely-told tale is of Lay walking into Philadelphia Yearly Meeting sessions, opening up a cloak to reveal military uniform underneath, and declaring that slave-made products were products of war, plunged a sword into a hollowed-out Bible full of pig's blood, splattering Friends sitting nearby.

What role did Woolman play in the larger anti-slavery awakening happening at the time? It's hard to tell just reading his Journal. How can we find ways to replicate his kind of faithfulness and witness today? Again, his Journal doesn't give much clue.

Next time: I Really Do Like Woolman!

Reading John Woolman:

• Part One: The Public Life of a Private Man
• Part Two: The Last Safe Quaker
• Part Three: The Isolated Saint (this page)
• Part Four (forthcoming)

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Picked up today in the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Library:

• The Reformation of American Quakerism, by Jack Marietta
• John Woolman Quintessential Quaker, by David Sox
• The Tendering Presence: Essays on John Woolman, edited by Mike Heller

PYM Librarian Rita Varley reminded me today they mail books anywhere in the US for a modest fee and a $50/year subscription. It's a great deal and a great service, especially for isolated Friends. The PYM catalog is online too!

Someone who only knew Woolman from articles in popular Quaker periodicals might be forgiven for a moment of shock when opening his book. John Woolman is so much more religious than we usually acknowledge. We describe him as an activist even though he and his contemporaries clearly saw and named him a minister. There are many instances where he described the inhumanity of the slave trade and he clearly identified with the oppressed but he almost always did so with from a Biblical perspective. He acknowledged that religious faithfulness could exist outside his beloved Society of Friends but his life's work was calling Friends to live a profoundly Christian life. Flip to a random page of the journal and you'll probably count half a dozen metaphors for God. Yes, he was a social activist but he was also a deeply religious minister of the gospel.

So why do we wrap ourselves up in Woolman like he's the flag of proto-liberal Quakerism? In an culture where Quaker authority is deeply distrusted and appeals to the Bible or to Quaker history are routinely dismissed, he has become the last safe Friend to claim. His name is invoked as a sort of talisman against critique, as a rhetorical show-stopper. "If you don't agree with my take on the environment/tax resistance/universalism, you're the moral equivalent of Woolman's slave holders." (Before the emails start flooding in, remember I'm writing this as a dues-paying activist Quaker myself.) We don't need to agree with him to engage with him and learn from him. But we do need to be honest about what he believed and open to admitting when we disagree. We shouldn't use him simply as a stooge for our own agenda.

I like Woolman but I have my disagreements. His scrupulousness was over the top. My own personality tends toward a certain purity, exemplified by fifteen years of veganism, my plain dress, my being car-less into my late thirties. I've learned that I need to moderate this tendency. My purity can sometimes be a sign of an elitism that wants to separate myself from the world (I've learned to laugh at myself more). Asceticism can be a powerful spiritual lens but it can also burn a self- and world-hatred into us. I've had friends on the brink of suicide (literally) over this kind of scrupulousness. I worry when a new Friend finds my plain pages and is in broadfalls and bonnets a few weeks later, knowing from my own experience that the speed of their gusto sometimes rushes a discernment practice that needs to rest and settle before it is fully owned (the most personally challenging of the traditional tests of Quaker discernment is "patience").

John Woolman presents an awfully high bar for future generations. He reports refusing medicine when illness brought him to the brink of death, preferring to see fevers as signs of God's will. While that might have been the smarter course in an pre-hygienic era when doctors often did more harm than good, this Christian Scientist-like attitude is not one I can endorse. He sailed to England deep in the hold along with the cattle because he thought the woodwork unnecessarily pretty in the passenger cabins. While his famous wearing of un-dyed garments was rooted partly in the outrages of the manufacturing process, he talked much more eloquently about the inherent evil of wearing clothes that might hide stains, arguing that anyone who would try to hide stains on their clothes would be that much more likely to hide their internal spiritual stains (all I could think about when reading this was that he must have left child-rearing duties to the well-inclined Sarah).

Woolman proudly relates (in his famously humble style) how he once tried to shut down a traveling magic act that was scheduled to play at the local inn. I suspect that if any of us somehow found ourselves on his clearness committee we might find a way to tell him to... well, lighten up. I sympathize with his concerns against mindless entertainment but telling the good people of Mount Holly that they can't see a disappearing rabbit act because of his religious sensibilities is more Taliban than most of us would feel comfortable with.

He was a man of his times and that's okay. We can take him for what he is. We shouldn't dismiss any of his opinions too lightly for he really was a great religious and ethical figure. But we might think twice before enlisting the party pooper of Mount Holly for our cause.

Next time: The Myth of the Isolated Saint.

Reading John Woolman:

• Part One: The Public Life of a Private Man
• Part Two: "The Last Safe Quaker" (this page)
• Part Three: The Isolated Saint
• Part Four (forthcoming)