death quaker Posts

Not something I'll do every day, but over on QuakerQuaker I cross-referenced today's One Year Bible readings with Esther Greenleaf Murer's Quaker Bible Index. Here's the link to my post about today: First Month 20: Joseph rises to power in Egypt; Jesus' parable of wheat & tares and pearls. It's a particularly rich reading today. Jesus talks about the wheat and the weeds aka the corn and the tares, an interesting parable about letting the faithful and the unfaithful grow together.

As if knowing today is Inauguration Day, Isaac Penington turned it into a political reference: "But oh, how the laws and governments of this world are to be lamented over! And oh, what need there is of their reformation, whose common work it is to pluck up the ears of corn, and leave the tares standing!"

Margaret Fell sees the wheat and tares as an example of jealousy and false ministry: "Oh how hath this envious man gotten in among you. Surely he hath come in the night, when men was asleep: & hath sown tares among the wheat, which when the reapers come must be bound in bundles and cast into the fire, for I know that there was good seed sown among you at the first, which when it found good ground, would have brought forth good fruit; but since there are mixed seedsmen come among you & some hath preached Christ of envy & some of good will, ... & so it was easy to stir up jealousy in you, you having the ground of jealousy in yourselves which is as strong as death."

We get poetry from the seventeen century Elizabeth Bathurst (ahem) when she writes that "the Seed (or grace) of God, is small in its first appearance (even as the morning -light), but as it is given heed to, and obeyed, it will increase in brightness, till it shine in the soul, like the sun in the firmament at noon-day height."

The parable of the tares became a call for tolerance in George Fox's understanding: "For Christ commands christian men to "love one another [John 13:34, etc], and love their enemies [Mat 5:44];" and so not to persecute them. And those enemies may be changed by repentance and conversion, from tares to wheat. But if men imprison them, and spoil and destroy them, they do not give them time to repent. So it is clear it is the angels' work to burn the tares, and not men's."

A century later, Sarah Tuke Grubb read and worried about religious education and Quaker drift: "But for want of keeping an eye open to this preserving Power, a spirit of indifference hath crept in, and, whilst many have slept, tares have been sown [Mat 13:25]; which as they spring up, have a tendency to choke the good seed; those tender impressions and reproofs of instruction, which would have prepared our spirits, and have bound them to the holy law and testimonies of truth."

I hope all this helps us remember that the Bible is our book too and an essential resource for Friends. It's easy to forget this and kind of slip one way or another. One extreme is getting our Bible fix from mainstream Evangelical Christian sources whose viewpoints might be in pretty direct opposition from Quaker understandings of Jesus and the Gospel (see Jeanne B's post on The New Calvinism or Tom Smith's very reasonable concerns about the literalism at the One Year Bible Blog I read and recommend). On the other hand, it's not uncommon in my neck of the Quaker woods to describe our religion as "Quaker," downgrade Christianity by making it optional, unmentionable or non-contextual and turning to the Bible only for the obligatory epistle reference.

This was first made clear to me a few years ago by the margins in the modern edition of Samuel Bownas' "A Description of the Qualifications Necessary to a Gospel Ministry," which were peppered with the Biblical references Bownas was casually citing throughout. On my second reading (yes it's that good!) I started looking up the references and realized that: 1) Bownas wasn't just making this stuff up or quoting willy-nilly; and 2) reading them helped me understand Bownas and by extension the whole concept of Quaker ministry. You're not reading my blog enough if you're not getting the idea that this is one of the kind of practices that Robin, Wess and I are going to be talking about at the Convergent workshop next month. If you can figure out the transport then get yourself to Cali pronto and join us.

Always a step behind Wess, I started a QuakerQuaker "Page" over on Facebook. Nothing there yet but it could be a place for readers to comment and for me to toss out ideas for future directions.

I've personally found that the organizing potential of Facebook isn't nearly as interesting as it seems at first blush. Groups are constantly created, joined in a mad rush, then left to decay a slow death of unanswered discussions. FB is a good place to chat with friends and there's a certain thrill of the ephemeral to learn that an acquaintance you haven't talked to in years is in Tuscon this weekend enjoying a spicy Thai chicken. But perhaps a Facebook Group (or "Page," as this technically is) will be a good forum for a somewhat established network.

Getting right back on the horse, I'm teaching Quakerism 101 at Moorestown NJ Meeting Wednesday evenings starting in a few weeks. The original plan was for the most excellent Thomas Swain to lead it but he's become rather busy after being tapped to be yearly meeting clerk (God bless 'im). He'll be there for the first session, I'll be on my own for the rest. A rather small group has signed up so it should be nice and intimate.

For the last year I've been pondering the opportunities of using mid-week religious education and worship as a form of outreach. Emergent Church types love small group opportunities outside of the Sunday morning time slot and it seems that mid-week worship is one of those old on-the-verge-of-death Quaker traditions that might be worth revitalizing and recasting in an Emergent-friendly format.

Last Spring I spent a few months regularly attending one of the few surviving mid-week worships in the area and I found it intriguing and full of possibilities but never felt led to do more. It seemed that attenders came and went each week without connecting deeply to one another or getting any serious grounding in Quakerism.

Reflecting on the genesis of a strong Philadelphia young adult group in the mid-1990s, it seemed like the ideal recipe would look something like this:

• 6pm: regular religious ed time, not super-formal but real and pastoral-based. This would be an open, non-judgemental time where attenders would be free to share spiritual insights but they would also learn the orthodox Quaker take on the issue or concern (Barclay essentially).
• 7pm: mid-week worship, unprogrammed
• 8pm: unofficial but regular hang-out time, people going in groups to local diners, etc.

Unprogrammed worship just isn't enough (just when y'all thought I was a dyed-in-the-plain-cloth Wilburite....) . People do need time to be able to ask questions and explore spirituality in a more structured way. Those of us led to teaching need to be willing to say "this is the Quaker take on this issue" even if our answer wouldn't necessarily pass consensus in a Friends meeting.

People also need time to socialize. We live in an atomized society and the brunt of this isolation is borne by young adults starting careers in unfamiliar cities and towns: Quaker meeting can act as a place to plug into a social network and provide real community. It's different from entertainment, but rather identity-building. How do we shift thinking from "those Quakers are cool" to "I'm a Quaker and I'm cool" in such a way that these new Friends understand that there are challenges and disciplines involved in taking on this new role.

Perhaps the three parts to the mid-week worship model is head, spirit and heart; whatever labels you give it we need to think about feeding and nurturing the whole seeker and to challenge them to more than just silence. This is certainly a common model. When Peggy Senger Parsons and Alivia Biko came to the FGC Gathering and shared Freedom Friends worship with us it had some of this feel. For awhile I tagged along with Julie to what's now called The Collegium Center which is a Sunday night Catholic mass/religious ed/diner three-some that was always packed and that produced at least one couple (good friends of ours now!).

I don't know why I share all this now, except to put the idea in other people's heads too. The four weeks of Wednesday night religious ed at Moorestown might have something of this feel; it will be interesting to see.

For those interested in curriculum details, I'm basing it on Michael Birkel's Silence and Witness: the Quaker Tradition (Orbis, 2004. $16.00). Michael's tried to pull together a good general introduction to Friends, something surely needed by Friends today (much as I respect Howard Brinton's Friends for 300 Years it's getting old in the tooth and speaks more to the issues of mid-century Friends than us). Can Silence and Witness anchor a Quakerism 101 course? We'll see.

As supplementary material I'm using Thomas Hamm's Quakers in America (Columbia University Press, 2003, $45), Ben Pink-Dandelion's Convinced Quakerism: 2003 Walton Lecture (Southeastern Yearly Meeting Walton Lecture, 2003, $4.00), Marty Grundy's Quaker Treasure (Beacon Hill Friends House Weed Lecture, 2002, $4.00) and the class Bill Tabor pamphlet Four Doors to Quaker Worship (Pendle Hill, 1992, $5.00). Attentive readers will see echos from my previous Quakerism 101 class at Medford Meeting.

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)

Hi QuakerRanter friends: I've been busy today covering the Quaker response to the Christian Peacemakers Teams hostages. Two sites with a lot of overlapping content:

• Quaker Blog Watch page focused on the hostages
• Nonviolence.org statement and list of responses

Both of these feature a mix of mainstream news and Quaker views on the situation. I'll keep them updated. I'm not the only busy Friend: Chuck Fager and John Stephens have a site called Free the Captives -- check it out.

It's always interesting to see the moments that I explictly identify as a Friend on Nonviolence.org. As I saythere, it seems quite appropriate. We need to explain to the world why a Quaker and three other Christians would needlessly put themselves in such danger. This is witness time, Friends. The real deal. We're all being tested. This is one of those times for which those endless committee meetings and boilerplate peace statements have prepared us.

It's time to tell the world that we live in the power that takes away the occasion for war and overcomes our fear of death (well, or at least mutes it enough that four brave souls would travel to dangerous lands to witness our faith).

Two of the blasts that hit London today were near Friends House, the home of Britain Yearly Meeting, which is acting as a relief center. From TimesOnline

Ministers and priests went on to the streets to work alongside the emergency services, helping to comfort traumatised commuters. At Friends House, opposite Euston Station, Quakers set up an emergency unit for the hundreds of people blocked in the middle of the explosions at Kings Cross, Woburn Place and Russell Square.

The Quakers offered free tea, coffee and telephone calls to all the people affected by the blasts as well as emotional support. Many of the hundreds of people stuck in Euston were witness to the explosions, with one young woman describing how she saw the bus explode and thought it was another 9/11.

She has become partially deaf and is resting in the Quaker First Aid room.

The hundreds of people who are in Friends House remain stuck there for the foreseeable future and many are unsure how they will return home tonight.

Friends House also gets a mention in this Guardian piece

Responses from the Quaker Blogosphere:

Rob of Consider the Lillies is okay and is posting reactions. The Contemplative Activist reminds us to live in that virtue of that life and power that takes away the occasion of all wars'. Peterson Toscano wonders if the bombings really are senseless in light of our cultural attitudes--"You push me; I push you harder; you push me back, and it goes on and on and on." Beppe turns to a recent passage from his scripture study to gage just what Jesus might have done. I will try to continue updating these responses as they come in.

Our prayers are with all those in London today: the dead, the injured, the scared. And with those whose fear turns to anger and will inevitably lead to calls for retribution. Our Friends Peace Testimony helps us keep our groundedness in times of horror and I am grateful to hear that Friends are there, ready to tend to the wounded of body and soul.

Elsewhere

Apparently Wikipedia is now covering news and is one of the better sources of information on the London bombings.

I've spent the last three days bowled over with the Bubonic Plague. Well I haven't seen a doctor yet, so the autopsy might determine that it's really the Black Death, Yellow Fever or garden-variety Ebola. This is the second (day the world calls) Christmas in a row that I've spent in bed with high fevers and I'm beginning to suspect the office Christmas party. Well, if I'm blogging maybe I'm coming out of it. My temperature is under 100°'s, whoo-whee. Fortunately, I'm the only sick family member: Theo's just had a runny nose and Julie's just had the exhaustion of being a de-facto single parent (which might just be worse than three days of nearly 103%#176; fevers and chills).

Back on the computer, I see the headlines of the massive tidal wave that's hit southeast Asia. As a parent, the most chilling line in the Times' lead article has to be the one about "children being torn from their parents' arms and washed out to sea." My prayers go out to all the millions who's lives are forever changed by this. I also have to give a very selfish prayer of thanks that my friends Jason and Kristy's trip to the area was to start next week.

Other readings:

• I posted relief effort info on my main Nonviolence.org blog;
• Joe Guada has this interesting post wondering why the Quakers he knows barely seem to mention the disaster in their New Years greetings. Camassia posted an insightful comment that wonders if Friends have a way to understand such natural evil.