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One of the blueprints for Quaker community is the "Epistle from the Elders at Balby" written in 1656 at the very infancy of the Friends movement by a gathering of leaders from Yorkshire and North Midlands, England.

It's the precursor to Faith and Practice, as it outlines the relationship between individuals and the meeting. If remembered at all today, it's for its postscript, a paraphrase of 2 Corinthians that warns readers not to treat this as a form to worship and to remain living in the light which is pure and holy. That postscript now starts off most liberal Quaker books of Faith and Practice.

But the Epistle itself is well worth dusting off. It addresses worship, ministry, marriage, and how to deal in meekness and love with those walking "disorderly." It talks of how to support families and take care of members who were imprisoned or in need. Some of it's language is a little stilted and there's some talk of the role of servants that most modern Friend would object to. But overall, it's a remarkably lucid, practical and relevant document. It's also short: just over two pages.

One of the things I hear again and again from Friends is the desire for a deeper community of faith. Younger Friends are especially drawn toward the so-called "New Monastic" movement of tight communal living. The Balby Epistle is a glimpse into how an earlier generation of Friends addressed some of these same concerns.

ONLINE EDITIONS OF THE EPISTLE AT BALBY:
Quaker Heritage Press: qhpress.org/texts/balby.html
Street Corner Society: strecorsoc.org/docs/balby.html
Wikisource: en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Epistle_from_the_Elders_at_Balby,_1656

DISCUSSIONS:
Brooklyn Quaker post & discussion (2005): brooklynquaker.blogspot.com/2005/03/elders-at-balby.html

I was able to make up this list that displays QuakerQuaker.org membership profiles and upcoming gatherings in a geography-focused way.

Countries Australia Belgium Canada France Germany Greece Ireland Kenya Mexico Netherlands New Zealand United Kingdom United States

Select Cities London Philadelphia New York Richmond Greensboro Portland Seattle Birmingham Boston Minneapolis San Francisco U.S. Regions New England Mid-Atlantic Southeast US Great Plains Southwest Midwest North Pacific

U.S. States Alabama Alaska Arizona Arkansas California Colorado Connecticut Delaware District of Columbia Florida Georgia Hawaii Idaho Illinois Indiana Iowa Kansas Kentucky Louisiana Maine Maryland Massachusetts Michigan Minnesota Mississippi Missouri Montana Nebraska Nevada New Hampshire New Jersey New Mexico New York North Carolina North Dakota Ohio Oklahoma Oregon Pennsylvania Puerto Rico Rhode Island South Carolina South Dakota Tennessee Texas Utah Vermont Virginia Washington West Virginia Wisconsin Wyoming

Gatherings by Theme Convergent Yearly Meetings Gatherings Retreats Online Young Adult Gatherings by Location New England United Kingdom Mid Atlantic Baltimore Philadelphia Great Plains Northwest Ohio

In Chris Anderson's new book Free: The Future of a Radical Price, he looks into the meaning of the word free. The word has two meanings: free as in "freedom" and free as in "price." Most of the romance languages divide these meanings into two different words, derived from liber and gratiis. Our double-duty English word comes from Old English freon or freogan, meaning "to free, love." In addition to free, this word also gave us our word friend. Anderson quotes etymologist Douglas Harper:

The primary sense seems to have been "beloved, friend"; which in some languages (notably Germanic and Celtic) developed a sense of "free," perhaps from the terms "beloved" or "friend" being applied to the free members of one's clan (as opposed to slaves). (P. 18)

This double-meaning of beloved and free made friend the perfect word for the early translators of the English bible when they got to John 15, where Jesus says:

Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you. Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye should go and bring forth fruit, and [that] your fruit should remain: that whatsoever ye shall ask of the Father in my name, he may give it you. These things I command you, that ye love one another.

This was a favorite verse of a bunch of spiritual trouble-makers in England in mid-1600s, who liked it so much they started calling one another Friends. They were a new brother- and sister-hood of beloveds, newly freed of the tyrants of their age by their personal experience of Christ as friend, spreading the good news that we were all free and all commanded to love one another.

My F/friend Raye Hodgson is taking a train from Connecticut to South Jersey next week for a visit, and locals and would-be visitors are invited to my house for some worship! Raye's involved with Ohio Conservative and New England Friends and seems to be doing a cool sustainable agriculture project these days (which I didn't know except for Google!)

It's next Thursday, the 19th at 7:30pm in Hammonton. If you want to join but don't have my address just send me an email and I'll provide details. There's also a Facebook event listing for this. If enough people are interested we can have more occasional Conservative/Convergent/Emergent Quakerly worship in this part of South Jersey! If you can't make it but are intrigued by the idea, let me know and I'll keep you in the loop.

UPDATE: The worship went well, about half a dozen people showed up. If you want to be alerted to any follow-up worship opportunities in the Hammonton area send me an email and I'll add you to my list.

Friends never set out to start to their own religion; what became seen as the more "peculiar" Quaker practices were simply their interpretation of the proper mode of christian living. At some point some of these practices became forms, things done because that's what Quakers are supposed to do. The emptiness of this rationale led some of those in later generations to abandon them altogether. Neither path is very satisfactory. Those of us inspired by the Quaker tradition and have to sift through the half-remembered ancient forms to understand their rationale and continued relevancy.

When reading through Thomas Clarkson's account of Friends circa 1800, I was struck by the differing lengths of explanation needed for two customs. read earlier installments of my series you'll know that Thomas Clarkson was a British Anglican who  spent a lot of time with Friends around the turn of the 19th Century and published an invaluable multi-volumn apology in 1806. "A Portraiture of Quakerism" explains contemporary Friends practices and defends them as legitimate ways to lead a "christian" life.

The two practices that struck me were 1: the Quaker custom of using "thee" in speech and, 2: of using numbers for the names of days of the week and months of the year. Clarkson makes a good defense of the reasons behind the practices:

Many of the expressions, then in use, appeared to him to contain gross flattery, others to be idolatrous, others to be false representatives of the ideas they were intended to convey... Now he considered that christianity required truth, and he believed therefore that he and his followers, who prefessed to be christians in word and deed, and to follow the christian pattern in all things, as far as it could be found, were called upon to depart from all the censurable modes of seech, as much as they were from any of the customs of the world, which christianity had deemed objetionable. (p. 275-6, my edition, p. 199 in this edition in Google Books).

Clarkson takes the next four pages to explain some grammatical history. In Fox's time, "thee" was still at the tail end of being replaced by the grammatically-incorrect "you" for the second person singular, a cultural change that was a "trickle down" of the courtier's desire to flatter so-called superiors in church and state. To a band of religious reformers largely drawn from rural North England, the reappropriation of "thee" was a bold cultural statement. It spoke to both a grammatical integrity and a desire to flatten social classes in a radically idealistic religious society.

Following the history lesson, Clarkson turns to names of the days of the week and months of the years. Most are pagan names. Good christians seeking to honor the one true God and deny any false gods shouldn't spend their days invoking the Norse gods Tyr and Woden or the Roman gods Janus, Mars. Replacing them by Third Day, Fourth Day, First Month and Third Month strips them of their roots in non-christian cultures.

As Clarkson well knew, the question 150 years later (and now 350 years later) is whether these old peculiar customs carry any weight beyond a kind of 17th Century Quaker nostalgia. As he writes:

There is great absurdity, it is said, in supposing, that persons pay any respect to heathen idols, who retain the use of the ancient names of the divisions of time. How many thousands are there, who know nothing of their origin? The common people of the country know none of the reasons.

When I look at old customs I ask two questions:

1. The Elevator rule: could I explain to my peculiarity to a non-Quaker "average Joe" in under two minutes?
2. The Christian rule: could I make the argument that this practice is not just a Quaker oddity but something that every faithful and earnest Christian should consider adopting?

In these cases, thee fails and numbered days passes.

Let me explain: I can't really explain why I would use thee without going into a explanation of pre-17th Century grammar, talking about different forms of second person singular in the history of the English language and the retention of the second person singular in most romance languages. By the time I'd be done I'd come off as an over-educated bore.

In contrast I can say "Wednesday is named after the Norse god Woden, Thursday after Thor, January after the Roman Janus, etc., and as a one-God Christian I don't want to spend my days invoking their names constantly." A one-sentence explanation works even in modern America. I'll still be seen as an odd duck (nothing wrong with that) but at least people will leave the conversation knowing there's someone who thinks we really should be serious about only worshipping one God: mission accomplished, really.

I know faithful Friends who do use thee. I'm glad they do and don't want to double-guess their leadings. But for me the test of keeping it real (which I think is a ancient Quaker principle) means holding onto oddities that still point to their origins.

Visting 1806's "A portraiture of Quakerism: Taken from a view of the education and discipline, social manners, civil and political economy, religious principles and character, of the Society of Friends"

Thomas Clarkson wasn't a Friend. He didn't write for a Quaker audience. He had no direct experience of (and little apparent interest in) any period that we've retroactively claimed as a "golden age of Quakerism." Yet all this is why he's so interesting.

The basic facts of his life are summed up in his Wikipedia entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Clarkson), which begins: "Thomas Clarkson (28 March 1760 – 26 September 1846), abolitionist, was born at Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, England, and became a leading campaigner against the slave trade in the British Empire." The only other necessary piece of information to our story is that he was a Anglican.

British Friends at the end of of the Eighteenth Century were still somewhat aloof, mysterious and considered odd by their fellow countrymen and women. Clarkson admits that one reason for his writing "A Portraiture of Quakerism" was the entertainment value it would provide his fellow Anglicans. Friends were starting to work with non-Quakers like Clarkson on issues of conscience and while this ecumenical activism was his entre--"I came to a knowledge of their living manners, which no other person, who was not a Quaker, could have easily obtained" (Vol 1, p. i)-- it was also a symptom of a great sea change about to hit Friends. The Nineteenth Century ushered in a new type of Quaker, or more precisely whole new types of Quakers. By the time Clarkson died American Friends were going through their second round of schism and Joseph John Gurney was arguably the best-known Quaker across two continents: Oxford educated, at ease in genteel English society, active in cross-denominational work, and fluent and well studied in Biblical studies. Clarkson wrote about a Society of Friends that was disappearing even as the ink was drying at the printers.

Most of the old accounts of Friends we still read were written by Friends themselves. I like old Quaker journals as much as the next geek, but it's always useful to get an outsider's perspective (here's a more modern-day example). Also: I don't think Clarkson was really just writing an account simply for entertainment's sake. I think he saw in Friends a model of christian behavior that he thought his fellow Anglicans would be well advised to study.

His account is refreshingly free of what we might call Quaker baggage. He doesn't use Fox or Barclay quotes as a bludgeon against disagreement and he doesn't drone on about history and personalities and schisms. Reading between the lines I think he recognizes the growing rifts among Friends but glosses over them (fair enough: these are not his battles). Refreshingly, he doesn't hold up Quaker language as some sort of quaint and untranslatable tongue, and when he describes our processes he often uses very surprising words that point to some fundamental differences between Quaker practice then and now that are obscured by common words.

Thomas Clarkson is interested in what it's like to be a good christian. In the book it's typeset with lowercase "c" and while I don't have any reason to think it's intentional, I find that typesetting illuminating nonetheless. This meaning of "christian" is not about subscribing to particular creeds and is not the same concept as uppercase-C "Christian." My Lutheran grandmother actually used to use the lowercase-c meaning when she described some behavior as "not the christian way to act." She used it to describe an ethical and moral standard. Friends share that understanding when we talk about Gospel Order: that there is a right way to live and act that we will find if we follow the Spirit's lead. It may be a little quaint to use christian to describe this kind of generic goodness but I think it shifts some of the debates going on right now to think of it this way for awhile.

Clarkson's "Portraiture" looks at peculiar Quaker practices and reverse-engineers them to show how they help Quaker stay in that christian zone. His book is most often referenced today because of its descriptions of Quaker plain dress but he's less interested in the style than he is with the practice's effect on the society of Friends. He gets positively sociological at times. And because he's speaking about a denomination that's 150 years old, he was able to describe how the testimonies had shifted over time to address changing worldly conditions.

And that's the key. So many of us are trying to understand what it would be like to be "authentically" Quaker in a world that's very different from the one the first band of Friends knew. In the comment to the last post, Alice M talked about recovered the Quaker charism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charism). I didn't join Friends because of theology or history. I was a young peace activist who knew in my heart that there was something more motivating me than just the typical pacifist anti-war rhetoric. In Friends I saw a deeper understanding and a way of connecting that with a nascent spiritual awakening.

What does it mean to live a christian life (again, lowercase) in the 21st Century? What does it mean to live the Quaker charism in the modern world? How do we relate to other religious traditions both without and now within our religious society and what's might our role be in the Emergent Church movement? I think Clarkson gives clues. And that's what this series will talk about.

Technorati Tags: quaker, quakerism, thomas clarkson, anglican, abolition, anti-slavery, joseph john gurney, christian, gospel order, practice, denomination, testimonies, catholic, emergent chruch, charism

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