With the abdication of Japan’s emperor comes renewed attention on his first post-war teacher: American Friend Elizabeth Gray Vining:
An American teacher taught the young prince he would never be a god. But he just might help heal his country.
Warning: this is a blog post about blogging.
It’s always fascinating to watch the ebb and flow of my blogging. Quakerranter, my “main” blog has been remarkably quiet. I’m still up to my eyeballs with blogging in general: posting things to QuakerQuaker, giving helpful comments and tips, helping others set up blogs as part of my consulting business. My Tumblr blog and Facebook and Twitter feeds all continue to be relatively active. But most of these is me giving voice to others. For two decades now, I’ve zigzagged between writer and publisher; lately I’ve been focused on the latter.
When I started blogging about Quaker issues seven years ago, I was a low-level clerical employee at an Quaker organization. It was clear I was going nowhere career-wise, which gave me a certain freedom. More importantly, blogs were a nearly invisible medium, read by a self-selected group that also wanted to talk openly and honestly about issues. I started writing about issues in among liberal Friends and about missed outreach opportunities. A lot of what I said was spot on and in hindsight, the archives give me plenty of “told you so” credibility. But where’s the joy in being right about what hasn’t worked?
Things have changed over the years. One is that I’ve resigned myself to those missed opportunities. Lots of Quaker money and humanly activity is going into projects that don’t have God as a center. No amount of ranting is going to dissuade good people from putting their faith into one more staff reorganization, mission rewrite or clever program.It’s a distraction to spend much time worrying about them.
But the biggest change is that my heart is squarely with God. I’m most interested in sharing Jesus’s good news. I’m not a cheerleader for any particular human institution, no matter how noble its intentions. When I talk about the good news, it’s in the context of 350 years of Friends’ understanding of it. But I’m well aware that there’s lots of people in our meetinghouses that don’t understand it this way anymore. And also aware that the seeker wanting to pursue the Quaker way might find it more closely modeled in alternative Christian communities. There are people all over listening for God and I see many attempts at reinventing Quakerism happening among non-Friends.
I know this observation excites some people to indignation, but so be it: I’m trusting God on this one. I’m not sure why He’sgiven us a world why the communities we bring together to worship Him keep getting distracted, but that’s what we’ve got (and it’s what we’ve had for a long time). Every person of faith of every generation has to remember, re-experience and revive the message. That happens in church buildings, on street corners, in living rooms, lunch lines and nowadays on blogs and internet forums.We can’t get too hung up on all the ways the message is getting blocked. And we can’t get hung up by insisting on only one channel of sharing that message. We must share the good news and trust that God will show us how to manifest this in our world: his kingdom come and will be done on earth.
But what would this look like?
When I first started blogging there weren’t a lot of Quaker blogs and I spent a lot more time reading other religious blogs. This was back before the emergent church movement became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Zondervan and wasn’t dominated by hype artists (sorry, a lot of big names set off my slime-o-meter these days). There are still great bloggers out there talking about faith and readers wanting to engage in this discussion. I’ve been intrigued by the historical example of Thomas Clarkson, the Anglican who wrote about Friends from a non-Quaker perspective using non-Quaker language. And sometimes I geek out and explain some Quaker point on a Quaker blog and get thanked by the author, who often is an experienced Friend who had never been presented with a classic Quaker explanation on the point in question. My tracking log shows seekers continue to be fascinated and drawn to us for our traditional testimonies, especially plainness.
I’ve put together topic lists and plans before but it’s a bit of work, maybe too much to put on top of what I do with QuakerQuaker (plus work, plus family). There’s also questions about where to blog and whether to simplify my blogging life a bit by combining some of my blogs but that’s more logistics rather than vision.
Interesting stuff I’m reading that’s making me think about this:
Sad news coming over the internet: after 100 days of captivity, Christian Peacemaker Tom Fox was found dead yesterday in Iraq, the status of his three companions unknown.
The Christian Peacemaker Teams issued an elegant and heartfelt statement beginning “In grief we tremble before God who wraps us with compassion.” Fox knew the risk he was taking going to Iraq unarmed. But he also knew that this witness would mean more to the Iraqi people than a hundred tanks. He knew the war we Friends wage is the Lamb’s War, a war won not through strength but through meekness, our only weapon our humilty before God and our love of neighbor. My prayers are with his family and friends, may Christ’s comfort continue to hold them through these aching times.
More history and resources on my “Christian Peacemaker Team Watch”:http://www.quakerquaker.org/christian_peacemaker_teams/
Here’s an email from Danny, a new friend who I met at last week’s FGC-sponsored “Youth Ministries Consultation.” I liked his observations and asked if I could share this on the blog. I’m glad he said yes, since it’s a good perspective on where one convinced 19 year old Friend is at.
Update: “Here’s Danny’s new blog, Riding the Whale”:http://Quakernow.blogspot.com/
Went to the opening of “Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s”:http://www.pym.org annual sessions yesterday. It’s hard to get too excited about it. It was the same people talking about the same issues. I really like and respect so many in the yearly meeting, but try as I might, I can never imagine this group on _fire._ What would it mean for us to scrap our plans and agendas to follow His?
Yet another group of Friends (doesn’t matter which, it could be any) is planning a program on “community.” They quote a snippet of a 1653 epistle on George Fox – you know the one about “Mind that which is eternal…” Fine enough, but there’s so much more to the epistle that we would fear to quote, like:
We are redeemed by the only redeemer Christ Jesus, not with corruptible things, neither is our redemption of man, nor by man, nor according to the will of man, but contrary to man’s will. And so, our unity and fellowship with vain man are lost, and all his evil ways are now turned into enmity; and all his profession is now found to be deceit, and in all his fairest pretences lodgeth cruelty; and the bottom and ground of all his knowledge of God and Christ is found sandy, and cannot endure the tempest.
Interesting ideas, but not ones most liberal Friends would like to tackle. It’s a shame. I wish we would more more actively engage with our tradition and not just selectively edit out a few words which makes Fox sound like a seventeen century Thich Nhat Hanh. I think we can simultaneously wrestle with and challenge our tradition without having to either capitulate to it or abandon it.
After writing the above, I went for a neighborhood walk with baby asleep in the backpack. And I realized I hadn’t explained why it matters to engage. I didn’t quote the sentences about human willfullness to show that I’m more seventeenth century than thee, or to prove I can use the “C” word.
No, I quote it because it’s a rockin’ quote. George Fox is mapping out for us twenty-first century Friends just how we might get out of the predicament of superficial “community” we’ve gotten ourselves into. Everyone from Walmart to Walgreen’s, from Hillary Clinton to Oprah, is trying to sell us on some dream of community complete with a price tag from corporate America. Buy our products, our political party, our lifestyle and we’ll give you the narcotic of consumer targeting. Wear the right right sneaker or drive the right car and you’re part of the in-crowd.
But these communities built on the sand just dissolve in the tide and leave us more stranded than when we started.
We poor humans are looking for ways to transcend the crappiness of our war- and consumer-obsessed world. Quakerism has something to say about that (more than ways to recycle plastic or stage a protest faux-blockade). We’re tossing out the future when we throw away the past, just to live in our TVs. George’s epistle mentions this too:
Let not hard words trouble you, nor fair speeches win you; but dwell in the power of truth, in the mighty God, and have salt in yourselves to savour all words, and to stand against all the wiles of the devil, in the mighty power of God.
(Quotes from Epistle 24, reprinted here.)
One of the pieces I helped put online in my role of FGC webmaster is FGC Religious Education: Lessons for the 21st Century, by Beckey Phipps. It’s definitely worth a read. It’s comprised of interviews of three Friends:
Ernie Buscemi: “It is the most amazing thing, all the kids that I know that have gone into [Quaker] leadership programs – they’ve disappeared. I see the same thing [happening] as a woman and person of color, we are doing something wrong.”
Marty Grundy: “Our branch [of Friends] has discarded the tools by which earlier Friends’ practices were formed. We’ve lost our understanding of what it is that we are about.”
Arthur Larrabee: “We need to tap into God’s energy and God’s joy. Early Friends had that energy, they had a vision, they had the connection with the inward Christ, a source of infinite energy power and joy.”
While I wish this could be extended a bit (e.g., why not ask the ‘kids’ themselves where they’ve gone), at least these are the right questions.
A review of Michael Sheeran’s Beyond Majority Rule. Twenty years later, do Friends need to experience the gathered condition?
Beyond Majority Rule has one of the more unique stories in Quaker writings. Michael Sheeran is a Jesuit priest who went to seminary in the years right after the Second Vatican Council. Forged by great changes taking place in the church, he took seriously the Council’s mandate for Roman Catholics to get “in touch with their roots.” He became interested in a long-forgotten process of “Communal Discernment” used by the Jesuit order in when it was founded in the mid-sixteenth century. His search led him to study groups outside Catholicism that had similar decision-making structures. The Religious Society of Friends should consider itself lucky that he found us. His book often explains our ways better than anything we’ve written.
Sheeran’s advantage comes from being an outsider firmly rooted in his own faith. He’s not afraid to share observations and to make comparisons. He started his research with a rather formal study of Friends, conducing many interviews and attending about ten monthly meetings in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. There are sections of the book that are dry expositions of Quaker process, sprinkled by interviews. There are times where Sheeran starts saying something really insightful about early or contemporary Friends, but then backs off to repeat some outdated Quaker cliche (he relies a bit too heavily on the group of mid-century Haverford-based academics whose histories often projected their own theology of modern liberal mysticism onto the early Friends). These sections aren’t always very enlightening – too many Philadelphia Friends are unconscious of their cherished myths and their inbedded inconsistencies. On page 85, he expresses the conundrum quite eloquently:
If the researcher was to succumb to the all too typical canons of social science, he would probably scratch his head a few times atjust this point, note that the ambiguity of Quaker expression makes accurate statistical evaluation of Quaker believes almost impossible without investment of untold time and effort, and move on to analysis of some less interesting but more manageable object of study.
Fortunately for us, Sheeran does not succumb. The book shines when Sheeran steps away from the academic role and offers us his subjective observations.
There are six pages in Beyond Majority Rule that comprise its main contribution to Quakerism. Almost every time I’ve heard someone refer to this book in conversation, it’s been to share the observations of these six pages. Over the years I’ve often casually browsed through the book and it’s these six pages that I’ve always stopped to read. The passage is called “Conflicting Myths and Fundamental Cleavages” and it begins on page 84. Sheeran begins by relating the obvious observation:
When Friends reflect upon their beliefs, they often focus upon the obvious conflict between Christocentric and universalist approaches. People who feel strongly drawn to either camp often see the other position as a threat to Quakerism itself.
As a Gen-X’er I’ve often been bored by this debate. It often breaks down into empty language and the desire to feel self-righteous about one’s beliefs. It’s the MacGuffin of contemporary liberal Quakerism. (A MacGuffin is a film plot device that drives the action but is in itself never explained and doesn’t really matter: if the spies have to get the secret plans across the border by midnight, those plans are the MacGuffin and the chase the real action.) Today’s debates about Christocentrism versus Universalism ignore the real issues of faithlessness we need to address.
Sheeran sees the real cleavage between Friends as those who haveexperienced the divine and those who haven’t. I’d extend the former just a bit to include those who have faith that the experience of the divine is possible. When we sit in worship do we really believe that we might be visited by Christ (however named, however defined)? When we center ourselves for Meeting for Business do we expect to be guided by the Great Teacher?
Sheeran found that a number of Friends didn’t believe in a divine visitation:
Further questions sometimes led to the paradoxical discovery that, for some of these Friends, the experience of being gathered even in meeting for worship was more of a formal rather than an experiential reality. For some, the fact that the group had sat quiety for twenty-five minutes was itself identified as being gathered.
There are many clerks that call for a “moment of silence” to begin and end business – five minutes of formal silence to prove that we’re Quakers and maybe to gather our arguments together. Meetings for business are conducted by smart people with smart ideas and efficiency is prized. Sitting in worship is seen a meditative oasis if not a complete waste of time. For these Friends, Quakerism is a society of strong leadership combined with intellectual vigor. Good decisions are made using good process. If some Friends choose to describe their own guidance as coming from “God,” that their individual choice but it is certainly not an imperative for all.
Maybe it’s Sheeran’s Catholicism that makes him aware of these issues. Both Catholics and Friends traditionally believe in the real presence of Christ during worship. When a Friend stands to speak in meeting, they do so out of obedience, to be a messenger and servant of the Holy Spirit. That Friends might speak ‘beyond their Guide’ does not betray the fact that it’s God’s message we are trying to relay. Our understanding of Christ’s presence is really quite radical: “Jesus has come to teach the people himself,” as Fox put it, it’s the idea that God will speak to us as He did to the Apostles and as He did to the ancient prophets of Israel. The history of God being actively involved with His people continues.
Why does this matter? Because as a religious body it is simply our duty to follow God and because newcomers can tell when we’re faking it. I’ve known self-described atheists who get it and who I consider brothers and sisters in faith and I’ve known people who can quote the bible inside and out yet know nothing about love (haven’t we all known some of these, even in Quakerism?). How do we get past the MacGuffin debates of previous generations to distill the core of the Quaker message?
Not all Friends will agree with Sheeran’s point of cleavage. None other than the acclaimed Haverfordian Douglas V Steere wrote the introduction to Beyond Majority Rule and he used it to dismiss the core six pages as “modest but not especially convincing” (page x). The unstated condition behind the great Quaker reunifications of the mid-twentieth century was a taboo against talking about what we believe as a people. Quakerism became an individual mysticism coupled with a world-focused social activism – to talk about the area in between was to threaten the new unity.
Times have changed and generations have shifted. It is this very in-between-ness that first attracted me to Friends. As a nascent peace activist, I met Friends whose deep faith allowed them to keep going past the despair of the world. I didn’t come to Friends to learn how to pray or how to be a lefty activist (most Quaker activists now are too self-absorbed to be really effective). What I want to know is how Friends relate to one another and to God in order to transcend themselves. How do we work together to discern our divine leadings? How do we come together to be a faithful people of the Spirit?
I find I’m not alone in my interest in Sheeran’s six pages. The fifty-somethings I know in leadership positions in Quakerism also seem more tender to Sheeran’s observations than Douglas Steere was. Twenty-five years after submitting his dissertation, Friends are perhaps ready to be convinced by our Friend, Michael J. Sheeran.
Postscript: Michael J Sheeran continues to be an interesting and active figure. He continues to write about governance issues in the Catholic Church and serves as president of Regis University in Denver.
