identity Posts

That man with the funny name is going to be President. And all I can think about is the pride I feel that we've finally made it to the White House. We? Well yes, I am about as white as they come. Put me on the beach for ten minutes and I'm burnt through. Blue eyes and blond hair, my boys would have no sign-up problems for the Aryan youth league. But that skin color masks a complicated family history and abstracted ethnicity. My father, like Barack's, had multiple families and my mother, like Barack's, had children with different fathers. I have paternal half-siblings I've never met and a maternal half-sibling who I've always simply called my brother. No one in my family shares my Irish last name, which is fine by me because my only real Irish heritage is the name of my father's father's father. My accent, my tastes and my cultural references are all pretty much generic American.

A few generations ago everyone in my family had clear ethnic identities. They lived in enclaves of people like them, went to churches full of people like them and worked the jobs their people worked. I never had any of that. In school I was always vaguely jealous of the kids who had strong roots and relationships that were familial. But I was always an outsider to those networks, always sitting at the lunch tables of other outsiders. As I grew older I became more adept at finding outsider communities and my identity remains largely self-chosen and self-created.

This is kind of complicated identity is increasingly common not only in the United States, but throughout the world. And even the complexities of the complicated swirl about when you think of the ever-increasing gender identities and the minority of families now made up of a mom, dad and 2.5 kids.

This election is a victory for merit over family. George W Bush was a lousy student who never would have even been accepted to Yale if his father and grandfather hadn't been prominent U.S. Senators. The Navy would never have given mediocre student John McCain a fighter jet if his father and grandfather hadn't been admirals (and they would have taken the keys away after he crashed one after another after another before that final crash over North Vietnam). Al Gore? Son and grandson of U.S. Senators. John Kerry? Not quite so golden, with a secret paternal Jewish ancestry so hushed up that even Kerry didn't know about it, but his mother was from the Forbes family and a rich aunt paid his way through school.

Bill Clinton is the only recent presidential politician I can think of with a truly complicated family life and like Barack and Michelle Obama he owes his education to scholarships received as the reward of hard work and merit. A revolution took place a generation ago when universities started opening up and accepting students based on grades and that revolution has swept into the White House, first with Bill Clinton and now even more dramatically with Barack Obama.

And me? Well, to be perfectly honest I'm still a bit jealous of those who belong somewhere. I remain vaguely embarrassed by my last name. I can be defensive that I didn't inherit my religious identity. I still have a deer-in-the-headlights moment of anxiety when someone casually inquires about my ancestry and I live in a town where you're a transient if you don't go back three generations. If you want to ask me about my family life, you'd better be ready to invest a couple of hours studying flow-charts. But come January I'll be able to look at the President of the United States and see someone who looks like me. And increasingly like us.

This week I received an email from a young seeker in the Philadelphia area who found my 2005 article "Witness of Our Lost Twenty-Somethings" published in FGConnections. She's a former youth ministries leader from a Pentecostal tradition, strongly attracted to Friends beliefs but not quite fitting in with the local meetings she's been trying. Somewhere she found my article and asks if I have any insights.

The 2005 article was largely pessimistic, focused on the "committed, interesting and bold twenty-something Friends I knew ten years ago" who had left Friends and blaming "an institutional Quakerism that neglected them and its own future" but my hope paragraph was optimistic:

There is hope... A great people might possibly be gathered from the emergent church movement and the internet is full of amazing conversations from new Friends and seekers. There are pockets in our branch of Quakerism where older Friends have continued to mentor and encourage meaningful and integrated youth leadership, and some of my peers have hung on with me. Most hopefully, there's a whole new generation of twenty- something Friends on the scene with strong gifts that could be nurtured and harnessed.

Hard to imagine that only three years ago I was an isolated FGC staffer left to pursue outreach and youth ministry work on my own time by an institution indifferent to either pursuit. Both functions have become major staff programs, but I'm no longer involved, which is probably just as well, as neither program has decided to focus on the kind of work I had hoped it might. The more things change the more they stay the same, right? The most interesting work is still largely invisible.

Some of this work has been taken up by the new bloggers and by some sort of alt-network that seems to be congealing around all the blogs, Twitter networks, Facebook friendships, intervisitations and IM chats. Many of us associated with QuakerQuaker.org have some sort of regular correspondence or participation with the Emerging Church movement, we regularly highlight "amazing conversations" from new Friends and seekers and there's a lot of inter-generational work going on. We've got a name for it in Convergent Friends, which reflects in part that "we" aren't just the liberal Friends I imagined in 2005, but a wide swath of Friends from all the Quaker flavors.

But we end up with a problem that's become the central one for me and a lot of others: what can we tell a new seeker who should be able to find a home in real-world Friends but doesn't fit? I could point this week's correspondent to meetings and churches hundreds of miles from her house, or encourage her to start a blog, or compile a list of workshops or gatherings she might attend. But none of these are really satisfactory answers.   

Elsewhere:

Gathering in Light Wess sent an email around last night about a book review done by his PhD advisor Ryan Bolger that talks about tribe-style leadership and a new kind of church identity that uses the instant communication tools of the internet to forge a community that's not necessarily limited to locality. Bolger's and his research partner report that they see "emerging initiatives within traditional churches as the next horizon for the spread of emerging church practices in the United States." More links from Wess' article on emerging churches and denominations.

• Former Friend talks of Pagans, Quakers and a self-centered Christian identity
  While Quakerism is (still) Christian, it often comes over as a separate religion, a law unto itself in a sense. They talk primarily about the Quaker heritage, while the Christian character is not adequately covered.
  (tags: quaker quaker.liberal quaker.influences)
• One reader of CT article things Paganism is official Qr outreach effort
  The Quakers are finding a new strategy for church growth: Merge with paganism! From “Pagans find a sometimes uneasy home among Quakers”, referring to “a small but growing movement of Quakers who also identify as pagan.
  (tags: quaker quaker.outreach quaker.in)
• Mega Catholic church opens in Round Rock Texas
  (tags: catholic galante)
• Breakaway liberal Catholics claims closed churches=lost adherents
  FutureChurch, no study cited.
  (tags: catholic)

For any bleeding edge Web 2.0 Quakers out there, there's now a QuakerQuaker FriendFeed account to go along with its Twitter account. Both accounts simply spit out the QuakerQuaker RSS feed but there might be some practical uses. I actually follow QQ primary by Twitter these days and those who don't mind annoying IM pop-ups could get instant alerts.

Web 2.0 everywhere man Robert Scoble recently posted that many of his conversations and comments have moved away from his blog and over to FriendFeed. I don't see that occurring anytime soon with QQ but I'll set the accounts up and see what happens. I've hooked my own Twitter and FriendFeed accounts up with QuakerQuaker, so that's one way I'm cross-linking with this possible overlay of QQ.

For what it's worth I've always assumed that QQ is relatively temporary, an initial meeting ground for a network of online Friends that will continue to expand into different forms. I'm hoping we can pick the best media to use and not just jump on the latest trends. As far as the Religious Society of Friends is concerned, I'd say the two most important tests of a new media is it's ability to outreach to new people and its utility in helping to construct a shared vision of spiritual renewal.

On these test, Facebook has been a complete failure. So many promising bloggers have disappeared and seem to spend their online time swapping suggestive messages on Facebook (find a hotel room folks) or share animated gifs with 257 of their closed "friends." Quaker Friends tend to be a clannish bunch and Facebook has really fed into that (unfortunate) part of our persona. Blogging seemed to be resuscitating the idea of the "Public Friend," someone who was willing to share their Quaker identity with the general public. That's still happening but it seems to have slowed down quite a bit. I'm not ready to close my own Facebook account but I would like to see Friends really think about which social media we spend our time on. Friends have always been adapting--railroads, newspapers, frequently flier miles have all affected how we communicate with each other and the outside world. Computer networking is just the latest wrinkle.

As a personal aside, the worst thing to happen to my Quaker blogging has been the lack of a commute (except for a short hop to do some Haddonfield web design a few times a week). I'm no longer stranded on a train for hours a week with nothing to do but read the journal of Samuel Bownas or throw open my laptop to write about the latest idea that flits through my head. Ah the travails of telecommuting!

Over on Friends Journal site, some recent stats on Friends mostly in the US and Canada. Written by Margaret Fraser, the head of FWCC, a group that tries to unite the different bodies of Friends, it's a bit of cold water for most of us. Official numbers are down in most places despite whatever official optimism might exist. Favorite line: "Perhaps those who leave are noticed less." I'm sure P.R. hacks in various Quaker organizations are burning the midnight oil writing response letters to the editor spinning the numbers to say things are looking up.

She points to a sad decline both in yearly meetings affiliated with Friends United Meeting and in those affiliated with Friends General Conference. A curiosity is that this decline is not seen in three of the four yearly meetings that are dual affiliated. These blended yearly meetings are going through various degrees of identity crisis and hand-wringing over their status and yet their own membership numbers are strong. Could it be that serious theological wrestling and complicated spiritual identities create healthier religious bodies than monocultural groupings?

The big news is in the south: "Hispanic Friends Churches" in Mexico and Central America are booming, with spillover in el Norte as workers move north to get jobs. There's surprisingly little interaction between these newly-arrived Spanish-speaking Friends and the the old Main Line Quaker establishment (maybe not surprising really, but still sad). I'll leave you with a challenge Margaret gives readers:

One question that often puzzles me is why so many Hispanic Friends congregations are meeting in churches belonging to other denominations. I would love to see established Friends meetings with their own property sharing space with Hispanic Friends. It would be an opportunity to share growth and challenges together.

• Press story on how Quaker Mtg discovered & bought munitions detectors
  Today, three detectors - two bought by the Quakers for about $1,500 and a third donated as part of a deal with the manufacturer - are being used under U.N. auspices in Tajikistan. And Lenik, his fellow Quakers, and others are raising money to buy more.
  (tags: quaker quaker.witness)
• Robin M on Sojourners call to conversion
  If George Fox had lived in 1981, he might have written a sentence like that. I think this is where the RsoF at its best is headed again. We may or may not name the force ... “Christ.” We are nonetheless hearing the call to conversion.
  (tags: quaker quaker.vision quaker.convergent)
• Qr Street Jez looking at why we do outreach
  We are trying to help people know who and what we are, what we believe and where they might or might not fit in. In another sense, we have a sense that there are some answers here among our Quaker faith and it is important to share it.
  (tags: quaker quaker.outreach)
• New blog: Quaker Queeries, for dialog around sexual orientation issues
  Holding the tension that surrounds faith, religion, sexual orientation and sexual identity In The Light
  (tags: quaker quaker.blogs)
• Qr Funnel Tania on hidden sexual identities and integrity
  Because I am married to a man, the assumption is that I'm straight. This leads me to the awkward question: Am I violating our Testimony of Integrity by allowing people to believe something about me that isn't true?
  (tags: comment)
• Wanderer Gavin on Quaker dating
  I’ve been thinking, for a couple of years now, about a Young Adult Friends (YAF) workshop on Quaker romance. I was hoping this blog post might try to address some of the questions that come up for me about what it means to date as a Friend.
  (tags: quaker quaker.youth comment)
• Sheffield Craig on prophetic leadings and questionnaire Quakerism
  My understanding of discernment is that it is a process of seeking the will of God in a particular situation. Can this be done with a questionnaire?
  (tags: quaker quaker.clearness quaker.liberal comment)
• Brent Bill's leaked list of undesirable Pastoral Candidates
  Jesus: Has had popular times, but once his church grew to 5000 he managed to offend them all, and then this church dwindled down to twelve people. Seldom stays in one place very long. And, of course, he's single -- at his age, you have to wonder why.
  (tags: quaker.humor)
• QuakerRanter is NJ.com's Blog of the Day
  Martin Kelley is a Quaker who blogs about . . . being a Quaker. The South Jersey resident blogs at Quaker Ranter, his site on life in the religious movement that dates back to 17th century England.
  (tags: martin_kelley.feedback)

• Will T reports on last month's Friends United Meeting board meeting
  This was also the first GB meeting that I had attended where we were not looking at our identity issues and what was dividing us. ...Our differences were on plain view... but we also heard how God had worked among us this year.
  (tags: quaker quaker.fum)
• Robin M wonders how we get to her blog
  Checking out the Google links and referrals.
  (tags: comment)
• Kirk W's Quaker bookmarks on eBible
  I tagged verses that mean the most to me, relating to Quaker faith and practice, particularly in the historical context. After marking a handful that I’ve noted for myself over the years, I drew from several other sources as they’ve presented themselves...  See also: Kirk's most recent blog post about this, Friends and the eBible.
  
  (tags: quaker quaker.christianity quaker.bible)