lifestyle Posts

Robin wrote a little about the New Monastic movement in a plug for the Pendle Hill workshop I'm doing with Wess Daniels this Fall.

Here's my working theory: I think Liberal Friends have a good claim to inventing the "new monastic" movement thirty years ago in the form of Movement for a New Society, a network of peace and anti-nuclear activists based in Philadelphia that codified a kind of "secular Quaker" decision-making process and trained thousands of people from around the world in a kind of engaged drop-out lifestyle that featured low-cost communal living arrangements in poor neighborhoods with part-time jobs that gave them flexibility to work as full-time community activists. There are few activist campaigns in the 1970s and 1980s that weren't touched by the MNS style and a less-ideological, more lived-in MNS culture survives today in borderline neighborhoods in Philadelphia and other cities. The high-profile new monastics rarely seem to give any props to Quakers or MNS, but I'd be willing to bet if you sat in on any of their meetings the process would be much more inspired by MNS than Robert's Rules of Order or any fifteen century monastic rule that might be cited.

For a decade I lived in West Philly in what I called "the ruins of the Movement for a New Society." The formal structure of MNS had disbanded but many of its institutions carried on in a kind of lived-in way. I worked at the remaining publishing house, New Society Publishers, lived in a land-trusted West Philly coop house, and was fed from the old neighborhood food coop and occasionally dropped in or helped out with Training for Change, a revived training center started by MNS-co-founder (and Central Philadelphia Meeting-member) George Lakey It was a tight neighborhood, with strong cross-connections, and it was able to absorb related movements with different styles (e.g., a strong anarchist scene that grew in the late 1980s). I don't think it's coincidence that some of the Philly emergent church projects started in West Philly and is strong in the neighborhoods that have become the new ersatz West Philly as the actual neighborhood has gentrified.

So some questions I'll be wrestling with over the next six months and will bring to Pendle Hill:

• Why haven't more of us in the Religious Society of Friends adopted this engaged lifestyle?
• Why haven't we been good at articulating it all this time?
• Why did the formal structure of the Quaker-ish "new monasticism" not survive the 1980s?
• Why don't we have any younger leaders of the Quaker monasticism? Why do we need others to remind us of our own recent tradition?
• In what ways are some Friends (and some fellow travelers) still living out the "Old New Monastic" experience, just without the hype and without the buzz?

It's entirely possible that the "new monasticism" isn't sustainable. At the very least Friends' experiences with it should be studied to see what happened. Is West Philly what the new monasticism looks like thirty years later? The biggest differences between now and the heyday of the Movement for a New Society is 1) the Internet's ability to organize and stay in touch in completely different ways; and 2) the power of the major Evangelical publishing houses that are hyping the new kids.

I'll be looking at myself as well. After ten years, I felt I needed a change. I'm now in the "real world"--semi suburban freestanding house, nuclear family. The old new West Philly monasticism, like the "new monasticism" seems optimized for hip twenty-something suburban kids who romanticized the gritty city. People of other demographics often fit in, but still it was never very scalable and for many not very sustainable. How do we bring these concerns out to a world where there are suburbs, families, etc?

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Trying to catch up on the reading on the One Year Bible plan: I'm two days behind. That's a point where it's easy enough to catch up but another day or so becomes hard to catch up. The whole point of this for me is not to read the Bible in bursts or even to get through the whole thing in a year, but to develop the lifestyle habit of daily scripture reading.

I'm in Exodus 30 now and the Lord is giving Moses a list of very specific laws. In 30:17, he specifies how Aaron and the priestly caste must wash their feet everytime they come into the Tabernacle and gives the what else: "or they will die!" Then God makes the law firm: "This is a permanent law for Aaron and his descendants, to be observed from generation to generation."

I'm reading a special One Year Bible, where all of the daily readings are grouped together. There's not too much commentary and I tend to skip it but the editors did feel the need to address the laws of the Old Testament head on and asked in one sidebar "Do we need to follow these laws today?" The answer was yes and no: "The moral law is still to be followed... The ceremonial laws no longer need to be followed because of the final sacrifice for since has been made by Jesus."

God very clearly says in Exodus that the laws he's giving are permanent. I don't really read much wiggle room in there. Priests need to wash their feet... and kill a certain number of lamb every year... and splatter the sacrificial blood around the alter a certain way and... I know Jesus is the new law, etc., but still it's kind of funny how literal-interpretation Christians will shrug off a direct and permanent order from God. It seems obvious that the religious traditions in the Bible differ greatly, as do the modern lens we bring to them and the two centuries of shifting Christian practices we've brought to them.

Does anyone happen to know if there's any religious group still trying to follow the details of the Mosaic Law? I wonder close do certain Orthodox Jewish groups get?

One of the things I don't get about the press treatment of the Follieri/Galante scandal is their attitude toward actress Anne Hathaway. Until a few weeks ago she was the dapper Italian's girlfriend and they were constantly photographed together. But they broke up the week before the scandal hit the tabloids, and all we've gotten are these silly human interest stories. We hear speculation she must be heartbroken, we hear how she's moving on with her life, we even hear details about getting her dog back from her old apartment with Follieri. She's lost a lot of weight of her latest movie promo tour and mysteriously showed up at a Cape May bar singing Journey songs this weekend with a photographer conveniently in tow.

Hello? She was on the board of directors of the Follieri Group's charities. The New York penthouse they shared was paid for by conned money as were their lavish trips and high flying lifestyle. Boyfriend drama is the last thing she needs to be worried about right now. I sure hope the FBI is carefully going through her checkbook and date book right now. She both solicited and received stolen money. No wonder she's lost a lot of weight.

And what's up with her getting off the plane from London and driving a couple of hours to the southern tip of the New Jersey? The Cape May County house Follieri bought from the bishop was reportedly just sold again. Could Anne Hathaway be on the deed or authorized to sign for  Follieri? Idle speculation of course but I do wish her publicists weren't making fools of the popular press like this.

Sometimes it seems as if moderns are looking back at history through the wrong end of the telescope: everything seems soooo far away. The effect is magnified when we're talking about spirituality. The ancients come off as cartoonish figures with a complicated set of worked out philosophies and prohibitions that we have to adopt or reject wholesale. The ideal is to be a living branch on a long-rooted tree. But how do we intelligently converse with the past and negotiate changes?

Let's talk Friends and music. The cartoon Quaker in our historical imagination glares down at us with heavy disapproval when it comes to music. They're squares who just didn't get it.

Getting past the cartoons

Thomas Clarkson, our Anglican guide to Quaker thought circa 1700, brings more nuance to the scruples. "The Quakers do not deny that instrumental music is capable of exciting delight. They are not insensible either of its power or of its charms. They throw no imputation on its innocence, when viewed abstractly by itself." (p. 64)

"Abstractly by itself": when evaluating a social practice, Friends look at its effects in the real world. Does it lead to snares and tempations? Quakers are engaged in a grand experiment in "christian" living, keeping to lifestyles that give us the best chance at moral living. The warnings against certain activities are based on observation borne of experience. The Quaker guidelines are wikis, notes compiled together into a collective memory of which activities promote--and which ones threaten--the leading of a moral life.

Clarkson goes on to detail Quaker's concerns about music. They're all actually quite valid. Here's a sampling:

• People sometimes learn music just so they can show off and make others look talentless.
• Religious music can become a end to itself as people become focused on composition and playing (we've really decontextualized: much of the music played at orchestra halls is Masses; much of the music played at folk festival is church spirituals).
• Music can be a big time waster, both in its learning and its listening.
• Music can take us out into the world and lead to a self-gratification and fashion.

I won't say any of these are absolute reason to ban music, but as a list of negative temptations they still apply. The Catholic church my wife belongs to very consciously has music as a centerpiece. It's very beautiful, but I always appreciate the pastor's reminder that the music is in service to the Mass and that no one had better clap at some performance! Like with Friends, we're seeing a deliberate balancing of benefits vs temptations and a warning against the snares that the choice has left open.

Context context context

In section iv, Clarkson adds time to the equation. Remember, the Quaker movement is already 150 years old. Times have changed:

Music at [the time of early Quakers] was principally in the hands of those, who made a livelihood of the art. Those who followed it as an accomplishment, or a recreation, were few and those followed it with moderation. But since those days, its progress has been immense... Many of the middle classes, in imitation of the higher, have received it... It is learned now, not as a source of occasional recreation, but as a complicated science, where perfection is insisted upon to make it worth of pursuit. p.76.

Again we see Clarkson's Quakers making distinctions between types and motivations of musicianship. The laborer who plays a guitar after a hard day on the field is less worrisome than the obsessed adolescent who spends their teen years locked in the den practicing Stairway to Heaven. And when music is played at large festivals that lead youth "into company" and fashions, it threatens the religious society: "it has been found, that in proportion as young Quakers mix with the world, they generally imbibe its spirit, and weaken themselves as members of their own body."

Music has changed even more radically in the suceeding two centuries. Most of the music in our lives is pre-recorded; it's ubiquitious and often involuntary (you can't go shopping without it). Add in the drone of TV and many of us spend an insane amount of time in its semi-narcotic haze of isolated listenership. Then, what about DIY music and singalongs. Is there a distinction to be made between testoterone power-chord rock and twee singer-songwriter strums? Between arenas and coffeehouse shows? And move past music into the other media of our lives. What about movies, DVS, computers, glossy magazines, talk shows. Should Friends waste their time obsessing over American Idol? Well what about Prairie Home Companion?

Does a social practice lead us out into the world in a way that makes it hard for us to keep a moral center? What if we turned off the mediated consumer universe and engaged in more spiritually rewarding activities--contemplative reading, service work, visiting with others? But what if music, computers, radio, is part of the way we're engaging with the world?

How to decide?

Finally, in Clarkson's days Friends had an elaborate series of courts that would decide about social practices both in the abstract (whether they should be published as warnings) and the particular (whether a particular person had strayed too far and fallen in moral danger). Clarkson was writing for a non-Quaker audience and often translated Quakerese: "courts" was his name for monthly, quarterly and yearly meeting structures. I suspect that those sessions more closely resembled courts than they do the modern institutions that share their name. The court system led to its own abuses and started to break down shortly after Clarkson's book was published and doesn't exist anymore.

We find outselves today pretty much without any structure for sharing our experiences ("Faith and Practice" sort of does this but most copies just gather dust on shelves). Monthly meetings don't feel that oversight of their members is their responsibility; many of us have seen them look the other way even at flagrantly egregious behavior and many Friends would be outraged at the concept that their meeting might tell them what to do--I can hear the howls of protest now!

And yet, and yet: I hear many people longing for this kind of collective inquiry and instruction. A lot of the emergent church talk is about building accountable communities. So we have two broad set of questions: what sort of practices hurt and hinder our spiritual lives in these modern times; and how do we share and perhaps codify guidelines for twenty-first century righteous living?

• Hugh MacLeod's How To Be Creative manifesto
  26 hard-earned tips for being truly creative. Dont' follow crowds, don't hide behind pillars, don't take friends' advice too seriously and most importantly follow the Sex and Cash Theory. Via http://kaushik.net
  (tags: tech tech.design)
• Anna at New York YM, the fear of following God
  We sometimes forget that in its demand that we all open ourselves to God and dedicate every facet of our lives to Her grace and glory, Quakerism is the very antithesis of safe and easy.
  (tags: quaker quaker.newyork-ym)  r
  
• Ben's friend Maggie wants more traveling ministry
  Since.. the majority of Quakers in this century will be convinced Friends, I believe we are in need of a revival of traveling recorded ministers speaking out to meetings.
  (tags: quaker quaker.ministry quaker.vision)
• Robin M reads Rufus Jones' call to the youth of his generation
  Does this sound familiar to anyone? Go read it for yourself and tell me how many of these things you have said yourself. Why are we still working on these same things? Is this required every generation or so?.. What is different now?
  (tags: quaker quaker.vision)

I'm not quite sure just how to respond to the group hug Chris M has organized, the QuakerQuaker Carnival. It's mostly just nice to hear how people have come together these last few years via blogs to talk about what they believe, what they experience and what they dream about for this little religious society of ours. This isn't the first online community I've been involved with but it's by far the most lively. My in-between-careers lifestyle right now isn't the most glamorous so it's nice to read these kind words. Thanks Chris and thanks everyone!

Those Quaker Ranters readers who are coming to the FGC Gathering but haven't lost internet access yet might be interested in some of the events the Advancement & Outreach committee is sponsoring over the week. There will be a flyer in the registration packets (all these events will take place in Admin 203). For those not coming, I suspect I'll have some sort of Gathering round-up post at some point after it's all done. I'm also co-hosting a Monday night interest group with LizOpp and Robin: "On Fire! Renewing Quakerism through a Convergence of Friends." For details, see Liz's post or Robin's post.

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The FGC Advancement and Outreach committee is sponsoring afternoon events during four days of Gathering. Come share your outreach ideas, learn about FGC and support the growth of Quakerism!

All Friends Welcome, 1:30-3:00

Monday: "What Do Quakers Believe?" Come talk about the range of Quaker beliefs, from Robert Barclay to the present day, and explore what binds us together as Friends. Convened by Deborah Haines.

Wednesday: A special welcome to Friends from Pacific, North Pacific and Intermountain Yearly Meetings. Come talk about the spirit, concerns, and Quaker ways of these three independent yearly meetings.

Thursday: Visitors from Freedom Friends Church will join us to talk about the witness of this unique independent evangelical Friends Church.

Outreach Hours, 3:15-4:15

Sunday: Visibility. Interested in publicizing your meeting and getting the Quaker message out into your community? Friends are invited to come share their stories and questions and pick up a free copy of our "Inreach-Outreach Packet for Small Meetings." Jane Berger will host.

Monday: Isolated Friends & New Worship Groups. Learn about FGC's new service for Friends and seekers who live far from any meeting or worship group. Are you interested in helping to nurture new worship groups? Come find out what resources are available from the FGC Advancement Committee, and share your stories and ideas.

Wednesday: Friends interested in affiliation. FGC is an association of 14 yearly meetings and regional groups and 9 directly affiliated monthly meetings. A&O clerk Deborah Haines will talk about the work of FGC and the benefits of affiliation.

Thursday: Spiritual Hospitality. It's easy to feel isolated even within a local meeting. A&O coordinator Martin Kelley will talk about some strategies to overcome the isolations of age, theology, race, lifestyle, etc. What can meetings do to help these Friends not feel isolated?