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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

There's a nice remembrance of George Willoughby by the Brandywine Peace Community's Bob Smith over on the War Resisters International site. George died a few days ago at the age of 95 [updated]. It's hard not to remember his favorite quip as he and his wife Lillian celebrated their 80th birthdays: "twenty years to go!" Neither of them made it to 100 but they certainly lived lives more full than the average people.

I don't know enough of the details of their lives to write the obituary (a Wikipedia page was started this morning) but I will say they always seemed to me like the Forrest Gump's of peace activism--at the center of every cool peace witness since 1950. You squint to look at the photos at there's George and Lil, always there. Or maybe pop music would give us the better analogy: you know how there are entire b-rate bands that carve an entire career around endlessly rehashing a particular Beatles song? Well, there are whole activist organizations that are built around particular campaigns that the Willoughby's championed. Like: in 1958 George was a crew member of the Golden Rule (profiled a bit here), a boatload of crazy activists who sailed into a Pacific nuclear bomb test to disrupt it. Twelve years later some Vancouver activists stage a copycat boat sailing which became Greenpeace. Lillian was concerned about rising violence against women and started one of the first Take Back the Night marches. If you've ever sat in an activist meeting where everyone's using consensus, then you've been influenced by the Willoughby's!

Just finished: Kenneth S.P. Morse's "A History of Conservative Friends" from 1962. Like most histories of Conservative Friends, it's both heartening and depressing. It's great to read the quotes, which often put the dilemma very clearly, like this one from Iowa Friends in 1877:

In consideration of many and various departures in Doctrine, Principle and Practice, brought into our beloved Society of late years by modern innovators, who have so revolutionized our ancient order in the Church, as to run into views and practices out of which our early Friends were lead, and into a broader, and more self-pleasing, and cross-shunning way than that marked out by our Savior, and held to by our ancient Friends.... And who have so approximated to the unregenerate world that we feel it incumbent upon us to bear testimony...and sustain the Church for the purpose for which is was peculiarly raised up.

I love this stuff. You've got theology, polity, culture and an argument for the eternal truths of the "peculiarly raised" Quaker church. But even in 1962 this is a story of decline, of generations of ministers passing with no one to take their place and monthly and yearly meetings winking out with disarming regularity as the concept of Friends gets stretched from all sides. "It is certainly true that most of those who call themselves Friends at the present time are only partial Friends in that they seem not to have felt called to uphold various branches of the Quaker doctrine."

Putting the book down the most remarkable fact is that there are any Conservative Friends around still around almost fifty years later.

The task of sharing and upholding the Quaker doctrine is still almost impossibly hard. The multiplicity of meanings in the words we use become stumbling blocks in themselves. Friends from other traditions are often the worst, often being blind to their own innovations, oftener still just not caring that they don't share much in common with early Friends.

Then there's the disunity among present-day Conservatives. Geography plays a part but it seems part of the culture. The history is a maze of traditionalist splinter groups with carefully-selected lists of who they do and do not correspond with. Today the three Conservative Yearly Meetings seem to know each another more through carefully-parsed reading of histories than actual visitation (there is some, not enough). There's also the human messiness of it all: some of the flakiest liberal Quakers I've known have been part of Conservative Yearly Meetings and the internet is full of those who share Conservative Friends values but have no yearly meeting to join.

No answers today from me. Maybe we should take solace that despite the travails and the history of defeat, there still remains a spark and there are those who still seek to share Friends' ways. For those wanting to learn more the more recent "Short History of Conservative Friends" (1992) is online and a good introduction.

A busy Quaker week. On Tuesday I heard North Carolina Friend Betsy Blake give a talk called "He Lives" at Pendle Hill, the story of how "Jesus has been her rock" to quote from the program description. It was a great talk and very well received.

Betsy is a graduate of the Quaker program at Guilford (so she was a good followup for Max Carter's talk this weekend) and she helped organize the World Gathering of Young Friends a few years ago. The talk was recorded and should be up on the Pendle Hill shortly (I'll add a link when it is) so I'll not try to be comprehensive but just share a few of my impressions.

Betsy is the kind of person that can just come under the radar. She starts telling stories, funny and poignant by turn, each one a Betsy story that you take on its own merits. It's only at the end of the hour that you fully realize she's been testifying to the presence of Jesus in her life in all this time. Real-life sightings, comforting hands on shoulders family tragedy, intellectual doubts and expanded spiritual connections all come together like different sides of the elephant.

One theme that came up a few times in the question-and-answer section is the feeling of a kind of spiritual tiredness--a fatigue from running the same old debates over and over. It's an exhaustion that squelches curiosity about other Friends and sometimes moves us to follow the easy path in times of conflict rather than the time-consuming & difficult path that might be the one we need to be on.

The last time I was in the Pendle Hill barn it was to listen to Shane Claiborne. I'm one of those odd people that don't think he's a very good speaker for liberal Quakers. He downplays the religious instruction he received as a child to emphasize the progressive spiritual smörgåsbord of his adulthood without ever quite realizing (I think) that this early education gave him the language and vocabulary to ground his current spiritual travels. Those who grow up in liberal Quaker meetings generally start with the dabbling; their challenge is to find a way to go deeper into a specific spiritual practice, something that can't be done on weekend trips to cool spiritual destinations.

Betsy brought an appreciation for her grounded Christian upbringing that I thought was a more powerful message. She talked about how her mom was raised in a tradition that could talk of darkness. When a family member died and doubt of God naturally followed, her mother was able to remind her that God had healed the beloved sister, only "not in the way we wanted." Powerful stuff.

The sounds at Pendle Hill were fascinating: the sound of knitting needles was a gentle click-clack through the time. And one annoying speaker rose at one point with an annoying sermonette that I realized was a modern-day version of Quaker singsong (liberal Friend edition), complete with dramatic pauses and over-melodious delivery. Funny to realize it exists in such an unlikely place!

And a plug that the Tuesday night speaker's series continues with some great Friends coming up, with North Carolina's Lloyd Lee Wilson at bat for next week. Hey, and I'll be there with Wess Daniels this May to lead a workshop on "The New Monastics and Convergent Friends."

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.

Earlier today I posted an excerpt of an interesting article on Anabaptism on my Tumblr blog and it's engendered quite a conversation on Facebook about testimonies and empty forms, etc. It's true that any form of spiritual discipline can get twisted into look-at-me heroism or lets-talk-anything-but-God group conformity.

The answer isn't to give up testimonies or to hold onto them even tighter, but instead to constantly remind ourselves about their purpose: to learn how to live as an attentive people of God. Here's what I wrote on Facebook:

I've been a mostly bicycle-riding vegan for decades, an outspoken pacifist and a frequent plain dresser. All of these practices have aided my spiritual growth but also have unearthed new sources of pride for me to wrestle with. The self-examination has been practice in discernment.

I often think back to the story of the Good Samaritan. What mattered wasn't how he was dressed or whether he was riding a bicycle. No, what mattered is that he knew enough to know he was being called to sacrifice something: to get covered in a strangers blood, to aid someone who might resent him for it, to lose money he had earned to put someone up for the night. Maybe he had practiced this discernment of self-sacrifice by living a testimony that had challenged him to navigate between loss and pride, and maybe he had been brought up in a community where the value of love was prized above all. The important thing is he knew to stop and be a true neighbor.

Mark Franek, a teacher with Friend School connections, recently wrote an interesting piece in the Christian Science Monitor called "Bring integrity to the Internet." Here's a taste:

The Internet, led by the pervasive power of Google's ranking system, has become an extension of your résumé. And here's the real kicker: When thwarted by a webmaster who refuses to give ground, an average citizen can have a very hard time getting links that lead to offensive material off the first page of Google's search results.

The stories are interesting to me as a fan of user-generated content. I love how the internet is empowering grassroots fact-checking and starting to allow for a distribution of information that is bringing transparency to some stubborn institutions.

Mark is a great writer and I've long enjoyed his blog. He's a public persona, a journalist and educator and he's not afraid of voicing strong opinions. So how can he protect his reputation? The most effective way is to be online in many different types of settings so that when your name goes into Google, people are seeing your content. Web 2.0 profile-based services like Twitter, Facebook and Flickr are giving us online footprints that rank high and solidify our online presence. When people ask why we should be on all of these different services, one good answer is that we're protecting our reputations.

I'll try to return to this soon in a more technical way over on my Martin Kelley consulting site.