metaphors Posts

Someone who only knew Woolman from articles in popular Quaker periodicals might be forgiven for a moment of shock when opening his book. John Woolman is so much more religious than we usually acknowledge. We describe him as an activist even though he and his contemporaries clearly saw and named him a minister. There are many instances where he described the inhumanity of the slave trade and he clearly identified with the oppressed but he almost always did so with from a Biblical perspective. He acknowledged that religious faithfulness could exist outside his beloved Society of Friends but his life's work was calling Friends to live a profoundly Christian life. Flip to a random page of the journal and you'll probably count half a dozen metaphors for God. Yes, he was a social activist but he was also a deeply religious minister of the gospel.

So why do we wrap ourselves up in Woolman like he's the flag of proto-liberal Quakerism? In an culture where Quaker authority is deeply distrusted and appeals to the Bible or to Quaker history are routinely dismissed, he has become the last safe Friend to claim. His name is invoked as a sort of talisman against critique, as a rhetorical show-stopper. "If you don't agree with my take on the environment/tax resistance/universalism, you're the moral equivalent of Woolman's slave holders." (Before the emails start flooding in, remember I'm writing this as a dues-paying activist Quaker myself.) We don't need to agree with him to engage with him and learn from him. But we do need to be honest about what he believed and open to admitting when we disagree. We shouldn't use him simply as a stooge for our own agenda.

I like Woolman but I have my disagreements. His scrupulousness was over the top. My own personality tends toward a certain purity, exemplified by fifteen years of veganism, my plain dress, my being car-less into my late thirties. I've learned that I need to moderate this tendency. My purity can sometimes be a sign of an elitism that wants to separate myself from the world (I've learned to laugh at myself more). Asceticism can be a powerful spiritual lens but it can also burn a self- and world-hatred into us. I've had friends on the brink of suicide (literally) over this kind of scrupulousness. I worry when a new Friend finds my plain pages and is in broadfalls and bonnets a few weeks later, knowing from my own experience that the speed of their gusto sometimes rushes a discernment practice that needs to rest and settle before it is fully owned (the most personally challenging of the traditional tests of Quaker discernment is "patience").

John Woolman presents an awfully high bar for future generations. He reports refusing medicine when illness brought him to the brink of death, preferring to see fevers as signs of God's will. While that might have been the smarter course in an pre-hygienic era when doctors often did more harm than good, this Christian Scientist-like attitude is not one I can endorse. He sailed to England deep in the hold along with the cattle because he thought the woodwork unnecessarily pretty in the passenger cabins. While his famous wearing of un-dyed garments was rooted partly in the outrages of the manufacturing process, he talked much more eloquently about the inherent evil of wearing clothes that might hide stains, arguing that anyone who would try to hide stains on their clothes would be that much more likely to hide their internal spiritual stains (all I could think about when reading this was that he must have left child-rearing duties to the well-inclined Sarah).

Woolman proudly relates (in his famously humble style) how he once tried to shut down a traveling magic act that was scheduled to play at the local inn. I suspect that if any of us somehow found ourselves on his clearness committee we might find a way to tell him to... well, lighten up. I sympathize with his concerns against mindless entertainment but telling the good people of Mount Holly that they can't see a disappearing rabbit act because of his religious sensibilities is more Taliban than most of us would feel comfortable with.

He was a man of his times and that's okay. We can take him for what he is. We shouldn't dismiss any of his opinions too lightly for he really was a great religious and ethical figure. But we might think twice before enlisting the party pooper of Mount Holly for our cause.

Next time: The Myth of the Isolated Saint.

Reading John Woolman:

• Part One: The Public Life of a Private Man
• Part Two: "The Last Safe Quaker" (this page)
• Part Three: The Isolated Saint
• Part Four (forthcoming)

A lot has been written about Intelligent Design (creationism without the G-word) because of the trial in Pennsylvania's Dover Area School District. An excellent New Yorker article about it a few weeks ago mentioned that one of the school board members pushing Intelligent Design is a Quaker. Who would have guessed? But should I be so surprised?

Now, I absolutely don't think it should be taught in science classes at all. I'm with the judge that the ID argument is religious and not scientific. Students shouldn't be forced to listen to Christian propaganda in a public school. But what if we take the debate out of the schoolhouse and bring it into the meetinghouse? A core principle of Friends is Fox's opening that Christ has come to teach the people himself. The era of divine agency in human affairs didn't end in the early 30s A.D. but continues. When we pray for discernment in our business meetings, we're asking for a very real presence (common metaphors are the still small voice and a "nudge from the Spirit"). If God guides us as individuals and a Society of Friends into the mystery of a direct, Christ-centered contact, then it's not much of a stretch to suppose God at least occassionally tips the scales on the evolutionary front as well.

We are a religious people who believe in God's active agency in our lives: isn't that pretty much the Intelligent Design argument? As a science geek, I don't buy it at all but as a Friend it seems to make sense. Is anyone else out there struggling with this seeming-contradiction?

ps: yes I know there are some liberal Friends who don't buy into anything dealing with God, which seems to be to be a different issue. What are those of us who do look for direct guidance to make of Intelligent Design?
pps: Things so Small Sarah skirted by this issue last week in a great post.

The FGC Gathering is coming up in a few weeks. I'm taking the workshop on James Nayler led by David Neelon.

Regular readers will know that I have a concern that Friends have become so generic with our spiritual language that we have lost the vocabulary to talk about our faith experience. Read any random page from an old Quaker journal and you'll come across half a dozen beautifully-rich metaphors for the Divine. Early Friends knew that human language could trap the Spirit and they vigorously challenged the human institutions and creedal statements that encrusted the organized religion of their day. They responded with a kind of poetry (in fact, one of Walt Whitman's influences was Elias Hicks and an argument can be made that Hick's impossible-to-pin-down theology was a poetical response to the Quaker stand against creeds). Today most Friends deal with this mandate not with poetry but with a sanitized political correctness. We strip our discourse of any language which is too evocative and limit ourselves to increasingly tamer metaphors for the divine.

So when it came time for me to choose a Gathering workshop, I decided to take an organized approach. I picked all the theological words I could think of and cross-referenced these with the extended workshop descriptions. I then picked the workshop with the most evocative language. I realize that a methodical keyword search of the workshops is not a particularly "poetic" way to make a choice, but as I'm interested in both protest and prophecy, I thought it might be a good match. I'll let you all know!

I've met many "supra-religionists": those who believe that all religions are the ultimately the same, don't sweat the details of religious practice or duty and proudly hyphenate their religious life. I'm reminded of the people I meet who grew up in a little dinky Midwestern town but now crave to be seen as urban sophisticates and world travelers... Can we get off the cloud of supra-religiosity and get dirty working the soil of peculiarities and particularities?

Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of Christ is a challenge for many modern Quakers. Most of the rich metaphors of co-mingled joy and suffering of the early Friends have been dumbed-down to feel-good cliches. Can the debate on this movie help us return to that uncomfortable place where we can acknowledge the complexities of being fervently religious in a world haunted by past sins and still in need of conviction and comfort?