modernist Posts

A recent article on the art and science of taste and smell in the New Yorker had a paragraph that stood out for me. The author John Lanchester had just shared a moment where he suddenly understood the meaning behind "grainy," a term that had previously been an esoteric wine descriptor. He then writes:

The idea that your palate and your vocabulary expand simultaneously might sound felicitous, but there is a catch. The words and the references are really useful only to people who have had the same experiences and use the same vocabulary: those references are to a shared basis of sensory experience and a shared language. To people who haven't had those shared experiences, this way of talking can seem like horse manure, and not in a good way.

How might this apply to Quakerism? A post-modernist philosopher might argue that our words are our experience and their argument would be even stronger for communal experiences. I once spent a long afternoon worrying whether the colors I saw were really the same colors others saw: what if what I interpreted as yellow was the color others saw as blue? After turning around the riddle I ended up realizing it didn't matter as long as we all could point to the same color and give it the same name.

But what happens when we're not just talking about yellow. Turning to the Crayola box, what if we're trying to describe the yellowish colors apricot, dandelion, peach and the touch-feely 2008 "super happy". Being a Crayola connoisseur requires an investment not only in a box of colored wax but also in time: the time needed to experience, understand and take ownership in the various colors.

Religion can be a like wine snobbery. If you take the time to read the old Quaker journals and reflect on your spiritual experiences you can start to understand what the language means. The terms stop being fussy and obscure, outdated and parochial. They become your own religious vocabulary. When I pick up an engaging nineteenth journal (not all are!) and read stories about the author's spiritual up and downs and struggles with ego and community, I smile with shared recognition. When I read an engaging historian's account of some long-forgotten debate I nod knowing that many of the same issues are at the root of some blogospheric bruhaha.

Of course I love outreach and want to share the Friends "sensory experience." One way to do that is to strip the language and make it all generic. The danger of course is that we're actually changing the religion when we're change the language. It's not the experience that makes us Friends--all people of all spiritual persuasions have access to legitimate religious experiences no matter how fleeting, misunderstood or mislabeled. We are unique in how we frame that experience, how we make sense of it and how we use the shared understanding to direct our lives.

We can go the other direction and stay as close to our traditional language as possible, demanding that anyone coming into our religious society's influence take the time to understand us on our terms. That of course opens us to charges of spreading horse manure, in Lanchester's words (which we do sometimes) and it also means we threaten to stay a small insider community. We also forget to speak "normal," start thinking the language really is the experience and start caring more about showing off our vocabulary than about loving God or tending to our neighbors.

I don't see any good way out of this conundrum, no easy advice to wrap a post up. A lot of Friends in my neck of the woods are doing what I'd call wink-wink nudge-nudge Quakerism, speaking differently in public than in private (see this post) but I worry this institutionalizes the snobbery and excuses the manure, and it sure doesn't give me much hope. What if we saw our role as taste educators? For want of a better analogy I wonder if there might be a Quaker version of Starbucks (yes yes, Starbucks is Quaker, I'm talking coffee), a kind of movement that would educate seekers at the same time as it sold them the Quaker experience. Could we get people excited enough that they'd commit to the higher costs involved in understanding us?

I'm reading Bill Taber's fascinating history of Ohio Conservative Friends called The Eye of Faith. Like any good history there's a lot of the present in there. There's a strong feeling of deja-vu to the scenes of Friends in conflict and various characters come to life as much for their foibles as their strength of character (there's more than a few bloggers echoed there). I'm now a few years into the second great separation, the Wilburite/Gurneyite split that brewed for years before erupting in 1854.

I'm not one of those Friends who bemoan the various schisms. The diversity of those calling themselves Friends today is so great that it's hard to imagine them ever having stayed part of the same body. Only a strong authoritarian control could have prevented the separations and even then, large masses of the "losing" party would have simply left and regrouped elsewhere: the only real difference is that one party stops using the Quaker name. Here in South Jersey, where the only Gurneyite meeting wasn't recognized by either Philadelphia yearly meeting for almost a hundred years, we've got dozens of Methodist "meeting houses" with graveyards full of old Quaker family names. Fascinating histories could be written of Friends who didn't bother to squabble over meetinghouse deeds and simply decided to congregate under another banner.

One concept I'm chewing on is that of the "remnant." As I understand it, the doctrine comes largely from Revelation 12 and is used by small theologically-conservative Christian sects to explain why their small size isn't a problem; it's kind of like Mom saying it's better to do the right thing than to be popular. When the remnant community is a relatively isolated locale like Barnesville, there's also the image of the Land That Time Forgot, the place where the old time ways has come down to us most fully intact. There's truth to the preserving power of isolation: linguists claim the Ozark hillbilly accent most clearly mirrors Shakespeare's. But Ohio Friends aren't simply Jed Clampett's Quaker cousins.

Like most rural Quaker yearly meetings, Ohio Yearly Meeting Conservative has lost much of its membership over the last hundred years. I don't have statistics but it seems as if a good percentage of the active members of the yearly meeting hail from outside southeastern Ohio and a great many are convinced Friends. This echoes the most significant change in U.S. Quakerism in the past fifty years: the shift from a self-perpetuating community with strong local customs and an almost ethnic sense of self, to a society of convinced believers.

The keen sense of self-sufficiency and isolation that held together tight-knit Quaker communities over the centuries are largely non-sustainable now. In our media-saturated lives even Barnesville teens can get the latest Hollywood gossip and New York fashions in real time. Yes it's possible to ban the TV and live as a media hermit in a commune somewhere, but even that only gets you so far. Once upon a time, not so long ago, a Friend could situate themselves in the wider Quaker universe simply by comparing family trees and school ties but that's becoming less important all the time. For those of us who enter into the Society of Friends as adults--majorities in many yearly meetings now--there's a sense of choice, of donning the clothes. We play at being Quaker until voila!, some mystical alchemical process happens and we identify as Quaker--even if we're not always quite so made-over into Quakerness as we imagine ourselves.

At the Ohio sessions a few Friends really loved Wess Daniel's statement that "A tradition that loses the ability to explain itself becomes an empty form" (see his wrap-up post here). One Ohio Friend said he had heard it postulated that isolated and inward-focused communities like Ohio Conservative were God's method of preserving the old ways against the onslaught of the modernist age (with its mocking disbelief) until they could be reintroduced to the wider world in a more forgiving post-modernist era. Looked at that way, Quakerism isn't a quaint relic in need of the same botox/bleach blond "NOW!" makeover every other spiritual tradition is getting. Think of it instead as a time capsule ready to be opened. An interesting theory. Are we ready to look at this peculiar thing we've dug up and reverse-engineer it back into meaningfulness?

Update:

Kirk W. over at Street Corner Society emailed me that he had recently put the Journal of Ann Branson online. She features heavily in the middle part of Taber's book, which is the story of Conservative Ohio finding its own identity. Kirk suggests, and I agree, that her journal might be considered one of the artifacts of the Ohio time capsule. I hope to find some time to read this in the not-too-distant future.