religious behavior Posts

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?

Visting 1806's "A portraiture of Quakerism: Taken from a view of the education and discipline, social manners, civil and political economy, religious principles and character, of the Society of Friends"

Thomas Clarkson wasn't a Friend. He didn't write for a Quaker audience. He had no direct experience of (and little apparent interest in) any period that we've retroactively claimed as a "golden age of Quakerism." Yet all this is why he's so interesting.

The basic facts of his life are summed up in his Wikipedia entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Clarkson), which begins: "Thomas Clarkson (28 March 1760 – 26 September 1846), abolitionist, was born at Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, England, and became a leading campaigner against the slave trade in the British Empire." The only other necessary piece of information to our story is that he was a Anglican.

British Friends at the end of of the Eighteenth Century were still somewhat aloof, mysterious and considered odd by their fellow countrymen and women. Clarkson admits that one reason for his writing "A Portraiture of Quakerism" was the entertainment value it would provide his fellow Anglicans. Friends were starting to work with non-Quakers like Clarkson on issues of conscience and while this ecumenical activism was his entre--"I came to a knowledge of their living manners, which no other person, who was not a Quaker, could have easily obtained" (Vol 1, p. i)-- it was also a symptom of a great sea change about to hit Friends. The Nineteenth Century ushered in a new type of Quaker, or more precisely whole new types of Quakers. By the time Clarkson died American Friends were going through their second round of schism and Joseph John Gurney was arguably the best-known Quaker across two continents: Oxford educated, at ease in genteel English society, active in cross-denominational work, and fluent and well studied in Biblical studies. Clarkson wrote about a Society of Friends that was disappearing even as the ink was drying at the printers.

Most of the old accounts of Friends we still read were written by Friends themselves. I like old Quaker journals as much as the next geek, but it's always useful to get an outsider's perspective (here's a more modern-day example). Also: I don't think Clarkson was really just writing an account simply for entertainment's sake. I think he saw in Friends a model of christian behavior that he thought his fellow Anglicans would be well advised to study.

His account is refreshingly free of what we might call Quaker baggage. He doesn't use Fox or Barclay quotes as a bludgeon against disagreement and he doesn't drone on about history and personalities and schisms. Reading between the lines I think he recognizes the growing rifts among Friends but glosses over them (fair enough: these are not his battles). Refreshingly, he doesn't hold up Quaker language as some sort of quaint and untranslatable tongue, and when he describes our processes he often uses very surprising words that point to some fundamental differences between Quaker practice then and now that are obscured by common words.

Thomas Clarkson is interested in what it's like to be a good christian. In the book it's typeset with lowercase "c" and while I don't have any reason to think it's intentional, I find that typesetting illuminating nonetheless. This meaning of "christian" is not about subscribing to particular creeds and is not the same concept as uppercase-C "Christian." My Lutheran grandmother actually used to use the lowercase-c meaning when she described some behavior as "not the christian way to act." She used it to describe an ethical and moral standard. Friends share that understanding when we talk about Gospel Order: that there is a right way to live and act that we will find if we follow the Spirit's lead. It may be a little quaint to use christian to describe this kind of generic goodness but I think it shifts some of the debates going on right now to think of it this way for awhile.

Clarkson's "Portraiture" looks at peculiar Quaker practices and reverse-engineers them to show how they help Quaker stay in that christian zone. His book is most often referenced today because of its descriptions of Quaker plain dress but he's less interested in the style than he is with the practice's effect on the society of Friends. He gets positively sociological at times. And because he's speaking about a denomination that's 150 years old, he was able to describe how the testimonies had shifted over time to address changing worldly conditions.

And that's the key. So many of us are trying to understand what it would be like to be "authentically" Quaker in a world that's very different from the one the first band of Friends knew. In the comment to the last post, Alice M talked about recovered the Quaker charism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charism). I didn't join Friends because of theology or history. I was a young peace activist who knew in my heart that there was something more motivating me than just the typical pacifist anti-war rhetoric. In Friends I saw a deeper understanding and a way of connecting that with a nascent spiritual awakening.

What does it mean to live a christian life (again, lowercase) in the 21st Century? What does it mean to live the Quaker charism in the modern world? How do we relate to other religious traditions both without and now within our religious society and what's might our role be in the Emergent Church movement? I think Clarkson gives clues. And that's what this series will talk about.

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Last night I took advantage of an opportunity to stay late in the city to attend mid-week worship at a place I'll call Meeting A (a thin disguise, but I don't want this post to be about this particular meeting). Attendance was low, the worship never felt grounded and the one piece of vocal ministry didn't speak to my condition. I came expecting all this but the behavior after the rise of meeting surprised me. The greeter asked a member to provided ten minutes of information about someone never identified who was engaged in a ministry shrouded in never-defined Quaker acronyms. This done, we were dismissed without even so much as a go-round of names. A few people beat feet for the door and others beat feet for their friends, backs turned to the newcomer.

There's an irony in that this particular meeting was one of the targets of a multi-year yearly meeting campaign to field-test outreach ideas. Elaborate surveys, meeting self-evaluations and outside outreach mentors focused on six meetings. Gallons of ink continue to be spilt in yearly meeting publicity material about the program, yet after all years of attention no one at Meeting A apparently knows how to say "hello and howdido" to a stranger at mid-week worship. The failure of the the meeting's outreach efforts seem pretty obvious: no one there cared about who a stranger was, why he had come, whether he had been to a Quaker Meeting before or might have any questions. No one gave the stranger any reason to ever come back.

About a year ago I had the opportunity to sit in on Meeting A's religious education committee meeting. An exciting proposal for an adult R.E. program to attract newcomers was whittled down as every possible time for it was blocked by various committee meetings. There's nothing the dying meeting needed more than fresh blood yet it fiercely prioritized an over-elaborated committee structure that left no room for either outreach.

The tyranny of programs

One thing I've been noticing lately is that many Friends try to use ambitious programs to achieve goals that are better met through simple ministries. Meeting A needs someone who holds a concern for friendliness. I'm sure there's someone at the meeting carrying this gift; they could be identified and named. The Friend could be released from all committee work (gasp!) and given the simple permission to be friendly to newcomers and to any who might feel like outsiders to the meeting. They could hold the concern for friendliness and outreach at business meeting and gently labor with the meeting about the issues learned from befriending the newcomers. One or two people who faithfully held this as a calling could change the history of the meeting.

Part of this is a need to examine our dependence on committees. Meeting A is extreme but many Friends spend so much time in insider-focused committee meetings that they have little time to do much else. Why does the typical Quaker meeting have so many committees? Let's take the ubiquitous peace and social concern committee. Why don't rising concerns and ministries on social issues get brought to the ministry & council/overseers/elders and treated as any other leading? Meeting committees are often less interesting than the people in them. Many committees exude a chronic sense of being overburdened and actively resist taking on new leadings (in practice, this means that exciting ideas from younger Friends are routinely shut out,).

Why not release individual Friends to their leadings, with meeting testing and oversight and an open-ended possibility that leadings might come over time to be held by the meeting at large? Devolve some of the committee structure with a faith that the work that wouldn't be picked up is the work we don't need to be doing anyway. How amazing would it be to see a flowering of ministries or to see a whole meeting take on a homegrown concern? And how precious would it be if more individual Friends felt the encouragement to simply go up and talk to strangers at mid-week worship?

Quaker Storytelling as Religious Ed: how do you teach a religion that can't be defined?

Howard Brinton's Quaker Journals: Varieties of Religious Experience Among Friends

A guest piece by Evan Welkin

Shortly after finishing my second year at Guilford College, I set out to understand what brought me there. During the stressful process of deciding which college to attend, I felt a strong but slightly mysterious urge to explore Quakerism in my undergraduate years. Two years later, this same urge led me to buy a motorcycle, learn to ride it, and set out in a spiritual journey up the Eastern seaboard visiting Quaker meetings. While Guilford had excited and even irritated my curiosity about the workings of Quakerism, I knew little about how Quakers were over a large area of the country. I wanted to find out how Quakers worked as a group across a wide area of the country, and if I could learn how to be a leader within that community.

For those who can't name God in their lives, it must be just a bit bizarre to come week after week to participate with a group of people praying for God's guidance. But that's okay. I think all that is good in our religious society come from the Great Master. We are known by our fruits and the outward forms of our witnesses constantly point back to God's love. This is the only real outreach we do. I'm happy spending a lifetime laboring with someone in my community pointing out to the Spirit's presence in our midst.

Just stumbled on the website of the National Study of Youth and Religion.