s david Posts

Over in the NYTimes columnist David Brooks talks about Two Theories of Change. He's talking about modern American politics but it seems relevant to Friends. Here's his summary of a new paper by Yuval Levin of the University of Chicago:

[Thomas] Paine believed that societies exist in an "eternal now." That something has existed for ages tells us nothing about its value. The past is dead and the living should use their powers of analysis to sweep away existing arrangements when necessary, and begin the world anew. He even suggested that laws should expire after 30 years so each new generation could begin again

[Edmund] Burke, a participant in the British Enlightenment, had a different vision of change. He believed that each generation is a small part of a long chain of history. We serve as trustees for the wisdom of the ages and are obliged to pass it down, a little improved, to our descendents. That wisdom fills the gaps in our own reason, as age-old institutions implicitly contain more wisdom than any individual could have.

For Brooks, the Paine folllowers are Tea Party activists who think it's fine to "sweep away 100 years of history and return government to its preindustrial role." 

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!

Here are a few photos from our trip to Barnesville Ohio for yearly meeting sessions. The panel talk on Convergent Friends with C Wess Daniels and Ohio's David Male seemed to be well received. In some ways I thought it was silly for us to travel so far to tell them about convergence, as OYM© Friends have been doing important outreach and renewal work for years, supporting isolated Friends with the bi-annual Conservative Gatherings and though their affiliate member program. One place to learn more about current outreach efforts is ConservativeFriend.org.

My F/f Thomas T emailed me about the Blogphiladelphia "unconference" happening next month in downtown Philly. It sounds like it could be silly and interesting at the same time so I've signed up.

Personal stalkers making summer plans should keep mid-August open. It looks like my blog/IM/Twitter/Facebook buddy C Wess Daniels and I are going to add yet another social media to our repertoire and actually meet face to face as co-presenters for an evening event at Ohio Yearly Meeting Conservative. Along with Ohio's David Male we'll be banging on that ever-popular "Convergent Friends" drum. I'm not sure I've ever actually given my two cents on the term and the phenom. I'll probably post about it in the lead up to the August event as a kind of preparation. Anyone within road-trip distance of Barnesville is invited to come over Friday evening the 17th to hear the talk.

And speaking of Conservative Friends, everyone should check out the great newish website called The Conservative Friend, an unofficial outreach initiative of Ohio Yearly Meeting. It's simple but attractive, walks that fine line between truth telling and humility with grace and has a wonderful sense of humor and self-awareness that sneaks up on you as you read through. Now who knew Ohio Conservatives had a sense of humor? Seriously, it's really nice work.

I'll be missing the Conservative Gathering of Friends being held in the Lancaster, PA, area next weekend. I'd like to claim that money and time is keeping me from attending but it's hard to argue that when I drove by its meeting sites only a few days ago just to look at trains. Well, let's just say at this moment of life my spirit needed family time more than Quaker gathering time. I hope it goes well; if any QuakerRanter readers do attend I'd love to hear their impressions.

It's said that John Woolman re-wrote his Journal three times in an effort to excise it of as many "I" references as possible. As David Sox writes in Johh Woolman Quintessential Quaker, "only on limited occasion do we glimpse Woolman as a son, a father and a husband." Woolman wouldn't have been a very good blogger. Quoting myself from my introduction to "Quaker blogs": http://www.quakerquaker.org/quaker_blogs/::

blogs give us a unique way of sharing our lives—how our Quakerism intersects with the day-to-day decisions that make up faithful living. Quaker blogs give us a chance to get to know like-minded Friends that are separated by geography or artificial theological boundaries and they give us a way of talking to and with the institutions that make up our faith community.

I've read many great Woolman stories over the years and as I read the Journal I eagerly anticipated reading the original account. It's that same excitement I get when walking the streets of an iconic landscape for the first time: walking through London, say, knowing that Big Ben is right around the next corner. But Woolman kept letting me down.

One of the AWOL stories is his arrival in London. The Journal's account:

On the 8th of Sixth Month, 1772, we landed at London, and I went straightway to the Yearly Meeting of ministers and elders, which had been gathered, I suppose, about half an hour. In this meeting my mind was humbly contrite.

But set the scene. He had just spent five weeks crossing the Atlantic in steerage among the pigs (he doesn't actually specify his non-human bunkmates). He famously went out of his way to wear clothes that show dirt because they show dirt. He went straightaway: no record of a bath or change of clothes. Stories abound about his reception, and while are some of dubious origin, there are first hand accounts of his being shunned by the British ministers and elders. "The best and most dubious story is the theme of another post":.

I trust that Woolman was honestly aiming for meekness when he omitted the most interesting stories of his life. But without the context of a lived life he becomes an ahistorical figure, an icon of goodness divorced from the minutiae of the daily grind. Two hundred and thirty years of Quaker hagiography and latter-day appeals to Woolman's authority have turned the tailor of Mount Holly into the otherworldly Quaker saint but the process started at John's hands himself.

Were his struggles merely interior? When I look to my own ministry, I find the call to discernment to be the clearest part of the work. I need to work to be ever more receptive to even the most unexpected prompting from the Inward Christ and I need to constantly practice humility, love and forgiveness. But the practical limitations are harder. For years respectibility was an issue; relative poverty continues to be one. It is asking a lot of my wife to leave responsibility for our two small boys for even a long weekend.

How did Woolman balance family life and ministry? What did wife Sarah think? And just what was his role in the sea-change that was the the "Reformation of American Quakerism" (to use Jack Marietta's phrase) that forever altered American Friends' relationship with the world and set the stage for the schisms of the next century.

We also lose the context of Woolman's compatriots. Some are named as traveling companions but the colorful characters go unmentioned. What did he think of the street-theater antics of Benjamin Lay, the Abbie Hoffman of Philadelphia Quakers. The most widely-told tale is of Lay walking into Philadelphia Yearly Meeting sessions, opening up a cloak to reveal military uniform underneath, and declaring that slave-made products were products of war, plunged a sword into a hollowed-out Bible full of pig's blood, splattering Friends sitting nearby.

What role did Woolman play in the larger anti-slavery awakening happening at the time? It's hard to tell just reading his Journal. How can we find ways to replicate his kind of faithfulness and witness today? Again, his Journal doesn't give much clue.

Next time: I Really Do Like Woolman!

Reading John Woolman:

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

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Picked up today in the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Library:

• The Reformation of American Quakerism, by Jack Marietta
• John Woolman Quintessential Quaker, by David Sox
• The Tendering Presence: Essays on John Woolman, edited by Mike Heller

PYM Librarian Rita Varley reminded me today they mail books anywhere in the US for a modest fee and a $50/year subscription. It's a great deal and a great service, especially for isolated Friends. The PYM catalog is online too!

I've finally done it. I've read John Woolman's Journal. Here I've been an activist among Quakers for almost two decades and I've read one of our Big Books.

I have tried before. Many's the time over the years where I cracked open Moulton's edition to settle myself down. Chapter one read, chapter two read. Then to chapter three, opening with:

About this time, believing it good for me to settle, and thinking seriously about a companion, my heart was turned to the Lord with desires that He would give me wisdom to proceed therein agreeably to His will, and He was pleased to give me a well-inclined damsel, Sarah Ellis, to whom I was married the 18th of Eighth Month, 1749.

And that's it. One run-on sentence about courting and marrying his wife. I always put the book down here. I tuck a bookmark in with all good intentions of continuing after dinner. But the book sits on the coffee table till a week or so goes by, whereupon it's moved to the library area for a month or so until it's finally reshelved. The bookmarks stays put until a year or two passes and I re-start the Journal with renewed determination.

I know why the sentence stops me. Throughout my twenties and early thirties a lot of my emotional energy was drained in the (mostly Quaker) dating scene. In theory I thought it a good time "for me to settle" and would have been quite content with a well-inclined damsel. But the chaos of my personal family history combined with the casual dating culture I was part of combined to keep me distracted with the largely-manufactured drama of relationship roller-coasters. For better or worse, if and when I ever write a journal I will have to find a way to talk about the ways this dating era both fed and stunted my spiritual growth.

One of the lesson I learned back in the early 90s when I was editor at New Society Publishers was that I should pay attention when I put a manuscript or book down. The temptation is to chalk it up to tiredness or a busy life but I found there was usually something going on in the text itself that caused me to drop it. When I picked the manuscript back up and re-read the passages on either side of my abandoned bookmark, I found some sort of shift of tone that weakened the book.

I appreciate that Quaker journals are not racy memoirs; they have a specific religious education purpose. But I think it's natural to look to them for clues about how to live our lives. Samuel Bownas talks a bit about his engagement and David Ferris turns meeting his future wife into quite a humorous story. Perhaps Woolman was such a saintly aesthete that Sarah was simply presented to him with no futher questions. But still, there's a level of privacy in Woolman's writings that separates him from us; I'll return to this is part three.

Before I go: so how did I get through the journal this time? Two things are different now: first, my five year wedding anniversary is only a few weeks away; and second: Woolman's Journal is now always with me inside my Palm Pilot (courtesy the Christian Classics Etherial Library). A few weeks ago I found myself on the train without reading material and started reading!

Next: The Last Safe Quaker

Reading John Woolman:

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

Sometimes my Quaker Ranter posts dry up for awhile. I console myself that I'm doing enough giving out the daily reading list of Quaker posts, reading through my new old Quaker book collection (Samuel Bownas just visited the meeting I'm attending most frequently these days!) and working my new advancement and outreach job--oh, and of course there's also the family! But you could also just follow my train of thought by looking over my shoulder at comments made at other sites. Over the last few days the Quaker blogosphere has had a number of interesting posts. Here's a cobble-together of posts and comments that have spoken to me about the inherent Quaker snare of confusing our "Quaker faith" for God.

Over on Kwakersaur, David M shares some renewal queries for his yearly meeting. Nancy A detected a "sense an overall fatigue" in them and Beppe agreed, asking if the seemingly-simple answers to these sorts of queries require that we first have the much harder-to-come-by "understanding [of] who we are."

One of the queries goes "What does our Quaker faith ask us to DO?" Eeeyyaa-aa-yaaaaawwwn. My favorite Quaker committee-meeting trick of late consists of replace all the "we"-like phrases with God. How about "What does God ask us to DO?" (Just a quick testimony: I love David's work and I value his wonderful online ministry. Any time he wants to come down to Philly to tend to our flock with talk of Quaker renewal, he's welcome!! I'm sure everyone on the Consultation and Renewal Working Group is deeper than the queries would indicate and suspect that this is an example of the Quaker corporate dumbing-down tendency that's practically our modus operandi.)

All this ties into a great post from AJ Schwanz, Can I Say I’m Emerging If I Haven’t Emerged or Quaker If I Haven’t Quaked?,. Here's a taste:

Part of me has thought of shedding my Quaker pin. How can I use it?: have I ever quaked with the power of God? Shedding my differentiation label certainly would support the idea that “there’s really only one church, but lots of meeting places.” Particularly in this town where the Quaker college is perceived as pretty insular, would I have different interactions with folks if I simply said “I’m a follower of Christ” rather than a “Friend”? What would I miss out on? What would be gained?

Paul L implicitly addresses the question of shedding the Quaker pin in his review of Punshon's Reasons for Hope, where he asks if "Quakers have a unique niche to fill in the Christian and broader social landscape."

Are we Quaker because it's comfortable, because our friends are, because the buildings are cool and the social hour coffee hot? Or the opposite: are we Friends because we really liked Barclay's Apology but couldn't care less for the messyness of flesh-and-blood religious community? Another Quaker blogger recently sent me a private email in which he confided: "My main question of late to Quakers is: what is so remarkable about Quakers? I sometimes have to be a pain-in-the-ass in order to ask these questions." That seems like both a good question and a important meeting role.

There’s something about living both within a community and outside it. The real deal isn’t in any of our human institutions, theories or notions yet it is through these that we live out our faith. Christ as transcendent everythingness and Christ as a particular guy in a particular place speaking a particular language and living a particular life. The pull between the eternal and peculiar is the very essence of the human condition. The same voice that spoke to the prophets and apostles speaks to us today, if only we have ears to hear. How can we learn to lessen the volume on our own self-kudos long enough to hear the divine whisperer?