simplicity Posts

My sort-of response to Callid's great Youtube piece on the Quaker testimonies, I compare the classic testimonies to a wiki: the collective knowledge of Friends distilled into specific cautions and guides. "We as Friends have found that...." I do talk about how the recent "SPICE" simplification (simplicity, integrity, integrity, community and equality) has robbed our notion of testimonies of some of their power.

John S made an interesting comment at the end of my last post (all ) about live twittering tonight's Presidential Debate got me thinking about a Quaker response to the debates might be. As I've admitted I can be rather snarky and partisan. So I prepared some interesting quotes from some old Quaker tesimonies and have been sprinkling them throughout my twitter commentary. 

• 1762: Friends ought not be active in electing to offices, the execution whereof tends to lay wast our Christian testimony
• <1879: Members should maintain inoffensive, circumspect emeanour towards all men, manifesting peaceable spirit of Christ.
• <1879: Friends should avoid those heats & controversies respecting the policies and govt's of the world.
• 1874: The mere natural wisdom and will of man have no palce in the church of Christ.
• 1808: The preservation of love and unity is a duty in every state of religious attainment.
• 1853: It is upon the simplicity of the Truth as it is in Jesus that our testimony to plainness and moderation rests.
• <1879: Friends are to avoid electing brethren to civil govt as may subject them to temptation of violating testimonies.
• 1808: Friends are not to unite in warlike measures, either offensive or defensive, we are subj of Messaih's peaceful reign.
• 1843: Fds must decline acceptance of any office or station in civil govt w/duties inconsistent w/our religious principles.
• 1843: Friends warned vs. raising & circulating paper credit w/appearance of value w/o intrinsic reality.
• 1843: Friends should be open-hearted and liberal in raising funds for relief for members in indigent circumstances.
• 1843: So may we be living members of the Church militant on earth; and inhabitants of that city which hath foundations.
• 1853: The standards which the world adopts in pursuit of trade and desire for riches in not safe for disciple of Christ.
• 1853: May no Friends involve themselves in worldy concerns disqualify for right use of their time, talents & temporal substance.

The quotes are culled from "Christian Advices" (1879) and "Rules of Discipline" (1843), both published by Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. I think these are Orthodox and Hicksite respectively, but I'm not an expert in the investigative details necessary to differentiate between yearly meeting publications. If anyone knows "Christian Advices" says it's available from the Friends Bookstore at 304 Arch Street; "Rules of Discipline" is printed by John Richards of 130 N. Third Street.

• Robin M surveys renewal and outreach at her meeting
  The line that seems to be working is this: 'We're not trying to convert anybody who's not interested. We're just trying to make it easier for the people who are looking for a faith community to find us.'
  (tags: quaker quaker.convergent quaker.outreach)
• Emerging Qr on Shane Claiborne's message for Friends
  I've finished Shane Claiborne's Irresistible Revolution. Claiborne's Christianity looks almost identical to Christ-centered Quakerism. He embodies the Quaker testimonies of simplicity, peace, equality, community and integrity.
• New'ish blog: A Friendly Hesychast
  I am a member of the Ohio Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends; that is, I am a Conservative Quaker. Although the Peace Testimony of the Friends is what drew me to the Society, it is actually their worship that "convinced" me.
  (tags: quaker quaker.blogs)
• Prof Christine Trevett
  Christine Trevett, early Quakerism scholar and co-organizer of research on Religion and Autism.
  (tags: autism)

• Jeanne on some Friends' assumptions of elite education
  (tags: checkback)
• New Blog: Left Libertarian Quaker
  "Left, because the poor are being robbed. Libertarian, because he who lives by the sword dies by the sword. Quaker, in order to know and worship in simplicity and in truth the Light which is the Life of all things."
  (tags: quaker quaker.blogs)

Summer visitations got an early start last month when the Northeast US Quaker blogroll converged in my back yard with no agenda to follow and no epistle to write.Front row: James, Jeffrey and visitation ringleader Amanda. Back: Ryan, Rob, Me, Theo and poor blogless Christina.

Well since Kwakersaur is inaugurating the I don't have anything to post meme, I'll chime in that I don't either. Actually I've written two and half essays but realized they're both really for myself. This is how it happens sometimes. I've long noticed this phenomenon in fully-formed verbal ministry that I know I'm not supposed to deliver and it feels as if such restraint is sometimes healthy on the blog. The message will reappear in other forums I'm sure, most likely next month's Gathering workshop with Zachary Moon.

In the meantime, there's been fresh talk about plain language and dress this week by Johan Maurer, Claire Reddy and the Livejournal Quakers. Russ Nelson's started a Planet Quaker blog aggregator (which includes Quaker Ranter: thanks!). LizOpp talked about field testing her upcoming Quaker identity Gathering workshop at Northern Yearly Meeting sessions and Kiara's talked about being field tested by Liz at this year's NYM sessions (how cool is that?!).

I've been geeking out on Del.icio.us, the "social bookmarking" system and on the esoteric concepts of tags, the semantic web and folksonomies. Two weeks ago I would have laughed at these neologisms but I'm beginning to see that there's something in all this. The only outward form the regulars will see is a more accurate "Related Entries" selection at the bottom of posts (thanks to Adam Kalsey) and better visibility in selected Technorati entries (which will get less me-centric as I finish tagging my own back posts).

And of course we're tilling the field, planting a garden, putting up laundry lines and otherwise thoroughly enjoying the first Spring in our new house. It's bedtime, off to read the radically folksonomic adventures of Sam and My Car (it's pure tags: "My name is Sam." "This is my car." "I love my car." I'd worry that not-so-baby Theo is getting too excited by combusion engines if he weren't even more excited by "dia-di-calschht" aka the "bicycle" Papa rides off to work on.)

One of the more revolutionary transformations of American Quakerism in the twentieth century has been our understanding of the testimonies. In online discussions I find that many Friends think the "SPICE" testimonies date back from time immemorial. Not only are they relatively new, they're a different sort of creature from their predecessors.

In the last fifty years it's become difficult to separate Quaker testimonies from questions of membership. Both were dramatically reinvented by liberal Gurneyite Friends in the early part of the Twentieth Century and the codified by Howard Brinton's landmark Friends for 300 Years, published in the early 1950s.

Comfort and the Test of Membership

Brinton comes right out and says that the test for membership shouldn't involve issues of faith or of practice but should be based on whether one feels comfortable with the other members of the Meeting. This conception of membership has gradually become dominant among liberal Friends in the half century since this book was published. The trouble with it is twofold. The first is that "comfort" is not necessarily what God has in mind for us. If the frequently-jailed first generation of Friends had used Brinton's model there would be no Religious Society of Friends to talk about (we'd be lost in the historical footnotes with the Muggletonians, Grindletonians and the like). One of the classic tests for discernment is whether an proposed action is contrary to self-will. Comfort is not our Society's calling.

The second problem is that comfortability comes from fitting in with a certain kind of style, class, color and attitude. It's fine to want comfort in our Meetings but when we make it the primary test for membership, it becomes a cloak for ethnic and cultural bigotries that keep us from reaching out. If you have advanced education, mild manners and liberal politics, you'll fit it at most East Coast Quaker meetings. If you're too loud or too ethnic or speak with a working class accent you'll likely feel out of place. Samuel Caldwell gave a great talk about the difference between Quaker culture and Quaker faith and I've proposed a tongue-in-cheek testimony against community as way of opening up discussion.

The Feel Good Testimonies

Friends for 300 Years also reinvented the Testimonies. They had been specific and often proscriptive: against gambling, against participation in war. But the new testimonies became vague feel-good character traits--the now-famous SPICE testimonies of simplicity, peace, integrity, community and equality. Who isn't in favor of all those values? A president taking us to war will tell us it's the right thing to do (integrity) to contruct lasting peace (peace) so we can bring freedom to an oppressed country (equality) and create a stronger sense of national pride (community) here at home.

We modern Friends (liberal ones at least) were really transformed by the redefintions of membership and the testimonies that took place mid-century. I find it sad that a lot of Friends think our current testimonies are the ancient ones. I think an awareness of how Friends handled these issues in the 300 years before Brinton would help us navigate a way out of the "ethical society" we have become by default.

The Source of our Testimonies

A quest for unity was behind the radical transformation of the testimonies. The main accomplishment of East Coast Quakerism in the mid-twentieth century was the reuniting of many of the yearly meetings that had been torn apart by schisms starting in 1827. By end of that century Friends were divided across a half dozen major theological strains manifested in a patchwork of institutional divisions. One way out of this morass was to present the testimonies as our core unifying priciples. But you can only do that if you divorce them from their source.

As Christians (even as post-Christians), our core commandment is simple: to love God with all our heart and to love our neighbor as ourselves:

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. Matthew 22:37-40 and Mark 12:30-31, Luke 10:27.

The Quaker testimonies also hang on these commandments: they are our collective memory. While they are in contant flux, they refer back to 350 years of experience. These are the truths we can testify to as a people, ways of living that we have learned from our direct experience of the Holy Spirit. They are intricately tied up with our faith and with how we see ourselves following through on our charge, our covenant with God.

I'm sure that Howard Brinton didn't intend to separate the testimonies from faith, but he chose his new catagories in such a way that they would appeal to a modern liberal audience. By popularizing them he made them so accessible that we think we know them already.

A Tale of Two Testimonies

Take the twin testimonies of plainness and simplicity. First the ancient testimony of plainness. Here's the description from 1682:

Advised, that all Friends, both old and young, keep out of the world's corrupt language, manners, vain and needless things and fashions, in apparel, buildings, and furniture of houses, some of which are immodest, indecent, and unbecoming. And that they avoid immoderation in the use of lawful things, which though innocent in themselves, may thereby become hurtful; also such kinds of stuffs, colours and dress, as are calculated more to please a vain and wanton mind, than for real usefulness; and let tradesmen and others, members of our religious society, be admonished, that they be not accessary to these evils; for we ought to take up our daily cross, minding the grace of God which brings salvation, and teaches to deny all ungodliness and worldly lusts, and to live soberly, righteously and godly, in this present world, that we may adorn the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ in all things; so may we feel his blessing, and be instrumental in his hand for the good of others.

Note that there's nothing in there about the length of one's hem. The key phrase for me is the warning about doing things "calculated to please a vain and wanton mind." Friends were being told that pride makes it harder to love God and our neighbors; immoderation makes it hard to hear God's still small voice; self-sacrifice is necessary to be an instrument of God's love. This testimony is all about our relationships with God and with each other.

Most modern Friends have dispensed with "plainness" and recast the testimony as "simplicity." Ask most Friends about this testimony and they'll start telling you about their cluttered desks and their annoyance with cellphones. Ask for a religious education program on simplicity and you'll almost certainly be assigned a book from the modern voluntary simplicity movement, one of those self-help manuals that promise inner peace if you plant a garden or buy a fuel-efficient car, with "God" absent from the index. While it's true that most Americans (and Friends) would have more time for spiritual refreshment if they uncluttered their lives, the secular notions of simplicity do not emanate out of a concern for "gospel order" or for a "right ordering" of our lives with God. Voluntary simplicity is great: I've published books on it and I live car-free, use cloth diapers, etc. But plainness is something different and it's that difference that we need to explore again.

Pick just about any of the so-called "SPICE" testimonies (simplicity, peace, integrity, community and equality) and you'll find the modern notions are secularlized over-simplications of the Quaker understandings. In our quest for unity, we've over-stated their importance.

Earlier I mentioned that many of the earlier testimonies were proscriptive--they said certain actions were not in accord with our principles. Take a big one: after many years of difficult ministering and soul searching Friends were able to say that slavery was a sin and that Friends who held slaves were kept from a deep communion with God; this is different than saying we believe in equality. Similarly, saying we're against all outward war is different than saying we're in favor of peace. While I know some Friends are proud of casting everything in postitive terms, sometimes we need to come out and say a particular practice is just plain wrong, that it interferes with and goes against our relationship with God and with our neighbors.

I'll leave it up to you to start chewing over what specific actions we might take a stand against. But know this: if our ministers and meetings found that a particular practice was against our testimonies, we could be sure that there would be some Friends engaged in it. We would have a long process of ministering with them and laboring with them. It would be hard. Feelings would be hurt. People would go away angry.

After a half-century of liberal individualism, it would be hard to once more affirm that there is something to Quakerism, that it does have norms and boundaries. We would need all the love, charity and patience we could muster. This work would is not easy, especially because it's work with members of our community, people we love and honor. We would have to follow John Woolman's example: our first audience would not be Washington policy makers instead Friends in our own Society.

Testimonies as Affirmation of the Power

In a world beset by war, greed, poverty and hatred, we do need to be able to talk about our values in secular terms. An ability to talk about pacifism with our non-Quaker neighbors in a smart, informed way is essential (thus my Nonviolence.org ministry, currently receiving two millions visitors a year). When we affirm community and equality we are witnessing to our faith. Friends should be proud of what we've contributed to the national and international discussions on these topics.

But for all of their contemporary centrality to Quakerism, the testimonies are only second-hand outward forms. They are not to be worshipped in and of themselves. Modern Friends come dangerously close to lifting up the peace testimony as a false idol--the principle we worship over everything else. When we get so good at arguing the practicality of pacifism, we forget that our testimony is first and foremost our proclamation that we live in the power that takes away occassion for war. When high school math teachers start arguing over arcane points of nuclear policy, playing armchair diplomat with yearly meeting press releases to the State Department, we loose credibility and become something of a joke. But when we minister to the Power is the Good News we speak with an authority that can thunder over petty governments with it's command to Quake before God.

When we remember the spiritual source of our faith, our understandings of the testimonies deepen immeasurably. When we let our actions flow from uncomplicated faith we gain a power and endurance that strengthens our witness. When we speak of our experience of the Holy Spirit, our words gain the authority as others recognize the echo of that "still small voice" speaking to their hearts. Our love and our witness are simple and universal, as is the good news we share: that to be fully human is to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul and mind and to love our neighbors as we do ourselves.

Halleluiah: praise be to God!

Reading elsewhere:

• James Healton has a great piece on the testimonies over on Quakerinfo.com. The One Testimony That Binds Them All Together talks about Christ's role in the testimonies. (Be sure to check out Quakerinfo's list of testimony resources.

As we got onto the campus of UMass Amherst to help set up for this year's FGC Gathering, Julie & I realized that this is the first time we've been to this venue since we started plain dressing (last year we stayed home since Julie was very pregnant). FGC Friends tend to turn to the Lands End catalog for sartorial inspiration. Hippie culture is another font, both directly as tie-die shirts and in muted form as the tasteful fair-trade clothes that many older Friends prefer. Because the Gathering takes place in July and in sporadically air-conditioned buildings, people also dress for summer camp--khaki shorts & once colorful faded t-shirts are the de facto Gathering uniform. In this setting, just wearing long pants is cause for comment ("aren't you hot like that?!") Try broadfalls and a long-sleeve collarless shirt, or a long dress!