The academic obsession with Quaker history is about 100 years old or so. From the beginning the rise of “Quaker history” has been tied to the arguments of the day. We want to boil “Quakerism” down to it essentials and separate out what is core from what was an artifact of 17th century England. Each branch raises up historians who argue that its churches’ focus is the essential of those early Friends.
I consciously try not to use early Friends as justification. But I do use them for reference. I think a lot of the problem is we all have stereotypes about them. When I go back and read the old Books of Discipline, I find them much more nuanced and interior-focused than we give them credit for.
Greg mentioned taverns, for example. It’s not that earlier Friends thought everyone couldn’t handle their liquor. They saw that some people couldn’t and that spending a lot of time there tended to affect one’s discernment and God-centeredness. They also saw that some people got really messed up by alcohol and eventually came to the conclusion that the safest way to protect the most vulnerable in the spiritual community was to stay out.
The observations and logic are still valid. I’ve known senior members of past Quaker communities who have had alcohol problems but we don’t know how to talk about it because we’ve decided it’s a personal decision.
What I try to do is not focus on the conclusions of early Friends but to drop into the conversations of early Friends. As I said, the old Books of Discipline are surprisingly relevant. And I love Thomas Clarkson, an Anglican who explained Quaker ways in 1700 and talked about the sociology of it more than Friends themselves did. It’s a good way of separating out rules from knowledge. When we ground ourselves that way, we can more readily decide which of the classic Quaker testimonies are still relevant. That keeps us a living community testifying to the people of today. For what it’s worth, there’s quite a bit of mainstream interest in the stodgy traditions most of us have cast off as irrelevant.…
My workshop partner Wess Daniels just posted an update about the upcoming workshop at Pendle Hill. Here’s the start. Click through to the full post to get a taste of what we’re preparing.
Martin Kelley and I will be
leading a
weekend retreat at Pendle Hill in just a couple weeks (May 14 – 16)
and I’m starting to get really excited about it! Martin and I have been
collaborating a lot together over the past few months in preparation for
this weekend and I wanted to share a little more of what we have
planned for those of you who are interested in coming (or still on the
fence). During the weekend we will be encouraging conversations around
building communities, convergent Friends and how this looks in our local
meetings. I wanted to give the description of the weekend, some of the
queries we’ll be touching on, and the outline for the weekend. And of
course, I want to invite all of you interested parties to join us!
One of the blueprints for Quaker community is the “Epistle from the Elders at Balby” written in 1656 at the very infancy of the Friends movement by a gathering of leaders from Yorkshire and North Midlands, England.
It’s the precursor to Faith and Practice, as it outlines the relationship between individuals and the meeting. If remembered at all today, it’s for its postscript, a paraphrase of 2 Corinthians that warns readers not to treat this as a form to worship and to remain living in the light which is pure and holy. That postscript now starts off most liberal Quaker books of Faith and Practice.
But the Epistle itself is well worth dusting off. It addresses worship, ministry, marriage, and how to deal in meekness and love with those walking “disorderly.” It talks of how to support families and take care of members who were imprisoned or in need. Some of it’s language is a little stilted and there’s some talk of the role of servants that most modern Friend would object to. But overall, it’s a remarkably lucid, practical and relevant document. It’s also short: just over two pages.
One of the things I hear again and again from Friends is the desire for a deeper community of faith. Younger Friends are especially drawn toward the so-called “New Monastic” movement of tight communal living. The Balby Epistle is a glimpse into how an earlier generation of Friends addressed some of these same concerns.
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. 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 fuller lives than the average couple.
George in 2002, from War Resisters International
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 Gumps of peace activists — at the center of every cool peace witness since 1950. You squint to look at the photos and 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 Willoughbys 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, an act which spawned 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 Willoughbys!
The Golden Rule, 1959, from the Swarthmore Peace Collection.
For many years I lived deeply embedded in communities co-founded by the Willoughbys. There’s a recent interview with George Lakey about the founding of Movement for a New Society that he and they helped create. In the 1990s I liked to say how I lived “in its ruins,” working at its publishing house, living in one of its land-trusted houses, and getting my food from the coop, all institutions that grew out of MNS. I got to know the Willoughbys through Central Philadelphia meeting but also as friends. It was a treat to visit their house in Deptford, N.J. — it adjoined a wildlife sanctuary they helped protect against the strip-mall sprawl that is the rest of that town. I last saw George a few months ago, and while he had a bit of trouble remembering who I was, that irrepressible smile and spirit were very strong!
When news of George’s passing started buzzing around the net I got a nice email from Howard Clark, who’s been very involved with War Resisters International for many years. It was a real blast-from-the-past and reminded me how little I’m involved with all this these days. The Philadelphia office of New Society Publishers went under in 1995 and a few years ago I finally dropped the Nonviolence.org project that I had started to keep the organizing going.
George at Fort Gulick in Panama (undated), also from Swarthmore.
I’ve written before that one of the closest modern-day successor to the Movement for a New Society is the so-called New Monastic movement – explicitly Christian but focused on love and charity and often very Quaker’ish. Our culture of secular Quakerism has kept Friends from getting involved and sharing our decades of experience. Now that Shane Claiborne is being invited to seemingly every liberal Quaker venue, maybe it’s a good opportunity to look back on our own legacy. Friends like George and Lillian helped invent this form.
I miss the strong sense of community I once felt. Is there a way we can combine MNS & the “New Monastic” movement into something explicitly religious and public that might help spread the good news of the Inward Christ and inspire a new wave of lefty peacenik activism more in line with Jesus’ teachings than the xenophobic crap that gets spewed by so many “Christian” activists? With that, another plug for the workshop Wess Daniels and I are doing in May at Pendle Hill: “New Monastics and Covergent Friends.” If money’s a problem there’s still time to ask your meeting to help get you there. If that doesn’t work or distance is a problem, I’m sure we’ll be talking about it more here in the comments and blogs.
Had a good time with Philadelphia Yearly Meeting high school Friends yesterday, two mini-session on the testimonies in the middle of their end-of-summer gathering. The second session was an attempt at a write-your-own testimonies exercise, fueled by my testimonies-as-wiki idea and grounded by passages from an 1843 Book of Discipline and Thomas Clarkson’s “Portraiture”. My hope was that by reverse-engineering the old testimonies we might get an appreciation for their spiritual focus. The exercise needs a bit of tweaking but I’ll try to fix it up and write it out in case others want to try it with local Friends.
The invite came when the program coordinator googled “quaker testimonies” and found the video below (loose transcript is here):
Earlier today I posted an excerpt of an interesting article on Anabaptism on my Tumblr blog and it’s engendered quite a conversation on Facebook about testimonies and empty forms, etc. It’s true that any form of spiritual discipline can get twisted into look-at-me heroism or lets-talk-anything-but-God group conformity.
The answer isn’t to give up testimonies or to hold onto them even tighter, but instead to constantly remind ourselves about their purpose: to learn how to live as an attentive people of God. Here’s what I wrote on Facebook:
I’ve been a mostly bicycle-riding vegan for decades, an outspoken pacifist and a frequent plain dresser. All of these practices have aided my spiritual growth but also have unearthed new sources of pride for me to wrestle with. The self-examination has been practice in discernment.
I often think back to the story of the Good Samaritan. What mattered wasn’t how he was dressed or whether he was riding a bicycle. No, what mattered is that he knew enough to know he was being called to sacrifice something: to get covered in a strangers blood, to aid someone who might resent him for it, to lose money he had earned to put someone up for the night. Maybe he had practiced this discernment of self-sacrifice by living a testimony that had challenged him to navigate between loss and pride, and maybe he had been brought up in a community where the value of love was prized above all. The important thing is he knew to stop and be a true neighbor.
My solution: Quakers, Mennonites, Brethren, and whomever else wants to participate refuses to pay war taxes for a few years, and we suffer the consequences. I think we should campaign for a war-tax-free 2010 in all Quaker meetings and Mennonite/Brethren/etc. communities. What are they going to do – throw us all in jail? Maybe. But they can’t do that forever. No one wants to pay their taxes for a bunch of Quakers and other pacifists to sit in jail for not paying taxes. It doesn’t make sense.
A commenter chimes in with a warning about Friends who were hit by heavy tax penalties a quarter century ago. But I know of someone who didn’t pay taxes for twenty years and recently volunteered the information to the Internal Revenue Service. The collectors were nonchalant, polite and sympathetic and settled for a very reasonable amount. If this friend’s experience is any guide, there’s not much drama to be had in war tax resistance. These days, Caesar doesn’t care much.
What if our witness was directed not at the federal government but at our fellow Christians? We could follow Quaker founder George Fox’s example and climb the tallest tree we could find (real or metaphorical) and begin preaching the good news that war goes against the teachings of Jesus. As always, we would be respectful and charitable but we could reclaim the strong and clear voices of those who have traveled before us. If we felt the need for backup? Well, I understand there are twenty-seven or so books to the New Testament sympathetic to our cause. And I have every reason to believe that the Inward Christ is still humming our tune and burning bushes for all who have eyes to see and ears to listen. Just as John Woolman ministered with his co-religionists about the sin of slavery, maybe our job is to minister to our co-religionists about war.
But who are these co-religionist neighbors of ours? Twenty years of peace organizing and Friends organizing makes me doubt we could find any large group of “historic peace church” members to join us. We talk big and write pretty epistles, but few individuals engage in witnesses that involve any danger of real sacrifice. The way most of our established bodies couldn’t figure out how to respond to a modern day prophetic Christian witness in Tom Fox’s kidnapping is the norm. When the IRS threatened to put liens on Philadelphia Yearly Meeting to force resistant staffers to pay, the general secretary and clerk said all sorts of sympathetic words of anguish (which they probably even meant), then docked the employee’s pay anyway. There have been times when clear-eyed Christians didn’t mind loosing their liberty or property in service to the gospel. Early Friends called our emulation of Christ’s sacrifice the Lamb’s War, but even seven years of real war in the ancient land of Babylonia itself hasn’t brought back the old fire. Our meetinghouses sit quaint, with ownership deeds untouched, even as we wring our hands wondering why most remain half-empty on First Day morning.
But what about these emerging church kids?: all those people reading Shane Claiborne, moving to neighborhoods in need, organizing into small cells to talk late into the night about primitive Christianity? Some of them are actually putting down their candles and pretentious jargon long enough to read those twenty-seven books. Friends have a lot of accumulated wisdom about what it means the primitive Christian life, even if we’re pretty rusty on its actual practice. What shape would that witness take and who would join us into that unknown but familiar desert? What would our movement even be called? And does it matter?
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.
My workshop partner 
