Tag Archives: use

Jan 05

Introducing Gregory Kelley Heiland

Posted on by

Bothering babies to make them make cute faces is fun!

On Tues­day, Dec 28 my lovely wife Julie gave birth to our third son. After some dither­ing back and forth (we’re method­i­cal about baby names) we picked Gre­gory. Every­one is happy and healthy. Vital stats: 20 inches, 7 pounds 9 oz. The broth­ers are adjust­ing well, though Theo’s first response to my phone call telling him it was a boy was “oh no, another one of those.”

Francis is now also a big brother! Proud brother

That’s 5yo Fran­cis (aka “lit­tle big brother”) and 7yo Theo (“big big brother”) meet­ing their new sib­ling at the hos­pi­tal. More pics in the Gre­gory! and Gre­gory in the Hos­pi­tal sets on Flickr.

As you can see, we’ve basi­cally bred triplets spaced over three years apart. As fur­ther evi­dence, here’s Theo and Fran­cis in their first pics (links to their announce­ment posts):
Brotherly love

As I men­tioned, we’re method­i­cal about names. When we were faced with Baby #2 I put together the “Fallen Baby Names Chart”–classic names that had fallen out of trendy use. It’s based on the cur­rent rank­ing of the top names of 1900. “Gre­gory” doesn’t appear on our chart because it was almost unused until a sud­den appear­ance in the mid-1940s (see chart, right). Yes, that would be the time when a hand­some young actor named Gre­gory Peck became famous. It peaked in 1962, the year of Peck’s Acad­emy Award for To Kill a Mock­ing­bird and has been drop­ping rapidly ever since. Last year less than one in a thou­sand new­born boys were Gregory’s. While we rec­og­nize Peck’s influ­ence in the name’s Twen­ti­eth Cen­tury pop­u­lar­ity, Julie is think­ing more of Gre­gory of Nyssa [edited, I orig­i­nally linked to another early Gre­gory]. Peck’s par­ents were Catholic (pater­nal rel­a­tives helped lead the Irish Easter Ris­ing) and were pre­sum­ably think­ing of the Catholic saint when they gave him Gre­gory for a mid­dle name (he dropped his first name Eldred for the movies).

Nov 28

Another Quaker bookstore bites the dust

Posted on by

Not really news, but Friends United Meet­ing recently ded­i­cated their new Wel­come Cen­ter in what was once the FUM bookstore:

On Sep­tem­ber 15, 2007, FUM ded­i­cated the space once used as the Quaker Hill Book­store as the new FUM Wel­come Cen­ter. The Wel­come Cen­ter con­tains Quaker books and resources for F/friends to stop by and make use of dur­ing busi­ness hours. Tables and chairs to com­fort­ably accom­mo­date 50 peo­ple make this a great space to rent for reunions, church groups, meet­ings, anniversary/birthday par­ties, etc. Reduced prices are avail­able for churches.

Most Quaker pub­lish­ers and book­sellers have closed or been greatly reduced over the last ten years. Great changes have occurred in the Philadelphia-area Pen­dle Hill book­store and pub­lish­ing oper­a­tion, the AFSC Book­store in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, Bar­clay Press in Ore­gon. The ver­i­ta­ble Friends Book­shop in Lon­don farmed out its mail order busi­ness a few years ago and has seen part of its space taken over by a cof­fee­bar: pop­u­lar and cool I’m sure, but does Lon­don really needs another place to buy cof­fee? Rumor has it that Britain’s pub­li­ca­tions com­mit­tee has been laid down. The offi­cial spin is usu­ally that the work con­tin­ues in a dif­fer­ent form but only Bar­clay Press has been reborn as some­thing really cool. One of the few remain­ing book­sellers is my old pals at FGC’s Quaker­Books: still sell­ing good books but I’m wor­ried that so much of Quaker pub­lish­ing is now in one bas­ket and I’d be more con­fi­dent if their web­site showed more signs of activity.

The boards mak­ing these deci­sions to scale back or close are prob­a­bly unaware that they’re part
of a larger trend. They prob­a­bly think they’re respond­ing to unique sit­u­a­tions (the peer group Quak­ers Unit­ing in Pub­li­ca­tions sends inter­nal emails around but hasn’t done much to pub­li­cize this story out­side of its mem­ber­ship). It’s sad to see that so many Quaker decision-making bod­ies have inde­pen­dently decided that pub­lish­ing is not an essen­tial part of their mission.

Jan 01

The Quaker Peace Testimony: Living in the Power, Reclaiming the Source

Posted on by

The Quaker Peace Tes­ti­mony is one of the pop­u­larly well-known out­ward expres­sions of Quaker faith. But have we for­got­ten its source?

In a meet­ing for wor­ship I attended a few years ago a woman rose and spoke about her work for peace. She told us of let­ters writ­ten and meet­ings attended; she cer­tainly kept busy. She con­fessed that it is tir­ing work and she cer­tainly sounded tired and put-upon. But she said she’d keep at it and she quoted early Friends’ man­date to us: that we must work to take away the occa­sion of war.

Read con­tem­po­rary Friends lit­er­a­ture and you’ll see this imper­a­tive all over the place. From one brochure: “We are called as Friends to lead lives that ‘take away the occa­sion of all wars.’ ” Yet this state­ment, like many con­tem­po­rary state­ments on Quaker tes­ti­monies, is taken out of con­text. The actor has been switched and the mes­sage has been lost. For the peace tes­ti­mony doesn’t instruct us to take away occasions.

The Quaker Peace Tes­ti­mony: Liv­ing in the Power

The clas­sic state­ment of the Quaker peace tes­ti­mony is the 1660 Dec­la­ra­tion. Eng­land was embroiled in war and insur­rec­tion. A failed polit­i­cal coup was blamed on Quak­ers and it looked like Friends were going to be per­se­cuted once more by the civil author­i­ties. But Friends weren’t inter­ested in the polit­i­cal process swirling around them. They weren’t tak­ing sides in the coups. “I lived in the virtue of that life and power that took away the occa­sion of all wars,” George Fox had told civil author­i­ties ten years before and the sign­ers of the dec­la­ra­tion elab­o­rated why they could not fight: “we do earnestly desire and wait, that by the Word of God’s power and its effec­tual oper­a­tion in the hearts of men, the king­doms of this world may become the king­doms of the Lord.”

For all of the over-intellectualism within Quak­erism today, it’s a sur­prise that these state­ments are so rarely parsed down. Look at Fox’s state­ment: many mod­ern activists could agree we should take away occas­sion for war, cer­tainly, but it’s a sub­or­di­nate clause. It is not refer­ring to the “we,” but instead mod­i­fies “power.” Our instruc­tions are to live in that power. It is that power that does the work of tak­ing away war’s occasion.

I’m not quib­bling but get­ting to the very heart of the clas­sic under­stand­ing of peace. It is a “tes­ti­mony,” in that we are “tes­ti­fy­ing” to a larger truth. We are acknowl­edg­ing some­thing: that there is a Power (let’s start cap­i­tal­iz­ing it) that takes away the need for war. It is that Power that has made peace pos­si­ble and that Power that has already acted and con­tin­ues to act in our world. The job has actu­ally been done. The occa­sion for war has been ended. Our rela­tion­ship to this Power is sim­ply to live in it. Around the time of the Dec­la­ra­tion, George Fox wrote a let­ter to Lord Pro­tec­tor Oliver Cromwell :

The next morn­ing I was moved of the Lord to write a paper to the Pro­tec­tor, Oliver Cromwell; wherein I did, in the pres­ence of the Lord God, declare that I denied the wear­ing or draw­ing of a car­nal sword, or any other out­ward weapon, against him or any man; and that I was sent of God to stand a wit­ness against all vio­lence, and against the works of dark­ness; and to turn peo­ple from dark­ness to light; and to bring them from the causes of war and fight­ing, to the peace­able gospel.

The peace tes­ti­mony is actu­ally a state­ment of faith. Not sur­pris­ing really, or it shouldn’t be. Early Friends were all about shout­ing out the truth. “Christ has come to teach the peo­ple him­self” was a early tagline. It’s no won­der that they stretched it out to say that Christ has taken away occa­sion for war. Hal­lelu­jiah!, I can hear them shout. Let the cel­e­bra­tion begin. I always hear John Lennon echo­ing these cel­e­brants when he sings “War is over” and fol­lows with “if we want it.”

Obvi­ously war isn’t over. Peo­ple must still want it. And they do. War is rooted in lusts, James 4:1–3 tells us. Mod­ern Amer­i­can greed for mate­r­ial things with ever more rapac­ity and blind­ness. We drive our S.U.V.s and then fight for oil sup­plies in the Per­sian Gulf. We worry that we won’t be pop­u­lar or loved if we don’t use teeth-whitening strips or don’t obsess over the lat­est T.V. fad. We aren’t liv­ing in the Power and the Deceiver con­vinces us that war is peace.

But the Power is there. We can live in that Power and it will take away more than occa­sions for war, for it will take away the lusts and inse­cu­ri­ties that lead to war.

Speak­ing Faith to Power

When you’ve acknowl­edge the Power, what does faith become? It becomes a tes­ti­mony to the world. I can tes­tify to you per­son­ally that there is a Power and that this Power will com­fort you, teach you, guide you. Early Friends were pros­e­lytis­ing when they wrote their state­ment. After writ­ing his let­ter to Cromwell, Fox went to visit the man him­self. Cromwell was undoubt­edly the most pow­er­ful man in Eng­land and any­thing but a paci­fist. He had raised and led armies against the king and it was he who ordered the behead­ing of King Charles I. And what did Fox talk about? Truth. And Jesus.

George Fox stood as a wit­ness just as he promised, and tried to turn Cromwell from dark­ness to light, to bring him from the cause of war to the peace­able gospel. By Fox’s account, it almost worked:

As I was turn­ing, he caught me by the hand, and with tears in his eyes said, “Come again to my house; for if thou and I were but an hour of a day together, we should be nearer one to the other”; adding that he wished me no more ill than he did to his own soul. I told him if he did he wronged his own soul; and admon­ished him to hear­ken to God’s voice, that he might stand in his coun­sel, and obey it; and if he did so, that would keep him from hard­ness of heart; but if he did not hear God’s voice, his heart would be hard­ened. He said it was true.

This then is the Quaker Peace Tes­ti­mony. I don’t think it can be divorced from its spir­i­tual basis. In the twen­ti­eth cen­tury, many lead­ing Friends tried to dilute the Quaker mes­sage to make it more under­stand­able and palat­able for non-Friends. A line of George Fox was taken out of con­text and used so much that most Friends have adopted “that of God in every­one” as a uni­fied creed, for­get­ting that it’s a mod­ern phrase whose ambi­gu­ity Fox wouldn’t have appre­ci­ated. When we talk about peace, we often do so in very sec­u­lar­ized lan­guage. We’re still try­ing to pros­e­ly­tize, but our mes­sage is a ratio­nal­ist one that war can be solved by tech­no­cratic means and a more demo­c­ra­tic appor­tion­ment of resources. Most con­tem­po­rary state­ments have all the umph of a floor speech at the Demo­c­ra­tic National Con­ven­tion, with only throw-away ref­er­ences to “com­mu­ni­ties of faith,” and bland state­ments of “that of God” hint­ing that there might be some­thing more to our message.

The free­dom of liv­ing the Power

We actu­ally share much of the peace tes­ti­mony with a num­ber of Chris­tians. There are many Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians who read­ily agree that there’s a Power but con­clude that their job is just to wait for its return. They define the power strictly as Jesus Christ and the return as the Sec­ond Com­ing. They fore­see a worldly Armaged­don when peace will fail and thou­sands will die.

That’s not our way. Friends pulled Chris­tian­ity out of the first cen­tury and refused to wait for any last cen­tury to declare that Jesus is here now, “to teach his peo­ple him­self.” We keep con­stant vigil and rejoice to find the returned Christ already here, deep in our hearts, at work in the world. Our way of work­ing for peace is to praise the Power, wait for its guid­ance and then fol­low it’s com­mands through what­ever hard­ship await us. When we’re doing it right, we become instru­ments of God in the ser­vice of the Spirit. Christ does use us to take away the occa­sions for war!

But the wait­ing is nec­es­sary, the guid­ance is key. It gives us the strength to over­come over­work and burn-out and it gives us the direc­tion for our work. The slick­est, most expen­sive peace cam­paigns and the most dra­matic self-inflating actions often achieve much less than the sim­ple, hum­ble, behind-the-scenes, year-in, year-out ser­vice. I sus­pect that the ways we’re most used by the Spirit are ways we barely perceive.

Quaker min­istry is not a pas­sive wait­ing. We pray, we test, we work hard and we use all the gifts our Cre­ator has given us (intel­li­gence, tech­nolo­gies, etc.). There are prob­lems in the world, huge ones that need address­ing and we will address them. But we do so out of a joy. And through our work, we ask oth­ers to join us in our joy, to lift up the cross with us, join­ing Jesus metaphor­i­cally in wit­ness­ing to the world.

The modern-day Pres­i­dent order­ing a war suf­fers from the same lack of faith that George Fox’s Cromwell did. They are igno­rant or impa­tient of Christ’s mes­sage and so take peace-making into their own hands. But how much do faith­less politi­cians dif­fer from many con­tem­po­rary peace activists? When I block­ade a fed­eral build­ing or stand in front of a tank, am I try­ing to stop war myself? When I say it’s my job to “end the occa­sion for war,” am I tak­ing on the work of God? I feel sad for the woman who rose in Meet­ing for Wor­ship and told us how hard her peace work is. Each of us alone is inca­pable of bring­ing on world peace, and we turn in our own tracks with a quiet dis­pair. I’ve seen so many Quaker peace activists do really poor jobs with such a over­whelmed sense of sad­ness that they don’t get much sup­port. Detached from the Spirit, we look to gain our self-worth from oth­ers and we start doing things sim­ply to impress our worldly peers. If we’re lucky we get money but not love, respect but not a new voice lifted up in the choir of praise for the Cre­ator. We’ve given up hope in God’s promise and despair is our ever-present companion.

Our tes­ti­mony to the world

It doesn’t need to be this way. And I think for many Friends it hasn’t been. When you work for the Power, you don’t get attached to your work’s out­come in the same way. We’re just foot­sol­diers for the Lord. Often we’ll do things and have no idea how they’ve affected oth­ers. It’s not our job to know, for it’s not our job to be sucess­ful as defined by the world. Maybe all the work I’ve ever done for peace is for some exchange of ideas that I won’t rec­og­nize at the time. We need to strive to be gra­cious and grounded even in the midst of all the undra­matic moments (as well as those most dra­matic moments). We will be known to the world by how we wit­ness our trust in God and by how faith­fully we live our lives in obe­di­ence to the Spirit’s instructions.

Related Read­ing

Again, the link to the 1660 Dec­la­ra­tion is the first stop for those want­ing to under­stand Friends’ under­stand­ing on peacemaking.

Quaker His­to­rian Jerry Frost talked about the peace tes­ti­mony as part of his his­tory of twen­ti­eth cen­tury Quak­erism (“Non-violence seemed almost a panacea for lib­eral Friends seek­ing polit­i­cally and socially rel­e­vant peace work”). Bill Samuel has writ­ten a his­tory of the peace tes­ti­mony with a good list of links. Lloyd Lee Wil­son wrote about being a “Chris­t­ian Paci­fist” in the April 2003 edi­tion of Quaker Life.

If wars are indeed rooted in lust, then non­vi­o­lent activism should be involved in exam­i­nat­ing those lusts. In The Roots of Non­vi­o­lence (writ­ten for Non​vi​o​lence​.org), I talk a lit­tle about how activists might relate to the deeper causes of the war to tran­scend the “anti-war” move­ment. One way I’ve been explor­ing anti-consumerism in with my re-examination of the Quaker tra­di­tion of plain dress.

For rea­sons I can’t under­stand, peo­ple some­times read “Liv­ing in the Power: the Quaker Peace Tes­ti­mony Reclaimed” and think I’m “advo­cat­ing a retreat from directly engag­ing the prob­lems of the world” (as one Friend put it). I ask those who think I’m posit­ing some sort of either/or dual­ity betwen faith vs. works, or min­istry vs. activism, to please reread the essay. I have been a peace activist for over fif­teen years and run non​vi​o​lence​.org [update: ran, I laid it down in 2008), a promi­nent web­site on non­vi­o­lence. I think some of the mis­un­der­stand­ings are generational.

Oct 15

Quaker Testimonies

Posted on by

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 a newly-minted class of lib­eral 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 Non​vi​o​lence​.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: