vain Posts

A few decades ago a little boy named Linus van Pelt sat in a pumpkin patch waiting in vain for the return of the Great Pumpkin (gotta love Wikipedia). Nowadays he might as well sit on his front stoop waiting for the trick-or-treaters. With the two hour "official" time almost at an end we've had only one lonely costumer come to our door. We ourselves went up and down the street (the last showing of the butterfly outfits) but only one in three houses opened their doors. Curiously, the most Halloween-decorated houses on the street were empty. Only one house with kids opened the door--it was grandma, who said her daughter had taken the granddaughter across town to a busy trick-or-treat street.

I used to live on Windsor Avenue, one of West Philly's best trick-or-treat streets, a magnet that drew ghosts, goblins and ballerinas from across that part of the city. It was a lot of fun. Over the years I developed a routine where I'd play a helpless victim on a spider web stretched with string across the back of the porch. I'd moan, "candy candy, give me some candy so I can go free." Eventually some brave little kid would inch up and give me candy, whereupon I'd scream "I'm free, now I can steal your candy, hahaha!" Little kid screams raised in alarm as I lunged at them. I often kept the candy and once counted over thirty pieces in my pockets by night's end! That was a lot of showings for the "candy!" routine, at at least one family of Ethiopian kids would yell out "Candy Man!! Candy Man!!" year-round whenever they'd see me.

When I moved to Jersey I decided I wanted to make this my home and that one way I'd do this is by celebrating Halloween here. A few of the people on my current, way-too-quiet street told me that this street used to be busy on Halloween night and I've heard enough anecdotal stories to think this is just how Halloween has evolved over the last few decades: carnivalesque magnet streets surrounded by miles of dark porch lights. It's kind of a shame, as this is really the only night of the year where I have a good reason to go up to my neighbor's doors and chat a few moments with them. Trick-or-treating is such an iconic small town American tradition and it's death is just another indicator of the way in which geographic locality has been replaced, for better or worse.

The tragedies were reflections not on the power of nature but on the power of our human disregard for one another.

When the ramparts of New Orleans burst and flooded its streets and homes, I was at a hospital preparing to welcome a child. As my partner and I celebrated new life we saw images of people trapped in attics, heard tales of loved ones swept away as they sought to protect their children. We watched other new parents and their vulnerable children caught without food, water or services in a city suddenly unable to operate.

The tragedies show our human disregard. The trapped were almost all African American. They were almost all poor. Stories on the news--shot-at helicopters, mass violence in the Convention center--reflected America's racist imagination more than reality. The levees failed because our political leaders ignored the recommendations of government engineers and scientists and slashed spending on storm protection. Even the hurricane itself was supercharged by a century of burning fossil fuels, our disregard for nature and our stonewalling over the reality of global warming.

A favorite image of pacifists comes from a line in the Book of Isaiah, that part in that talks about beating the swords into plowshares. But surrounding passages have been echoing in my ears lately. Like this one:

Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto me; the new moons and sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity, even the solemn meeting. Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hatest; they are a trouble unto me; I am weary to bear them.... Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings before mine eyes; cease to do evil. Learn to do well; seek judgement, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, please for the widow. Isaiah 1:13-17.

The righteous indigation that followed the images from New Orleans is fading. Life is returning to normal in Washington DC and the high costs of recovery (and the continuing costs of Bush's wars) will be shifted to the poor. We cannot stay silent to the vain oblations of our government. It is time to do well and protect the poor. It is time to relieve the oppressed and demand justice for the human decisions that led to broken levees.

This isn't all finger-pointing: we each need to seek a self-judgement about our American lifestyles that have fuelled global warming with its consumeristic disregard for consequences. We need to depend upon each other more, seek a community deeper and more interlaced than that offered by Walmart and McDonalds. We are all part of one another, part of the earth and brethren to our human family. We need to gather together as a people who know that government and consumerism alone can never address our society's deepest needs and that vain oblations alone will do nothing to put away the evil of our doings. We need to get angry and sing a song of change. We need more Isaiahs.

A guest piece from Rob of Consider the Lillies

Rob describes himself: "I’m a twenty-something gay Mid-western expatriate living in Boston. I was inspired to begin a blog based on the writings of other urban Quaker bloggers as they reflect and discuss their inward faith and outward experiences. When I’m not reading or writing, I’m usually with my friends, traveling about, and/or generally making an arse of myself."

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.

A guest piece by Amanda

Originally posted as a comment to "My Experiments with Plainness", Amanda's story deserves its own post: "I've noticed that I'm becoming really attached to my clothes. As I was grimly and methodically culling my closet, a whiny, desperate voice in my head piped up, and I began to have a serious conversation with myself... [A] reservation I have is that plain dressing may just be another way of telegraphing the image I want the world to have of me. Only instead of that message being 'I am cool and worthy of your attention and envy' the message might be 'I'm so hoooooly'."

Hi there!

I am 21, and the only member of my family who attends meetings of Friends. (I am not a Friend yet, being young to the whole experience, and an ex-catholic, and having wandered for several years in strange paths!! :) However, I am taking it very seriously, and reading all I can get my hands on. I feel a strong call towards plain dress, and have gone through fits and starts of it spontaneously, even as a Catholic child. At 12, I decided I would no longer wear colours in imitation of all the siants habits I saw in my books, and my friends and I (I grew up in rural Canada, homeschooled, the oldest of 11 kids, an anarchonism to begin with) tried sewing our own clothes ourselves, praire dresses and pinafores.

When I was 14, we moved to the States, to the suburbs, away from our uber-traditional Catholic enclave, and I began to normalize myself out of the "homeschooler uniform" (its own sort of plain dress - those terrible jumpers with ankle socks and canvas sneakers! Ack!) and into mainstream fashion, where I've been solidly entrenched ever since, especially since moving to NYC.

I am now in the process of purging a lot of my stuff, and seeking a simpler way of living. I quit smoking, and have decided that drinking as a recreational activity is out unless it's an organized event. This may become more strict in time, but I have to ease into it a little bit. I got rid of several bags of clothes and a bunch of household items I was hoarding "just in case I might need them someday". Classic. A lot of things have precipitated this, but one of them is my absolute horror at how I've gone from making $12,000 a year to nearly $30,000, and I still am saving no money at all, nor am I making any lasting purchase/investments, etc...I'm just spending it on vain and useless things. I've noticed as well, that I'm starting to have more and more big-salary fantasises, and recreationally go to stare in shop windows at clothes, not just to appreciate the asthetic value of some of the most gorgeous garments in the world (after all, this is Manhattan) but also to drool and covet. I found, while examining my concience, that it wasn't even the thing - the piece of clothing that I wanted, and it wasn't a simple desire to have something pretty. I saw myself linking these clothes and things to my self worth and future happiness. You know:

"Once I am thin and rich enough to wear this, I will be happy. I will be so happy. So very happy. Everything will be perfect, and my hair will always be straight, and I will have my teeth veneered, and I will have a handsome man who worships the ground I walk on, and three bright-eyed children who appear only on Sunday mornings to snuggle with me in my California-king-sized bed with the white crisp sheets, while I languidly smile at their frolicing and plan to buy them a golden retriever puppy later that afternoon as I stroll through an antique fair and buy a vintage wicker bird cage, which I will fill with finches and hang from my sun-drenched porch in my second house in the south of France, and I be happy. So happy. So very happy, if I am only thin and rich enough to wear those clothes."

I really, really woke up one afternoon to find myself standing on 5th Ave and 59th street, on my lunch break, staring in a window, and having that fantasy with absolutely no internal ironic monolouge at all. At all.

It completley panicked me.

I've noticied that I'm becoming really attatched to my clothes. As I was grimly and methodically culling my closet, a whiney, desperate voice in my head piped up, and I began to have a serious conversation with myself.

"You can't get rid of so many of your cool clothes. The clothes are you, they're a huge part of who you are."

"Wait," the other voice in my head, the stern one, said (I am a schizophrenic and so am I) "You are saying that I am what I wear. That's supposed to make me want to keep them? Do you even hear what you're saying?"

The first voice was totally backtracking.

"No, no, no, I didn't mean you were your clothes, or that you were only worth as much as your clothes, why do you always have to be so literal? I meant that your clothes tell people about you, about who you are and what you believe in. They're an outside sign of who you are."

"Ah." said the second voice, rather sarcastically, I thought, "So we'd rather have people learn everything they need to know about us by our clothes, instead of having them take the time to get to know us from experience of us."

"Well, that's all very well!" said the first voice. "That's nice in an ideal world. But the truth is, the sad truth is, most people won't take the time to get to know you if you don't seem cool."

"Wow." said the second voice. "Wow. This has nothing to do with fashion, does it? This totally has to do with your inferiority complex, dating back to about second grade, doesn't it?"

At this point the first voice began to suck its thumb, and I realized to my horror that the second voice was right. It's always right.

"Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are." ~Quentin Crisp

I've actually begun buying my personality in a store, and telling myself that it's okay because I'm buying it in a thrift store. I know from personal experience that the right headscarf or pair of vintage shoes, or funny t-shirt will suddenly raise the value of my social currency off the charts. And I'm becoming really dependent on that, to the point where I've started to actually feel anxiety around my "style" and my clothes. I ironically played the role of fashion police for a boy at a party who was mocking me for being from Williamsburg, and although I was kidding around when I excoriated him for his American-Eagle shorts and surfer-boy hair, it struck me, I'm spouting all these "rules" as if I'm mocking them, but I actually live by them, don't I?

And I've increasingly begun to obey them out of fear instead of out of a love of neat clothes or a sense of aesthetic. I have cooler clothes than ever, and sudenly I have a need to make more money so that I can keep looking cool, and keep fitting in, and keep proving to everyone, most of all myself, that I should be invited to Angelica's birthday party because the whole rest of the class is and it's not fair...oh wait. That was second grade.

Benjamin Franklin wrote: "Money never made a man happy yet, nor will it. There is nothing in its nature to produce happiness. The more a man has, the more he wants. Instead of its filling a vacuum, it makes one. If it satisfies one want, it doubles and trebles that want another way."

This seems like a huge cliche, but you know, the more I think about it, the more it seems that the modern horror of cliches may have less to do with a love of originality than with a fear of the truth.

So those are the motivations - that much is worked out. But the practice of it is hard. Was I experienceing a genuine calling to plain dress as a child, or did I just read too much "Little House"? (Is there such a thing as too much "Little House"?) And now, am I just a costume-loving poser?

I feel a bizarre attraction to head-covering as well, though I recoil with my whole post-feminist self from those passages in the bible. I don't think I believe in submission to anybody. In fact, I'm not sure even God wants me submissive -I feel he wants my co-operation.

"I will not now call you servants: for the servant knoweth not what his lord doth. But I have called you friends: because all things whatsoever I have heard of my Father, I have made known to you." John 15:15

Another reservation I have is that plain dressing may just be another way of telegraphing the image I want the world to have of me. Only instead of that message being "I am cool and worthy of your attention and envy" the message might be "I'm so hoooooly". Or, perhaps more positively, it might be a message that is "witness" - a concept I am struggling with on its own - what if I make mistakes and my witness is mistaken, etc.

My compromise was to get rid of all the clothes I'd bought just for attention, all the clothes I was keeping for purely sentimental reasons, everything that didn't fit, or match with anything else, etc. And to be honest, that just pared it down to where I can actually fit all my clothes in my 1 closet and dresser, a feat heretofore unknown to me. Also, a big part of this move was to start taking care of my clothes, something I've never done. I've made an active dicipline of something as simple as hanging up my clothes each night, as an act of respect and gratitude. It occured to me that when I am so fortunate as to have many posessions, it seems extremely wrong that I should mistreat them the way I've been doing.

Wow. Forget plain dress, plain speech is going to be an even bigger problem. I've written a novel.

* blush *

Anyhow, it is wonderful to see it discussed, sometimes I feel like I'm just nuts. I mean, I know I'm nuts, but I don't like feeling that way. :)

in friendship,
Amanda

Yet another group of Friends (doesn't matter which, it could be any) is planning a program on "community." They quote a snippet of a 1653 epistle on George Fox--you know the one about "Mind that which is eternal..." Fine enough, but there's so much more to the epistle that we would fear to quote, like:

We are redeemed by the only redeemer Christ Jesus, not with corruptible things, neither is our redemption of man, nor by man, nor according to the will of man, but contrary to man's will. And so, our unity and fellowship with vain man are lost, and all his evil ways are now turned into enmity; and all his profession is now found to be deceit, and in all his fairest pretences lodgeth cruelty; and the bottom and ground of all his knowledge of God and Christ is found sandy, and cannot endure the tempest.

Interesting ideas, but not ones most liberal Friends would like to tackle. It's a shame. I wish we would more more actively engage with our tradition and not just selectively edit out a few words which makes Fox sound like a seventeen century Thich Nhat Hanh. I think we can simultaneously wrestle with and challenge our tradition without having to either capitulate to it or abandon it.

After writing the above, I went for a neighborhood walk with baby asleep in the backpack. And I realized I hadn't explained why it matters to engage. I didn't quote the sentences about human willfullness to show that I'm more seventeenth century than thee, or to prove I can use the "C" word. No, I quote it because it's a rockin' quote. George Fox is mapping out for us twenty-first century Friends just how we might get out of the predicament of superficial "community" we've gotten ourselves into. Everyone from Walmart to Walgreen's, from Hillary Clinton to Oprah, is trying to sell us on some dream of community complete with a price tag from corporate America. Buy our products, our political party, our lifestyle and we'll give you the narcotic of consumer targeting. Wear the right right sneaker or drive the right car and you're part of the in-crowd.

But these communities built on the sand just dissolve in the tide and leave us more stranded than when we started. We poor humans are looking for ways to transcend the crappiness of our war- and consumer-obsessed world. Quakerism has something to say about that (more than ways to recycle plastic or stage a protest faux-blockade). We're tossing out the future when we throw away the past, just to live in our TVs. George's epistle mentions this too:

Let not hard words trouble you, nor fair speeches win you; but dwell in the power of truth, in the mighty God, and have salt in yourselves to savour all words, and to stand against all the wiles of the devil, in the mighty power of God.

(Quotes from Epistle 24, reprinted here.)