vegan Posts

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.

Update: I'll be adding #qqtalk to tonight's live Twitter blog of the Presidential debate. If you have a Twitter account you can just follow me at "martin_kelley" and non-Twitter users can see all the qqtalk posts by going to this "qqtalk" page. And definitely check out the fascinating discussions happening in the comments of this post!

Wess of GatheringinLight just emailed me if we might designate a "qqtalk" tag for those of us QuakerQuaker regulars who are live-blogging tonight's presidential debate on Twitter.com. Interesting idea but I'm worried that it will be too partisan. I, for one, have not been live blogging the debates as a Friend.

I've taken a lot of care to keep QuakerQuaker culturally-neutral so that we keep the focus on the faith. I want it to be a place where people from different backgrounds and values will find common ground in their interest in the role of Quaker tradition in their lives. I'm a leftie East Coast Christian anarco-pacifist--vegan, bike rider, you get the picture, right?--and while I can argue that my values jibe with my understanding of Quaker faith, I would never want to presume that you have to adopt them to be a good Quaker.

Part of the problem with Quakerism in all of its forms is that we've mixed up the faith with the culture and sometimes don't know where one ends and the other begins. That's kind of natural but it's led to a situation where we're sometimes divided against one another over the wrong issues. We also use the words "Quaker" or "Friends" as a shortcut for a range of values and don't do the work explaining how the faith leads to the values.

So in the few hours we have till the debate, any ideas about whether to adopt a qqtalk tag? Drop them in the comments. Also, if you're a Quaker who's going to be live-twittering tonight, leave your twitter name below so people can see what we're doing on an individual level if they want.

I'll start off:

I'm at http://twitter.com/martin_kelley and have been using #debate08 for my debate coverage.

More back blogging from our Ohio trip, this photo from a vegan eatery a few miles off a rural Pennsylvania turnpike exit. Prices were steep and the homemade non-dairy ice cream servings small but we ate everything from our plates.

Photo: Vegan food & messy boy at Maggie's Mercantile off exit 91 of the Penna Turnpike, an hour or so east of Pittsburgh. Enlarged photo.

Someone who only knew Woolman from articles in popular Quaker periodicals might be forgiven for a moment of shock when opening his book. John Woolman is so much more religious than we usually acknowledge. We describe him as an activist even though he and his contemporaries clearly saw and named him a minister. There are many instances where he described the inhumanity of the slave trade and he clearly identified with the oppressed but he almost always did so with from a Biblical perspective. He acknowledged that religious faithfulness could exist outside his beloved Society of Friends but his life's work was calling Friends to live a profoundly Christian life. Flip to a random page of the journal and you'll probably count half a dozen metaphors for God. Yes, he was a social activist but he was also a deeply religious minister of the gospel.

So why do we wrap ourselves up in Woolman like he's the flag of proto-liberal Quakerism? In an culture where Quaker authority is deeply distrusted and appeals to the Bible or to Quaker history are routinely dismissed, he has become the last safe Friend to claim. His name is invoked as a sort of talisman against critique, as a rhetorical show-stopper. "If you don't agree with my take on the environment/tax resistance/universalism, you're the moral equivalent of Woolman's slave holders." (Before the emails start flooding in, remember I'm writing this as a dues-paying activist Quaker myself.) We don't need to agree with him to engage with him and learn from him. But we do need to be honest about what he believed and open to admitting when we disagree. We shouldn't use him simply as a stooge for our own agenda.

I like Woolman but I have my disagreements. His scrupulousness was over the top. My own personality tends toward a certain purity, exemplified by fifteen years of veganism, my plain dress, my being car-less into my late thirties. I've learned that I need to moderate this tendency. My purity can sometimes be a sign of an elitism that wants to separate myself from the world (I've learned to laugh at myself more). Asceticism can be a powerful spiritual lens but it can also burn a self- and world-hatred into us. I've had friends on the brink of suicide (literally) over this kind of scrupulousness. I worry when a new Friend finds my plain pages and is in broadfalls and bonnets a few weeks later, knowing from my own experience that the speed of their gusto sometimes rushes a discernment practice that needs to rest and settle before it is fully owned (the most personally challenging of the traditional tests of Quaker discernment is "patience").

John Woolman presents an awfully high bar for future generations. He reports refusing medicine when illness brought him to the brink of death, preferring to see fevers as signs of God's will. While that might have been the smarter course in an pre-hygienic era when doctors often did more harm than good, this Christian Scientist-like attitude is not one I can endorse. He sailed to England deep in the hold along with the cattle because he thought the woodwork unnecessarily pretty in the passenger cabins. While his famous wearing of un-dyed garments was rooted partly in the outrages of the manufacturing process, he talked much more eloquently about the inherent evil of wearing clothes that might hide stains, arguing that anyone who would try to hide stains on their clothes would be that much more likely to hide their internal spiritual stains (all I could think about when reading this was that he must have left child-rearing duties to the well-inclined Sarah).

Woolman proudly relates (in his famously humble style) how he once tried to shut down a traveling magic act that was scheduled to play at the local inn. I suspect that if any of us somehow found ourselves on his clearness committee we might find a way to tell him to... well, lighten up. I sympathize with his concerns against mindless entertainment but telling the good people of Mount Holly that they can't see a disappearing rabbit act because of his religious sensibilities is more Taliban than most of us would feel comfortable with.

He was a man of his times and that's okay. We can take him for what he is. We shouldn't dismiss any of his opinions too lightly for he really was a great religious and ethical figure. But we might think twice before enlisting the party pooper of Mount Holly for our cause.

Next time: The Myth of the Isolated Saint.

Reading John Woolman:

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

It seems that every day brings new revelations from mainstream media about governmental spying on Americans.

MS-NBC started the ball rolling on the 14th when they informed us that the Pentagon had a database of protesters including the Raging Grannies and a dozen or so Quakers in Florida. This must have prompted the New York Times to publish a story they had been sitting on for a year: the scoop that Bush had ordered the super-secret National Security Agency to start evesdropping on Americans following the 9/11 terror attacks. It's revelation was an FBI agent's email complaining about radical militant librarians [who] kick us around. Two days later we received the almost-humorous news that the Department of Homeland Security was hard at work monitoring the Massachusett's inter-library loan system [UPDATE: this has been revealed to be a hoax by the student]. Trying to outdo the DHS in ridiculous, we learned on the 20th that the FBI has been infiltrating vegan potlucks. Today it turns out the New York City Police Department has been doing its own extensive investigations into protesters. They even apparently staged mock arrests in an attempt to incite violence (their contribution to the self-parody has been to send officers undercover on bicycle protests).

Are we surprised by all this? Well, not really. The fears unleashed after 9/11 ignited a firestorm of paranoia in the ranks of spydom. Nonviolence.org got a call from the U.S. Secret Service when Osama bin Laden posted to the board that he wanted to kill President Bush (well, actually we're pretty certain it was a acne-faced fourteen year old procrastinating on his geometry homework). When I shot shot photos of a scuffle at a Biodemocracy protest a few months ago a Philadelphia police detective was in my office an hour later wanting to see it (the "melee" was harmless except for a policeman with heart conditions who took that moment to have a heart attack).

While some monitoring and prudence is indeed necessary, what ties together the string of stories this week is the randomness of the targets. It's as if the agencies had lost all sense of judgement. Anyone critical of the war (or even mainstream culture: witness the vegans) was considered a threat. All leads were investigated, no matter how silly.

While invading American's privacy is upsetting and unwarranted, the greatest danger is the sheer mass of irrelevant information that's been collected. What's an agency to do with reams of data on bicycle riders and Quakers? Who's watching the flight schools and fertilizer depots while Agent Nincompoop is trading hummus recipes with the cute vegan with the nosering?

In late January 2004, I went to a gathering on "Quaker Faith and Practice: The Witness of Our Lives and Words," co-sponsored by the Christian Friends Conference and the New Foundation Fellowship. Here are some thoughts about the meeting.