If you cycle through my last few months of comments, you’ll see that I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about who “we” Friends are and who we serve and the consequent question of why we organize into local meetings, national affiliations, blogs, etc.
Essential to this thinking has been Jeanne B’s Social Class and Quakers blog. There are many ways to tease out the way culture and faith work to reinforce and sabotage one another, but class is a good one. If you travel from one theological brand of Friends to another, from one cultural zone to another (e.g, urban vs ex-urban vs rural) you’ll see marked culture differences. Just take a look at the potluck array if you doubt me. Jeanne talks about the urban liberal Quaker stigma against Cool Whip and a great link she turned me on to talks about some of the ways the alterna-lefty culture can unwittingly separate itself from potential allies in social change over tofu (update: more recent work from this organization can be found at classism.org).
Since falling out of the rarefied world of professional Quakerism a year ago, I’ve become more local. I live in a small, largely agricultural town in rural South Jersey roughly equidistant from the region’s skyscraper metropoli (I don’t give its name for privacy reasons) and residents range from multi-generational families to Mexican farmworkers to people who got in trouble up north in NYC and are looking for a quieter place to come clean. I don’t see Quakers in my day-to-day life anymore but I do interact with a more representative sampling of America, people who are all trying to get somewhere other than where they are. Jesus would have been here. Fox would have preached here. But what do modern liberal Friends have to say about this world? As Bill Samuel wrote on Jeanne’s blog issues of safety-net public assistance that seem like do-gooder causes for most well-off liberal Friends are matters of personal practicality for more economically diverse religious bodies (the child care program that President Bush vetoed last month is the same one that let me take my fevered two year old to the doctor last Friday).
Last First Day I heard a good orthodox piece of Quaker ministry couched in a learned language, all talk of justification versus sanctification, with a bit of insider Quaker acronyms thrown in for good effect. I love the fellow who gave the message and I appreciated his ministry. But the whole time I wondered how this would sound to people I know now, like the friendly but hot-tempered Puerto Rican ex-con less than a year out of a eight-year stint in federal prison, now working two eight hour shifts at almost-minimum wage jobs and trying to stay out of trouble. How does the theory of our theology fit into a code of conduct that doesn’t start off assuming middle class norms. What do our tofu covered dishes and vanilla soy chai’s (I’m so addicted) have to do with living under Christ’s instruction? And just which FGC outreach pamphlet should I be handing my new friend?
Enough for now. More soon.
I think the best thing to give this new friend is what we’d extend to any new friend – your own hand, in welcome. I’m sure that’s what came first to you, of course; I’m not being flip. But I think that five minutes of warm and welcoming conversation, answering questions as they arise, is worth any number of pamphlets…
Probably that’s part of the secret of Pagan “evangelical” success. (If success is measured by numbers, then the Pagan movement is wildly successful; our growth in the last twenty years has been mind-boggling – though that’s not actually an unmixed good.) Though there are an awful lot of popular titles out there – not to mention websites, listserves, and blogs – the real entry is person to person, and all real religious education is either self-directed or in the context of intimate social connections. I think that helps communicate the spirit, the real substance, of the religious practice.
Just my thoughts…
I have a very practical suggestion. Check out the Southern State worship group down near Cape May. The person you need to ask is William Geary who is a member of a meeting down in Cape May. Bill attends our yearly meeting annually with letters from the prisoners who are currently in the worship group at Southern State prison.
MaryM
Martin,
Assuming for the moment that there isn’t a good pamphlet, I’m wondering what one would look like if you wrote it. And beyond that, suppose you did have a pamphlet that was more focused on living under Christ’s instruction, is there a meeting that would give your friend the support he would need? Once the seed is planted, we need someone to water it.
Also, Bill Geary of Mullica Hill Friends Meeting (PYM) facilitates Southern State Worship Group in a prison (I think it is in NJ), he might be a good resource in talking to your friend about Friends. I don’t have any contact info for him, unfortunately, but you might be able to get it from the clerk of NCYM‑C. Also, minutes of the NCYM‑C 2007 have a letter from Southern State worship group, as do the older minutes.
With love,
Mark
Maybe I’m not explaining myself well. I don’t particularly want to get involved in prison ministry. I threw out a quick sketch to show you how different some of the people I’ve gotten to know are from the Quaker mainstream. This particular guy once asked if I was Christian (“yes of course,” “good”) so I’ve wondered about brining up religion in some of his more hot-tempered moments.
There’s lots of stories I could give, and the common thread isn’t prison (though that’s not uncommon) but hard, unrewarding work where breaks don’t come easy and lapses in judgment can mix with temper and bitterness to tragic effect. These aren’t just my neighbors but yours, wherever you live, this is the life of much of America that’s invisibly right under our nose in a thousand check-out lines and all-night gas stations. It’s the Beat class of Americans that Kerouac was originally trying to talk about in much of his writing before the term became trendy. And then there’s Jesus, who certainly didn’t hang with all the goody two-shoes in the temple.
FYI: Much of rural deep South Jersey’s economy is prison-based: the state builds prisoners for Newark and Camden in the southern-most counties. My next door neighbor commutes to one of the prisons. I’ve met Bill Geary and it might be fruitful to talk with him about how he talks Quaker. But again, my interest is not the prison population itself. I should say I also have a lot of “What Would Peggy Say” moments!
PS: it feels so pretentious to even write this. Ack.
Martin,
I didn’t think you were trying to get engaged in prison ministry (if you were I’d point you to PVS), but I did think that Bill might be able to provide some insight as to how prisoners approach and respond to Quakerism, so I agree with you that it might be fruitful. Reading the letters from the worship group might also give a sense of where they are — which seems to me to be very Christ-centered, and steeped in the bible. That sense might help determine what might go into a pamphlet for outreach to people like your friend. Or rather, it might help weed out some of the “middle class values”.
With love,
Mark
Why do you have to choose which pamphlet to give him? What’s your motivation/agenda? And should you even have one? Do you think Jesus would have given someone a pamphlet?
What does your friend want? I think the answer is right there.
I think you’ve written about the answer before — it’s not to hand people a pamphlet and then wash your hands. It’s to say, “would you like to have lunch with me and my family?”
It’s to remind everyone, frequently, out loud, that Christ has come to teach his[sic] people himself — that George Fox, one of the first Quakers even said that you don’t have to go to college to become a minister, you have to listen to the Word of God that is already written on your heart. Anybody who’s trying to stay out of trouble is hearing that voice. How can we help them to listen to it?
It’s to be willing to speak in the first person about the choices we make. And to include the mistakes we make.
And those of us with this concern have to hang in there, to be at meeting when folks are brave enough to visit, and to think about ways of doing outreach that include the bulletin board at the pak-n-save grocery store not just the health foods store.
To start with.
Allison wrote: Do you think Jesus would have given someone a pamphlet?
That is an interesting question to ponder. In his time, information was conveyed to the masses by word of mouth. Teaching in parables and “pithy sayings” is, in a way, like giving someone a pamphlet, in that it is something they can take home and remember, and even tell to other people. I don’t think a pamphlet is a substitute for face-to-face interaction — we are a faith community after all, not a book club. There are numerous reasons for wanting printed information about our society, though. For example, some people have trouble taking in information orally, they have an easier time reading it. Maybe you can’t always reach people to ask questions, maybe you want to read about it while sitting on the bus. The root of our faith is simple — and it isn’t about what you read, but the immediate experience of “that of God” within us. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t need to share our experiences, questions, advice.
Allison also wrote: What’s your motivation/agenda? And should you even have one?
Let me relate that one to Allison’s question about pamphlets — What was Jesus’ motivation/agenda? Should he have even had one? I believe that his only motivation/agenda was a deep love for all people. Likewise, I believe that should be our motivation. And out of that love, Jesus taught people, he preached to them, he demonstrated with service to others, and by example in how he lived his life. He pointed the way and issued an invitation to follow, but he did not force anyone.
With love,
Mark
@Robin: yes, one piece is just sharing our story. Figuring out a way of having more grounded conversations might be good.
@Allison & Mark: interesting question about Jesus and pamphlets. The difference between the kind of direct preaching of Jesus (and any minister under His guidance) is that it’s speaking directly to the condition of the listener. How we speak will be affected by our relationship with the listener and the context and culture of the forum.
Pamphlets speak to a generic “someone.” I’m wondering if there’s a parallel between blogs and their idiosyncratic willingness to share a faith life as lived, and institutional church sites that tend to be full of hedged generic statements about beliefs.
Agenda? Mine is not to be selfish with the insights and grace God has given me. I want to praise His name and be an instrument that helps turn others to the Light.
Pamphlets are important to have available to give to the ones about to get away… I spend hours every week at farmer’s markets, and have a stack of literature on the table for people to look at while they’re waiting for me to finish with another customer.
I use pamphlets that I write to give curious people something to take away, especially if they’re too hurried to talk. But still, the most important thing to do is talk to them personally, to their condition. Talking about God and Quakerism to Protestant Ethiopian seminary students is different from talking to Wiccans or Reformed Calvinists. Or Sufis.
I’m talking strangers on the street here, where you have one shot and they’re gone. If I want to reach my Puerto Rican neighbor, I share his life and bone up on the Spanish. I borrow his jumper cables, feed his dog when he’s away, and teach his kids how to juggle. But I also tell him explicitly what I am and what drives my decisions. I dress weird, so people usually ask anyway.
Actually, I’m poorer than most of my neighbors, so they give me food and second hand clothing. I just remembered that.
Kevin
This is a hard one for me. I work in the social services. Most of the people that I interact with that come from a different socioeconomic group than me are my clients. They are formerly homeless people and many experience major mental illnesses. At one point I attended a meeting that included person who lived at a program I occasionally worked at. I’m not sure if he made the connection, but the experience was uncomfortable for me. I couldn’t figure out how to negotiate the complex boundaries of the situation, and never settled into the meeting.
I feel unsettled by my own discomfort about this, but am trying to accept it as real at this time. A friend of mine who also works in this field has talked about how in theory she would like to be a part of a faith community that had space for the highly symptomatic homeless women she works with, but she just can’t deal with it. She needs to have time away from that population. I think it’s even more challenging in context of meeting, because of the level of intimacy involved in speaking in meeting.
I don’t any answers on this, and I know that my experience is very particular. Most poor people are not homeless or mentally ill. Still, class seems to be tightly interwoven into these dynamics.
Katie
Katie, you make an interesting point and one that I hadn’t thought about. Many Friends work in helping professions: teaching, social work, psychology, doctors, etc.
I had a bone marrow transplant and ran into a Friend during discharge. She ran the visiting nurses program. She seemed extraordinarily (my judgment) uncomfortable providing care to me even though she went to a different meeting than I. And even though my care committee knew far more intimate details of my care than she did (and many of these details were broadcast to the entire Meeting).
So what was the problem?
Just as you state – you want to be away from those you help. I bet she saw her work as separate from her spiritual life.
But did Jesus stay away from those he helped?
Yes, he had his time in the desert. So perhaps if you cared for yourself outside of the one hour during Meeting for Worship, you wouldn’t need to feel so separate.
Martin, you are right-on here. And I’d posted a similar question tonight on my blog after reading a New York Times article about class and race. It gets to the heart of who we are, and who we want to be.
Quakerism felt really inaccessible to me when I first arrived at Meeting, and because I’d learned to hate my class background (from my mother and from society). I felt ashamed, like something was wrong with me. Others, who don’t feel shame, I think they see that unnecessarily academic stuff and turn away.
And I think it would be hypocritical to make a pamphlet to speak to your “hot-tempered Puerto Rican ex-con less than a year out of a eight-year stint in federal prison, now working two eight hour shifts at almost-minimum wage jobs and trying to stay out of trouble.”
I wish it were that easy.
In our meeting we are struggling mightily with what to put in our “Welcoming Pamplet”. Here is my two cents:
Quakerism is about trusting people that they can know or find their own spiritual path or places. We believe that within each of us is a seed of inspiration that given time to grow in a quiet supportive place will transform us and heal us of all worldly troubles.
Much more than that we have difficulty saying because there is a world of difference between the words we use concerning that transformative thing and the thing itself within. The words themselves do so often lead us astray.
But if we wait and labour to know, understand, and allow ourselves to be guided by, the motives, leadings, teachings of the thing thing within we will be transformed and healed.
@Jim: But your description doesn’t give anyone much of a reason to visit or join your meeting. As I see it Quakerism isn’t about giving people permission to find a spiritual path, it’s about offering a spiritual path, one tested by a community of faith held accountable to itself and its legacy. Just because words sometimes lead astray doesn’t mean we have to go mute. By taking the very legitimate liberal Quaker concern around empty words this far we’ve stripped ourselves of the possibility of articulating an alternative. I think we need to stop being such purists and get messy with the language again.
When one attends our meeting one feels the spirituality there. That is enough. I don’t have the quote in front of me but Barclay once said, “when I am in their presence I feel the good rise up and the evil melt away.”
The spiritual path tested by our community and its legacy is our trust that the Truth resides in each of us. There are so many different understandings among present and historical Quakers about the nature of God and spirituality. Often these differences are masked because we can pretend what you mean by “God” or “The Divine” is the same as what I mean, or we do not wish to go there because at other times these differences have caused us to be at odds and to split. However, the fundamental Truth goes beyond words and we need not be trapped by those words.
I recently asked a non-theist Friend why he uses God language. He answered that it is the language of power. That is my observation also. God language is about power, you see it everywhere in the bible. Power is not spirituality. It is in the absence of power that spirituality truly rises up to transform.
Quaker spirituality is about a spirituality rising from within. It is a blooming flower, creativity itself, a fountain whose source need not be captured by name and is better not captured.
If you wish to name it for yourself I will celebrate your celebration of the fountain within, but the need to name it for us is an exercise in power, perhaps even a violent act.
@Jim: After some digging I realize you’re referring to that well-trodden Barclay quote, paragraph seven of his Eleventh Proposition where he’s chilling out from his extended and very detailed (and very violent?) description of Friends to testify to his own convincement. As he said, he was drawn in by an awareness of the of the “secret power” of those assembled and not the right doctrine they espoused. I agree with him and with you about that. But I think he and I will disagree with you that this means gospel ministry is inherently violent. Here’s a next quote a little ways down from the one you chose:
This reminds me of the discussion recently over at a blog of a seeker recently come visiting Friends. He was given a fifty year old pamphlet upon walking in the door. It’s Howard Brinton, a modern classic from the pages of Friends Journal (1955), a great pamphlet and a good introduction to Friends’ worship, with copies printed by both Friends General Conference and Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. Someone writing today in the “Quaker We” like Brinton would be censured by those Friends who argue that any collective statements of faith are an exercise in power (that’s why we let dead Quakers do our talking for us). Brinton actually addresses this question of inward faith and outward voice more eloquently than I could at the end of the pamphlet:
It’s a call for balance between the inner and outer. Unfortunately public discourse by and among Friends has become split between ultra-inner’ness and ultra-outwardness. One the one hand you have the you-can-think-this and I‑can-think-this kind of “undiluted mysticism”; on the other you have a kind of “SPICE ministry” of activism that is essentially secular. I have to admit that I’m finding most meetings terribly boring and boorish these days, self-indulgent, secular and cliches of comfortable upper-middle-class lukewarm-ishness. Would a young Robert Barclay feel the secret power of these assemblies? Where’s our peculiar and unusual stubbornness gone to?
There should be great concern from all Quakers about a “you-can-think-this” and “I‑can-think-this” spirituality, a concern which I share. There is something about Quakerism that is unique, shared and deeply spiritual. Each of us has a connection to that inner seed and what is beautiful about Quakerism is that we see that connection and that spirituality in everyone.
The problem with “you-can-think-this” and “I‑can-think-this” is that it involves “thinking”. Spirituality is not “thinking”, which is where I believe the Universalists go astray. Quaker spirituality is something much, much, deeper and more connected. Yes thinking can be a raft that leads us to the spiritual shore and thinking can be the vessel that creates Quaker action from our spiritual core, but Quaker Spirituality is not about “thinking” it is about the mouth of that deep perpetually flowing river. It is the “thinking” that dilutes that “secret power”. I believe that Christocentric Friends, if they listened long enough, would find their Christocentric spirituality and could drop their Christocentric “thinking” which requires Quakerism to be a Christian religion. If we listen with our “spiritual ear” we can hear that deep spiritual seed equally in the Christocentric Friend and the Friend that is not Christocentric. We can be equally transformed by both of them.
It has been said that secularism is a recent invention. In England 350 years ago being secular or non-theist was not a real option. Now we have to “think” about that choice and worse feel we have to proclaim Quakerism to be one or the other. One only has to read about Fox and Woolman’s interactions with native-Americans (a unique place where they had that “choice” opportunity) to see that Quakerism is broader organization of spirituality than one rational framework.
Jim: Of course Christ speaks to those who don’t call themselves Christian; Friends have always thought that. Beyond that we’re going to have to agree to disagree. Please stop the arguing and please stop telling me I can’t believe what Quakers have always believed, it’s getting rude. If you have more to say you’ve got your own blog.
Excellent post, Martin.
The question that arises for me is: If our message and religious culture only appeal to a narrow segment of the population, have we strayed from the message we Quakers were given? The answer is a resounding YES, as far as I’m concerned. And the solution to the problem is not to be found in the pamphlet section at the FGC bookstore, as you so humorously allude to, Martin. Instead the solution will be found deep within our hearts when we seek to reorient ourselves, remembering that the good news is for EVERYONE, not just those among us with college degrees who like our vanilla soy lattes (I actually prefer a plain non-fat latte).
If huge segments of the population feel uncomfortable among us, there is something wrong wth US!