Author Archives ⇒ Martin Kelley

Passing the Faith, Planet of the Quakers Style

January 21, 2004
· Martin Kelley

There’s that famous scene in the 1968 movie “Plan­et of the Apes” when our astro­naut pro­tag­o­nist Charl­ton Hes­ton real­izes that the space­ship that brought him to the land where apes rule did­n’t trav­el in space but in time. He’s escap­ing the pri­mate theoc­ra­cy, head­ing north along the coast, when he rounds a cor­ner to see the charred ruin remains of the Stat­ue of Lib­er­ty lying in the sand. He falls to his knees and screams out “YOU MANIACS! YOU BLEW IT UP!” He real­izes that it was his own peo­ple who had destroyed every­thing they loved with their inat­ten­tion and pettiness.

Yes­ter­day my old friend Chris Park­er post­ed a com­ment to “The Lost Quak­er Gen­er­a­tion” essay where he won­dered if “the Quak­er com­mu­ni­ty has lost its vital­i­ty” (scroll down to third entry). I first met Chris at a 1997 con­fer­ence in Burling­ton NJ for “Quak­er Vol­un­teer Ser­vice, Train­ing, & Wit­ness.” I had been excit­ed by the prospect of a group of peo­ple deep­en­ing and explor­ing the roots of Quak­er wit­ness and was­n’t dis­ap­point­ed with the con­ver­sa­tions and new friend­ships. Chris had a recent MDiv from the Earl­ham School of Reli­gion and was work­ing at the Amer­i­can Friends Ser­vice Com­mit­tee; he left the con­fer­ence pas­sion­ate about help­ing to cre­ate some­thing new. While work­ing with AFSC, he start­ed pulling togeth­er a nation­al Quak­er net­work of vol­un­teer oppor­tu­ni­ties. This was a min­istry, pure and sim­ple, from one of the more active, vision­ary, and hard­work­ing twenty-something Friends I’ve known. But frus­tra­tions mount­ed and sup­port evap­o­rat­ed. As I remem­ber even his month­ly meet­ing could­n’t uni­fy around sup­port­ing this min­istry. The project even­tu­al­ly fell apart as our email cor­re­spon­dence grew sketchy.

A month or so ago I got an email from Chris with his new address, a yoga retreat cen­ter in New Eng­land. I respond­ed back with per­son­al news but also with regrets that Quak­erism had appar­ent­ly lost him. Part of his com­ments from yesterday:

Well, I’m one of these thir­ty some­things that has drift­ed away. I’m sure each of us has our own sto­ry. I did try to help orga­nize, but that turned out to be a bit­ter and unsuc­cess­ful expe­ri­ence. A long sto­ry for anoth­er time. But the spir­it flows in many direc­tions and if the Quak­er com­mu­ni­ty has lost it’s vital­i­ty or does­n’t work for some peo­ple, there are oth­er places there. Hold­ing on too tight­ly to Quak­erism is to hold on to a human creation.

I am now liv­ing and work­ing at Kri­palu yoga cen­ter, a place that many call a spir­i­tu­al home. We have 60,000 peo­ple on our mail­ing list, of whom about 68% have come here as a guest. There are about 30,000 unpro­grammed Quakers.

He’s right of course: Kri­palu undoubt­ed­ly touch­es more spir­i­tu­al lives than unpro­grammed Quak­erism. But the real les­son is that Kri­palu knows what a gem they have in Chris: they’ve giv­en him the kind of respon­si­bil­i­ties and encour­age­ment that Quak­ers didn’t.

Chris was one of those involved Friends I had hoped to grow old with. I had imag­ined us run­ning into each oth­er in half a dozen com­mit­tees over the next fifty years. We could have gone on back­pack­ing trips togeth­er, invit­ed each oth­er to our kids’ wed­dings, had catch-up lunch­es at Quak­er con­fer­ences, con­soled each oth­er through grief, thought about how to “trans­mit our faith” to the next gen­er­a­tion of Friends. Chris Park­er was worth more to Quak­erism than any num­ber of out­reach ini­tia­tives or peace net­works. Chris was the real deal: a com­mit­ted, impas­sioned Friend. And now he’s one of Quak­eris­m’s scarred and rust­ed stat­ues, trib­utes to what could have been.

He put his sto­ry up on a web­site way back when. I’m just going to exten­sive­ly quote it here:

I feel an urgency about this project because it has come to me that Quak­ers are about to be need­ed by the larg­er cul­ture. Under­neath the ills we face as a nation is a spir­i­tu­al prob­lem of vio­lence and dom­i­nance over oth­er peo­ple and life. Friends have a tra­di­tion that presents an alter­na­tive. The essen­tial gem of Quak­erism is the knowl­edge that each per­son is part of the divine, that we need to treat every­body as equal and sacred. While I am com­fort­able with more wit­ness than Friends usu­al­ly muster, I do believe that faith is more eas­i­ly caught than taught. Ser­vice has been an expe­ri­ence where many are exposed to Quak­ers, with the oppor­tu­ni­ty to inspire and bring transformations.

But the Soci­ety of Friends is not in great shape. Friends are unfo­cused and tired. Often young adult Friends are miss­ing. I have lis­tened jeal­ous­ly to an ear-lier gen­er­a­tion tell how AFSC work­camps formed them and taught them how to be lead­ers. While Quak­erism is very good for seek­ers, my gen­er­a­tion seems to need an expe­ri­ence giv­en to them, which is a dif­fer­ent ener­gy. My friends from Brethren Vol­un­teer Ser­vice were inspired and equipped for a life of com­mit­ment they prob­a­bly would­n’t have oth­er­wise choosen.

My inspi­ra­tions have assem­bled slow­ly over the last six years. I went to Earl­ham School of Reli­gion to pre­pare to be of ser­vice. There I was inspired by friends who had par­tic­i­pat­ed in Breth­ern Vol­un­teer Ser­vice. At the same time I worked as Assis­tant Direc­tor of a peer coun­sel­ing pro­gram where I watched the teens blos­som and trans­form when trust­ed with the oppor­tu­ni­ty to help oth­ers and have a real impact.

Can Quak­erism sur­vive if we can’t keep Friends like this?

Religious Peace Left: Puny, Aged & Marginalized?

January 16, 2004
· Martin Kelley

Jour­nal­ist Mark I. Pin­sky talks about the “state of the reli­gious left”:www.fortwayne.com/mld/newssentinel/7644649.htm :
bq. Left-wing reli­gious efforts at polit­i­cal mobi­liza­tion — where they exist — seem puny, aged and mar­gin­al­ized. After decades of rid­ing pop­u­lar social move­ments such as civ­il rights, the left splin­tered and now seems unable to regroup. Con­verse­ly, the GOP has co-opted the sup­port of reli­gious vot­ers by focus­ing their atten­tion on cul­tur­al and lifestyle issues — such as gay marriage.
Arti­cle found from a link on “The Right Christians”:http://www.therightchristians.org/ site, which has more com­men­tary on the sub­ject and a pro­pos­al to mim­ic the Dean Cam­paign inter­net orga­niz­ing to rebuild a pro­gres­sive Chris­t­ian left.

Quakers & Anabaptists

January 14, 2004
· Martin Kelley

Tough ques­tion in the book­store today: a cus­tomer called ask­ing for books about the con­nec­tion between Friends and Anabap­tists. Remark­ably, we could­n’t come up with much of a list. But let’s be inter­ac­tive here, read­ers! What books did I for­get about? And what’s this phe­nom­e­na of deny­ing Quaker/Anabaptist com­mon roots and cross-pollination?

Con­tin­ue read­ing →

Swinging off the gallows and into the Glory

January 5, 2004
· Martin Kelley

Oh my gosh, TheOoze has an amaz­ing arti­cle on called “Ortho­dox Twenty-Somethings” (a review of “The New Faith­ful” and “The Younger Evan­gel­i­cals”, a great book I’ve rec­om­mend­ed. Read this arti­cle if you want to under­stand why Julie’s at a tra­di­tion­al Catholic Church and why I’m plain dress­ing. This is a bona fide phe­nom­e­non, folks.

None of this is sup­posed to be hap­pen­ing because it’s not the project for which two gen­er­a­tions of Protes­tant and Catholic cler­gy have worked… The push for rel­a­tivist moral teach­ing, “sim­pli­fied” wor­ship, inter­change­able sex roles, and an utter sep­a­ra­tion of pri­vate belief from polit­i­cal expres­sion has come from the pul­pit as read­i­ly as it has been demand­ed by pseudo-intellectual elites. But against all odds, por­tions of a mod­ern Amer­i­can soci­ety, which groans to find itself sec­u­lar­ist, is return­ing in a qui­et rev­o­lu­tion to the fun­da­men­tal truths of the Chris­t­ian religion.

Mean­while, no one should miss Melyn­da Huskey’s won­der­ful rant in the com­ments of my “Beyond Major­i­ty Rule” review. Warn­ing: it skew­ers a beloved Quak­er institution!

Or maybe it was just the gen­er­al whiff of the tomb – a real­ly old tomb, all scent of decay long gone, and noth­ing left but dust and dead air. No Quak­ers here, pal. No George Fox rebuk­ing priests from the next aisle. No Isaac Pen­ning­ton seiz­ing the moment of the Restora­tion to make Quak­ers as unpop­u­lar with the King and Court as they had been with the Pro­tec­tor and the Com­mon­wealth. No Mary Dyer ready to swing off the gal­lows and into Glo­ry for the sake of Light.

Arnold: Losing Our Religion

December 31, 2003
· Martin Kelley

Johann Christoph Arnold has an inter­est­ing piece on the inter­sec­tion of peace activism and reli­gion [orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished on Non​vi​o​lence​.org]. Here’s a taste:

The day before Mar­tin Luther King was mur­dered he said, “Like any­body, I would like to live a long life…But I’m not con­cerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will.” We must have this same desire if we are going to sur­vive the fear and vio­lence and mass con­fu­sion of our time. And we should be as unabashed about let­ting peo­ple know that it is our reli­gious faith that moti­vates us, regard­less of the set­ting or the consequences.

Many peace activists are dri­ven by reli­gious moti­va­tions, which is often all that keeps them going through all the hard times and non-appreciation. Yet we often present our­selves to the world in a sec­u­lar way using ratio­nal arguments.

It took me a few years to real­ly admit to myself that Non​vi​o​lence​.org is a min­istry inti­mate­ly con­nect­ed with my Quak­er faith. In the eight years it’s been going, thou­sands of web­sites have sprung up with good inten­tions and hype only to dis­ap­pear into obliv­ion (or the inter­net equiv­a­lent, the line read­ing “Last updat­ed July 7, 1997”). I have a sep­a­rate forum for “Quak­er reli­gious and peace issues” [which lat­er became the gen­er­al Quak­er­Ran­ter blog] In my essay on the Quak­er peace tes­ti­mo­ny, I wor­ry that mod­ern reli­gious paci­fists have spent so much effort con­vinc­ing the world that paci­fism makes sense from a strict­ly ratio­nal­ist view­point that we’ve large­ly for­got­ten our own moti­va­tions. Don’t get me wrong: I think paci­fism also makes sense as a prag­mat­ic pol­i­cy; while mil­i­tary solu­tions might be quick­er, paci­fism can bring about the long-term changes that break the cycle of mil­i­tarism. But how can we learn to bal­ance the shar­ing of both our prag­mat­ic and reli­gious motivations?

 

Beyond the MacGuffins: Sheeran’s Beyond Majority Rule

December 26, 2003
· Martin Kelley

A review of Michael Sheer­an’s Beyond Major­i­ty Rule. Twen­ty years lat­er, do Friends need to expe­ri­ence the gath­ered condition?

Beyond Major­i­ty Rule has one of the more unique sto­ries in Quak­er writ­ings. Michael Sheer­an is a Jesuit priest who went to sem­i­nary in the years right after the Sec­ond Vat­i­can Coun­cil. Forged by great changes tak­ing place in the church, he took seri­ous­ly the Coun­cil’s man­date for Roman Catholics to get “in touch with their roots.” He became inter­est­ed in a long-forgotten process of “Com­mu­nal Dis­cern­ment” used by the Jesuit order in when it was found­ed in the mid-sixteenth cen­tu­ry. His search led him to study groups out­side Catholi­cism that had sim­i­lar decision-making struc­tures. The Reli­gious Soci­ety of Friends should con­sid­er itself lucky that he found us. His book often explains our ways bet­ter than any­thing we’ve written.

Sheer­an’s advan­tage comes from being an out­sider firm­ly root­ed in his own faith. He’s not afraid to share obser­va­tions and to make com­par­isons. He start­ed his research with a rather for­mal study of Friends, con­duc­ing many inter­views and attend­ing about ten month­ly meet­ings in Philadel­phia Year­ly Meet­ing. There are sec­tions of the book that are dry expo­si­tions of Quak­er process, sprin­kled by inter­views. There are times where Sheer­an starts say­ing some­thing real­ly insight­ful about ear­ly or con­tem­po­rary Friends, but then backs off to repeat some out­dat­ed Quak­er cliche (he relies a bit too heav­i­ly on the group of mid-century Haverford-based aca­d­e­mics whose his­to­ries often pro­ject­ed their own the­ol­o­gy of mod­ern lib­er­al mys­ti­cism onto the ear­ly Friends). These sec­tions aren’t always very enlight­en­ing – too many Philadel­phia Friends are uncon­scious of their cher­ished myths and their inbed­ded incon­sis­ten­cies. On page 85, he express­es the conun­drum quite eloquently:

If the researcher was to suc­cumb to the all too typ­i­cal canons of social sci­ence, he would prob­a­bly scratch his head a few times atjust this point, note that the ambi­gu­i­ty of Quak­er expres­sion makes accu­rate sta­tis­ti­cal eval­u­a­tion of Quak­er believes almost impos­si­ble with­out invest­ment of untold time and effort, and move on to analy­sis of some less inter­est­ing but more man­age­able object of study.

For­tu­nate­ly for us, Sheer­an does not suc­cumb. The book shines when Sheer­an steps away from the aca­d­e­m­ic role and offers us his sub­jec­tive observations.

There are six pages in Beyond Major­i­ty Rule that com­prise its main con­tri­bu­tion to Quak­erism. Almost every time I’ve heard some­one refer to this book in con­ver­sa­tion, it’s been to share the obser­va­tions of these six pages. Over the years I’ve often casu­al­ly browsed through the book and it’s these six pages that I’ve always stopped to read. The pas­sage is called “Con­flict­ing Myths and Fun­da­men­tal Cleav­ages” and it begins on page 84. Sheer­an begins by relat­ing the obvi­ous observation:

When Friends reflect upon their beliefs, they often focus upon the obvi­ous con­flict between Chris­to­cen­tric and uni­ver­sal­ist approach­es. Peo­ple who feel strong­ly drawn to either camp often see the oth­er posi­tion as a threat to Quak­erism itself.

As a Gen-X’er I’ve often been bored by this debate. It often breaks down into emp­ty lan­guage and the desire to feel self-righteous about one’s beliefs. It’s the MacGuf­fin of con­tem­po­rary lib­er­al Quak­erism. (A MacGuf­fin is a film plot device that dri­ves the action but is in itself nev­er explained and does­n’t real­ly mat­ter: if the spies have to get the secret plans across the bor­der by mid­night, those plans are the MacGuf­fin and the chase the real action.) Today’s debates about Chris­to­cen­trism ver­sus Uni­ver­sal­ism ignore the real issues of faith­less­ness we need to address.

Sheer­an sees the real cleav­age between Friends as those who have expe­ri­enced the divine and those who haven’t. I’d extend the for­mer just a bit to include those who have faith that the expe­ri­ence of the divine is pos­si­ble. When we sit in wor­ship do we real­ly believe that we might be vis­it­ed by Christ (how­ev­er named, how­ev­er defined)? When we cen­ter our­selves for Meet­ing for Busi­ness do we expect to be guid­ed by the Great Teacher?

Sheer­an found that a num­ber of Friends did­n’t believe in a divine visitation:

Fur­ther ques­tions some­times led to the para­dox­i­cal dis­cov­ery that, for some of these Friends, the expe­ri­ence of being gath­ered even in meet­ing for wor­ship was more of a for­mal rather than an expe­ri­en­tial real­i­ty. For some, the fact that the group had sat qui­ety for twenty-five min­utes was itself iden­ti­fied as being gathered.

There are many clerks that call for a “moment of silence” to begin and end busi­ness – five min­utes of for­mal silence to prove that we’re Quak­ers and maybe to gath­er our argu­ments togeth­er. Meet­ings for busi­ness are con­duct­ed by smart peo­ple with smart ideas and effi­cien­cy is prized. Sit­ting in wor­ship is seen a med­i­ta­tive oasis if not a com­plete waste of time. For these Friends, Quak­erism is a soci­ety of strong lead­er­ship com­bined with intel­lec­tu­al vig­or. Good deci­sions are made using good process. If some Friends choose to describe their own guid­ance as com­ing from “God,” that their indi­vid­ual choice but it is cer­tain­ly not an imper­a­tive for all.

Maybe it’s Sheer­an’s Catholi­cism that makes him aware of these issues. Both Catholics and Friends tra­di­tion­al­ly believe in the real pres­ence of Christ dur­ing wor­ship. When a Friend stands to speak in meet­ing, they do so out of obe­di­ence, to be a mes­sen­ger and ser­vant of the Holy Spir­it. That Friends might speak ‘beyond their Guide’ does not betray the fact that it’s God’s mes­sage we are try­ing to relay. Our under­stand­ing of Christ’s pres­ence is real­ly quite rad­i­cal: “Jesus has come to teach the peo­ple him­self,” as Fox put it, it’s the idea that God will speak to us as He did to the Apos­tles and as He did to the ancient prophets of Israel. The his­to­ry of God being active­ly involved with His peo­ple continues.

Why does this mat­ter? Because as a reli­gious body it is sim­ply our duty to fol­low God and because new­com­ers can tell when we’re fak­ing it. I’ve known self-described athe­ists who get it and who I con­sid­er broth­ers and sis­ters in faith and I’ve known peo­ple who can quote the bible inside and out yet know noth­ing about love (haven’t we all known some of these, even in Quak­erism?). How do we get past the MacGuf­fin debates of pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tions to dis­till the core of the Quak­er message?

Not all Friends will agree with Sheer­an’s point of cleav­age. None oth­er than the acclaimed Haver­for­dian Dou­glas V Steere wrote the intro­duc­tion to Beyond Major­i­ty Rule and he used it to dis­miss the core six pages as “mod­est but not espe­cial­ly con­vinc­ing” (page x). The unstat­ed con­di­tion behind the great Quak­er reuni­fi­ca­tions of the mid-twentieth cen­tu­ry was a taboo against talk­ing about what we believe as a peo­ple. Quak­erism became an indi­vid­ual mys­ti­cism cou­pled with a world-focused social activism – to talk about the area in between was to threat­en the new unity.

Times have changed and gen­er­a­tions have shift­ed. It is this very in-between-ness that first attract­ed me to Friends. As a nascent peace activist, I met Friends whose deep faith allowed them to keep going past the despair of the world. I did­n’t come to Friends to learn how to pray or how to be a lefty activist (most Quak­er activists now are too self-absorbed to be real­ly effec­tive). What I want to know is how Friends relate to one anoth­er and to God in order to tran­scend them­selves. How do we work togeth­er to dis­cern our divine lead­ings? How do we come togeth­er to be a faith­ful peo­ple of the Spirit?

I find I’m not alone in my inter­est in Sheer­an’s six pages. The fifty-somethings I know in lead­er­ship posi­tions in Quak­erism also seem more ten­der to Sheer­an’s obser­va­tions than Dou­glas Steere was. Twenty-five years after sub­mit­ting his dis­ser­ta­tion, Friends are per­haps ready to be con­vinced by our Friend, Michael J. Sheeran.

Post­script: Michael J Sheer­an con­tin­ues to be an inter­est­ing and active fig­ure. He con­tin­ues to write about gov­er­nance issues in the Catholic Church and serves as pres­i­dent of Reg­is Uni­ver­si­ty in Denver.

Housekeeping on Non​vi​o​lence​.org

December 17, 2003
· Martin Kelley

We are mak­ing some big behind-the-scene changes at Non​vi​o​lence​.org over the next few days. There will almost cer­tain­ly be fea­tures of our site that are affect­ed. We apol­o­gize in advance for dis­rup­tions and hope that the changes will be worth­while. If you’d like to help us build the new fea­tures we have planned, “please con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion today”:www.nonviolence.org/support. Thanks!

Zunes on the Geneva Initiative

December 8, 2003
· Martin Kelley

Stephen Zunes is a care­ful and bal­anced com­men­ta­tor on Mid east issues, some­one I turn to help sort out con­flict­ing claims. No where is this need­ed more than in the ever-changing rela­tion­ship between Israel and Pales­tine, with its con­stant suces­sion of hopes born and shattered.
The “every Church a Peace Church” site has a good arti­cle from Zunes on the lat­est hope, the so-called “Gene­va Ini­tia­tive for peace between Israel and Palestine”:www.ecapc.org/newspage_detail.asp?control=849. Zunes gives the con­text of the pro­posed accord and then explains its major points. For example:
bq. In con­trast to Washington’s insis­tence on focus­ing upon the thus far unsuc­cess­ful confidence-building mea­sures described in the Roadmap, the archi­tects of the Gene­va Ini­tia­tive went direct­ly to the issues at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian con­flict and devel­oped a detailed out­line for a permanent-status agreement.