On Abid­ing Quak­er, Patri­cia Dall­mann tells a sto­ry of two very dif­fer­ent Quak­ers:

Unbe­knownst to him or to me that morn­ing, we each embod­ied a force that in rela­tion to the oth­er, as Pen­ing­ton wrote, had “no com­mu­nion or peace between them”; these forces con­tend (like the two kings referred to in the epi­graph) for the soul of human­i­ty: to edi­fy or to destroy. Though this Sun­day morn­ing inci­dent involved only two peo­ple in an emp­ty meet­ing­house, it was, nev­er­the­less, the Lamb’s War: a skir­mish in which the pow­ers clashed, pow­ers which when pit­ted against one anoth­er on a grander scale deter­mine history. 

From Steven Davison:

This trans­fer­ence of blame, hurt, and anger to the meet­ing calls for a spe­cial kind of pas­toral care that we don’t seem to do very well or even talk about much. I am not at all clear about what’s called for myself, but I grieve for the peo­ple I know who have been hurt in this way and also for the meet­ings in which this pain and ten­sion lives as a shad­ow on the fellowship.

He has some good obser­va­tions here, like this one: “Friends also have a per­verse ten­den­cy some­times to min­is­ter to the per­pe­tra­tor in a fraught sit­u­a­tion, rather than the vic­tim.” This is cer­tain­ly a phe­nom­e­non. I remem­ber a meet­ing sit­u­a­tion some years back in which every­one at the meet­ing pri­vate­ly agreed that a cer­tain mem­ber was being mean-spirited in their char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of oth­er mem­bers but didn’t say any­thing even as peo­ple start­ed leav­ing the meeting.

He talks about ear­ly Friends’ use of the con­cept of gospel order, but admits that “modern-day Friends hard­ly even know it exists.” I’ve seen a rel­a­tive­ly tra­di­tion­al­ist meet­ing fail a fair­ly straight-forward test of gospel order. Why would we pass up an oppor­tu­ni­ty to help a recal­ci­trant mem­ber find some inner heal? Do we secret­ly think that peo­ple can’t change?

Hurt by the Meet­ing | Through the Flam­ing Sword

The Friends Jour­nal “From the Edi­tor’s Desk” blog began as ideas for future which I post­ed here on Quak­er Ranter. At a cer­tain point I real­ized I should share it on Friends Jour­nal web­site direct­ly. But I still want read­ers here to know about upcom­ing issues and to share them to poten­tial writ­ers. Don’t under­es­ti­mate your abil­i­ty to inspire: often an arti­cle’s birth starts with an expe­ri­enced friend sug­gest­ing a top­ic to a new writer. If you know a Quak­er who might have some­thing inter­est­ing to say on this top­ic, please share this with them. Here’s an excerpt to my Edi­tor’s Desk blog post.

Thin spaces is a term mys­tics use for those places where our human world and the Divine come clos­er togeth­er. They’ll often cite those his­toric sacred spaces that catch our breath when we enter, loca­tions where one can feel the echoes of gen­er­a­tions of worshipers.

But for Friends, every place has the poten­tial of being a thin space. Indeed, per­haps every place is already brim­ming over with divin­i­ty and only waits on our abil­i­ty to set­tle. Our phys­i­cal spaces tes­ti­fy to that ethos by mak­ing wor­ship rooms plain, uncon­se­crat­ed, and func­tion­al, and our wor­ship is based on a divine immi­nence that needs no pas­tor or litur­gi­cal ritual.

Learn more at the blog post Writ­ing Opp: Thin Spaces.

In the NYTimes Opin­ion sec­tion, a fas­ci­nat­ing com­par­i­son of the lan­guage pol­i­tics of ear­ly Friends and today’s pro­noun expan­sion­ists. By Tere­sa M. Bejan:

Mod­ern prac­ti­tion­ers of pro­noun pol­i­tics can learn a thing or two from the ear­ly Quak­ers. Like today’s egal­i­tar­i­ans, the Quak­ers under­stood that what we say, as well as how we say it, can play a cru­cial part in cre­at­ing a more just and equal soci­ety. They, too, were sen­si­tive to the hum­ble pronoun’s abil­i­ty to rein­force hier­ar­chies by encod­ing invid­i­ous dis­tinc­tions into lan­guage itself.

Yet unlike the ear­ly Quak­ers, these mod­ern egal­i­tar­i­ans want to embrace, rather than resist, pro­nouns’ hon­orif­ic aspect, and thus to see trans‑, non­bi­na­ry and gen­derqueer peo­ple as equal­ly enti­tled to the “title” of their choosing.

Opin­ion | What Quak­ers Can Teach Us About the Pol­i­tics of Pro­nouns (Pub­lished 2019) 

In the 17th cen­tu­ry, they also sus­pect­ed that the rules of gram­mar stood between them and a society…

www​.nytimes​.com

I should note that while Bejan’s dis­cus­sion of Friends ends in Her­man Melville’s time, many of us are still very aware of how lan­guage can lib­er­ate and oppress. Friends Jour­nal uses the sin­gu­lar “they” upon author request, for example.

The one place we do have ten­sions is around hon­orifics. The Quak­er tes­ti­mo­ny has been clear against using them — in a man­ner Bevan describes as “lev­el­ing down” but there are instances in which hon­orifics have been used to lev­el up. The most com­mon occur­rence is the use of titles for Black cler­gy. I under­stand the argu­ments on both sides but in the end the rea­son we still talk about Mar­tin Luther King Jr. is his brav­ery, clear-sightedness, and stir­ring words. His doc­tor­ate degree con­tributed to his devel­op­ment I’m sure, but as Friends we know that his aca­d­e­m­ic record is not the source of his moral authority.