On Tuesday, Dec 28 my lovely wife Julie gave birth to our third son. After some dithering back and forth (we’re methodical about baby names) we picked Gregory. Everyone is happy and healthy. Vital stats: 20 inches, 7 pounds 9 oz. The brothers are adjusting well, though Theo’s first response to my phone call telling him it was a boy was “oh no, another one of those.”

That’s 5yo Francis (aka “little big brother”) and 7yo Theo (“big big brother”) meeting their new sibling at the hospital. More pics in the Gregory! and Gregory in the Hospital sets on Flickr.

As you can see, we’ve basically bred triplets spaced over three years apart. As further evidence, here’s Theo and Francis in their first pics (links to their announcement posts):

As I mentioned, we’re methodical about names. When we were faced with Baby #2 I put together the “Fallen Baby Names Chart”–classic names that had fallen out of trendy use. It’s based on the current ranking of the top names of 1900. “Gregory” doesn’t appear on our chart because it was almost unused until a sudden appearance in the mid-1940s (see chart, right). Yes, that would be the time when a handsome young actor named Gregory Peck became famous. It peaked in 1962, the year of Peck’s Academy Award for To Kill a Mockingbird and has been dropping rapidly ever since. Last year less than one in a thousand newborn boys were Gregory’s. While we recognize Peck’s influence in the name’s Twentieth Century popularity, Julie is thinking more of Gregory of Nyssa [edited, I originally linked to another early Gregory]. Peck’s parents were Catholic (paternal relatives helped lead the Irish Easter Rising) and were presumably thinking of the Catholic saint when they gave him Gregory for a middle name (he dropped his first name Eldred for the movies).

As if knowing today is Inauguration Day, Isaac Penington turned it into a political reference: “But oh, how the laws and governments of this world are to be lamented over! And oh, what need there is of their reformation, whose common work it is to pluck up the ears of corn, and leave the tares standing!”

Margaret Fell sees the wheat and tares as an example of jealousy and false ministry: “Oh how hath this envious man gotten in among you. Surely he hath come in the night, when men was asleep: & hath sown tares among the wheat, which when the reapers come must be bound in bundles and cast into the fire, for I know that there was good seed sown among you at the first, which when it found good ground, would have brought forth good fruit; but since there are mixed seedsmen come among you & some hath preached Christ of envy & some of good will, … & so it was easy to stir up jealousy in you, you having the ground of jealousy in yourselves which is as strong as death.”

We get poetry from the seventeen century Elizabeth Bathurst (ahem) when she writes that “the Seed (or grace) of God, is small in its first appearance (even as the morning ‑light), but as it is given heed to, and obeyed, it will increase in brightness, till it shine in the soul, like the sun in the firmament at noon-day height.”

The parable of the tares became a call for tolerance in George Fox’s understanding: “For Christ commands christian men to “love one another [John 13:34, etc], and love their enemies [Mat 5:44];” and so not to persecute them. And those enemies may be changed by repentance and conversion, from tares to wheat. But if men imprison them, and spoil and destroy them, they do not give them time to repent. So it is clear it is the angels’ work to burn the tares, and not men’s.”

A century later, Sarah Tuke Grubb read and worried about religious education and Quaker drift: “But for want of keeping an eye open to this preserving Power, a spirit of indifference hath crept in, and, whilst many have slept, tares have been sown [Mat 13:25]; which as they spring up, have a tendency to choke the good seed; those tender impressions and reproofs of instruction, which would have prepared our spirits, and have bound them to the holy law and testimonies of truth.”

I hope all this helps us remember that the Bible is our book too and an essential resource for Friends. It’s easy to forget this and kind of slip one way or another. One extreme is getting our Bible fix from mainstream Evangelical Christian sources whose viewpoints might be in pretty direct opposition from Quaker understandings of Jesus and the Gospel (see Jeanne B’s post on The New Calvinism or Tom Smith’s very reasonable concerns about the literalism at the One Year Bible Blog I read and recommend). On the other hand, it’s not uncommon in my neck of the Quaker woods to describe our religion as “Quaker,” downgrade Christianity by making it optional, unmentionable or non-contextual and turning to the Bible only for the obligatory epistle reference.

This was first made clear to me a few years ago by the margins in the modern edition of Samuel Bownas’ “A Description of the Qualifications Necessary to a Gospel Ministry,” which were peppered with the Biblical references Bownas was casually citing throughout. On my second reading (yes it’s that good!) I started looking up the references and realized that: 1) Bownas wasn’t just making this stuff up or quoting willy-nilly; and 2) reading them helped me understand Bownas and by extension the whole concept of Quaker ministry. You’re not reading my blog enough if you’re not getting the idea that this is one of the kind of practices that Robin, Wess and I are going to be talking about at the Convergent workshop next month. If you can figure out the transport then get yourself to Cali pronto and join us.

Friends traditionally have lumped Christmas in with all of the other ritualistic boo-ha that mainstream Christians practice. These are outward elements that should be abandoned now that we know Christ has come to teach the people himself and is present and available to all of us at all times. Outward baptism, communion, planned sermons, paid ministers, Christmas and Easter: all distractions from true Christian religion, from primitive Chritianity revived.

One confusion that arises in liberal meetings this time of year is that it’s assumed it’s the Christian Friends who want the Christmas tree. Arguments sometime break out with “hyphenated” Friends who feel uncomfortable with the tree: folks who consider themselves Friends but also Pagan, Nontheistic, or Jewish and wonder why they’re having Christianity forced on them. But those of us who follow what we might call the “Christian tradition as understood by Friends” should be just as put out by a Christmas tree and party. We know that symbolic rituals like these spark disunity and distract us from the real purpose of our community: befriending Christ and listening for His guidance.

I was shocked and startled when I first learned that Quaker schools used to meet on Christmas day. My first response was “oh come on, that’s taking it all too far.” But it kept bugging me and I kept trying to understand it. This was one of the pieces that helped me understand the Quaker way better and I finally grew to understand the rationale. If Friends were more consistent with more-or-less symbolic stuff like Christmas, it would be easier to teach Quakerism.

I don’t mind Christmas trees, per se. I have one in my living room. In my extended family Christmas has served as one of the mandatory times of year we all have to show up together for dinner. It’s never been very religious, so I never felt I needed to stop the practice when I became involved with Friends. But as a Friend I’m careful not to pretend that the consumerism and social rituals have much to do with Christ. Christmas trees are pretty. The lights make me feel good in the doldrums of mid-winter. That’s reason enough to put one up.

Unprogrammed liberal Friends could use the tensions between traditional Quakerly stoicism and mainstream Christian nostalgia as a teaching moment, and we could use discomfort around the ritual of Christmas as a point of unity and dialog with Pagan, Jewish and Non-theistic Friends. Christian Friends are always having to explain how we’re not the kind of Christians others assume we are (others both within and outside the Society). Being principled about Christmas is one way of showing that difference. People will surely say “oh come on,” but so what? A lot of spiritual seekers are critical of the kind of crazy commercial spending sprees that marked Christmases past and I don’t see why a group saying Christmas isn’t about Christ would be at a particular disadvantage during this first Christmas season of the next Great Depression.

I’ve been talking about liberal unprogrammed Friends. For the record, I understand Christmas celebrations among “pastoral” and/or “programmed” Friends. They’ve made a conscious decision to adopt a more mainstream Christian approach to religious education and ministry. That’s fine. It’s not the kind of Quaker I practice, but they’re open about their approach and Christmas makes sense in that context.

Whenever I post this kind of stuff on my blog I get comments how I’m being too Scroogey. Well I guess I am. Bah Humbug. Honestly though, I’ve always like Quaker Christmas parties. They’re a way of mixing things up, a way of coming together as a community in a warmer way that we usually do. People stop confabbing about committee questions and actually enjoy one another’s company. One time I asked my meeting to call it the Day the World Calls Christmas Party, which I thought was kind of clever (everyone else surely thought “there goes Martin again”). The joy of real community that is filled once a year at our Christmas parties might be symptom of a hunger to be a different kind of community every week, even every day.

I heard about this conference almost by accident, from a listing on Quakerinfo’s Christian Renewal page. It was hard to get details about it, as my emails to the organizers kept getting lost, but finally I did hear back. Sessions included:

• The Simplicity of Our Witness to That Which We Know Within
• The Witness of Our Meetings, Our Lives, and Our Words
• Being a Witness to Christ’s Presence and Power in a Time of Strife
• Living Our Witness in a Secular Age.
• Our Witness in Scripture and Friends Writing

So what did I think of the conference?

I liked meeting the workshop leaders and fellow participants. There are very sincere, devote Friends who are aware of the need to have the Society of Friends look more closely at our roots. The New Foundation Fellowship has been around since the mid-70s and gathered around a series of Lewis Benson’s talks about George Fox and early Friends. They publish a number of interesting books and pamphlets. The Christian Friends Conference is relatively new and I never found how quite how it differed from NFF: there was so much overlap between the two groups that that it was hard for this outsider to figure out the difference.

I felt very welcomed, especially by the event organizer (who went out of her way to attend to my strange vegan diet). The weekend’s agenda was upended at the last moment by the absence of NFF organizer Terry Wallace, who was too ill to come.

Many of the sessions were on the intellectual side–prepared speeches read from notes. I suspect this is the legacy of Lewis Benson, who was very much a presence at the conference even though he died over fifteen years ago. I missed the kind of mystical, don’t-speak-unless-led spirit of old quietist conservatives and the extended worship sessions that are becoming popular with post-liberal conservative Friends. Somewhere between these extremes there’s a balance and I wondered if NFF could reach the larger audience it deserves with just this lecture format.

Size, aka there are more Christian Friends than this:

The first impression was how small the gathering was. I suspected this would be the case when I saw so little publicity. As the weekend came near, I mentioned it to a few Philadelphia-area Christian Friends, who were surprised to hear that such an event was happening. Most sessions had about eight people and maybe two dozen or so Friends circulated through during the weekend. Most of the participants already knew each other and were members of New Foundation Fellowship and/or Ohio Yearly Meeting (Conservative).

This was kind of a shame. With almost 12,000 members, there are certainly more Christians embedded in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting than there are in New Foundation Fellowship and Ohio Yearly Meeting combined. This kind of a conference could have easily attracted more people than this. Many small Quaker organizations act more as support groups for a core group of people who share interests and a desire to see each other regularly (I’ve joined these kinds of groups in the past, mistakenly thinking they would get excited if they realized how many people they could attract with only a little outreach). I don’t know if this was the dynamic with NFF/CFC but no one seemed to be too concerned at the small turnout or limited publicity in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. The NFF never put this event up on their website calendar and the CFC doesn’t even have a website, which has become a crucial outreach tool for any small, geographically-dispersed new initiative that wants to reach its intended audience.

Divides and Reaching Across:

I also felt sort of sad for the self-imposed divide going on here. In between sessions, Seth Hinshaw, clerk of Ohio Yearly Meeting, asked me about FGC and then asked each of the other people there at the time if they had ever been to the FGC Gathering. Almost none had. I know the Gathering can be a depressing place for a Christian Friend, but if you want to go fishing for new disciples, there’s nothing like it. Just the presence of grounded traditionalist Friends at the Gathering does a lot to dispel stereotypes and generate good will.

When Jack Smith (Ohio YM, CFC) gave his spiel on the Christian Friends Conference, it sounded very much in the same spirit as FGC’s Traveling Ministries Program. There’s a shared impulse to look anew at traditions and to make the time to tell stories with one another, one on one, in an authentic sharing sprit. Call this the spirt of the age and label it post-liberal, emergent church, whatever–there is a lot more kinship here than we think and a lot of opportunities to go beyond our circles to connect with others.

Geographically Scattered Meetings:

From conversations and reading the Ohio Yearly Meeting minute book I learned more about a very geographically diverse meeting–Rockingham Friends. Although there’s a physical town in Virginia after which it’s named, only a few members of the meeting actually live nearby. The great majority live across the country and around the world, made up of Quaker Christian Friends holding dual membership in a local yearly meeting and in Rockingham. I’ve had wonderful fellowship in the Spirit with the Rockingham Friends I’ve met (I spent some time with the London cohort last Spring). While many meetings have long-distance members on the books (it’s not uncommon to find a Philadelphia-area meeting that claims hundreds of members but only has a few dozen people on First Day), Rockingham Friends outside Virginia seem to value and affirm their affiliate membership (link to the Ohio book of discipline). It would be fascinating to hear more about how business meeting works and to understand the impulse and benefits of being part of a geographically-diverse meeting like this.

I find it fascinating that the most socially-conservative yearly meeting in the U.S. would have one of the most ground-breaking concept of membership. Perhaps it’s part of an evolving twenty-first century model. Many people within the Religious Society of Friends and in the larger religious world have a closer sense of identity with an intentionally-defined identity group than they do with their local meeting. Perhaps the most lively, spirit-led example in the Quaker world had its mid-winter gathering in the same Burlington meetinghouse a few weeks later: FLGBTQC, Friends for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Concerns. I didn’t attend but all reports were that it was a much bigger gathering. (I can also guarantee that there were more Christian Quakers in the meetinghouse that weekend, an irony that deserves some chewing over sometime in the future).

Final Thoughts:

I’d certainly go again. There was some very good, thought-provoking conversations there. Is this the springboard of a Christian renewal that will sweep throughout all branches of the Religious Society of Friends? Well, probably not. But it is another rivulet making its way into the future and a interesting group to go paddling downstream with on a weekend in January.