We’ve spent a lot of time here since then. It’s a 24 hour vigil and has been and will continue to be. In Boston there are vigils that have been going seven years. I try to imagine Gregory as a seven year old, having spent his childhood growing up here in this little church. It’s not an impossible scenario.

I also spend a lot of time talking with the faithful Catholics who have come here to protect the church. It’s a cacophony of voices right now–conversations about the church, sure, but that’s only one of the many topics that come up. People are sharing their lives–stories about growing up, about people that are know, about current events… It’s a real community. We’ve been attending this church for years but it’s now that I’m really getting to know everyone.

I sometimes ponder how I, the self-dubbed “Quaker Ranter,” got involved in all of this. Through my wife, of course–she grew up Catholic, became a Friend for eleven years and then “returned to the Church” a few years after our marriage. But there’s more than that, reasons why I spend my own time here. Part is my love of the small and quirky. St Mary’s parishioners are standing up for the kind of churches where people know each other. In an era where menial tasks are hired out, the actual members of St. Marys tend the church’s rosary garden and clean its basement and toilets. They spend time in the church beyond the hour of mass, doing things like praying the rosary or adoration.

The powers-that-be that want St Mary’s closed so badly want a large inpersonal church with lots of professionalized services and a least-common-denominator faith where people come, go and donate their money to a diocese that’s run like a business. But that’s not St. Mary’s. There’s history here. This is a hub of a town, an ancient crossroads, but the bishop wants big churches in the splurge of suburban sprawl. Even we Friends need places like St Mary’s in the world.

The Diocese of Camden is in frantic spin control mode after yesterday’s revelations that Bishop Galante personally received $400,000
from high flying Eurotrash con man Raffaelo Follieri for the sale of a
beach house the Bishop had been unable to unload. Follieri’s the guy
who’s been trying to buy up Catholic church properties across the
country while making out with his Hollywood girlfriend on San Tropez
beaches and partying it up with Bill Clinton’s sleezy billionaire
buddies.

It seems like a pretty clear cut case. Galante had his hand in Follieri’s cookie jar.
Sold his beach house to the guy who stood to profit most from the
Bishop’s plan to sell off half of South Jersey’s churches. Oldest story
in the book. Give him the cell next to Follieri’s and they can reminisce about
the good old days (NSFW).

I’ve been wondering just how the Diocese would try to spin this story
as it waits for federal investigators to come knocking at the door. And
today the official Spokesperson in Charge of Fairy Tales called up all the papers. Ladies and gentlemen, we present you with:

The Andrew Walton Idiot Defense

Turns out someone at the Vatican called someone at the
Diocesan offices back in 2004 telling them to sell to Follieri. That’s
it. No one can remember who made the call. No one can remember who took
the call. For all we know Follieri filled his mouth with cotton balls
and did his best Marlon Brando imitation from the pay phone across the street.

The Archdioceses in Boston, New York, Newark and elsewhere told Follieri they had enough bridges thank you very much, but poor Grandpa Joe was confused and started lending him priests and giving him the keys to the beach house.

How could anyone imagine that Follieri was a crook? He seemed like any
other Mother Teresa choir boy with his $10,000 suits, New York penthouse,
heroin habit, convicted mob associates, San Tropez weekends and expensively-maintained Hollywood girlfriend. “Nobody was aware of problems with Mr. Follieri or his company at that time.” Yeah right. Nobody. Nobody. Nobody. Nobody. Nobody. And I’m the widow of the late John Paul II, recently deceased President of the Vatican, with frozen assets in Nigeria I’d like your help in securing. Please email me back at your earliest convenience Andy Walton, I know you won’t be disappointed.

As of late, I’ve been led to consider my outward appearance and how I choose to dress. Without elaborating on that leading in this posting (perhaps later), I have given much thought to clothing and dress generally. How we dress communicates a great deal to others about ourselves—whether or not it’s our intention.

The vain among us put a great deal of emphasis on our clothes and obsess about what it may say to others about our physical or social traits: “Am I hot, or am I not? Do I look smart with these glasses? Do these pants make my butt look big?” The secretly vain (perhaps everyone else) tend to avoid the topic lest they might have to inwardly admit that they are in the former category. Even if we tell ourselves that we don’t mean to communicate much of anything by our attire, it’s certainly true that others understand our clothes to be saying something about us. Let us begin the conversation there to avoid determining whether we are outright vain or just secretly vain. 🙂

Clothing communicates many things about us including perceptions of age, sex, class, and wealth. Clothing can stereotype us as urban or rural; cool or uncool (a subjective measure, of course); hip or hopelessly out of fashion. Some examples: when I wear my best suit to work, I sense that I get a higher level of respect than when I dress more casually. When I go out for a night on the town, I pick my “New York” shoes to convey a certain cosmopolitan image. Also, when I wear my coat collar standing up, it says something different than when I wear my collar flat. In what instances do you dress differently to emphasize a different part of yourself?

On evenings and weekends, I tend to wear the same clothes: a logo-free long-sleeve shirt, corduroy pants and a pair of retro-like sneakers. I do it because it’s comfortable and it’s easy; I always know what to wear, and I get to avoid the dreaded deed of shopping—something I really dislike. (It also means that I do laundry more often!)

Even though I tend to wear that same set of clothes outside of work, that decision says more than that I simply don’t care that my clothes are always the same. The outfit communicates a great deal more: One is just as likely to see a man wearing cords, retro sneakers and a logo-free long-sleeve shirt as one is a woman. Perhaps my clothes communicate androgyny. Maybe they say that I’m an urban dweller—a little bit of a hipster, but not too much. Perhaps they say that I’m cheap. Whatever they communicate, I think it’s fair to say that they say something to others. Once I admit that my clothes indeed say something, I can get past my discomfort (I must be secretly vain) and talk about it openly. Who is the person that I’m called to be and how am I outwardly led to embody those qualities? Through actions, yes, but through dress?

Plain dress, while a statement in and of itself, communicates faith, commitment to that faith, and Otherness. It set a person apart differently than other forms of dress. When prompted by an inner spiritual leading, plain dress isn’t simply the other side of the “cool coin.” It doesn’t vary by day or circumstance, and to some, plain dress is rather ugly. However, plain dress stands for something much different than a rejection of our cultural ideals of beauty and virility. It is an embrace of one’s inner spirit and making that spirit and that faith an outward symbol.

To me, plain dress would serve as a daily reminder of a commitment to lead a more Christian and Quaker life. If I were to dress plain, I would have to sacrifice my coolness (for lack of a better word) and wear plain, and rather unexciting clothes. I wouldn’t have the luxury of dressing for different audiences and circumstances depending on my motivations. In essence, I would outwardly communicate that I am a Quaker first, a person living each moment in the spirit and in the Light, and everything else second. Plain dress would serve as a reminder to me and others that I aspire to live toward God and in the footsteps of Jesus in all places, at all times, and in every circumstance.

What an empowering thought! It is a tremendous leading for anyone to hear and one worth seeking greater discernment.

I’ve had my own run-in’s with the sweat lodge, most unforgettably when I was the co-planning clerk of the 2002 Adult Young Friends program at FGC (a few of us thought it was inappropriate to transfer a portion of the rather small AYF budget to the sweat lodge workshop, a request made with the argument that so many high-school and twenty-something Friends were attending it). But I find myself increasingly unconcerned about the lodge. It’s clear to me now that it part of another tradition than I am. It is not the kind of Quaker I am. The question remaining is whether an organization that will sponsor it is a different tradition.

How did Liberal Friends get to the place where most our our younger members consider the sweat lodge ceremony to be the high point of their Quaker experience? The sweat lodge has given a generation of younger Friends an opportunity to commune with the divine in a way that their meetings do not. It has given them mentorship and leadership experiences which they do not receive from the older Friends establishment. It has given them a sense of identity and purpose which they don’t get from their meeting “community.”

I don’t care about banning the workshop. That doesn’t address the real problems. I want to get to the point where younger Friends look at the sweat and wonder why they’d want to spend a week with some  white Quaker guy who wonders aloud in public whether he’s “a Quaker or an Indian” (could we have a third choice?). I’ve always thought this was just rather embarrassing.  I want the sweat lodge to wither away in recognition of it’s inherent ridiculousness. I want younger Friends to get a taste of the divine love and charity that Friends have found for 350 years. We’re simply cooler than the sweat lodge.

Set in this context, George Price is clearly just the latest white guy to claim that only the spirit of purer Native Americans will save us from our Old World European stodginess. Yes, it’s appropriation I guess, but it’s so transparent and classically American that our favorite song “Yankee Doodle” is a British wartime send-up of the impulse. We’ve been sticking feathers in our caps since forever.

In the Friends Journal article, it’s clear the Quaker sweat lodge owes more to the European psychotherapy of Karl Jung than Chief Ockanickon. It’s all about “liminality” and initiation into mythic archetypes, featuring cribbed language from Victor Turner, the anthropologist who was very popular circa 1974. Price is clear but never explicit about his work: his sweat lodge is Jungian psychology overlaid onto the outward form of a Native American sweatlodge. In retrospect it’s no surprise that a birthright Philadelphia Friend in a tired yearly meeting would try to combine trendy European pop psychology with Quaker summer camp theming. What is a surprise (or should be a surprise) is that Friends would sponsor and publish articles about a “Quaker Sweat Lodges” without challenging the author to spell out the Quaker contribution to a programmed ritual conducted in a consecrated teepee steeplehouse.

(Push the influences a little more, and you’ll find that Victor Turner’s anthropological findings among obscure African tribes arguably owes as much to his Catholicism than it does the facts on the ground. More than one Quaker wit has compared the sweat lodge to Catholic mass; well: Turner’s your missing philosophical link.)

I keep reading inflammatory pieces about Mel Gibson’s movie _The Passion of Christ._ The basic gist is that anyone who focuses on the suffering of Jesus’s last days is inherently anti-Semitic. Because medieval passion plays stirred up anti-Semitism, all good Christians should stay away from the story and should stay away from Gibson’s movie.
I haven’t seen the movie (update: yes I have, see below), but I find it hard to imagine that there’s any anti-Semitism in it that matches the anti-Catholicism of Gibson’s detractors. To focus on Christ’s sufferings is to explain one of the most important metaphors of Christianity, especially of Roman Catholicism. I went to a Catholic college where every room had a crucifix–Jesus nailed to the cross. It was very different from the empty crosses I had always seen growing up as a pseudo-Protestant, but this difference is an important difference of focus between Catholics and Protestants. Is the most iconic act of Jesus his suffering for our sins (his time on the cross) or his resurrection (his disappearance from the cross)? As a good Catholic, Gibson is going to focus on the torture, on the pain, on the cruelty and on the suffering and to imply that he’s doing so just to shock is to miss the whole point. It is the very gruesomeness that makes the sacrifice so meaningful and it is the horror that makes the resurrection even more of miracle.
While we need to be aware of anti-Semitism we also need to be aware of this country’s history of anti-Catholicism. My alma mater is situated twelve miles outside Philadelphia because its first home was burned to the ground by anti-Catholic rioters (of course the Irish Catholics killed, looted and burned out African Americans in New York City a generation later). My Italian wife is related to Aunt Jemima (I kid you not) because in the 1920s Italians were considered half-black (and presumably because white audiences preferred a half-black performer to an all-black one). Lots of the anti-prohibition societies and reform societies of the early 20th century were fueled in part by an abhorrence of the garlic-eating immigrant mobs with their too-colorful clothing and their religious obsession with suffering and iconic excess. Much of this WASPy distaste and aloofness lingers in the anti-Gibson pieces.
It’s all a shame. This is just a movie folks. But because it’s become so polarized we can’t talk about it without taking sides. And the sides have nothing to do with the movie itself or its merits or detractions, but are instead positions in a proxy cultural war about religion. A recent piece by one prominent religious essayist argued that good Christians don’t focus on Christ’s suffering. For the last fifty years liberal Christians have focused on the positives, on that empty cross, and Gibson’s movie is a challenge to that. It’s a challenge that reminds liberals that suffering is also a central part of the story. For those who would demote Jesus to a merely human teacher, on the scale of Abraham Lincoln, _The Passion of Christ_ is a reminder that for many Christians the suffering and miracles of his life is quite beyond anything else in that has ever happened in human history.
This movie is a challenge for many modern Quakers. Most of the rich metaphors of co-mingled joy and suffering of the early Friends have been dumbed-down over the centuries to become little more than feel-good cliches. Today we talk of “The Light” as if it’s some sort of ultraviolet grow lamp helping us to become nice big plants. That’s a nice image and George Fox might have appreciated it. But Fox’s “Light of Christ” was also the harsh light of the interrogation room, a light that banished shadows to expose our sins and human failings. It was only after the light had “convicted” us (and that was the terminology) and only after we had given up our human follies to walk only in its power that we would find Christ’s comfort. And that comfort would often be in the midst of our suffering in imitation of Christ, in our persecution by those who would call themselves Christian.
Friends burst onto the scene in seventeenth century England with a radical message: that Christianity had been stolen to serve the power of the state and that only by restoring primitive Christianity could we truly follow God. Today that’s a challenge to both left and right: to those who will use Gibson’s movie as a banner to reinforce their cultural bigotries. On the right, some will surely use _The Passion_ to justify their anti-Semitism. On the left, I see many op-ed writers using it to justify their distaste for anyone who takes their Christian faith too seriously. Mel Gibson is making a movie about his belief. He claims that it’s not anti-Semitic and I’m inclined to believe him, that any bigotry we will see there is conditioned by our gruesome history and not by a deliberate act on Gibson’s part. Why can’t we just accept a believer believing? And why can’t we just watch the movie before arguing about it?
The heart of this debate is this: is Christianity so defiled by centuries of those wrongly tortured in its name that any honest expression of it is bigoted? There are many who will answer on both sides of that question. But Friends are a people born in a time of much wrongful persecution and so for us the answer is actually kind of easy: Christianity has been stolen time and again but we must constantly try to recover it. We do that by telling stories and reaffirming the truths we have no matter who’s critiquing us. We need to engage with our history and with each other. We are often put into a �uncomfortable middle� when we affirm the truths arising out of our peace testimony (opposing a war while still denouncing a dictator) and it seems to me we should have a similar attitude towards Christianity’s past.
Does Mel Gibson cross the line into bigotry? I haven�t seen the movie but I doubt it. All the op-eds against him have argued guilt-by-association and some of the charges against the “cult” or “sect” of traditionalist Catholics are so laughable that it’s pathetic to see them repeated on respected news programs. Gibson is a talented storyteller, one who will choose drama over sensitivity. He�s not averse to pandering to stereotypes to rouse an audience. He�s not a Quaker, that�s for sure. But he is a sincere believer telling a story about his faith. We need more of those. Let�s not picket and boycott someone simply for telling a story that doesn�t fit with the pieties of the modern liberal orthodoxy. Let�s return to that uncomfortable place where we can acknowledge the complexities of being fervently religious in a world haunted by past sins and still in need of conviction and comfort.

h3. Update 3/1: Having Seen the Movie
I’ve seen the movie now. It wasn’t as terrifying as I had feared. As a director, Gibson provides cues as to when the squeamish should look away. About half a dozen times I anticipated a particularly gruesome image and was able to avert my eyes in time. He didn’t need to do this–he knows how to shock audiences and he does have a few moments where he springs us from our seats, but he does play nice and keeps the shocks and goryness separate.
Because the movie tells a familiar story and tries to portray it in realistic terms, it acts as a sort of blank slate ripe for the projection of individual audience members. How you see this movie depends in large part about what you bring to it. What you bring to it of course often depends on your feelings about Jesus Christ. More than any movie I can remember, you will see what you want to see in the film.
Take the famous scourging scene. My wife Julie winced at every bloody lash, but she did so because she understood the Catholic teaching that each strike represented her own sins.
I didn’t take it that way. As an anarchist and Christian pacifist I was struck anew with the impossibility of supporting empire in the name of this man. Our temples have been rent asunder and reborn in the Spirit. We are the lamb’s warriors. If even Jesus didn’t save himself from this torture how can we? For me, the Roman warlords were clearly the American generals in Iraq and Pontius Pilate’s sacrificing of a Jewish prophet to keep civil order too reminiscent of “US occupying forces giving jobs to ex-Saddam security forces”:http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/000206.php to do the same thing. To be honest, the high Jewish priests all looked like Catholic bishops to me–I kept seeing Boston’s former Cardinal Bernard F. Law, a man who cared more about keeping his church out of scandal then he did the innocent children being molested by abusive priests. The message for me was that leaders will always be tempted to sacrifice the truth to protect the vanity of their institutional power. As Fox said:
bq. “When all my hopes in them and in all men were gone, so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, nor could I tell what to do, then, oh, then, I heard a voice which said, ‘�There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition.’ ”
Now, I can pretty sure that Mel Gibson doesn’t share my anarcho-pacifist politics or George Fox’s theologies (update: or can I be? See below for a link to an interview with the Jewish Romainan actress who plays Mary and explains the film in fairly political terms). And that’s the most interesting thing about this movie. I’m sure an anti-Semite will find reasons to be anti-Semitic. Someone angry at Christianity will find reasons to be angry. It seems as if just about ever movie reviewer I read must have seen a different movie, and I think there’s a kernel of truth in that. I wonder if this is a result of it being such a loaded story worn rigid by two thousand years of retelling for such different agendas or whether it’s a result of Gibson’s relatively radical filming decisions? I kept wondering what it would have been like if Gibson had followed through on his original concept and omitted even the subtitles?
A few friends of mine have been emailing back and forth, noting that they would be scared of anyone converted to Christianity by this movie. I barely see how that’s possible. Without the context of belief, this is just a story about some guy being tortured to death. (There were only two miracles, touched at briefly: a reattachment of a Roman solider’s ear and a brief, dream-like scene of the Resurrection. The latter reminded me most of ending in “Being There”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078841/ where the lucky simpleton played by Peter Sellers unexpected starts walking on water, tantalizing us that maybe he wasn’t quite so simple.) There are plenty of secular movies that have more miracles or more overt “Christ figures” than this one.
If there are any conversions it will be because of the activity _around_ the film.
The sad thing though, is that too many people have become divided on this film. Political correctness has settled in on both sides of political aisle. I lot of people I respect might have gone out to see this film had it been made by anyone but Mel Gibson and had it not been so denounced by the liberal media.
Because of this Martin Kelley Quaker Ranter website, I’ve been introduced to a much wider variety of Friends and fellow believers than I had before and it’s become harder to take seriously the institutional divisions we’ve erected. There’s a lot of sweet people among the big scary Evangelicals and a lot of deep thinking and concern deep in FUM-land. Likewise, non-Liberal Friends reading this site might realize that Liberal Quakers aren’t all the cartoonish stereotype we’re sometimes made out to be (fair disclosure: my wife Julie, the ex-Quaker, just read this sentence and laughed out “yes they are!”). The truth is beyond these divisions and it’s only when we break the ranks of our own orthodoxies that we will are really able to greet that of Christ/God/Spirit in each other. It’s fine to like or not to like _The Passion of the Christ_ but the biggest lesson the film might teach us is how to look beyond the pat answers to engage with each other and with our traditions.
h4. Other Stuff
* New Quaker Merle Harton Jr. wrote an interesting piece last year about “passion plays, anti-Semitism and the upcoming movie”:http://www.newQuaker.com/2003_08_17_blogarchive.htm#106116543162349803 and he has this piece “about seeing the movie”:http://newQuaker.com/2004_02_29_blogarchive.htm#107820009585274899.
* The Evangelical Friends at “Barclay Press”:http://www.barclaypress.com/ have a special feature on their website with reviews and reader’s comments.
* Whoa, apparently the cinematographer from the movie is Quaker!? Here’s an iinterview that “mentions he’s a Quaker”:http://starbulletin.com/2004/02/22/features/story4.html but doesn’t go into any depth. Link from Quakerinfo.com. Googling him he’s also described as a “Philadelphia-born Quaker,” which makes me wonder if he’s “ethnically” Quaker but not practicing. If anyone knows more I’d be interested.
* Talk about interesting casting: Mary is played by Maia Morgenstern , a Jewish Romanian whose parents are Holocaust survivors, who says of the film: “Again and again — I underline and underline this — it’s not the people who are blamed. It was some leaders. Unfortunately, we have so many examples — even now, every minute — of political, social, military, religious leaders who are dealing with our fears, with our hopes, who are trying to manipulate our ideas and our fears. And that film speaks about this.”
* Celebrity film critic Roger Ebert has an “interesting review”:http://www.suntimes.com/output/ebert1/cst-ftr-passion24.html: “For we altar boys, [the Stations of the Cross] was not necessarily a deep spiritual experience. Christ suffered, Christ died, Christ rose again, we were redeemed, and let’s hope we can get home in time to watch the Illinois basketball game on TV. What Gibson has provided for me, for the first time in my life, is a visceral idea of what the Passion consisted of… This is not a sermon or a homily, but a visualization of the central event in the Christian religion. Take it or leave it.”
* There is of course an official “Passion movie website”:http://www.thepassionofthechrist.com/.