I thought I had wandered into a group of people who actually believed that God was able to speak directly to them. I remember saying, “Oh my God, this is Pentecost!” I couldn’t believe that these people think God is actually glllllloing to speak to them! I’m down for this. This is where I belong.

Most of the Quakers reading this can probably guess where this is going–she pretty quickly got a lesson in the unwritten norms against exuberance at many Quaker meetings, the rules that prevent many expressions of worship. Ayesha’s Black and many of the strictures on behavior are pretty middle-class white. But a lot of this isn’t really about race. I’ve been led to do some very non-ordinary things at uptight Quaker meetings and feeling incredibly self-conscious over it. When I came to Friends, I loved the idea of the radical spontenaeity of our worship (anyone can minister anytime!) and the life it called us to but in practice we often are creatures of habit, to our detriment. I love Ayesha’s talk of “experimenting with freedom” and the “liberty of the spirit.” I realize my stories of non-ordinariness are all over a decade old. I wish I felt more of that liberty again.

http://quakerspeak.com/how-does-culture-influence-quaker-worship/

So my questions for Quakers are: How do you ensure that adults are trusted to be adults even if they are under 30? How do you make sure that people are given opportunities to take responsibility without feeling that they must perform especially well because they are representing a whole demographic?

Here in the U.S., the trick to getting on national committees while young (at least when I was trying it in my 20s) was having a well-known mom. As someone who kept knocking and kept getting turned away it blew me away when I heard Quaker-famous offspring complain how they were always being asked to serve on committees. But then I realized it was the same tokenizing phenomenon, just in reverse.

So our work isn’t just looking around a room and ticking off demographic boxes, but really digging deeper and seeing if we’re representative of multi-dimensional diversities. And if we’re not, the problem isn’t just that we aren’t diverse (diversity is a fine value in and of itself but ultimately just a crude tool) but that we have unexamined cultural practices and selection systems that are systematically turning away people from community participation and service.

Keeping cradle Quakers by making room to lean in?

In recent years, a number of Black Friends Journal contributors have shared heartbreaking stories of not feeling welcome in Quaker circles. As we planned this issue, we self‐consciously added a question mark to the end of its title—“A Racially Diverse Society of Friends?” The choice of punctuation hints at a certain weariness—are we really still asking this?—along with the suggestion that maybe many Friends are content enough with the status quo that they might simply answer “no” to a call for diversity.

Racially Diverse Society of Friends (January 2019) Archives — Friends Journal

January 2019: A Racially Diverse Society of Friends? Full Issue Access Features: Are We Ready to Make the…

Friends Journal

Especially artists and musicians, we often don’t have the same point of view or even the same background. Each of us will bring a lot of baggage into the meeting of the musicians and we have to build trust with each other and people need to feel free to express their ideas as a soloist without feeling told by the leader how exactly to play—we have to work it out as an ensemble. And I think that’s very true with meetings also.

Those with long memories might remember that I interviewed Chad Stephenson after he made a comparison between new jazz traditionalists and Convergent Friends at the 2009 Ben Lomond conference (I believe he wrote an expanded version for the Spirit Rising Quaker anthology but I can’t find a link).

Technical note: this was only possible with a water resistant phone, as I would not have dared wade out into a pool with previous phones. The 3D bokeh effect is courtesy of the iPhone 7 Plus “Portrait” mode. It’s not perfect: zoom in and there’s some distortion around his left arm, both at the top where it fuzzes around the mid background of the slide and on bottom where there are artifacts in the contrast with the far background of the fence line. But I’m still pleased and amazed at how well the 3D imaging works.

It also perhaps signals a cultural shift away from snobbery and into embracing roots. One of the most popular posts on the New York Times’s website last year celebrated regional accents (apparently Philadelphians are allowed to talk like Philadelphians again).

An analogue to this fashion trend has been occuring among Friends for a little while now. The “New Plain” discussion have revolved around reclaiming an attitude, not a uniform.

If you read the old Quaker guide books (called “Books of Discipline” then, now more often called “Faith and Practice”), you’ll see that unlike other plain-dressing American groups like the Amish, Quakers didn’t intend their clothes to be a uniform showing group conformity. Instead, plainness is framed in terms of interior motivations. Avoiding fashion trends helped Friends remember that they were all equal before God. It also spoke to our continuing testimony of integrity, in that Friends were to dress the same way in different contexts and so vouchsafe for a single identity.

When I began feeling the tug of a leading toward plainness it was for what I began calling “Sears Plain,” indicating that I wore clothes that I could find in any box store or mall. I developed a low-maintenance approach to fashion that freed up my time from shopping and the morning dressing ritual. Modern plainness can lessen the temptation to show off in clothes and it can reduce the overall wardrobe size and thus reduce our impact on the environment and with exploited labor. But all this is nothing new and it never really disappeared. If you looked around a room of modern Quakers you’ll often see a trend of sartorial boringness; I was simply naming this and putting it in the context of our tradition.

Over time I found that these motivations were more prevalent in the wider culture, especially in the minimalist techie scene. Steve Jobs famously sported a uniform of black turtleneck, jeans, and New Balance sneakers (explained in 2011). In a 2012 profile, Barack Obama talked about limiting his clothes to two colors of suits so that he could free up his decision-making energies on more important issues (I wrote about his fashion in “Plain like Barack”).

Non-celebrities also seem interested in working out their relationship with fashion. My articles on modern plainness have always been a big draw on my blog. While my fellow Quakers are sometimes mildly embarrassed by our historic peculiarities, outsiders often eat this stuff up. They’re looking for what the techies would call “life hacks” that can help them prioritize life essentials. If we can communicate our values in a real way that isn’t propped by appeals to the authority of tradition, then we can reach these seekers.

So now that “Normcore” is appearing in places like Huffington Post , the New York Times and fashion magazines, will Friends be able to talk more about it? Do we still have a collective witness in regards to the materialism and ego-centricity of fashion marketing?

One of the most famous scenes in the AMC show Mad Men comes near the end of season one. Kodak has asked the advertising firm to create a campaign around a new slide projector that has a circular tray. Don Draper presents the Carousel and gives a nostalgia-steeped presentation that use his personal photographs to move both the Kodak execs and the viewers at home, who know that these semi-focused pictures will soon be all that left of his disintegrating family.

No falling apart family for me, but I find myself already feeling nostalgic for a family vacation to Disney World that doesn’t start for another six days. I’ve recently been looking through our Flickr archive of past trips (four for me) and realize that they are our Carousel. The start with my fiancee taking a cynical me on my first trip. Later visits bring kids to the photographic lineup: newly-found legs to run, the joys of messy ice cream, the scare of not-very-scary rides and the big eyes of parades all run through the sets.

In less than a week we’ll start a new set. There will be two new children in this one. “The babies” are both walking and toddling and are at their peak of baby photogenic cuteness. The older two are real kids now and the eldest is starting to show early glimpses of teenage-hood: eye-rolling, exhalation of air (“uh!”) to show disapproval of inconvenient parental instructions.

Iconic family pictures will happen. Since our last visit five years ago, my wife’s lost her father to cancer and my mother’s been slipping into the forgetfulness of Alzheimer’s. As the wheel of life turns it somehow becomes more possible to see ourselves as part of the turning Carousel. Some decades from now I can imagine myself going through these pictures surrounded by indulging children and antsy grandchildren, exclaiming “look how young everyone looks!”

Update post-trip:

There are 104 pictures from this trip in our public Flickr set, with one of our four kids holding hands as they walk to the pool a standout iconic shot of their childhood together:

I never had much expectation that the trial of Trayvon Martin’s killer would find him guilty. A good team of lawyers can conjure up reasonable doubt over most anything. As as Alafair Burke writes on Huffington, much of what Zimmerman did was protected by Florida’s insanely-crazy “stand your ground” laws.

But even without that, high-profile court cases get so politicized so quickly that they rarely provide any kind of catharsis, let alone justice, when stacked against hundreds of years of racial injustices. And just as Zimmerman’s judgement was colored by his racial history and biases, so too are ours: our opinions about what happened that evening in Sanford, Florida, are much more a reaction to where we fall in the continuums of privileges than we might care to admit.

Privilege is unearned opportunities conferred by how closely we fit a particular stereotype. When I was in my early 20s, I was once pulled over by a policeman when I was driving aimlessly through a sleepy town at 3 am (no good story I’m afraid: I was simply bored, with insomnia). He visibly eased up when he saw I was white, and he got almost avuncular a minute later when he saw the Irish name on my drivers license. I know that almost-forgettable instant could have played out quite differently if I had been black, with a Muslim name, perhaps, and a chip on my shoulder because this was the fifth time that month I had gotten detained for no good reason.

No matter what I do to educate myself, I will always be George Zimmerman to (many) strangers on the street, just as Trayvon Martin will always be a suspicious house burgler for being a black stranger in a hoodie.

The work that needs to be done–or continued, for we need to remember the many times people have done the right thing–couldn’t be answered by a criminal trial anyway. What’s needed is the education of society at large.

One step is all of the conversations taking place on Facebook and around water coolers this week. Let’s talk about the fears that subconsciously drive us. For Zimmerman’s gun was only one of the triggers that killed Martin. It was fear that gave us Sanford’s gated community and its town watch, along with our nation’s permissive gun laws and draconian legal concepts like “standing one’s ground.” It was that potent mix of suspicion that set in motion a situation that left a seventeen year old kid with a pocketful of Skittles lying dead face down in the grass.

Can we learn to understand the ways we live in fear? Can we get to know one another more deeply in that place that breaks down the gates in our hearts?