great teacher - Quaker Ranter

The bully, the Friend and the Christian

Martin Kelley — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 15:51:13 +0000

Lazy guy I am, I’m going to cut-and-paste a comment I left over at Rich the Brooklyn Quaker’s blog in response to his post “What This Christian Is Looking For In Quakerism”:http://brooklynquaker.blogspot.com/2006/04/what-this-christian-is-looking-for-in.html. There’s been quite a good discussion in the comments. In them Rich poses this analogy:
bq. During the Great Depression and World War II, I have been told that Franklin Roosevelt rallied the spirits of the American people with his “fireside chats”. These radio broadcasts communicated information, projected hope, and called for specific responses from his listeners; including some acts of self-sacrifice and unselfishness… Often people would gather in small groups around their radios to hear these broadcasts, they would talk about what Roosevelt had said, and to some extent they were guided in their daily lives by some of what they had heard.

Rich then supposes what a listener sitting in front of the radio might by thinking. I thought it was an interesting analogy and thought it provided another way of thinking about the relationship of Quakerism and Christianity and especially of a Quaker-styled Christianity. Let’s start with a listener who’s figured out that the speaker’s a real person and not just electronic fuzz

The year is 1933.
Twelfth day Third Month.
“Cue Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first fireside chat”:ftp://webstorage2.mcpa.virginia.edu/library/nara/fdr/audiovisual/speeches/firesidechat_01.mp3
Our listener sitting in front of the radio would hear FDR’s voice without knowing who he is. The information would be there but there would be no particular weight attached to it. They might listen to it but they’d be just as likely to turn the knob and catch the much more entertaining Bob Hope special.
A bully sitting nearby in the room might rebuke the listener: “Don’t touch that dial! Listen to what he’s saying! That’s the PRESIDENT!” The listener, knowing nothing about our political system, would just hear a call to unearned authority. The bully’s rebuke would have the weight of fear–what might the bully do if I don’t listen?!?–but it will have taken the listener’s attention off of FDR and onto the bully.
Let’s say that instead there’s a gentle soul in the room who gives testimony. They share with our listener how valuable they’ve found FDR’s advice to be in the past. They’re simply saying, “it’s worth listening to this guy, he says some good stuff.”
As the listener starts appreciating FDR’s counsel, our nearby friend might start teaching about the role of the Presidency in American history. They could introduce concepts like checks-and-balances, they could tell stories of past Constitutional crises, they would talk about other types of political systems. Our listener would slowly gain a vocabularly that wouldn’t change the message but which would provide a way of talking about it. The friend would be tapping on the social history of generations of Americans who had struggled to understand how to organize themselves: the friend would be teaching our collective wisdom. By understanding it our listener would be in a better position to effectively act on FDR’s advice (perhaps they’d realize they need to lobby their senators to get FDR’s next budget passed).
A deconstructionist might argue that “The United States of America” is a social construct, but that doesn’t mean the Declaration of Independence isn’t an amazing, inspiring document that says something profoundly truthful about human existance.
Taking the analogy full circle, it’s almost as if liberal Friends today are afraid of teaching the Declaration of Independence because it might offend the Russian, Italian and Korean immigrants. We still believe in it and most of the immigrants are figuring out pieces of it hit-and-miss, but we’re just incredibly awkward talking about it since we’ve lost our language. If we just started speaking plainly again, that would give the immigrants a chance to say “hey that’s interesting but you know we did it this way back in the old country.” I wonder if we’d open up the conversation to a richer level of sharing?
The beauty of Quakerism is that we know that the quiet testimony and humble invitation are gifts we can share with one another and with all we meet. I’m thinking again of the Brian Drayton’s formulation:
bq. We are also called, I feel to invite others to share Christ directly, not primarily in order to introduce them to Quakerism and bring them into our meetings, but to encourage them to turn to the light and follow it.
The message we share matters not simply because it’s Christ’s but because it’s wise. We have much to share.
*Naming the Church*
The meeting I attend, “Middletown”:http://www.pym.org/pym_mms/middletownpa_cdq.php, is going through Acts in Bible Study and today the clerk forwarded some fascinating commentary from “1863 by a fellow named J. W. McGarvey”:http://www.ccel.org/m/mcgarvey/oca/OCA11.HTM. He talks about the names we give one another and the Source and it reminds me of the discussion over on Rich’s blog. Here’s a sample:
bq. The New Testament usage in reference to names is this: When the followers of Jesus were contemplated with reference to their relation to him as their great teacher, they were called disciples. When the mind of the speaker was fixed more particularly on their relation to one another, they were styled brethren. When their relation to God was in the foreground, they were called children of God. When they were designated with special reference to character, they were called saints. But when they were spoken of with the most general reference to their great leader, they were called Christians. A practical observance of the exact force of each of these names would soon conform our speech to the primitive model, and would check a tendency to exalt any one name above another, by giving to each its proper place.
The rest of the article is worth a read, though I can’t whole-heartedly endorse it. It ends up arguing for the kind of non-denominational Christianity that I find kind of shallow (maybe I just watch too much of “Marcus Grodi”:http://www.chnetwork.org/ewtn.htm Catholic conversion shows to buy into this simplicistic Protestanism, though I suspect Fox would have been more sympathetic to McGarvey than to Grodi).
*Coming together as church*
I’d like to give a shout-out to the Ohio Yearly Meeting (Conservative) ministers who came together a “worship opportunity last Sixth Night”:http://www.localquakers.org/Ministers.htm (Saturday to you worldly folks) at “Marlborough Meeting”:http://www.localquakers.org/Marlborough.html. The email invitation from Chip Thomas got wide enough circulation among Philadelphia Friends that I saw it three times. The ministry was tender and the fellowship afterwards very welcoming. It was nice to see this form of outreach from Ohio, I’d love to see more. Friends in the Philadelphia area will get another chance when Marlborough hosts another gathering of ministers on Sixth Month 24.

Beyond the MacGuffins: Sheeran’s Beyond Majority Rule

Martin Kelley — Fri, 26 Dec 2003 13:46:20 +0000

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.