Since Benson’s time, denominational-mindedness has gained ground among Quakers, and a diversity of philosophies is now seen as valid not only for those outside of the Society but for those within. A tightening conformity to the doctrine of individualism has accelerated the proliferation of ideologies within the Society. Resisted by most is the observation that human nature is intrinsic and universal, the same in every time and place, and that Jesus Christ speaks to this universal condition.

https://patradallmann.wordpress.com/2018/06/02/introduction-to-the-christian-universalism-of-george-fox/

In a meeting for worship I attended a few years ago a woman rose and spoke about her work for peace. She told us of letters written and meetings attended; she certainly kept busy. She confessed that it is tiring work and she certainly sounded tired and put-upon. But she said she’d keep at it and she quoted early Friends’ mandate to us: that we must work to take away the occasion of war.

Read contemporary Friends literature and you’ll see this imperative all over the place. From one brochure: “We are called as Friends to lead lives that ‘take away the occasion of all wars.’ ” Yet this statement, like many contemporary statements on Quaker testimonies, is taken out of context. The actor has been switched and the message has been lost. For the peace testimony doesn’t instruct us to take away occasions.

The Quaker Peace Testimony: Living in the Power

The classic statement of the Quaker peace testimony is the 1660 Declaration. England was embroiled in war and insurrection. A failed political coup was blamed on Quakers and it looked like Friends were going to be persecuted once more by the civil authorities. But Friends weren’t interested in the political process swirling around them. They weren’t taking sides in the coups. “I lived in the virtue of that life and power that took away the occasion of all wars,” George Fox had told civil authorities ten years before and the signers of the declaration elaborated why they could not fight: “we do earnestly desire and wait, that by the Word of God’s power and its effectual operation in the hearts of men, the kingdoms of this world may become the kingdoms of the Lord.”

For all of the over-intellectualism within Quakerism today, it’s a surprise that these statements are so rarely parsed down. Look at Fox’s statement: many modern activists could agree we should take away occassion for war, certainly, but it’s a subordinate clause. It is not referring to the “we,” but instead modifies “power.” Our instructions are to live in that power. It is that power that does the work of taking away war’s occasion.

I’m not quibbling but getting to the very heart of the classic understanding of peace. It is a “testimony,” in that we are “testifying” to a larger truth. We are acknowledging something: that there is a Power (let’s start capitalizing it) that takes away the need for war. It is that Power that has made peace possible and that Power that has already acted and continues to act in our world. The job has actually been done. The occasion for war has been ended. Our relationship to this Power is simply to live in it. Around the time of the Declaration, George Fox wrote a letter to Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell :

The next morning I was moved of the Lord to write a paper to the Protector, Oliver Cromwell; wherein I did, in the presence of the Lord God, declare that I denied the wearing or drawing of a carnal sword, or any other outward weapon, against him or any man; and that I was sent of God to stand a witness against all violence, and against the works of darkness; and to turn people from darkness to light; and to bring them from the causes of war and fighting, to the peaceable gospel.

The peace testimony is actually a statement of faith. Not surprising really, or it shouldn’t be. Early Friends were all about shouting out the truth. “Christ has come to teach the people himself” was a early tagline. It’s no wonder that they stretched it out to say that Christ has taken away occasion for war. Hallelujiah!, I can hear them shout. Let the celebration begin. I always hear John Lennon echoing these celebrants when he sings “War is over” and follows with “if we want it.”

Obviously war isn’t over. People must still want it. And they do. War is rooted in lusts, James 4:1–3 tells us. Modern American greed for material things with ever more rapacity and blindness. We drive our S.U.V.s and then fight for oil supplies in the Persian Gulf. We worry that we won’t be popular or loved if we don’t use teeth-whitening strips or don’t obsess over the latest T.V. fad. We aren’t living in the Power and the Deceiver convinces us that war is peace.

But the Power is there. We can live in that Power and it will take away more than occasions for war, for it will take away the lusts and insecurities that lead to war.

Speaking Faith to Power

When you’ve acknowledge the Power, what does faith become? It becomes a testimony to the world. I can testify to you personally that there is a Power and that this Power will comfort you, teach you, guide you. Early Friends were proselytising when they wrote their statement. After writing his letter to Cromwell, Fox went to visit the man himself. Cromwell was undoubtedly the most powerful man in England and anything but a pacifist. He had raised and led armies against the king and it was he who ordered the beheading of King Charles I. And what did Fox talk about? Truth. And Jesus.

George Fox stood as a witness just as he promised, and tried to turn Cromwell from darkness to light, to bring him from the cause of war to the peaceable gospel. By Fox’s account, it almost worked:

As I was turning, he caught me by the hand, and with tears in his eyes said, “Come again to my house; for if thou and I were but an hour of a day together, we should be nearer one to the other”; adding that he wished me no more ill than he did to his own soul. I told him if he did he wronged his own soul; and admonished him to hearken to God’s voice, that he might stand in his counsel, and obey it; and if he did so, that would keep him from hardness of heart; but if he did not hear God’s voice, his heart would be hardened. He said it was true.

This then is the Quaker Peace Testimony. I don’t think it can be divorced from its spiritual basis. In the twentieth century, many leading Friends tried to dilute the Quaker message to make it more understandable and palatable for non-Friends. A line of George Fox was taken out of context and used so much that most Friends have adopted “that of God in everyone” as a unified creed, forgetting that it’s a modern phrase whose ambiguity Fox wouldn’t have appreciated. When we talk about peace, we often do so in very secularized language. We’re still trying to proselytize, but our message is a rationalist one that war can be solved by technocratic means and a more democratic apportionment of resources. Most contemporary statements have all the umph of a floor speech at the Democratic National Convention, with only throw-away references to “communities of faith,” and bland statements of “that of God” hinting that there might be something more to our message.

The freedom of living the Power

We actually share much of the peace testimony with a number of Christians. There are many Evangelical Christians who readily agree that there’s a Power but conclude that their job is just to wait for its return. They define the power strictly as Jesus Christ and the return as the Second Coming. They foresee a worldly Armageddon when peace will fail and thousands will die.

That’s not our way. Friends pulled Christianity out of the first century and refused to wait for any last century to declare that Jesus is here now, “to teach his people himself.” We keep constant vigil and rejoice to find the returned Christ already here, deep in our hearts, at work in the world. Our way of working for peace is to praise the Power, wait for its guidance and then follow it’s commands through whatever hardship await us. When we’re doing it right, we become instruments of God in the service of the Spirit. Christ does use us to take away the occasions for war!

But the waiting is necessary, the guidance is key. It gives us the strength to overcome overwork and burn-out and it gives us the direction for our work. The slickest, most expensive peace campaigns and the most dramatic self-inflating actions often achieve much less than the simple, humble, behind-the-scenes, year-in, year-out service. I suspect that the ways we’re most used by the Spirit are ways we barely perceive.

Quaker ministry is not a passive waiting. We pray, we test, we work hard and we use all the gifts our Creator has given us (intelligence, technologies, etc.). There are problems in the world, huge ones that need addressing and we will address them. But we do so out of a joy. And through our work, we ask others to join us in our joy, to lift up the cross with us, joining Jesus metaphorically in witnessing to the world.

The modern-day President ordering a war suffers from the same lack of faith that George Fox’s Cromwell did. They are ignorant or impatient of Christ’s message and so take peace-making into their own hands. But how much do faithless politicians differ from many contemporary peace activists? When I blockade a federal building or stand in front of a tank, am I trying to stop war myself? When I say it’s my job to “end the occasion for war,” am I taking on the work of God? I feel sad for the woman who rose in Meeting for Worship and told us how hard her peace work is. Each of us alone is incapable of bringing on world peace, and we turn in our own tracks with a quiet dispair. I’ve seen so many Quaker peace activists do really poor jobs with such a overwhelmed sense of sadness that they don’t get much support. Detached from the Spirit, we look to gain our self-worth from others and we start doing things simply to impress our worldly peers. If we’re lucky we get money but not love, respect but not a new voice lifted up in the choir of praise for the Creator. We’ve given up hope in God’s promise and despair is our ever-present companion.

Our testimony to the world

It doesn’t need to be this way. And I think for many Friends it hasn’t been. When you work for the Power, you don’t get attached to your work’s outcome in the same way. We’re just footsoldiers for the Lord. Often we’ll do things and have no idea how they’ve affected others. It’s not our job to know, for it’s not our job to be sucessful as defined by the world. Maybe all the work I’ve ever done for peace is for some exchange of ideas that I won’t recognize at the time. We need to strive to be gracious and grounded even in the midst of all the undramatic moments (as well as those most dramatic moments). We will be known to the world by how we witness our trust in God and by how faithfully we live our lives in obedience to the Spirit’s instructions.

Related Reading

Again, the link to the 1660 Declaration is the first stop for those wanting to understand Friends’ understanding on peacemaking.

Quaker Historian Jerry Frost talked about the peace testimony as part of his history of twentieth century Quakerism (“Non-violence seemed almost a panacea for liberal Friends seeking politically and socially relevant peace work”). Bill Samuel has written a history of the peace testimony with a good list of links. Lloyd Lee Wilson wrote about being a “Christian Pacifist” in the April 2003 edition of Quaker Life.

If wars are indeed rooted in lust, then nonviolent activism should be involved in examinating those lusts. In The Roots of Nonviolence (written for Nonviolence.org), I talk a little about how activists might relate to the deeper causes of the war to transcend the “anti-war” movement. One way I’ve been exploring anti-consumerism in with my re-examination of the Quaker tradition of plain dress.

For reasons I can’t understand, people sometimes read “Living in the Power: the Quaker Peace Testimony Reclaimed” and think I’m “advocating a retreat from directly engaging the problems of the world” (as one Friend put it). I ask those who think I’m positing some sort of either/or duality betwen faith vs. works, or ministry vs. activism, to please reread the essay. I have been a peace activist for over fifteen years and run nonviolence.org [update: ran, I laid it down in 2008), a prominent website on nonviolence. I think some of the misunderstandings are generational.

In the last fifty years it’s become difficult to separate Quaker testimonies from questions of membership. Both were dramatically reinvented by a newly-minted class of liberal Friends in the early part of the twentieth century and then codified by Howard Brinton’s landmark Friends for 300 Years, published in the early 1950s.

Comfort and the Test of Membership

Brinton comes right out and says that the test for membership shouldn’t involve issues of faith or of practice but should be based on whether one feels comfortable with the other members of the Meeting. This conception of membership has gradually become dominant among liberal Friends in the half century since this book was published. The trouble with it is twofold. The first is that “comfort” is not necessarily what God has in mind for us. If the frequently-jailed first generation of Friends had used Brinton’s model there would be no Religious Society of Friends to talk about (we’d be lost in the historical footnotes with the Muggletonians, Grindletonians and the like). One of the classic tests for discernment is whether an proposed action is contrary to self-will. Comfort is not our Society’s calling.

The second problem is that comfortability comes from fitting in with a certain kind of style, class, color and attitude. It’s fine to want comfort in our Meetings but when we make it the primary test for membership, it becomes a cloak for ethnic and cultural bigotries that keep us from reaching out. If you have advanced education, mild manners and liberal politics, you’ll fit it at most East Coast Quaker meetings. If you’re too loud or too ethnic or speak with a working class accent you’ll likely feel out of place. Samuel Caldwell gave a great talk about the difference between Quaker culture and Quaker faith and I’ve proposed a tongue-in-cheek testimony against community as way of opening up discussion.

The Feel-Good Testimonies

Friends for 300 Years also reinvented the Testimonies. They had been specific and often proscriptive: against gambling, against participation in war. But the new testimonies became vague feel-good character traits–the now-famous SPICE testimonies of simplicity, peace, integrity, community and equality. Who isn’t in favor of all those values? A president taking us to war will tell us it’s the right thing to do (integrity) to contruct lasting peace (peace) so we can bring freedom to an oppressed country (equality) and create a stronger sense of national pride (community) here at home.

We modern Friends (liberal ones at least) were really transformed by the redefintions of membership and the testimonies that took place mid-century. I find it sad that a lot of Friends think our current testimonies are the ancient ones. I think an awareness of how Friends handled these issues in the 300 years before Brinton would help us navigate a way out of the “ethical society” we have become by default.

The Source of our Testimonies

A quest for unity was behind the radical transformation of the testimonies. The main accomplishment of East Coast Quakerism in the mid-twentieth century was the reuniting of many of the yearly meetings that had been torn apart by schisms starting in 1827. By the end of that century Friends were divided across a half dozen major theological strains manifested in a patchwork of institutional divisions. One way out of this morass was to present the testimonies as our core unifying priciples. But you can only do that if you divorce them from their source.

As Christians (even as post-Christians), our core commandment is simple: to love God with all our heart and to love our neighbor as ourselves:

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. Matthew 22:37–40 and Mark 12:30–31, Luke 10:27.

The Quaker testimonies also hang on these commandments: they are our collective memory. While they are in contant flux, they refer back to 350 years of experience. These are the truths we can testify to as a people, ways of living that we have learned from our direct experience of the Holy Spirit. They are intricately tied up with our faith and with how we see ourselves following through on our charge, our covenant with God.

I’m sure that Howard Brinton didn’t intend to separate the testimonies from faith, but he chose his new catagories in such a way that they would appeal to a modern liberal audience. By popularizing them he made them so accessible that we think we know them already.

A Tale of Two Testimonies

Take the twin testimonies of plainness and simplicity. First the ancient testimony of plainness. Here’s the description from 1682:

Advised, that all Friends, both old and young, keep out of the world’s corrupt language, manners, vain and needless things and fashions, in apparel, buildings, and furniture of houses, some of which are immodest, indecent, and unbecoming. And that they avoid immoderation in the use of lawful things, which though innocent in themselves, may thereby become hurtful; also such kinds of stuffs, colours and dress, as are calculated more to please a vain and wanton mind, than for real usefulness; and let tradesmen and others, members of our religious society, be admonished, that they be not accessary to these evils; for we ought to take up our daily cross, minding the grace of God which brings salvation, and teaches to deny all ungodliness and worldly lusts, and to live soberly, righteously and godly, in this present world, that we may adorn the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ in all things; so may we feel his blessing, and be instrumental in his hand for the good of others.

Note that there’s nothing in there about the length of one’s hem. The key phrase for me is the warning about doing things “calculated to please a vain and wanton mind.” Friends were being told that pride makes it harder to love God and our neighbors; immoderation makes it hard to hear God’s still small voice; self-sacrifice is necessary to be an instrument of God’s love. This testimony is all about our relationships with God and with each other.

Most modern Friends have dispensed with “plainness” and recast the testimony as “simplicity.” Ask most Friends about this testimony and they’ll start telling you about their cluttered desks and their annoyance with cellphones. Ask for a religious education program on simplicity and you’ll almost certainly be assigned a book from the modern voluntary simplicity movement, one of those self-help manuals that promise inner peace if you plant a garden or buy a fuel-efficient car, with “God” absent from the index. While it’s true that most Americans (and Friends) would have more time for spiritual refreshment if they uncluttered their lives, the secular notions of simplicity do not emanate out of a concern for “gospel order” or for a “right ordering” of our lives with God. Voluntary simplicity is great: I’ve published books on it and I live car-free, use cloth diapers, etc. But plainness is something different and it’s that difference that we need to explore again.

Pick just about any of the so-called “SPICE” testimonies (simplicity, peace, integrity, community and equality) and you’ll find the modern notions are secularlized over-simplications of the Quaker understandings. In our quest for unity, we’ve over-stated their importance.

Earlier I mentioned that many of the earlier testimonies were proscriptive–they said certain actions were not in accord with our principles. Take a big one: after many years of difficult ministering and soul searching, Friends were able to say that slavery was a sin and that Friends who held slaves were kept from a deep communion with God; this is different than saying we believe in equality. Similarly, saying we’re against all outward war is different than saying we’re in favor of peace. While I know some Friends are proud of casting everything in postitive terms, sometimes we need to come out and say a particular practice is just plain wrong, that it interferes with and goes against our relationship with God and with our neighbors.

I’ll leave it up to you to start chewing over what specific actions we might take a stand against. But know this: if our ministers and meetings found that a particular practice was against our testimonies, we could be sure that there would be some Friends engaged in it. We would have a long process of ministering with them and laboring with them. It would be hard. Feelings would be hurt. People would go away angry.

After a half-century of liberal individualism, it would be hard to once more affirm that there is something to Quakerism, that it does have norms and boundaries. We would need all the love, charity and patience we could muster. This work would is not easy, especially because it’s work with members of our community, people we love and honor. We would have to follow John Woolman’s example: our first audience would not be Washington policymakers , but instead Friends in our own Society.

Testimonies as Affirmation of the Power

In a world beset by war, greed, poverty and hatred, we do need to be able to talk about our values in secular terms. An ability to talk about pacifism with our non-Quaker neighbors in a smart, informed way is essential (thus my Nonviolence.org ministry [since laid down], currently receiving two millions visitors a year). When we affirm community and equality we are witnessing to our faith. Friends should be proud of what we’ve contributed to the national and international discussions on these topics.

But for all of their contemporary centrality to Quakerism, the testimonies are only second-hand outward forms. They are not to be worshiped in and of themselves. Modern Friends come dangerously close to lifting up the peace testimony as a false idol–the principle we worship over everything else. When we get so good at arguing the practicality of pacifism, we forget that our testimony is first and foremost our proclamation that we live in the power that takes away occassion for war. When high school math teachers start arguing over arcane points of nuclear policy, playing armchair diplomat with yearly meeting press releases to the U.S. State Department, we loose credibility and become something of a joke. But when we minister with the Power that transcends wars and earthly kingdoms, the Good News we speak has an authority that can thunder over petty governments with it’s command to quake before God.

When we remember the spiritual source of our faith, our understandings of the testimonies deepen immeasurably. When we let our actions flow from uncomplicated faith we gain a power and endurance that strengthens our witness. When we speak of our experience of the Holy Spirit, our words gain the authority as others recognize the echo of that “still small voice” speaking to their hearts. Our love and our witness are simple and universal, as is the good news we share: that to be fully human is to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul and mind and to love our neighbors as we do ourselves.

Hallelujah: praise be to God!

Reading elsewhere:

• James Healton has a great piece on the testimonies over on Quakerinfo.com. The One Testimony That Binds Them All Together talks about Christ’s role in the testimonies. Be sure to check out Quakerinfo’s list of testimony resources.

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/.

This was a post I sent to the “Pearl” email list, which consists of members of the 2002 FGC Gathering workshop led by Lloyd Lee Wilson of North Carolina Yearly Meeting (Conservative). Eighth Month 20, 2002

I thought I’d share some of my journey in plain-ness since Gathering. There’s two parts to plain dress: simplicity and plain-ness.

The most important part of the simplicity work has been simplifying my wardrobe. It’s incredible how many clothes I have. I suspect I have a lot fewer than most Americans but there’s still tons, and never enough room in the closets & dressers (I do have small closets but still!). I’d like to get all my clothes into one or two dresser drawers and donate the rest to charity. Two pairs of pants, a couple of shirts, a few days worth of socks and undergarments. This requires that I wash everything frequently which means I hand-wash things but that’s okay. The point is to not worry or think about what I’m going to wear every morning. I’ve been to a wedding and a funeral since I started going plain and it was nice not having to fret about what to wear.

I also appreciate using less resources up by having fewer clothes. It’s hard to get away from products that don’t have some negative side effects (support of oil industry, spilling of chemical wastes into streams, killing of animals for hide, exploitation of people constructing the clothes at horrible wages & conditions). I try my best to balance these concerns but the best way is to reduce the use.

These motivations are simple-ness rather than plain-ness. But I am trying to be plain too. For men it’s pretty easy. My most common clothing since Gathering has been black pants, shoes and suspenders, and the combo seems to look pretty plain. There’s no historic authenticity. The pants are Levi-Dockers which I already own, the shoes non-leather ones from Payless, also already owned. The only purchase was suspenders from Sears. I bought black overalls too. My Dockers were victims of a minor bike accident last week (my scraped knee & elbow are healing well, thank you, and my bike is fine) and I’m replacing them with thicker pants that will hold up better to repeated washing & use. There’s irony in this, certainly. If I were being just simple, I’d wear out all the pants I have–despite their color–rather than buy new ones. I’d be wearing some bright & wacky pants, that’s for sure! But irony is part of any witness, especially in the beginning when there’s some lifestyle shifting that needs to happen. As a person living in the world I’m bound to have contradictions: they help me to not take myself too seriously and I try to accept them with grace and good humor.

But practicality in dress more important to me than historical authenticity. I don’t want to wear a hat since I bike every day and want to keep my head free for the helmet; it also feels like my doing it would go beyond the line into quaintness. The only type of clothing that’s new to my wardrobe is the suspenders and really they are as practical as a belt, just less common today. A few Civil War re-enactment buffs have smilingly observed that clip-on suspenders aren’t historically authentic but that’s perfectly okay with me. I also wear collars, that’s perfectly okay with me too.

The other thing that I’m clear about is that the commandment to plain dress is not necessarily eternal. It is situational, it is partly a response to the world and to Quakerdom and it does consciously refer to certain symbols. God is what’s eternal, and listening to the call of Christ within is the real commandment. If I were in a Quaker community that demanded plain dress, I expect I would feel led to break out the tie-die and bleach and manic-panic hair coloring. Dress is an outward form and like all outward forms and practices, it can easily become a false sacrament. If we embrace the form but forget the source (which I suspect lots of Nineteenth Century Friends did), then it’s time to cause a ruckus.

Every so often Friends need to look around and take stock of the state of the Society. At the turn of the 20th Century, they did that. There’s a fascinating anti-plain dress book from that time that argues that it’s a musty old tradition that should be swept away in light of the socialist ecumenical world of the future. I suspect I would have had much sympathy for the position at the time, especially if I were in a group of Friends who didn’t have the fire of the Spirit and wore their old clothes only because their parents had and it was expected of Quakers.

Today the situation is changed. We have many Friends who have blended in so well with modern suburban America that they’re indistinguishable in spirit or deed. They don’t want to have committee meeting on Saturdays or after Meeting since that would take up so much time, etc. They’re happy being Quakers as long as not much is expected and as long as there’s no challenge and no sacrifice required. We also have Friends who think that the peace testimony and witness is all there is (confusing the outward form with the source again, in my opinion). When a spiritual emptiness sets into a community there are two obvious ways out: 1) bring in the fads of the outside world (religious revivalism in the 19 Century, socialist ecumenicalsim in the 20th, Buddhism and sweat lodges in the 21st). or 2) re-examine the fire of previous generations and figure out what babies you threw away with the bathwater in the last rebellion against empty outward form.

I think Quakers really found something special 350 years ago, or rediscovered it and that we are constantly rediscovering it. I have felt that power/ I know that there is still one, named Jesus Christ, who can speak to my condition and that the Spirit comes to teach the people directly. I’ll read old journals and put on old clothes to try to understand early Friends’ beliefs. The clothes aren’t important, I don’t want to give them too much weight. But there is a tradition of Quakers taking on plain dress upon some sort of deep spiritual convincement (it is so much of a cliche of old Quaker journals that literary types classify it as part of the essential structure of the journals). I see plain dress as a reminder we give ourselves that we are trying to live outside the worldliness of our times and serve the eternal. My witness to others is simply that I think Quakerism is something to commit oneself wholly to (yes, I’ll meet on a Saturday) and that there are some precious gifts in traditional Quaker faith & practice that could speak to the spiritual crisis many Friends feel today.

In friendship,
Martin Kelley
Atlantic City Area MM, NJ
martink@martinkelley.com

Related Posts

• Plain Dressing at the FGC Gathering (Seventh Month 2004)
• Gohn Brothers and some plain dressing tips (Seventh Month 2004)