Whitman absorbed deist principles from his father; he was equally influenced by his mother’s Quaker background. He embraced the Quaker emphasis on individual experience of the divine — what Friends call the “inner light” — as well as the concept of “that of God” existing within every person. Whitman’s poetry reflects Quakers’ radically egalitarian theology

https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2019/31-may/features/features/walt-whitman-a-prophet-found-under-your-boot-soles

Centering is always a welcome challenge, for, as one would expect, prison can be a noisy place and competing conversations can be overwhelming. What I do is draw myself into the pictures and focus upon the images and people therein. I have accompanying pictures of places visited by Friends and sent to me over the years with scenery that, for me as a person raised on the concrete pavements of New York City, gives me visions of natural beauty without the clutter of building structures and the like.

Never Having Set Foot in the Meetinghouse

When the meetinghouse is on the other side of state prison walls.

Friends Journal

In this vein, for early Friends, ‘being a Christian‘, was more than simply assenting to theological abstracts. To live as a ‘Friend of the Truth’ was to experience directly the claim that God loves the universe perpetually in Christ. In this respect, ‘Quaker’ Christianity is more than a theory or philosophy of things, but a practical relationship with a living person. To walk with Jesus of Nazareth meant to live with the same mantle upon one’s shoulders, to teach, to heal, and to restore.

Reflections on Liberal Quakerism and the Need for Roots

Most yearly meetings recommend that everyone who works with young people should have a background check. Most local meetings I have been a part of resist this, saying that “But we know that person – they have belonged here for years!” Requiring a background check feels to some Friends like an invasion of privacy, or that it goes against the openness and trust which they value in a Quaker meeting.

I have personally known of three respected Friends who turned out to be serial child rapists. Two were pillars of their meeting. None of the people in the monthly meeting knew learned about it because of outside legal action and investigations.

There were times when these individuals were around my children, though I was near-enough nearby that I’m not worried anything happened. Still, one of the cases involved rapes in a camper in the perpetrator’s backyard and I remember my eldest thinking it looked cool and trying the door handle. We also had a close call with a Boy Scout leader and respected local historian whose file was published when an Oregon judge ordered the national BSA to release decades of secret pedophile records.

One the affected meetings in particular is near and dear to me heart and have some warm and faithful Friends. I know it was a shock and ongoing trauma for them that this happened in their community. I understand that we were all a bit naive about these matters 10 and 20 and 30 years ago. But we’ve all been educated about just how common this is and just how charming pedophiles can be.

Even recently, I’ve had people assure me their Friends meetings are safe and that they don’t need to do background checks. I make a mental note to avoid those meetings. We are not immune. And we are not magically better about discerning this stuff than any other faith community.

Straight talk on preventing child abuse

There are also various schools who brand their sports teams with the Quaker name. But a Portland, Oregon, news station says that list is getting a bit smaller: Franklin High School ditching controversial ‘Quakers’ mascot

An assistant principal and another teacher told FOX 12 they shifted away from branding the school as “Quakers” several years ago. Several students also said they don’t know much about who Quakers are or the religion. Several seemed to think Benjamin Franklin, who the school is named after, was a Quaker. Franklin was not a Quaker. FOX 12 also spoke to Kelly McCurdy, who put three children through Franklin High. He said he believes the district is making a mistake and erasing tradition. “I think it’s silly, personally,” McCurdy said. “It’s not racially insensitive.”

It seems that the Fox affiliate went out of its way to find a cranky person to deplore a point no one was making. Of course it’s not racially insensitive. But these appropriated names are always… well, weird. No public school would call themselves The Jews or The Muslims or The Catholics or anything else smelling of religion. It’s a sign of how dismissed Friends are as a actual living religious movement and denomination that our nickname is considered fair game. We must turn to the local newspaper to get the real background:

Lisa Zuniga told the board that in 2014 she met Mia Pisano, a fellow Franklin High parent who is a member of the Quaker faith, and the pair started an effort to change the name. The name, they argued, violated the separation of church and state. The district, they said, should never commandeer a religious symbol or connotation for a mascot. Despite interest in the name change, Zuniga said, parents met stiff resistance from the district. It was hard to even get anyone to explain what the process would be to bring about a name change, she said.

https://www.oregonlive.com/education/index.ssf/2018/05/portland_school_board_finds_qu.html

http://www.kptv.com/story/38145833/franklin-high-school-ditching-controversial-quakers-mascot

It feels simple and deeply radical to just say as a group that is committed to honoring that of God in everyone, that that person of color, that black person is deserving of their full humanity—to be recognized by me as a Quaker. That’s a simple thing to say and it’s a radical thing to say.

Quakerism “done right” is not “do it yourself” in either sense… No task is done by one person alone; it is always the work and responsibility of the community, though we might not always clearly see the support and assistance we are given. Some would say that we are “upheld in prayer,” a term that does not speak to my experience, but we are certainly upheld by the love and nurture of our community – unless our community is failing.

Do Friends today have faith and trust in ‘that of God’ in every person? Are we striving to answer ‘that of God’ in others, and do we have the faith that doing so may eventually bring them away from evil? I ask this because much of the discourse today seems to ignore this.

“That of God in everyone” is one of those phrases that many traditional-leaning Friends have found a bit problematic over the years. Quaker co-founder George Fox used it, but sparingly. It doesn’t even appear in his Journal. If you were looking for an “elevator pitch” of his beliefs, I would go with his spiritual opening that there is one, even Christ Jesus, who can speak to our condition. The most well-argued (perhaps over-argued) expose of “that of God” as a latter-day Quaker overlay came from Lewis Benson’s famous essay from 1970, ‘That of God in Every Man” — What Did George Fox Mean by It?

In the second half of the piece Mark asks whether our belief of that of God leads us to act differently in the political sphere. He struggles with this, as do I, and as do presumably all of us. I worry particularly about judging the way Friends act; whenever I see someone share a hard truth, I know I’ll quickly see someone else critique them for being too divisive, too “unQuakerly.”

Jesus famously overturned the money changers and Benjamin Lay spilled pig blood in yearly meeting sessions. Maybe the only guide we have is the active Guide. Maybe our orderly walking will look alternatively meek or divisive depending on the cues we’re given. And maybe we’ll be misunderstood even as we’re being the most faithful.

Mark finishes:

For now, I am striving to walk in the Light as best I can and manifest the fruit of the Spirit in my interactions with people

Belief, Faith, and “That of God”

One of the difficulties I have with the question “What do Quakers believe?” is that it makes an…

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