When I look around, there is still so much hurt that needs to be processed. There are still real differences in philosophy about how to build community. Some see how much needs to radically change so that those who have been marginalized can truly be safe and have agency, and so want to go slowly to build it correctly. Some see the damage having no community can bring, and want to do what they can to build something as safely as possible. I hate that these differences are still causing damage to our relationships and our communities. I don’t have a solution.

I appreciate the way he tries to understand the flip sides of community and institutionalism; perhaps schism could be seen as the moment they can no longer be negotiated. As pastor of one of the “most institutional of institutional churches for 15 years,” he was in the center of the centrifugal forces that tore apart both Northwest Yearly Meeting as a whole and indivisible Friends churches within it. From a distance of 3000 miles and 150 years of diverging Quaker history, I’m not in a position to say whether things could have gone differently or whether individuals always acted in their best ways but I can appreciate that it there must have been a lot of impossible choices and no-good answers as polarization gave way to disintegration.

Risking Community

One might call this whole episode the triumph of Waspy good intentions over Jewish common sense… But of course Quaker schools—and Quaker camps, like the one I once attended, and Quaker meetinghouses—are, these days, pretty Jewish places. The Times article has a burlesque feel, with a bunch of Jewish students and alumni performing in Quaker-face.

He also makes interesting points about the cultures of Jewish humor (“We Jews survive because of Hitler jokes”) and that of Friends:

The Quaker practice of silent worship can disposes its practitioners against the loud, bawdy, contentious discourse that infuses Jewish culture. I’m not making claims about individual Quakers—I can introduce you to perfectly hilarious Quakers, some of whom interrupt even more than I do—but at their institutions, the values that come to the fore are Gene Sharp not Gene Wilder. In their earnestness, Quaker schools are David Brooks not Mel Brooks. You get the idea.

I’m always a bit unsure how seriously to take cultural Quaker stereotypes as motivating forces in pieces like these. I wonder how many Friends actually work or study at a Manhattan Quaker school. A more generic headmaster fear-of-conflict seems as likely a cause as anything to do with silent worship. Then too, we don’t know what other issues might be at play below the surface of privacy and confidentiality. But the Friends Seminary incident seems as good a marker as anything else of the complicated dynamics within Friends schools today.

http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/258394/jewish-teacher-fired-from-quaker-school-for-making-nazi-joke

It was late April on the northern moors and the winter had been especially harsh. Flowers were just starting to peek out of the ground as the farmers looked tested whether the soil was soft enough yet to plow. The nobleman dismounted his horse and asked the hamlet’s blacksmith for directions.

It has been a long journey. His ruffled silk shirt was dirty and full of the smells of a dozens of overnight accomodations in pig barns and lean-tos of the English Midlands. His most-prized possession was spotless, however: the silver sword given him by his father, the admiral, last year on his eighteenth birthday. It layed sheathed in its hand-stiched sheath.

The blacksmith pointed the foreigner to the path that crossed the dark moors toward the hillside of Judge Fell’s estate. The manor house was the de facto headquarters of the new cult that was scandalizing the Kingdom, the Children of the Light. A short ten minute walk and our traveler was face-to-face with the man he had come so far to see.

A long tumble of rehersed speaches came out of the young man’s mouth as George Fox warily sized him up. The young William Penn wanted to join the movement. Fox knew it would be a coup for the Children of the Light. Penn’s father was one of the wealthiest men in England and the family money could buy protection, fame, and land in the new colonies.

But Penn wasn’t quite ready. He had that sword. It would be a grave disrespect to his father to leave it or give it away. “Friend George, what can I do?” The wise Fox knew that Penn was led to join. With a little encouragement, it was a matter of time the new apprentice adopted their pacifist principles. Fox cleared his throat and answered: “Wear thy sword as long as thee can, young William.” Before tears could well in each man’s eyes they turned their attention to logistics of a preaching trip to London. On their way out a few days later, Penn quietly slipped back into a blacksmith shop and gave away his sword. By the time they left the Yorkshire, farmers were working the spring soil with their new silver plowshares.

It is a beautiful story (which I’ve made even more melodramatic, because why not). Unfortunately it’s also fake.

Both George Fox and William Penn left behind dozens of volumes of writings and memoirs. Their friendship was one of the most significant relationships for each of them. Surely such a foundational story would have made it to print. Paul Buckley tracked down the story in “Time To Lay Down William Penn’s Sword” in the December 2003 Friends Journal.

The sword story is fake but it is also somehow true. Buckley calls it a “authentic anecdote.” Every year Friends Journal gets otherwise-wonderful essays whose narrative turns on the story of William Penn’s sword. We can’t run them without correction so it falls on me to tell authors that the scene never took place. Occasionally I’m told it doesn’t matter that it’s not true.

What is the deeper myth inside our beloved tall tales? First: they depend on the celebrity status of their characters. If I substituted more obscure early Friends in the sword story—George Whitehead asking Solomon Eccles, say—I doubt it would be as compelling or get repeated as often.

Fame is an odd draw for modern-day Friends. There’s a baker’s-dozen of famous-enough Friends upon which we graft these sorts of stories—John Woolman, Lucretia Mott, Elias Hicks, Joseph John Gurney and his sister Elizabeth Fry. Changing celebrity Quaker’ stories began early: editors chopped out the embarrasing bits of recently-departed Friends’ journals. Dreams would get snipped out. George Fox’s accounts of miraculous healings disappear with his first editor, presumably worried they would sound too wild

It’s probably no coincidence that the Penn/Fox story dates back to the moment when American Friends split. The denomination’s origin story was fracturing. Paul Buckley thinks the sword story prefigured the tolerance and forbearance of the Hicksite Friends. Philadelphia-area Friends healed that particular wound almost three-quarters of a century ago. What does it say about us today that this tale is still so popular? Related reading, I tracked down another authentic anecdote in 2016, “Bring people to Christ / Leave them there.”

Even knowing that I’m coloring this interpretation through the use of a Quaker lens, I believe that a Quaker perspective can help the meaning of the Bible become more clear.

I must admit that I take claims that any denomination has some sort of special connection to the early church with a heaping spoonful of salt. But the early church was disorganized in a way that Friends can be.

The goal of most websites is to extended the interaction with the visitor beyond this one visit: we seek to sell them a product, join our mailing list, buy tickets to our event or subscribe to us in a news reader. Facebook is quickly becoming the most important email list and news reader. If it continues to innovate (and borrow ideas from innovative competitors) it could quickly become a major commercial portal as well. As its adoption rate climbs within the ranks of our target audiences, it becomes an effective way to extend visitor relationship and build more intimate brand identities.

This will change company’s interactions with customers, who will start to expect and then demand real-time interaction. This can take many forms–status updates, calendars, videos–but the emphasis will be on immediacy. The style will shift from slickly-produced mass marketing to a one-on-one responsive back and forth. Smart marketers will think less in terms of selling and more in terms of relationship building. Analytics and constantly-rolling A/B tests will give us a near real-time gauge with which to measure the success of these relationships. The recession is bringing a new urgency for measurable results and might actually help shift corporate and non-profit budgets away from high-price opinions and toward this new style of social-network-mediated marketing.

It will be interesting to see how organizations adapt to social media’s evolving role.