Quakers in evolution

March 1, 2018

UK Friend Craig Bar­nett describes changes in Friends in evo­lu­tion­ary terms. It’s a bit of a “On the one hand/On the oth­er hand” argu­ment that points out the strengths of both Quak­er tra­di­tion and Quak­er inno­va­tion. I want my have my cake and eat it too, to both hon­or the divine and work toward rad­i­cal neigh­bor­li­ness here on Earth using tech­niques boot­strapped on clas­sic Quak­er insights. Craig lays out where we are:

This evo­lu­tion­ary change towards a plu­ral­ist and post-Christian move­ment is not straight­for­ward­ly bet­ter or worse. It has cer­tain­ly been a use­ful adap­ta­tion for enabling many peo­ple to find a home in a spir­i­tu­al­ly wel­com­ing com­mu­ni­ty, while at the same time pro­duc­ing a loss of shared reli­gious expe­ri­ence and language

Getting vs. Feeling Better

March 1, 2018

Rhon­da Pfaltzgraff-Carlson wants us to take the heal­ing pow­er of the Light seri­ous­ly:

I was con­cerned about the under­ly­ing mes­sage being sent. I didn’t want non-Friends to believe that we have a tra­di­tion of silent wor­ship because we’ve found that we can use this time to for­get our prob­lems and bury our dis­com­fort! Indi­rect­ly, it sug­gest­ed that sit­ting in silence is just anoth­er means for feel­ing better.

This reminds me a bit of the recent­ly renewed dis­cus­sions in the Quak­er blo­gos­phere* around Michael Sheer­an’s obser­va­tions in Friends a gen­er­a­tion ago.

Quak­erism: Get­ting Bet­ter vs. Feel­ing Better

*This term isn’t too impos­si­bly 1998, is it?

The not-so-ancient Quaker clearness committee

February 28, 2018

I could prob­a­bly start a col­umn of Quak­er pet peeve of the day. I espe­cial­ly get bent out of shape with mis­re­mem­bered his­to­ry. One peeve is the myth that Quak­er clear­ness com­mit­tees are ancient. These com­mit­tees are typ­i­cal­ly con­vened for Friends who are fac­ing a major life deci­sion, like mar­riage or a career. Park­er Palmer is one of the most well-known prac­ti­tion­ers of this and gives the best description:

For peo­ple who have expe­ri­enced this dilem­ma, I want to describe a method invent­ed by the Quak­ers, a method that pro­tects indi­vid­ual iden­ti­ty and integri­ty while draw­ing on the wis­dom of oth­er peo­ple. It is called a “Clear­ness Com­mit­tee.” If that name sounds like it is from the six­ties, it is — the 1660’s!

While it’s true that you can see ref­er­ences to “being clear” in writ­ings by George Fox and William Penn around issues of ear­ly Quak­er mar­riages, what they’re describ­ing is not a spir­i­tu­al process but a check­list item. By law you could only get mar­ried in Eng­land under the aus­pi­cious of the Church of Eng­land. Quak­ers were one of the groups rebelling against that. This meant they had to per­form some of the func­tions typ­i­cal­ly han­dled by cler­gy – and nowa­days by the state. One check­list item: make sure nei­ther per­son in the cou­ple is already mar­ried or has chil­dren. That’s pri­mar­i­ly what they meant they asked whether a cou­ple was cleared for mar­riage (Mark Wut­ka has found a great ref­er­ence in Samuel Bow­nas that implies that the prac­tice also includ­ed check­ing with the bride and groom’s parents).

One rea­son I can be so obnox­ious­ly defin­i­tive about my opin­ions is because I have the Friends Jour­nal archives on my lap­top. I can do an instant key­word search for “clear­ness com­mit­tee” on every issue from 1955 to 2018. The phrase does­n’t appear in any issue until 1969. That arti­cle is by Jen­nifer Haines and Deb­o­rah Haines. Here it is, the debut of the con­cept of the Quak­er clear­ness committee:

We were chal­lenged repeat­ed­ly to test our lives against our beliefs. We labored long over con­cerns raised by our belief in the way of peace. We agreed to urge that each Month­ly Meet­ing, through a clear­ness com­mit­tee or oth­er com­mit­tees, take the respon­si­bil­i­ty for work­ing through with Friends the ten­sions raised in their lives by the Quak­er peace tes­ti­mo­ny. To this com­mit­tee could be brought prob­lems cre­at­ed by draft or employ­ment in insti­tu­tions impli­cat­ed with the mil­i­tary and the ques­tion of whether appli­cants for mem­ber­ship who find them­selves in oppo­si­tion to the peace tes­ti­mo­ny should be accepted.

The con­text sug­gests it was an out­growth of the new prac­tice of wor­ship shar­ing. I did do a deep dive on that a few years ago in a piece that was also based on Friends Jour­nal archives. Deb­o­rah Haines con­tin­ued to be very involved in Friends Gen­er­al Con­fer­ence and I worked with her when I was FGC’s Advance­ment and Out­reach coor­di­na­tor and she the com­mit­tee clerk.

In the ear­ly 1970s the ref­er­ences to clear­ness com­mit­tees con­tin­ued to focus on dis­cern­ment of anti­war activ­i­ties. With­in a few years it was extend­ed to prepa­ra­tion for mar­riages. A notice from 1982 gives a good sum­ma­ry of its uses then:

Meet­ings for clear­ness, for friends unfa­mil­iar with the term, are com­posed of peo­ple who meet by request with per­sons seek­ing clar­i­ty in an impor­tant life deci­sion — mar­riage, sep­a­ra­tion, divorce, adop­tion, res­o­lu­tion of fam­i­ly dif­fer­ences, a job change, etc.

Notably absent in this list is the process for new mem­ber appli­ca­tions. The first use of the term for this process in the FJ archives came in 1989! Why did it take twen­ty years for the con­cept to be applied here?

Why does it mat­ter that this isn’t an ancient prac­tice? A few things: one is that is nice to acknowl­edge that our tra­di­tion is a liv­ing, breath­ing one and that it can and does evolve. The clear­ness com­mit­tee is a great inno­va­tion. Decou­pling it from ancient Quak­erism also makes it more eas­i­ly adapt­able for non-Quaker contexts.

Wor­ship shar­ing came out of the long­time work of Rachel Davis DuBois. I would argue that she is one of the most impor­tant Quak­ers of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. What, you haven’t heard of her? Exact­ly: most of the most influ­en­tial Friends that came out of the Hick­site tra­di­tion in the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry did­n’t devel­op the cult of per­son­al­i­ties you see with Ortho­dox Friends like Rufus Jones and Howard Brin­ton. It’s a shame, because DuBois prob­a­bly has more influ­ence in our day-to-day Quak­er prac­tice than either of them.

Oth­er links: This has turned into an awe­some thread on Face­book (it’s pub­lic so jump in!). There was also a good dis­cus­sion on wor­ship shar­ing on Quak­erQuak­er a few years ago: When did Quak­ers start wor­ship shar­ing? Back in 2003, Deb­o­rah Haines wrote about Rachel Davis DuBois for FGCon­nec­tions, the awe­some mag­a­zine that Bar­bara Hir­shkowitz used to pro­duce for FGC. I post­ed it online then, which is why I remem­ber it; Archive​.org saved it, which is why I can link to it.

Caveats: Yes there were Quak­er process­es before this. On Face­book Bill Samuel quotes the 1806 Faith and Prac­tice on the mem­ber­ship process and argues it’s describ­ing a clear­ness com­mit­tee. I’d be very sur­prised if the 1812 process had any­where near the same tone as the modern-day clear­ness or even shared much in the way of the philo­soph­i­cal under­pin­ning. I decid­ed to pop over to Thomas Clark­son’s 1806 A Por­trait of Quak­erism (dis­cussed here) to see how he described the mem­ber­ship appli­ca­tion process. I often find him use­ful, as he avoids Quak­er ter­mi­nol­o­gy and our some­what unhelp­ful way of under­stat­ing things back then to give a use­ful snap­shot of con­di­tions on the ground. In three vol­umes I can’t find him talk­ing about new mem­bers at all. I’m won­der­ing if entry into the Soci­ety of Friends was more the­o­ret­i­cal than actu­al back then, so unusu­al that Clark­son did­n’t even think about.

Namesake of school in latest massacre had Quaker roots

February 27, 2018

When this lat­est school gun mas­sacre took place in a school called Stone­man Dou­glas I only paused at the unusu­al name as I con­tin­ued to read how­ev­er many details of the hor­ror I could stom­ach. But Stone­man Dou­glas was a per­son, an ear­ly envi­ron­men­tal activist who helped raise aware­ness of the Ever­glades as a nat­ur­al trea­sure. She might have got­ten some of that gump­tion and care from her father, a Quak­er from Minnesota:

The fam­i­ly found a com­mu­ni­ty of Quak­er friends in the small town, of which Stone­man Dou­glas wrote, “It may have been a ‘fron­tier town,’ but there was strict tra­di­tion to guide him, the tra­di­tion of ‘Yea and nay,’ the tra­di­tion of plain liv­ing and clear and inde­pen­dent think­ing, and there were fam­i­ly sto­ries to point up the stiff-backed breed. They may have been plain peo­ple but they were colorful.”
 — Read on m.startribune.com/namesake-at-school-of-latest-massacre-was-a-minnesota-native-born-in-1890/475206053/

Weak politics

February 27, 2018

An unsigned post on the Quak­er Lib­er­tar­i­an group blog looks at post­mod­ernism and weak politics. 

As I see it, Quak­ers at their best have been about the work of the for­mer for many years. And post­moder­ni­ty offers a com­ple­men­tary philo­soph­i­cal and the­o­log­i­cal lens to Quak­er faith and prac­tice, even as it chal­lenges our tra­di­tion to the extent that it makes uni­ver­sal claims, builds up its own dom­i­nant struc­tures and nar­ra­tives, and engages in oppres­sion of oth­ers in the name of a greater good

Belief (in anything) and belief (in nothing)

February 27, 2018

So Isaac Smith is back with the third install­ment of his grow­ing series, “Dif­fer­ence Between a Gath­ered Meet­ing and a Focused Meet­ing” and this time he’s ref­er­enc­ing two writ­ers on Quak­er mat­ters, Michael J. Sheer­an and yours tru­ly.

In my pre­vi­ous posts, the dis­tinc­tion between gath­ered and focused meet­ings seemed con­nect­ed to one’s reli­gious out­look, and thus relat­ed to the divide between Christ-centered and uni­ver­sal­ist Quak­ers that has bedev­iled our faith for cen­turies. But as Sheer­an and Kel­ley argue, the more fun­da­men­tal divide in the lib­er­al branch of Quak­erism is between those who seek con­tact with the divine and those who don’t.

My post is, as Smith puts it, “near­ly fif­teen years old,” which is about the length of a social gen­er­a­tion. I’m not sure if I’m in a good posi­tion to pon­tif­i­cate about what has and has­n’t changed. Much of my Quak­er work is with inter­est­ing out­liers, either one-or-one or as part of a loose tribe of Friends who pas­sion­ate­ly care about Quak­erism and are will­ing to go into the weeds to under­stand it. I have very lit­tle recent expe­ri­ence with com­mit­tees on local levels.

One use­ful con­cept that I’ve picked up in the last fif­teen years is that of “func­tion­al athe­ism.” This bypass­es a group’s self-stated under­stand­ings of faith to look at how its decision-making process actu­al­ly works. An orga­ni­za­tion that is func­tion­al­ly athe­ist might be full of very devout peo­ple who togeth­er still decide actions in a com­plete­ly sec­u­lar way. I would guess this has become even more the norm among the acronymic soup of nation­al Quak­er orga­ni­za­tions in the last fif­teen years. In that time a lot of bright ideas have come and gone which flashed briefly with the fuel of donor mon­ey but which did­n’t cre­ate a self-sustaining momen­tum to keep them going long term. Think­ing more strate­gi­cal­ly about what peo­ple are seek­ing in their spir­i­tu­al lives might have helped those cast seeds land on more fer­tile grounds.

The Dif­fer­ence Between a Gath­ered Meet­ing and a Focused Meet­ing (3)

Bonus: the 14-year-old com­ments on my piece include some gen­tle whin­ing about Friends Jour­nal between myself and a reg­u­lar read­er at the time. Now that I’m its senior edi­tor I’m sure there remains plen­ty to grum­ble about.

QOTD: Patricia Dallmann

February 27, 2018

“The mis­sion of ear­ly Friends was to turn peo­ple to the light in the con­science, which would first of all show them where they’d missed the mark. If Friends today would turn our Soci­ety around, we must first turn our­selves around inward­ly.” [Source]