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starts saying something really insightful about early or contemporary Friends, but then backs off to repeat some outdated Quaker cliche (he relies a bit too heavily on the group of mid-century Haverford-based academics whose histories often projected their own theology of modern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 haveexperienced 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.
I’ve enjoyed your work for several months – largely because we share some of the same exasperations and affections for our Quaker faith. But since we’re all Ranters now, I’d like to do a little ranting about what the latest issue of *Friends Journal* seems to say about the state of Quakerdom. My partner wishes we’d stop subscribing to *FJ,* since every issue sets me off. But the latest (geese on the cover) was just about more than I could bear.
Was it the letter from the meditation circle which likes to call one meditation time a month “Quaker Meeting,” but which elects not to be “burdened” by any of the Quaker testimonies?
How about the long essay on the unQuakerliness of saying mean things about President Bush, which adduced as reasons that equality is a Quaker testimony, and rich people are just as equal as poor people – and let’s not forget that a childhood of wealth and privilege can be just as hard on a person as poverty; and anyway, a president who tried to govern based on Quaker principles would be a noble failure, since those crazy ideas could never work in the real world!
Or maybe it was just the general whiff of the tomb – a really old tomb, all scent of decay long gone, and nothing left but dust and dead air. No Quakers here, pal. No George Fox rebuking priests from the narthex aisle. No Isaac Pennington seizing the moment of the Restoration to make Quakers as unpopular with the King and Court as they had been with the Protector and the Commonwealth. No Mary Dyer ready to swing off the gallows and into Glory for the sake of Light. Not even an Elizabeth Fry down in the dungeons. Just a bunch of skeletons in bulky Andean handknits and Birkenstocks, a dry wind whistling round their bones, as if they were moaning softly, “Imagine there’s no Heaven … Imagine no possessions … All we are saying … Ah, those were the bright days of hope.”
Dear Melynda,
I’m a bit surprised how many people are relating to these “rants.” I have to wonder if there’s a critical mass to turn this all into a group publication at some point…
As you might have seen if you had digged down to my resume, I worked for Friends Journal for almost two years recently, very part-time, as webmaster. I like the Journal staff but certainly understand and share many of your frustrations. A good bit of the content is made up of lifestyle articles for a certain kind of reader – over fifty, a half-committed liberal with a self-focused generic spirituality. They did a big survey or readers a few years ago and that’s their target reader. It’s a chicken/egg conundrum of course and I wish they’d do more to court a wider range of readers. Much of the content would be equally at home in a general interest magazine like Utne Reader. I find there’s usually about one good article an issue and this is what I always look for.
Interesting, many of the references that Thomas Hamm’s “Quakers in America” uses for FGC Friends come from Friends Journal articles. His footnotes are sort of a “best of” collection from the past ten years and as soon as I’ve finished the book I’m going to have to go over to the FJ office and photocopy all of Hamm’s references. One of the things I plan to talk about when I review his book are the footnotes, since I find his choices quite interesting.
If you’re looking to reallocate a limited magazine budget, you might take a look at Quaker Life. I’ve been regularly surprised and challenged by it since Trish Edwards-Konic became editor. It has its own frustrations (they’ve made an editorial decision to keep all the articles short) but they draw from a much wider swath of Quakerism and have less lifestyle articles per issue.
Then there’s always the web. I’m not sure why there’s such a mystique to print but I know many Friends who were more impressed to see my name printed in ten-point type on the FJ masthead than they were with my own Nonviolence.org, which reaches an audience five to ten times larger than the Journal’s… I wonder if there might be a larger phenomenon underway, in which old-media companies agressively court their aging audiences so much that younger audiences turn to the internet instead. This is certainly happening in the music industry, where the publishing companies have given up younger listeners to MP3s and online services, and thrown the marketing money into new albums by aging rock stars aimed at baby-boomers.
I’ve no idea if you take any note of comments to old posts (I became aware of this thread only yesterday [Dec 10 ’06] courtesy of http://gnoscast.blogspot.com/) but assuming you do…
fwiw, I’m the newest recorded member of Tampa (FL) Friends. While still an attender someone put Sheeran’s book in my hand, and just reading on my own, the passages you cite jumped out at me in exactly the same way.
Another citation that has stayed with me comes a few pages back:
… One evening, the writer was sharing supper with two friends in their late seventies. He mentioned he was curious how Friends understood God. One of his companions paused and remarked: “Well now, I guess I don’t really know. I know what I think.” Then, turning to his comrade, he said: “Thee and I have been worshiping together for almost fifty years. I don’t know what thee thinks about God. I don’t think we’ve ever talked about it.” The other grave Friend agreed, adding: “I really don’t think it matters much, either. If thee shares the experience in the worship, it doesn’t much matter how thee puts it into words.”
Or, as Angelus Silesius would say,
God whose love and joy are everywhere
can’t come to visit
unless you aren’t there.
Go well.