From Pales­tine Friend Sa’ed Atshan, “I Wish Amer­i­cans Could See the Human­i­ty of Pales­tini­ans as They Do With Israelis.”

A coali­tion of Quak­er orga­ni­za­tions have called for a cease­fire in Gaza.

On Friends Jour­nal, Ani­ta Hemphill McCormick writes about the Three Nephites, a Mor­mon folk­loric tra­di­tion of helpers who appear out of nowhere to do good deeds, then dis­ap­pear. As she grew up she real­ized she was start­ing to fill this role herself. 

Wess Daniel’s and Robin Mohr are going to exam­ine the some­what dor­mant top­ic of Con­ver­gent Friends in a pre­sen­ta­tion for the Quak­er Lead­er­ship Cen­ter at Earl­ham School of Reli­gion on Novem­ber 29. Sign up here.

Nan­cy Thomas asks How weighty do I want to be?

But I am a Quak­er and “weighty Friend” is one of those delight­ful Quak­er terms that’s fun to say, although the exact mean­ing slips and slides around a bit. I ask myself, is this rem­nant from ear­ly Quak­erism still mean­ing­ful? Help­ful? And what does it mean in ref­er­ence to me?

I love the old tra­di­tions, even the archa­ic words. Some of them car­ry an ambiance of holi­ness, order, and, yes, Quak­er cul­ture. Some still man­age to be use­ful, even after all these years. Maybe “weighty Friend” is one of them?

I like the visu­al metaphor of slip­ping and slid­ing. I think it’s apt when using terms denot­ing a kind of spir­i­tu­al author­i­ty in Quak­er cir­cles. The author­i­ty is ulti­mate­ly com­ing from the Holy Spir­it and the Inward Light. But it’s use­ful to acknowl­edge that some peo­ple have devel­oped their spir­i­tu­al sen­si­tiv­i­ty over a long-enough peri­od that their opin­ion car­ries a lit­tle extra weight.

You’re in poten­tial trou­ble as soon as you name it though: humans seem to have an instinct to rely on social des­ig­na­tions like these and begin to rely too much on the opin­ions of cer­tain peo­ple over every­one else. Pret­ty soon there’s a new class of insid­er Friends and strug­gles over who gets to define that class. You get 200 years of schisms and the exo­dus of gen­er­a­tions of deeply spir­i­tu­al peo­ple who don’t want to bat­tle over the crumbs of pow­er. But Nan­cy includes humor in the mix, which I think is wise and per­haps a bit of an anti­dote to spir­i­tu­al selfishness.

I think one of the great­est gifts weighty Friends can pro­vide is to give sim­ple words of encour­age­ment. Years ago I taught a six-week Quak­erism 101 class at Med­ford (N.J.) Meet­ing. Most of its mem­bers come from a near­by Quak­er retire­ment com­mu­ni­ty and it is full of weighty and sea­soned Friends — euphemisms aside, I was lit­er­al­ly half the age of all but a few work­shop atten­ders. After one ses­sion, Margery Larrabee came up to me. Even in a meet­ing of sea­soned Friends, she stood out, hav­ing writ­ten pam­phlets on Quak­er elder­ship and being inti­mate­ly involved with the Lib­er­al Quak­er re-embrace of trav­el­ing min­istries in the 1990s. Feel­ing self-conscious, I start­ed ner­vous­ly apol­o­giz­ing, say­ing I should­n’t be out there in front, that I should be tak­ing a class from her. She smiled sweet­ly and said “oh no, you’re right where you are sup­posed to be.” Just a few words, but I instant­ly felt at ease. This was­n’t coffee-hour small talk any­more, but a con­fir­ma­tion that I was on the right path with my teach­ing min­istry, giv­en by some­one who’s author­i­ty came from a life­time of faith­ful ser­vice to the Spirit.

Andy Stanton-Henry’s “All the Way Back to George Fox” looks at the lega­cy of John Wim­ber, a rock musi­cian turned Quak­er pas­tor turned charis­mat­ic church founder. Yes, that’s a lot of turns. Yes, it’s quite a story. 

One of the impuls­es that drove Wim­ber’s min­istry was a desire to “do the stuff” he read about in the Bible, not just talk and sing about it. This is not so very dif­fer­ent from ear­ly Friends. Founder George Fox brought peo­ple back to life, his mir­a­cles edit­ed out of most accounts until Hen­ry Cad­bury col­lect­ed them back togeth­er in the 1940s. James Nayler, anoth­er Quak­er co-founder, devel­oped a full-on mes­si­ah com­plex, even­tu­al­ly re-enacting Jesus’s Palm Sun­day entry into Jerusalem. Wim­ber’s wife talked about their reac­tion when they final­ly got around to read­ing Fox’s Jour­nal:

Read­ing it lat­er, we won­dered what our con­tem­po­raries were so upset about! A move­ment of the Spir­it hap­pened in our group — for which gen­er­a­tions of Quak­ers had prayed for years, but had no idea how it would look when it came — and when it did hap­pen, it didn’t real­ly fit with Quak­er the­ol­o­gy at that time.

Wim­ber’s min­istries got too enthu­si­as­tic for even Cal­i­for­nia Evan­gel­i­cal Friends and he left to co-found the Vine­yard Church­es. In our author chat, Andy and I dis­cuss some of the lessons we might learn from these rel­a­tive­ly modern-day seek­ers want­i­ng to “do the stuff.” 

Also of inter­est: the 2018 post from an anony­mous mem­ber of the Friend­ly Fire Col­lec­tive: The Mak­ing of a Charis­mat­ic Quak­er.

From the Amer­i­can Friends Ser­vice Com­mit­tee: 5 Things You Need to Know About What’s Hap­pen­ing in Israel and Gaza. The always-thoughtful Tim­o­thy Sny­der has a good piece, Ter­ror and Count-Terror, on what dri­ves ter­ror­ism (“For the vic­tim, ter­ror is about what it is. For the ter­ror­ist, it is about what hap­pens next.”). Friends Unit­ed Meet­ing has a brief update on Ramal­lah Friends School.

Quak­er­S­peak inter­views JT Dorr-Bremme on the Quak­er prac­tice of dis­cern­ment. Friends Jour­nal’s fea­tures Chester Free­man’s Bag­gage and Bless­ings: An African Amer­i­can Man’s Expe­ri­ence as a Friend.

This Code Break­ing Quak­er Poet Hunt­ed Nazis. Just that title was enough to make me stop and click.

I wrote up some­thing about Chris Stern’s vis­it to my meet­ing on Sun­day. I’ll share one extract on where he thought ear­ly Friends found their faith:

Chris said part of the answer came from Matthew 18:20: “For where two or three are gath­ered togeth­er in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” He said this is what ear­ly Friends were wait­ing for: “All of the prac­tices and rit­u­als didn’t have any mean­ing any more. They start­ed wait­ing because Jesus had said he’d show up. Ear­ly friends were averse to doc­trines but had a recog­ni­tion that there was some­thing inside urg­ing them to con­nect with God and urg­ing them con­nect with each oth­er — urg­ing them to love. They real­ized that this was Jesus.”

I was glad that he and trav­el­ing com­pan­ion, Joe Strat­ton, came out to share this min­istry with us. Not includ­ed there is a nice aside about his­toric meet­ing­hous­es. As Friends, we de-emphasize out­ward signs of faith — cross, steeples, altars. This includes our build­ings, yet there is a cer­tain feel­ing one gets step­ping into some of our meet­ing­hous­es. As Chris told us:

When you walk into an old meet­ing­house like this to get a sense of his­to­ry. I felt was trans­port­ed into anoth­er cen­tu­ry. But what is it that res­onates from these walls. Isn’t it the faith­ful lives of the peo­ple who inter­act­ed here all those years? Does­n’t that just draw us in to do that too? To enter that stream of faith­ful lives?

Accord­ing to a new poll by AP-NORC Cen­ter for Pub­lic Affairs Research, “Peo­ple with­out a reli­gious affil­i­a­tion lack faith in orga­nized reli­gion, not in spir­i­tu­al­i­ty.” A key find­ing: “30% describe them­selves as hav­ing no reli­gious affil­i­a­tion. But about half of them, 54%, still con­sid­er them­selves as spir­i­tu­al, reli­gious, or both.” The top rea­sons for dis­sat­is­fac­tion are dis­agree­ment with the polit­i­cal and cul­tur­al stances of reli­gious groups, a dis­like of orga­nized reli­gion, and abuse and mis­con­duct by church lead­ers. That works out to some­thing like 50 mil­lion peo­ple who might be recep­tive to a dif­fer­ent kind of spir­i­tu­al home.

The Dar­by (Pa.) Meet­ing­house has been rec­og­nized by the Nation­al Park Ser­vice for its Under­ground Rail­road his­to­ry. The self-emancipating escapees deserve the most recog­ni­tion but I’m glad Friends could pro­vide some cov­er. I don’t think it’s easy to defin­i­tive­ly doc­u­ment an UGRR stop (the activ­i­ties were of course secret) so I’m hap­py to see the meet­ing get it.

The Octo­ber issue of Friends Jour­nal looks at Ecu­meni­cal and Inter­faith Friends. We were a bit over-ambitious, per­haps, with four­teen fea­ture arti­cles. The first fea­tured arti­cle being shared comes from my friend Peter Blood-Patterson, Many Paths to the Light: Quak­er Uni­ver­sal­ism and Inter­faith Sol­i­dar­i­ty.

Over on the Quak­ers red­dit, a post I would­n’t nor­mal­ly share (“Is Quak­erism in decline or thriv­ing in the U.S.?”) except for the snip­pet at the end: “As for me, I left Quak­erism to become East­ern Ortho­dox (Anti­ochi­an) some years ago. A num­ber of the young Quak­ers I grew up with have also con­vert­ed to some fla­vor of east­ern orthodoxy.”

I can’t let an aside like that go. I answered that while it seems to be the norm for kids brought up as Lib­er­al Friends to not be active par­tic­i­pants at meet­ing much into adult­hood, I haven’t seen a ten­den­cy toward East­ern Ortho­doxy.¹ I asked for details and the poster, tarxvzf, gave them:

Punk rock con­vert­ed me to ortho­doxy. More pre­cise­ly, my inner rebel­lious­ness made me love punk rock as a teenag­er moti­vat­ed my move to ortho­doxy. The mod­ern west has embraced ‘you do you’ and ‘if it feels good do it.’. The ideals of tol­er­ance and kind­ness espoused by Quak­erism are the main­stream, to an excess in my opin­ion. The most punk rock thing you can do today is to be an Ortho­dox Chris­t­ian. Fit­ting­ly, many of our church lead­ers in the US are for­mer punk rock­ers or met­al heads.

It’s quite the tale. In the­o­ry one should­n’t have to leave Quak­erism to have a “punk rock” Chris­t­ian expe­ri­ence. My wife and I are re-reading William Pen­n’s No Cross No Crown in the evenings now and it’s bold and opin­ion­at­ed and glo­ri­ous. While Friends may occa­sion­al­ly share a bit of out-of-context Penn (like the ubiq­ui­tous “Let us see what love can do”), you won’t get this kind of bare-knuckle, com­plete­ly and unapolo­get­i­cal­ly (yet still uni­ver­sal­ist) Chris­t­ian Penn² in a lot of Quak­er cir­cles. Quak­erism was found­ed as a very inter­est­ing (dare I say “punk rock”?) take on Chris­tian­i­ty but it’s hard to find much of that in most Quak­er spaces today.

Quak­erism was a kind of qui­et rebel­lious­ness for me when I first walked into a meet­ing­house at age 20. I was look­ing for rad­i­cal com­mu­ni­ties where peo­ple were build­ing counter-cultural lives based on mutu­al coop­er­a­tion and direct ser­vice, an alter­na­tive to late-capitalist com­mer­cial lifestyle I was expect­ed to embrace as a late-80s young adult. I found these com­mu­ni­ties on the mar­gins of Quak­er spaces and it took a long while – years real­ly – for me to real­ize that Quak­ers had a his­to­ry of a the­ol­o­gy and rebel­lious­ness to match this. 

If that part of our per­son­al­i­ty weren’t so hid­den away or inac­ces­si­ble maybe some Quak­er kids and bold seek­ers would stay with us into their 20s, though of course oth­ers would run even faster for the exits. It’s a hard balance.