Craig Bar­nett on types and sources of pow­er for Friends, mod­ern and classic.

Mod­ern Quak­er cul­ture places a strong empha­sis on what Shin­ran would have called ‘self pow­er’ — polit­i­cal activism, the effort to embody eth­i­cal val­ues in our dai­ly lives, and the con­sci­en­tious per­for­mance of social respon­si­bil­i­ties.… Per­haps sur­pris­ing­ly, the orig­i­nal Quak­er inspi­ra­tion was strong­ly focussed on ‘oth­er pow­er’. It was faith in the Inward Guide, rather than their own efforts, that ear­ly Friends relied on to guide their lives and to endure suf­fer­ing and per­se­cu­tion. This Inward Guide, Teacher, Light or Christ was under­stood as some­thing apart from our own resources: it was the pres­ence and activ­i­ty of God with­in each person.

In a sur­prise to no one, I’m a fan of using the inward pow­er as a guide toward out­ward action, but of course they’re two sides the same coin. As we find our inward spir­i­tu­al teacher, our lives begin to con­form to right liv­ing, which in turn helps us to be more sen­si­tive to spir­i­tu­al prompts. It’s a vir­tu­ous cir­cle that brings us clos­er to the Spir­it and also changes what us mod­erns call our “lifestyle.”

I start­ed off as a peace advo­cate in my late teens, spurred into decid­ing issues of vio­lence and force in part because of fam­i­ly pres­sure to enlist in the naval acad­e­my. As I start­ed to explore com­mu­ni­ties of peace I kept run­ning into Quak­ers. I sensed that there was some­thing more to their moti­va­tion than just right-politics and it was that spir­i­tu­al ground­ing that drew me in. Nowa­days I see a lot of Quak­er polit­i­cal action that does­n’t use a vocab­u­lary of faith. I trust that the Friends engaged in the work are being guid­ed and strength­ened by what Bar­nett describes as “the oth­er pow­er” but I wor­ry that we lose the moral force of spir­i­tu­al wit­ness when we don’t artic­u­late the spir­i­tu­al under­pin­nings. Are we embar­rassed by the weird­ness of our spir­i­tu­al­i­ty? Do we think it will put off poten­tial sup­port­ers? Unprac­ticed in its articulation? 

Self Pow­er & Oth­er Power 

“Here is the real core of the reli­gious prob­lem: Help! Help!” William James, The Vari­eties of Reli­gious Experience…

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