Yet another group of Friends (doesn’t matter which, it could be any) is planning a program on “community.” They quote a snippet of a 1653 epistle on George Fox – you know the one about “Mind that which is eternal…” Fine enough, but there’s so much more to the epistle that we would fear to quote, like:
We are redeemed by the only redeemer Christ Jesus, not with corruptible things, neither is our redemption of man, nor by man, nor according to the will of man, but contrary to man’s will. And so, our unity and fellowship with vain man are lost, and all his evil ways are now turned into enmity; and all his profession is now found to be deceit, and in all his fairest pretences lodgeth cruelty; and the bottom and ground of all his knowledge of God and Christ is found sandy, and cannot endure the tempest.
Interesting ideas, but not ones most liberal Friends would like to tackle. It’s a shame. I wish we would more more actively engage with our tradition and not just selectively edit out a few words which makes Fox sound like a seventeen century Thich Nhat Hanh. I think we can simultaneously wrestle with and challenge our tradition without having to either capitulate to it or abandon it.
After writing the above, I went for a neighborhood walk with baby asleep in the backpack. And I realized I hadn’t explained why it matters to engage. I didn’t quote the sentences about human willfullness to show that I’m more seventeenth century than thee, or to prove I can use the “C” word.
No, I quote it because it’s a rockin’ quote. George Fox is mapping out for us twenty-first century Friends just how we might get out of the predicament of superficial “community” we’ve gotten ourselves into. Everyone from Walmart to Walgreen’s, from Hillary Clinton to Oprah, is trying to sell us on some dream of community complete with a price tag from corporate America. Buy our products, our political party, our lifestyle and we’ll give you the narcotic of consumer targeting. Wear the right right sneaker or drive the right car and you’re part of the in-crowd.
But these communities built on the sand just dissolve in the tide and leave us more stranded than when we started.
We poor humans are looking for ways to transcend the crappiness of our war- and consumer-obsessed world. Quakerism has something to say about that (more than ways to recycle plastic or stage a protest faux-blockade). We’re tossing out the future when we throw away the past, just to live in our TVs. George’s epistle mentions this too:
Let not hard words trouble you, nor fair speeches win you; but dwell in the power of truth, in the mighty God, and have salt in yourselves to savour all words, and to stand against all the wiles of the devil, in the mighty power of God.
(Quotes from Epistle 24, reprinted here.)
So Martin, what’s the offending snippet? Wondering minds want to know.
Even complete sentences don’t always add up when reading Fox, that notoriously inconsistent genius. Take the first sentence of Epistle 24:
TO all Friends every where, dwell in the truth, and walk in the love of the truth, in patience, and every one in your measure keep your habitations, and learn that good lesson of Jesus Christ, to be low and meek in heart, giving no occasion to the adversary by evil doing.
And the third:
And walking in uprighteousness, ye will be bold as lions, resisting the wicked with your spiritual weapons, not by bloody hands, as the wicked are tearing and rending the just that dwell in the truth.
Quite a range there, in just three sentences, when taken out of context.
I sometimes use a Quaker text (the length of four or five Bible passages) and the Friendly Bible Study questions with a workshop or retreat. With that, or even with quoting Scripture, I wonder what the appropriate amount is. I also wonder, when interpreting or thinking about a text, how to weight sentences or phrases in proximity against the gist of the whole.
Hi Kenneth,
Fox isn’t _that_ inscrutable, not really. If only you had quoted sentence two between one and three you would have the bridge between the sheep and lion: “But walk all honestly and uprightly; for the upright and meek in heart know God, and God delights in the upright and righteous.”
I don’t worry about anyone who is asking the sort of questions you’re posing. Once we’re sitting around debating just how many paragraphs are fair, we’re inside the wrestler’s ring and engaged with our past. (I’ve had to explain to first time attenders why Kenneth stood up in Meeting to talk about a “Lamb’s War” (“but I thought you Quakers are pacifists?”)).
What bugs me are the snippets which are extracted out to mean the complete opposite of their original meaning. There’s that one about “the only way to peace being to sit still in the Light” (paraphrasing here) when the original goes to on to make clear this is the Light of condemnation and judgment of Christ who will expose us and convict us of our sins. Mainstream liberal Quakerism is doing too much skipping over the hard stuff: sin, accountability, sacrifice, darkness. Too much Hallmark & Lawrence Welk. Or Lifetime and Utne Reader. And the quotes aren’t coincidence: they are selectively chosen and only the easy ones get published widely now.
I wouldn’t care except I think Friends and the world both really need to hear that meaningful community and simplicity comes only from a deep surrender of our wills and a submergence into a demanding community that’s not afraid to stand up to the world’s vanities or its member’s inconsistencies. I’ll describe it in different vocabulary than Fox but I think he does give us some important clues forward as a people but a lot of the good stuff is there in the hard quotes that we’re mostly ignoring.
For many years now, it seems, I’ve been really disgruntled about the overuse, misuse, and abuse of the word “community.” The worst example of this misuse and abuse is, of course, the term “gated community.” May God help us. Over the years, the term community has been used increasingly in everything from churches to tv commercials, as you note. Last Sunday Father Pasley at Mater Ecclesiae mentioned briefly in an announcement before the sermon, in relation to the various events going on at the church, (and no, I didn’t have a tape recorder in my pocket so I’m paraphrasing here, but I think I’m pretty close because this has been running through my head all week), “Other churches do nothing but talk of building ‘community,’ especially when they don’t have it. We never talk about ‘community’ here and we have nothing but it.” (Something like that. And by the way, when he mentioned “churches,” I think he meant both other Catholic churches and various Protestant denominations.) Anyway, I think he is right. Father’s implication that I too have found to be true over the years is that the people who talk about “community” the most really have no idea what a real community is. The best kind of community, of course, is a group of people focused on a common goal holding important values in common, all looking to the good Lord first and foremost as source and summit of their lives. They are not feigned by the prospect of hard work, struggles, difficulties, time spent, distances traveled. Notably, people in the best kind of community don’t necessarily find themselves doing things for the sake of “community,” but for the sake of the kingdom of God. Those joined together in faithfulness wind up getting community as a kind of indirect side effect of their love for God – He, in turn, binds them together. Those in true community know things won’t turn up rosy all the time, of course, but when something larger binds you, well, you try to deal with problems in that light.
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