A Guest Piece by Jeffrey Hipp
“I take this commitment of membership very seriously – to labor, nurture, support and challenge my fellow Friends; to walk in the Light together, and to give, receive, and pray with my fellow sojourners when the next step is unclear. My feet are on solid ground.”
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
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The Loss of a Faithful Servant
April 18, 2005
A humble giant among modern Friends passed away this weekend: Bill Taber. All of us doing the work of mapping out a “conservative liberal Quakerism” owe a huge debt to Bill. Although others are more qualified to share his biography, I know he taught for many years at Ohio Yearly Meeting (Conservative)‘s Olney Friends School and then for many more years at the Pendle Hill Center outside Philadelphia. He and his wife Fran were instumental in the 1998 founding of the Friends Center retreat and conference center on the campus of Olney.
I had the honor of meeting Bill and Fran once, when they came to lead a meeting retreat. But like so many Friends, Bill’s strongest influence has been his writings. “Four Doors to Meeting for Worship”:http://www.Quakerbooks.org/get/0 – 87574-306 – 4 was his introduction to worship. I’ll quote from the “About the Author,” since it explains the root of much of his work:
bq. This pamphlet’s metaphor of the four doors grew out of his awarness of a need for a more contemporary explanation of “what happens” in a Quaker meeting. He feels this lack of insturction in method has become an increasing problem as modern Friends move farther and farther away from the more pervasive Quaker culture which in earlier generations played such a powerful teaching role, allowing both birthright and convinced Friends to learn the nuances and spiritual methodology of Quakerism largely through osmosis. In sharing this essay Bill hopes to help nurture a traveling, teaching, and prophetic ministry which could reach out and touch people into spiritual growth just when they are ready to receive the teaching.
One of the spiritual methodolgy’s Bill shared with his students at Pendle Hill was a collection by a old Quaker minister named Samuel Bownas – regular readers of this site know how important Bownas’s “Descriptions of the Qualifications”:http://dqc.esr.earlham.edu/toc/E19787374 has been to me. But other books of his have been invalable too: his history of Ohio Yearly Meeting shared the old culture of the yearly meeting with great stories and gentle insight.
Bill Taber might have passed from his earthly body Friday morning but the work he did in the world will continue. May we all have the grace to be as faithful to the Teacher as he was.
James R: I Am What I Am
April 7, 2005
By James Riemermann
Here’s a thought-provoking comment that James left a few days ago on the “We’re All Ranters Now”:http://www.nonviolence.org/Quaker/ranters.php piece. It’s an important testimony and a good challenge. I’m stumped trying to answer it upon first reading, which means it’s definitely worth featuring!
Why don’t we say that charity and love are Christian issue?
November 3, 2004
In this election, religious conservatives were able to craft a message making same-sex marriages look like an afront to apple pie and baseball and of course people voted against it. What if we could have somehow framed this election with the details of human suffering that these laws suggest?
Now available for the fashionable Bush-era bumper. Proceeds go to support the Nonviolence.org websites:
We Quakers should be cooler than the Sweat Lodge
July 5, 2004
I have just come back from a “Meeting for Listening for Sweat Lodge Concerns,” described as “an opportunity for persons to express their feelings in a worshipful manner about the cancellation of the FGC Gathering sweat lodge workshop this year.” Non-Quakers reading this blog might be surprised to hear that Friends General Conference holds sweat lodges, but it has and they’ve been increasingly controversial. This year’s workshop was cancelled after FGC received a very strongly worded complaint from the Wampanoag Native American tribe. Today’s meeting intended to listen to the feelings and concerns of all FGC Friends involved and was clerked by the very-able Arthur Larrabee. There was powerful ministry, some predictable “ministry” and one stunning message from a white Friend who dismissed the very existance of racism in the world (it’s just a illusion, the people responsible for it are those who perceive it).
I’ve had my own run-in’s with the sweat lodge, most unforgettably when I was the co-planning clerk of the 2002 Adult Young Friends program at FGC (a few of us thought it was inappropriate to transfer a portion of the rather small AYF budget to the sweat lodge workshop, a request made with the argument that so many high-school and twenty-something Friends were attending it). But I find myself increasingly unconcerned about the lodge. It’s clear to me now that it part of another tradition than I am. It is not the kind of Quaker I am. The question remaining is whether an organization that will sponsor it is a different tradition.
How did Liberal Friends get to the place where most our our younger members consider the sweat lodge ceremony to be the high point of their Quaker experience? The sweat lodge has given a generation of younger Friends an opportunity to commune with the divine in a way that their meetings do not. It has given them mentorship and leadership experiences which they do not receive from the older Friends establishment. It has given them a sense of identity and purpose which they don’t get from their meeting “community.”
I don’t care about banning the workshop. That doesn’t address the real problems. I want to get to the point where younger Friends look at the sweat and wonder why they’d want to spend a week with some white Quaker guy who wonders aloud in public whether he’s “a Quaker or an Indian” (could we have a third choice?). I’ve always thought this was just rather embarrassing. I want the sweat lodge to wither away in recognition of it’s inherent ridiculousness. I want younger Friends to get a taste of the divine love and charity that Friends have found for 350 years. We’re simply cooler than the sweat lodge.
And what really is the sweat lodge all about? I don’t really buy the cultural appropriation critique (the official party line for canceling it argues that it’s racist). Read founder George Price’s Friends Journal article on the sweat lodge and you’ll see that he’s part of a long-standing tradition. For two hundred years, Native Americans have been used as mythic cover for thinly disguised European-American philosophies. The Boston protesters who staged the famous tea party all dressed up as Indians, playing out an emerging mythology of the American rebels as spiritual heirs to Indians (long driven out of the Boston area by that time). In 1826, James Fenimore Cooper turned that myth into one of the first pieces of classic American literature with a story about the “Last” of the Mohicans. At the turn of the twentieth century, the new boy scout movement claimed that their fitness and socialization system was really a re-application of Native American training and initiation rites. Quakers got into the game too: the South Jersey and Bucks County summer camps they founded in the nineteen-teens were full of Native American motifs, with cabins and lakes named after different tribes and the children encouraged to play along.
Set in this context, George Price is clearly just the latest white guy to claim that only the spirit of purer Native Americans will save us from our Old World European stodginess. Yes, it’s appropriation I guess, but it’s so transparent and classically American that our favorite song “Yankee Doodle” is a British wartime send-up of the impulse. We’ve been sticking feathers in our caps since forever.
In the Friends Journal article, it’s clear the Quaker sweat lodge owes more to the European psychotherapy of Karl Jung than Chief Ockanickon. It’s all about “liminality” and initiation into mythic archetypes, featuring cribbed language from Victor Turner, the anthropologist who was very popular circa 1974. Price is clear but never explicit about his work: his sweat lodge is Jungian psychology overlaid onto the outward form of a Native American sweatlodge. In retrospect it’s no surprise that a birthright Philadelphia Friend in a tired yearly meeting would try to combine trendy European pop psychology with Quaker summer camp theming. What is a surprise (or should be a surprise) is that Friends would sponsor and publish articles about a “Quaker Sweat Lodges” without challenging the author to spell out the Quaker contribution to a programmed ritual conducted in a consecrated teepee steeplehouse.
(Push the influences a little more, and you’ll find that Victor Turner’s anthropological findings among obscure African tribes arguably owes as much to his Catholicism than it does the facts on the ground. More than one Quaker wit has compared the sweat lodge to Catholic mass; well: Turner’s your missing philosophical link.)
Yesterday I had some good conversation about generational issues in Quakerism. I’m certainly not the only thirty-something that feels invisible in the bulldozer of baby boomer assumptions about our spirituality. I’m also not the only one getting to the point where we’re just going to be Quaker despite the Quaker institutions and culture. I think the question we’re all grappling with now is how we relate to the institutions that ignore us and dismiss our cries of alarm for what we Friends have become.
Plain Dress – Some Reflections
April 7, 2004
A guest piece by Melynda Huskey
I’ve been much afflicted on the subject of plain dress for the last several months, thanks to Thomas Clarkson. Clarkson, a British Abolitionist and close, even fond, observer of Friends, wrote a three-volume disquisition on Quaker testimonies, culture, and behavior (in 1811, if my memory serves me). There’s a lot in Clarkson to think about, but his section on Quaker garb was particularly interesting to me. Not because I intend to take up a green apron any time soon (did you know that was a badge of Quaker womanhood for nearly two centuries?), but because he provides what a present-day anthropologist would describe as a functionalist analysis of the meaning of plain dress: it served as a badge of membership, keeping its wearers peculiar and in visible communion with one another, while communicating a core value of the tradition.
When I was a kid, I yearned for plain dress like the kids in Obadiah’s family wore. I loved the idea of a Quaker uniform and couldn’t imagine why we didn’t still have one. Whenever I asked my mom about it, she would patiently explain that an outward conformity in plain dress called attention to itself as much as any worldly outfit did, and that Quakers should dress as plainly as was suitable and possible to their work in the world. It made sense, but I was still sorry.
And now, at nearly 40, after 35 years of balancing my convictions and my world, I’m still hankering after a truly distinctive and Quakerly plainness. What isn’t any clearer to me is what that might look like now.
After all, what are the options? According to my partner, the distinctive elements of contemporary Quaker garb are high-water pants for Friends over 40 and grimy hands and feet for Friends under 40. This obviously jaundiced view aside, there doesn’t seem to be much to distinguish Friends from, say, Methodists, Unitarians, or members of the local food co-op. A little denim, a little khaki, some suede sport mocs, some sandals and funky socks, batik and chunky jewelry. It’s not obviously worldly, but it’s not set apart, either. There is no testimony in our current dress.
On the other hand, anything too visibly a costume obviously isn’t right; I can’t appropriate the Mennonite dress-and-prayer-cap, for example. And my heart rises up against the whole range of “modest” clothing presently available – floral prairie dresses and pinafores, sailor dresses, denim jumpers, and head coverings – all with nursing apertures and maternity inserts, and marketed by companies with terrifying names like “Daddy’s Little Princess,” “King’s Daughters,” and “Lilies of the Field.” No Prairie Madonna drag for me. No messy, time-consuming, attention-requiring long hair; no endless supply of tights and nylons and slips; no cold legs in the winter snow and ice. No squeezing myself into a gender ideology which was foreign to Friends from the very beginning.
It seems to me that contemporary plain dress ought to be distinctive without being theatrical; it should be practical and self-effacing. It should be produced under non-exploitive conditions. It should be the same every day, without variation introduced for the sake of variation, and suitable for every occasion It should be tidy and well-kept – Quakers were once known for the scrupulous neatness of their attire and their homes. And it should communicate clearly that we are called and set apart.
But what garments they might be that would accomplish that, I cannot say. I’m stymied. Friends, share your light.
*Note from Martin Kelley:* I’m starting to collect stories from other Friends and fellow-religious on issues like plain dress, the testimonies and faith renewal. This is part of that project.
Recreating the theatrical residues of history
April 3, 2004
On the Picket Line, a funny post about the “circus of the current progressive movement”:http://www.sniggle.net/Experiment/index.php?entry=26Mar04
bq. In San Francisco, to be part of the anti-war, progressive movement means to be sharing the stage with a whole bunch of unapologetic Stalinists, paranoid schizophrenics, ersatz intifadists, tin-eared rhetorical broken-records, insatiable identity-politics police, new-age gurus of every variety, publicity hounds, careerist Democrats, and the like… A superficial fetishization of the theatrical residue of history gets you a renaissance faire, not a successful political movement.
The author also gives some hopeful reports from a recent conference he attended.
Testimonies for twentieth-first century: a Testimony Against “Community”
February 1, 2004
I propose a little amendment to the modern Quaker testimonies. I think it’s time for a moratorium of the word “community” and the phrases “faith community” and “community of faith.” Through overuse, we Friends have stretched this phrase past its elasticity point and it’s snapped. It’s become a meaningless, abstract term used to disguise the fact that we’ve become afraid to articulate a shared faith. A recent yearly meeting newsletter used the word “community” 27 times but the word “God” only seven: what does it mean when a religious body stops talking about God?
The “testimony of community” recently celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. It was the centerpiece of the new-and-improved testimonies Howard Brinton unveiled back in the 1950s in his Friends for 300 Years (as far as I know no one elevated it to a testimony before him). Born into a well-known Quaker family, he married into an even more well-known family. From the cradle Howard and his wife Anna were Quaker aristocracy. As they traveled the geographic and theological spectrum of Friends, their pedigree earned them welcome and recognition everywhere they went. Perhaps not surprisingly, Howard grew up to think that the only important criteria for membership in a Quaker meeting is one’s comfort level with the other members. “The test of membership is not a particular kind of religious experience, nor acceptance of any particular religious, social or economic creed,” but instead one’s “compatibility with the meeting community.” ( Friends for 300 Years page 127).
So what is “compatibility”? It often boils down to being the right “kind” of Quaker, with the right sort of behavior and values. At most Quaker meetings, it means being exceedingly polite, white, upper-middle class, politically liberal, well-educated, quiet in conversation, and devoid of strong opinions about anything involving the meeting. Quakers are a homogenous bunch and it’s not coincidence: for many of us, it’s become a place to find people who think like us.
But the desire to fit in creates its own insecurity issues. I was in a small “breakout” group at a meeting retreat a few years ago where six of us shared our feelings about the meeting. Most of these Friends had been members for years, yet every single one of them confided that they didn’t think they really belonged. They were too loud, too colorful, too ethnic, maybe simply too too for Friends. They all judged themselves against some image of the ideal Quaker – perhaps the ghost of Howard Brinton. We rein ourselves in, stop ourselves from saying too much.
This phenomenon has almost completely ended the sort of prophetic ministry once common to Friends, whereby a minister would challenge Friends to renew their faith and clean up their act. Today, as one person recently wrote, modern Quakers often act as if avoidance of controversy is at the center of our religion. That makes sense if “compatibility” is our test for membership and “community” our only stated goal. While Friends love to claim the great eighteenth century minister John Woolman, he would most likely get a cold shoulder in most Quaker meetinghouses today. His religious motivation and language, coupled with his sometimes eccentric public witness and his overt call to religious reform would make him very incompatible indeed. Sometimes we need to name the ways we aren’t following the Light: for Friends, Christ is not just comforter, but judger and condemner as well. Heavy stuff, perhaps, but necessary. And near-impossible when a comfy and non-challenging community is our primary mission.
Don’t get me wrong. I like community. I like much of the non-religious culture of Friends: the potlucks, the do-it-yourself approach to music and learning, our curiousity about other religious traditions. And I like the openness and tolerance that is the hallmark of modern liberalism in general and liberal Quakerism in particular. I’m glad we’re Queer friendly and glad we don’t get off on tangents like who marries who (the far bigger issue is the sorry state of our meetings’ oversight of marriages, but that’s for another time). And for all my ribbing of Howard Brinton, I agree with him that we should be careful of theological litmus tests for membership. I understand where he was coming from. All that said, community for its own sake can’t be the glue that holds a religious body together.
So my Testimony Against “Community” is not a rejection of the idea of community, but rather a call to put it into context. “Community” is not the goal of the Religious Society of Friends. Obedience to God is. We build our institutions to help us gather as a great people who together can discern the will of God and follow it through whatever hardships the world throws our way.
Plenty of people know this. Last week I asked the author of one of the articles in the yearly meeting newsletter why he had used “community” twice but “God” not at all. He said he personally substitutes “body of Christ” everytime he writes or reads “community.” That’s fine, but how are we going to pass on Quaker faith if we’re always using lowest-common-denominator language?
We’re such a literate people but we go surprisingly mute when we’re asked to share our religious understandings. We need to stop being afraid to talk with one another, honestly and with the language we use. I’ve seen Friends go out of their way to use language from other traditions, especially Catholic or Buddhist, to state a basic Quaker value. I fear that we’ve dumbed down our own tradition so much that we’ve forgotten that it has the robustness to speak to our twenty-first century conditions.
Related Essays
I talk about what a bold Quaker community of faith might look like and why we need one in my essay on the “Emergent Church Movement” I talk about our fear of meeting unity in “We’re all Ranters Now.”