One issue to which I am particularly sensitive is how our obsession with the past comes across to newcomers. Some people (especially those with Quaker ancestors) are excited by our history, while other people are turned off or simply puzzled by Quaker jargon and Quaker genealogies, which they experience as a serious barrier to being included.
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Tag Archives ⇒ history
Skeletons (not even) in the closet
May 22, 2018
This is a bit a grusome story, though not as shocking at it should be. Louellen White, a researcher looking for burial records of Native American children stumbled on a Native American skull just sitting in a display case of a old Philadelphia meeting.
As White searched for graveyard ledgers in the library — crammed with stuffed birds, clothing, shells and books — she came upon the skull. Her legs wobbled. And her stomach dropped. Arsenault-Cote offered advice and reassurance. “You’re out there looking for them, and now they’re showing themselves to you,” she told White. “He’s been waiting a long time.” Historically, Philadelphia Quakers were “inconsistent friends” to Indians, engaged in the same colonizing projects as other faiths while seeing themselves as uniquely able to educate natives.
Inconsistent is an apt word. Paula Palmer has been tracing the history of Quaker Indian Boarding Schools: high-minded enterprises that often forcably stripped heritage from their pupils in ways that were as culturally imperial as they were unaware.
Byberry Meeting dates to the 1690s and the meetinghouse grounds are full of abolitionist history. The skull was apparently dug up in the mid-nineteenth century as part of a nearby canal project and is thought to have come to the meetinghouse as part of a collection from a shuttered historical society. Its presence on the shelf represents the attitudes of Friends many decades ago who thought nothing of placing a Lenape skull in a case. There’s also the sad subtext that the meeting library is said to be so unused that most of the meeting’s contemporary members had no idea it was there. It’s a shame that it took an outside researcher to notice the skeletons in our display case.
https://www.philly.com/philly/news/483072571.html
Quaker Abolitionist Benjamin Lay Remembered
May 8, 2018
Philadelphia Yearly Meeting has published a piece on the rehabilitation of disowned seventeenth century Quaker rabblerouser Benjamin Lay
On Saturday, April 21, 2018, Abington Monthly Meeting unveiled a burial stone for Sarah & Benjamin Lay. The event which featured opening remarks by author Marcus Rediker and local resident and Quaker Avis Wanda McClinton was followed by a gathering in the meetinghouse in the manner of a Friends Memorial Meeting.
Abington was the first Friends meeting I ever visited and I’ve loved the story of Lay since the time I first stumbled on it (even as a kid I was enough of a local history nerd that I might have read of Lay’s antics before I ever met a Quaker). I’m personally so happy to see him get this wider recognition. The PYM piece is all-text but much of the grave marker ceremony has been posted to YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3e-4_YZxeQk
Cast out by the Quakers, Abington’s abolitionist dwarf finally has his day
April 19, 2018
A nice story on the belated recognition being given abolitionist stalwart and political prankster Benjamin Lay up at Abington Meeting in Pennsylvania (my first meeting!):
About 12 years ago, the Abington meetinghouse caretaker, Dave Wermeling, found an old sketch of Lay in a box. A short biography on worn brown paper was glued to back of the drawing. “I thought, ‘Who is this, and how can you not be talking about him?’” Wermeling recalled.
I’ve long admired the story of Benjamin Lay. I’m not sure that the general public reading these articles is quite realizing that Quaker disownment wasn’t a full shunning. As far as I know he continued to be influential with Quakers, for his passion if not his strategy. Lay went far, far ahead of the Quakers of the time. His stunts were awesome, but drenching yearly meeting attenders with pig blood and publishing books without permission was going to get you uninvited from formal decision making meetings.
I would very much hope that if any of us moderns were transported back to that era, we would find the conditions of human bondage so outrageous that we would all go full Benjamin Lay: disrupt meetings, shatter norms, get disowned by our religious bodies. If you read the history of eighteen-century Quaker activism in the Philadelphia area you’ll see there were many tracts starting in the earliest years of the Quaker colonies. There were lots of Quakers who felt slavery was morally wrong. But few felt the empowerment to break from social conventions the way Lay did. But that’s kind of the nature of prophecy. I would be suspicious of any candidate for prophet that is liked by the administrative bodies of their time. What kind of complacency are we demonstrating by our inactions today?
https://www.philly.com/philly/news/quakers-benjamin-lay-dwarf-abolitionist-slavery-abington-friends-meeting-20180419.html?mobi=true
Quaker historic ocean of zen calm silence
April 16, 2018
The Young Quaker Podcast in the UK recently had an episode in which they had a mic run through 30 minutes of silent worship. I must admit I kind of laughed at the John Cage’ness of it. But it’s generated quite a bit of buzz. The Guardian declared it an ocean of calm, NPR thinks silence is golden. Not to be outdone, the BBC breathlessly announced that the podcast makes history for recording Quaker worship (never mind people have been worshipping via Skype and other online media for many years now).
I love the intentionality of a roomful of people agreeing to settle into silence together as much as the next Friend, but I’m tempted to wonder whether the coverage would have quite so effusive if someone had interrupted part of the podcast’s silence to give a message. From daffodil ministry to top-of-the-hour newscast updates to disquisitions on the gospel, pretty much anything would have popped the silence’s “moment of Zen,” to use NPR’s head-scratching description.
The best part of it all so far, in my opinion, is that one of the podcasters, host Jessica Hubbard-Bailey, got a chance to use the buzz to write her story of being a Quaker for i (an online spin-off of the Independent): Life is tough for young people, but being a Quaker has given me hope.
When a friend came to me last year and suggested the Young Quaker Podcast record a silent Meeting for Worship I was intrigued. But given that most people are not quite so enamoured with silence as Quakers, I couldn’t have anticipated the interest and response that followed.
https://inews.co.uk/inews-lifestyle/women/life-is-tough-for-young-people-but-being-a-quaker-has-given-me-hope/
Do Friends Query?
April 6, 2018
Doug Gwyn is next up on QuakerSpeak, this time answering What is a Quaker Query?
The Quaker Queries are a wonderful invention of asking ourselves some simple questions… I’ve heard it said that throughout much of our history, we were shopkeepers and business people, and we were used to doing inventory all the time. And the queries are a kind of spiritual and moral inventory that Friends do well to keep track of.
It’s become kind of easy to make fun of queries. The classic use was as questions formally asked and formally answered in Quaker meetings for business. As Gwyn says they were a form of accounting. Local congregations would go though a set list and send them to quarter meetings to sift and answer so they could in turn send it up to yearly meeting sessions. I’ve seen this process followed at Ohio Yearly Meeting. It’s fascinating if a bit tedious.
I could imagine the process being useful if for no other reason that it gave Friends a chance to pry a bit into one another’s lives. Do all the members of our community have their alcohol use under control? Are we really committed to peace in our communities?
These days a form of over-simplistic query is are written on the fly, with an implicit “or” that I don’t always find particularly helpful. “Do Friends avoid the use of styrofoam cups?” [or do you all hate the Earth?]. Used this way, queries risk becoming a list of busybody norms to followed. We congratulate ourselves for not using paper napkins at a conference we flew to.
As Doug points out, it helps to have a little humility when it comes to queries. They’re one of the more useful items in the Quaker toolbox. A good query will have something to say to each of us, no matter where we individually are in our spiritual journey.
On the State of Religious Discourse at Haverford
March 13, 2018
This one only tangentially skims Friends but it’s an interesting case. A independent student website at the historically-Quaker Haverford College decided not to do a special issue on religion and one student penned an article about why he disagrees: On the State of Religious Discourse at Haverford
Haverford is not immune to this plague: we too relegate religious knowledge to a dimension of the personal. Considering the religious history and Quaker roots of our institution, this is particularly troubling. Haverford sells itself as a Quaker institution, and there is a sense in which this is true, as there are certain traditions at Haverford (speaking out of silence, quorum, confrontation, etc.), and yet the school split from organized Quakerism long ago, and one need only look at the last year to understand that we make decisions as an institution that are quite separable from any promoted quaker values.
Haverford’s official statement on its Quaker identity is a rather strained two sentences, but in recent years it’s developed a Quaker Affairs program, which is currently led by the awesome Walter Sullivan. The program’s Friend in Residence program has brought in some great Quaker thinkers on campus.
More on this topic soon as Friends Journal’s May issue will ask “What Are Quaker Values Anyway?” (Some of my preliminary thought are here).
The not-so-ancient Quaker clearness committee
February 28, 2018
I could probably start a column of Quaker pet peeve of the day. I especially get bent out of shape with misremembered history. One peeve is the myth that Quaker clearness committees are ancient. These committees are typically convened for Friends who are facing a major life decision, like marriage or a career. Parker Palmer is one of the most well-known practitioners of this and gives the best description:
For people who have experienced this dilemma, I want to describe a method invented by the Quakers, a method that protects individual identity and integrity while drawing on the wisdom of other people. It is called a “Clearness Committee.” If that name sounds like it is from the sixties, it is — the 1660’s!
While it’s true that you can see references to “being clear” in writings by George Fox and William Penn around issues of early Quaker marriages, what they’re describing is not a spiritual process but a checklist item. By law you could only get married in England under the auspicious of the Church of England. Quakers were one of the groups rebelling against that. This meant they had to perform some of the functions typically handled by clergy – and nowadays by the state. One checklist item: make sure neither person in the couple is already married or has children. That’s primarily what they meant they asked whether a couple was cleared for marriage (Mark Wutka has found a great reference in Samuel Bownas that implies that the practice also included checking with the bride and groom’s parents).
One reason I can be so obnoxiously definitive about my opinions is because I have the Friends Journal archives on my laptop. I can do an instant keyword search for “clearness committee” on every issue from 1955 to 2018. The phrase doesn’t appear in any issue until 1969. That article is by Jennifer Haines and Deborah Haines. Here it is, the debut of the concept of the Quaker clearness committee:
We were challenged repeatedly to test our lives against our beliefs. We labored long over concerns raised by our belief in the way of peace. We agreed to urge that each Monthly Meeting, through a clearness committee or other committees, take the responsibility for working through with Friends the tensions raised in their lives by the Quaker peace testimony. To this committee could be brought problems created by draft or employment in institutions implicated with the military and the question of whether applicants for membership who find themselves in opposition to the peace testimony should be accepted.
The context suggests it was an outgrowth of the new practice of worship sharing. I did do a deep dive on that a few years ago in a piece that was also based on Friends Journal archives. Deborah Haines continued to be very involved in Friends General Conference and I worked with her when I was FGC’s Advancement and Outreach coordinator and she the committee clerk.
In the early 1970s the references to clearness committees continued to focus on discernment of antiwar activities. Within a few years it was extended to preparation for marriages. A notice from 1982 gives a good summary of its uses then:
Meetings for clearness, for friends unfamiliar with the term, are composed of people who meet by request with persons seeking clarity in an important life decision — marriage, separation, divorce, adoption, resolution of family differences, a job change, etc.
Notably absent in this list is the process for new member applications. The first use of the term for this process in the FJ archives came in 1989! Why did it take twenty years for the concept to be applied here?
Why does it matter that this isn’t an ancient practice? A few things: one is that is nice to acknowledge that our tradition is a living, breathing one and that it can and does evolve. The clearness committee is a great innovation. Decoupling it from ancient Quakerism also makes it more easily adaptable for non-Quaker contexts.
Worship sharing came out of the longtime work of Rachel Davis DuBois. I would argue that she is one of the most important Quakers of the twentieth century. What, you haven’t heard of her? Exactly: most of the most influential Friends that came out of the Hicksite tradition in the twentieth century didn’t develop the cult of personalities you see with Orthodox Friends like Rufus Jones and Howard Brinton. It’s a shame, because DuBois probably has more influence in our day-to-day Quaker practice than either of them.
Other links: This has turned into an awesome thread on Facebook (it’s public so jump in!). There was also a good discussion on worship sharing on QuakerQuaker a few years ago: When did Quakers start worship sharing? Back in 2003, Deborah Haines wrote about Rachel Davis DuBois for FGConnections, the awesome magazine that Barbara Hirshkowitz used to produce for FGC. I posted it online then, which is why I remember it; Archive.org saved it, which is why I can link to it.
Caveats: Yes there were Quaker processes before this. On Facebook Bill Samuel quotes the 1806 Faith and Practice on the membership process and argues it’s describing a clearness committee. I’d be very surprised if the 1812 process had anywhere near the same tone as the modern-day clearness or even shared much in the way of the philosophical underpinning. I decided to pop over to Thomas Clarkson’s 1806 A Portrait of Quakerism (discussed here) to see how he described the membership application process. I often find him useful, as he avoids Quaker terminology and our somewhat unhelpful way of understating things back then to give a useful snapshot of conditions on the ground. In three volumes I can’t find him talking about new members at all. I’m wondering if entry into the Society of Friends was more theoretical than actual back then, so unusual that Clarkson didn’t even think about.