British Friend Helen Drewery writes about what might be a universal desire to make Quaker organizational life simpler
How can we achieve a flexible simplicity – living by the essence of the Quaker approach but not treating old habits as sacrosanct? Early Quakers saw simplicity as stripping out of their lives the superfluous activities and things – John Woolman called them ‘cumber’ – so that they could more fully follow the leadings of the Spirit.
Love was the first motion, and then a concern arose to spend some time with the Indians, that I might feel and understand their life, and the Spirit they live in, if haply I might receive some instruction from them, or they be in any degree helped forward by my following the leadings of Truth amongst them.
From Jnana Hodson’s blog, a look at “The Seed” as a Quaker metaphor:
Considering today’s emphasis on individuality, plurality, and personal psychology, I believe that returning to the metaphor of the Seed holds the most potential for fertile spiritual development and guidance in our own era.
I find the evolution of Quaker metaphors fascinating. Early Quaker sermons and epistles were packed with biblical allusions. I grew up relatively unchurched but I’ve tried to make up for it over the years. I’ve read the Bible cover-to-cover using the One Year Bible plan (like a lot of people I suspect, it took me a little over two years) and have been part of different denominational Bible study groups. I try to look up references. But even with that I don’t catch half the references early sermons packed in.
John Woolman lived a couple of generations after the first Friends. We Quaker remember his Journal for ministry of its anti-slavery sentiments, finally becoming a consensus among Friends by the time of its publication in 1774. But other religious folks have read it for its literary value. Open a random page and Woolman will have up to half a dozen metaphors for the Divine. It’s packed and rich and accessible. I find a kind of particular Quaker spiritual truth in Woolman’s rotation of metaphors: it implies that divinity is more than any specific words we try to stuff it into.
Lately Quaker metaphors have tended to become more sterile. I think we’re still worried about specifics but instead of expanding our language we contract it into a kind of impenetrable code. The “Light of Christ” becomes the “Inward Christ” then the “Inward Light” then “the Light” or “Spirit.” We’re still echoing the Light metaphors packed into the Book of John but doing so in such a way that seems particularly parochial to Friends and non-obvious to newcomers. A major New Testament theme is reduced to Quaker lingo.
Jnana Hodson’s problem with “the seed” as metaphor is interesting: “ ‘seed,’ as such, has far fewer Biblical citations than the corresponding complementary ‘light’ or ‘true’ and ‘truth’ do.” I’m not sure I ever noticed that. I like the seed, with its organic connotations and promise of future growth. But apparently the few biblical allusions were rather sexist (spoiler: it often meant semen) and lacking in biological awareness. It feels like Friends are searching for neutral metaphors like “the seed” these days; we also have a lot of gatherings around “weaving.” I certainly don’t think we should be limited to first century images of divinity but I also don’t think we’ve quite figured out how we can talk about the guidance we receive from the Inward Teacher.
The Seed, initially, is the most problematic of the three central Quaker metaphors
I have something of fascination with the phenomenon of urban myths and misattributed quotations. In the January Friends Journal I used the opening column to track down “Live simply so that others may simply live,” a phrase that recurred in many of the articles in the issue (the theme was Quaker Lifestyles). Among Quakers, one of the more oft-told tales involves a mad prophet and his fair-haired noble protege…
It was late April on the northern moors and the winter had been especially harsh. Flowers were just starting to peek out of the ground as the farmers looked tested whether the soil was soft enough yet to plow. The nobleman dismounted his horse and asked the hamlet’s blacksmith for directions.
It has been a long journey. His ruffled silk shirt was dirty and full of the smells of a dozens of overnight accomodations in pig barns and lean-tos of the English Midlands. His most-prized possession was spotless, however: the silver sword given him by his father, the admiral, last year on his eighteenth birthday. It layed sheathed in its hand-stiched sheath.
The blacksmith pointed the foreigner to the path that crossed the dark moors toward the hillside of Judge Fell’s estate. The manor house was the de facto headquarters of the new cult that was scandalizing the Kingdom, the Children of the Light. A short ten minute walk and our traveler was face-to-face with the man he had come so far to see.
A long tumble of rehersed speaches came out of the young man’s mouth as George Fox warily sized him up. The young William Penn wanted to join the movement. Fox knew it would be a coup for the Children of the Light. Penn’s father was one of the wealthiest men in England and the family money could buy protection, fame, and land in the new colonies.
But Penn wasn’t quite ready. He had that sword. It would be a grave disrespect to his father to leave it or give it away. “Friend George, what can I do?” The wise Fox knew that Penn was led to join. With a little encouragement, it was a matter of time the new apprentice adopted their pacifist principles. Fox cleared his throat and answered: “Wear thy sword as long as thee can, young William.” Before tears could well in each man’s eyes they turned their attention to logistics of a preaching trip to London. On their way out a few days later, Penn quietly slipped back into a blacksmith shop and gave away his sword. By the time they left the Yorkshire, farmers were working the spring soil with their new silver plowshares.
It is a beautiful story (which I’ve made even more melodramatic, because why not). Unfortunately it’s also fake.
Both George Fox and William Penn left behind dozens of volumes of writings and memoirs. Their friendship was one of the most significant relationships for each of them. Surely such a foundational story would have made it to print. Paul Buckley tracked down the story in “Time To Lay Down William Penn’s Sword” in the December 2003 Friends Journal.
The sword story is fake but it is also somehow true. Buckley calls it a “authentic anecdote.” Every year Friends Journal gets otherwise-wonderful essays whose narrative turns on the story of William Penn’s sword. We can’t run them without correction so it falls on me to tell authors that the scene never took place. Occasionally I’m told it doesn’t matter that it’s not true.
What is the deeper myth inside our beloved tall tales? First: they depend on the celebrity status of their characters. If I substituted more obscure early Friends in the sword story — George Whitehead asking Solomon Eccles, say — I doubt it would be as compelling or get repeated as often.
Fame is an odd draw for modern-day Friends. There’s a baker’s-dozen of famous-enough Friends upon which we graft these sorts of stories — John Woolman, Lucretia Mott, Elias Hicks, Joseph John Gurney and his sister Elizabeth Fry. Changing celebrity Quaker’ stories began early: editors chopped out the embarrasing bits of recently-departed Friends’ journals. Dreams would get snipped out. George Fox’s accounts of miraculous healings disappear with his first editor, presumably worried they would sound too wild
It’s probably no coincidence that the Penn/Fox story dates back to the moment when American Friends split. The denomination’s origin story was fracturing. Paul Buckley thinks the sword story prefigured the tolerance and forbearance of the Hicksite Friends. Philadelphia-area Friends healed that particular wound almost three-quarters of a century ago. What does it say about us today that this tale is still so popular? Related reading, I tracked down another authentic anecdote in 2016, “Bring people to Christ / Leave them there.”
Over on Quora, a question that is more fascinating than it might at first appear: What wars in history were fought in the name of Quakerism (Society of Friends)?:
This question is neither sarcastic nor rhetoric. As many people insist that violence and atrocities are an inherent part of religions, that religions would cause wars, I really want to know if that is the truth. Personally I believe religions can be peaceful, such as in the cases of the Quakers and the Baha’i, but I might be wrong.
The obvious answer should be “none.” Quakers are well-known as pacifists (fun fact: fake cannon used to deceive the enemy into thinking an army is more fortified than it actually is are called “Quaker guns.”) Individual Quakers have rarely been quite as united around the peace testimony as our reputation would suggest, but as a group it’s true we’ve never called for a war. I can’t think of any military skirmish or battle waged to rallying cries of “Remember the Quakers!”
And yet: all of modern civilization has been shaped by war. Our political boundaries, our religions, our demographic make-up – even the languages we speak are all remnants of long-ago battles. One of the most influential Quaker thinkers, the eighteenth century minister John Woolman, constantly reminded his brethren to consider those luxuries that are the fruit of war and slavery. When we broaden the scope like this, we’ve been involved in quite a few wars.
We like to remember how William Penn founded the colony of Pennsylvania as a religious refuge. But the king of England held European title to the mid-Atlantic seaboard because of regional wars with the Dutch and Swedes (and later held onto it only after a much larger war with the Canadian French settlements).
The king’s grant of “Penn’s Woods” was the settlement of a very large war debt owed to Penn’s father, a wealthy admiral. The senior William Penn was something of a scoundrel, playing off both sides in ever-shifting royalist/Roundhead seesaw of power. When the musical chairs were over he was on the side of the winner, who owed him and later his son. The admiral’s longest-lasting accomplishment was disobeying orders and capturing Jamaica for the British (Bob Marley sang his songs of oppression and injustice in English because of Sir William).
By most accounts, William Penn the younger was fair and also bought the land from local Lenape nations. Mostly forgotten is that the Lenape and Susquehannock population had been devastated in a recent regional war against the Iroquois over access to beaver-trapping territories. They were now subject nations to the Iroquois Confederacy, which skillfully played global politics by keeping the English and French colonial empires in enough strategic tension that both left the Iroquois homeland alone. It was in the Iroquois’s best interest to have another British colony on their southern flank and who would make a better buffer than these idealistic pacifists? The Lenape land reimbursement was secondary consideration to continental politics from their perspective. (One could easily make a case that the biological genocide of indigenous America by diseases brought over by uncaring colonists was also a form of war.)
The thousands of acres Penn deeded to his fellow Quakers were thus the fruits of at least four sets of wars: colonial wars over European claims to the Delaware Valley; debt-fueled English civil wars; English wars against Spanish Caribbean colonies, and Native American wars fought over access to commercial resources. Much of original Quaker wealth in succeeding generations is indebted to the huge land transfer in the 1680s, either directly (we still hold some valuable real estate) or indirectly (the real estate’s sale could be funneled into promising businesses).
Not all of the fruits of war were secondhand and coincidental to Friends themselves. Many wealthy Friends in the mid-Atlantic colonies had slaves who did much of the backbreaking work of clearing fields and building houses. Many of those oppressed souls were put into bondage in Africa as prisoners of war (John Woolman would probably point out that slavery itself is a form of war). That quaint old brick meetinghouse set back on a flower-covered field? It was probably built at least in part by enslaved hands.
Today, it’s impossible to step free of war. Most of our houses are set on land once owned by others. Our computers and cell phones have components mined in war zones. Our lights and cars are powered by fossil fuels. And even with solar panels and electric cars, the infrastructure of the daily living of most Americans is still based on extraction and control of resources.
This is not to say we can’t continue to work for a world free of war. But it seems important to be clear-eyed and acknowledge the debts we have.
It sometimes strikes me that the Lord sometimes picks some mightily unlikely messengers. We are all flawed in our ways, true, but it’s easy to think there are those flawed more than ourselves. In part this is the whole beam in the eye problem of perspective we find in Matthew 7. But the parable of the Lost Sheep recorded in Luke 15 suggests that some are more lost than others:
What man of you, having an hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it? And when he hath found it, he layeth it on his shoulders, rejoicing. And when he cometh home, he calleth together his friends and neighbours, saying unto them, Rejoice with me; for I have found my sheep which was lost. I say unto you, that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance.
One of the best-known examples of the formerly-lost sheep is the apostle Paul of Tarsus. We first learn about him as Saul, a Pharisee who actively persecuted the early church. The story of the the light of heaven interrupting his journey to Damascus is really key to understanding Friends understanding of the Light as judge and instructor (it’s also the source of one of my favorite line in the Johnny Cash oevre “it’s hard for thee to kick against the pricks”!).
But I always wonder what the other Christians made of the post-conversion Paul. We get a little of their reaction from Ananias but I imagine there was lots of talk and anger, jealousy and confusion all swirling with whatever joy they could muster that another soul was saved. A man who had “slaughtered” them was soon to present himself as a major leader, taking sides in the great debates over how Jewish the Christian community needed to be.
How do we react when God uses an unlikely messenger to spread the good news? None of my blog readers are likely to have seen their brethren slaughtered but it’s safe to say we’ve all been wronged and mistreated from time to time. One of the great mysteries I’ve experienced is how God has seemingly used other’s disobedience to do His work. Knowing this requires a scale of love that’s hard to imagine. People do wrong can still be somehow acting of God. People who have done wrong are sometimes especially chosen of God. Heaven rejoices more for that one saved sinner than all the rest of us trying to muddle along in faith. Even secret anger is akin to murder.
We Friends are rightly inspired of 17th Century New Jersey Friend John Woolman’s exceptional compassion and ability to see outside the prejudices of his day, but even this “Quaker saint” considered himself the unlikely messenger, the lost sheep of the Luke story. He wrote of a dream:“Then the mystery was opened, and I perceived there was joy in heaven over a sinner who had repented [Luk 15:7] and that that language John Woolman is dead meant no more than the death of my own will.”
How do we hold tight to love, even for those we don’t like? When we greet even those who have disappointed us, we need to bear in mind that they might have traveled their own road to Damascus since last we met. They might be one of those God chooses to teach.
(Thanks to Esther Greenleaf Mürer’s Quaker Bible Index for the Woolman connection.)
Over on Quaker Oats Live, Cherice is fired up about taxes again and proposing a peace witness for next year:
My solution: Quakers, Mennonites, Brethren, and whomever else wants to participate refuses to pay war taxes for a few years, and we suffer the consequences. I think we should campaign for a war-tax-free 2010 in all Quaker meetings and Mennonite/Brethren/etc. communities. What are they going to do – throw us all in jail? Maybe. But they can’t do that forever. No one wants to pay their taxes for a bunch of Quakers and other pacifists to sit in jail for not paying taxes. It doesn’t make sense.
A commenter chimes in with a warning about Friends who were hit by heavy tax penalties a quarter century ago. But I know of someone who didn’t pay taxes for twenty years and recently volunteered the information to the Internal Revenue Service. The collectors were nonchalant, polite and sympathetic and settled for a very reasonable amount. If this friend’s experience is any guide, there’s not much drama to be had in war tax resistance. These days, Caesar doesn’t care much.
What if our witness was directed not at the federal government but at our fellow Christians? We could follow Quaker founder George Fox’s example and climb the tallest tree we could find (real or metaphorical) and begin preaching the good news that war goes against the teachings of Jesus. As always, we would be respectful and charitable but we could reclaim the strong and clear voices of those who have traveled before us. If we felt the need for backup? Well, I understand there are twenty-seven or so books to the New Testament sympathetic to our cause. And I have every reason to believe that the Inward Christ is still humming our tune and burning bushes for all who have eyes to see and ears to listen. Just as John Woolman ministered with his co-religionists about the sin of slavery, maybe our job is to minister to our co-religionists about war.
But who are these co-religionist neighbors of ours? Twenty years of peace organizing and Friends organizing makes me doubt we could find any large group of “historic peace church” members to join us. We talk big and write pretty epistles, but few individuals engage in witnesses that involve any danger of real sacrifice. The way most of our established bodies couldn’t figure out how to respond to a modern day prophetic Christian witness in Tom Fox’s kidnapping is the norm. When the IRS threatened to put liens on Philadelphia Yearly Meeting to force resistant staffers to pay, the general secretary and clerk said all sorts of sympathetic words of anguish (which they probably even meant), then docked the employee’s pay anyway. There have been times when clear-eyed Christians didn’t mind loosing their liberty or property in service to the gospel. Early Friends called our emulation of Christ’s sacrifice the Lamb’s War, but even seven years of real war in the ancient land of Babylonia itself hasn’t brought back the old fire. Our meetinghouses sit quaint, with ownership deeds untouched, even as we wring our hands wondering why most remain half-empty on First Day morning.
But what about these emerging church kids?: all those people reading Shane Claiborne, moving to neighborhoods in need, organizing into small cells to talk late into the night about primitive Christianity? Some of them are actually putting down their candles and pretentious jargon long enough to read those twenty-seven books. Friends have a lot of accumulated wisdom about what it means the primitive Christian life, even if we’re pretty rusty on its actual practice. What shape would that witness take and who would join us into that unknown but familiar desert? What would our movement even be called? And does it matter?
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Anyone interested in thinking more on this should start saving up their loose change ($200 commuters) to come join C Wess Daniels and me this November when we lead a workshop on “The New Monastics and Convergent Friends” at Pendle Hill near Philadelphia. Methinks I’m already starting to blog about it.
Reading John Woolman Series:
1: The Public Life of a Private Man
2: The Last Safe Quaker
3: The Isolated Saint
It’s said that John Woolman re-wrote his Journal three times in an effort to excise it of as many “I” references as possible. As David Sox writes in Johh Woolman Quintessential Quaker, “only on limited occasion do we glimpse Woolman as a son, a father and a husband.” Woolman wouldn’t have been a very good blogger. Quoting myself from my introduction to Quaker blogs:
blogs give us a unique way of sharing our lives — how our Quakerism intersects with the day-to-day decisions that make up faithful living. Quaker blogs give us a chance to get to know like-minded Friends that are separated by geography or artificial theological boundaries and they give us a way of talking to and with the institutions that make up our faith community.
I’ve read many great Woolman stories over the years and as I read the Journal I eagerly anticipated reading the original account. It’s that same excitement I get when walking the streets of an iconic landscape for the first time: walking through London, say, knowing that Big Ben is right around the next corner. But Woolman kept letting me down.
One of the AWOL stories is his arrival in London. The Journal’s account:
On the 8th of Sixth Month, 1772, we landed at London, and I went straightway to the Yearly Meeting of ministers and elders, which had been gathered, I suppose, about half an hour. In this meeting my mind was humbly contrite.
But set the scene. He had just spent five weeks crossing the Atlantic in steerage among the pigs (he doesn’t actually specify his non-human bunkmates). He famously went out of his way to wear clothes that show dirt because they show dirt. He went straightaway: no record of a bath or change of clothes. Stories abound about his reception, and while are some of dubious origin, there are first hand accounts of his being shunned by the British ministers and elders. The best and most dubious story is the theme of another post.
I trust that Woolman was honestly aiming for meekness when he omitted the most interesting stories of his life. But without the context of a lived life he becomes an ahistorical figure, an icon of goodness divorced from the minutiae of the daily grind. Two hundred and thirty years of Quaker hagiography and latter-day appeals to Woolman’s authority have turned the tailor of Mount Holly into the otherworldly Quaker saint but the process started at John’s hands himself.
Were his struggles merely interior? When I look to my own ministry, I find the call to discernment to be the clearest part of the work. I need to work to be ever more receptive to even the most unexpected prompting from the Inward Christ and I need to constantly practice humility, love and forgiveness. But the practical limitations are harder. For years respectibility was an issue; relative poverty continues to be one. It is asking a lot of my wife to leave responsibility for our two small boys for even a long weekend.
How did Woolman balance family life and ministry? What did wife Sarah think? And just what was his role in the sea-change that was the the “Reformation of American Quakerism” (to use Jack Marietta’s phrase) that forever altered American Friends’ relationship with the world and set the stage for the schisms of the next century.
We also lose the context of Woolman’s compatriots. Some are named as traveling companions but the colorful characters go unmentioned. What did he think of the street-theater antics of Benjamin Lay, the Abbie Hoffman of Philadelphia Quakers. The most widely-told tale is of Lay walking into Philadelphia Yearly Meeting sessions, opening up a cloak to reveal military uniform underneath, and declaring that slave-made products were products of war, plunged a sword into a hollowed-out Bible full of pig’s blood, splattering Friends sitting nearby.
What role did Woolman play in the larger anti-slavery awakening happening at the time? It’s hard to tell just reading his Journal. How can we find ways to replicate his kind of faithfulness and witness today? Again, his Journal doesn’t give much clue.
Picked up today in the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Library:
PYM Librarian Rita Varley reminded me today they mail books anywhere in the US for a modest fee and a $50/year subscription. It’s a great deal and a great service, especially for isolated Friends. The PYM catalog is online too!
