A question From Jessica F about Friends and Easter.
On the face of it, this is an easy question. Early Friends were loath to recognize any liturgical practices and they were lower‑p puritanical about anything that smacked of paganism. Famously, they didn’t use the common names of the week or months because many of them referred to non-Christian deities, like Thor and Janus.
They were especially grumpy about anything that smacked of latter-day syncretism. Many of the church holidays were seen as pagan festivals with a superficial Christian overlay. I’ll be the first to admit they could get kind of obnoxious this way. Wikipedia explains some of this attitude:
Other Protestant groups took a different attitude, with most Anabaptists, Quakers, Congregationalists and Presbyterian Puritans regarding such festivals as an abomination. The Puritan rejection of Easter traditions was (and is) based partly upon their interpretation of 2 Corinthians 6:14 – 16 and partly upon a more general belief that, if a religious practice or celebration is not actually written in the Christian Bible, then that practice/celebration must be a later development and cannot be considered an authentic part of Christian practice or belief — so at best simply unnecessary, at worst actually sinful.
In Latin, Easter is called Pascha, a reference to the Jewish Passover festival. But in England, Pascha took place in the month the old English called Ēostre after a goddess whose festival was celebrated in that month. This made it doubly hard for English Protestant groups that wanted to cleanse Christianity of “popish” or “pagan” influences. So for right or wrong, they ignored it like they did the day the world calls Christmas.
Symbolically, Quakers love the idea of Easter. One of George Fox’s most key openings was that“Christ has come to teach the people himself!” The idea that Jesus rose again and is with us is pretty central to traditional Quaker beliefs.
These days Easter is largely celebrated by Friends standing up on Sunday to break the silence of worship with nostalgic stories of Easters in their pre-Quaker youth. Sometimes they’ll admit to having attended a Easter service at another church before coming to meeting that morning. If you’re really lucky, you’ll get ministry about flowers or hats.
Brian Drayton is looking at an early form of public Quaker worship, who’s various names (including “yearly meetings”) have perhaps hidden them from modern Quaker consciousness: From the Quaker toolbox: “Yearly meetings” and related
These meetings often included gatherings of ministers, and of elders (and sometimes the two together), and meetings mostly for Friends. But the public worship was carefully prepared for — usually more than one session, often over more than one day, with lots of publicity ahead of time. Temporary meeting places were erected for large crowds (the word “booth” is used, these clearly held hundreds of people.
Brian’s story reminds me of when I was a tourist in the “1652 Country” where Quakerism was born. One of the stops is Firbank Fell, where George Fox preached to thousands. Most histories call that sermon the official start of the Quaker movement.
But Firbank Fell itself is a desolate hillside miles from anywhere. There was a small ancient church there and then nothing but grazing fields off to the horizon. A thousand people in such a remote spot would have the feel of a music festival. And that’s kind of what was happening the week the unknown George Fox walked into that part of England. There was a organized movement that held independent religious preaching festivals. Fox was no doubt very moving and he might have given the seekers there a new way of thinking about their spiritual condition, but the movement was already there. I wonder if the general meetings of public worship that Drayton is tracking down is an echo of those earlier public festivals.
Over the years I’ve noticed various communication breakdowns among Friends that have made me worried. It’s often something relatively little. For example, I might be talking to an active Philadelphia Friend and be startled to realize they have no idea that a major yearly meeting across the country is breaking apart. Or someone will send me an article bemoaning the lack of something that I know already exists.
I’m in this funny position where I have a quarter century of random Quaker factoids in my head, have access to great databases (like instant searches of Friends Journal’s 60+ years of articles), and have good Googling chops. When I’m in a discussion with Friends face-to-face, I find I often have useful context. Some of it is historical (I geek out on the Quaker past) but some of it is just my lived memory. I’ve been in and out of Quaker offices for 27 years now. I’m entering this weird phase of life in which I’ve been a professional Quaker staffer longer than most of my contemporaries.
And ever since I was a kid, I’ve had this weird talent to remember things I read years earlier. When the topic of clearness committees recently came up, I remembered that Deborah Haines had written a piece about Rachel Davis DuBois in the long-defunct FGConnections newsletter (yes, groaner of a name but it was a great publication in its heyday). Thanks to Archive.org I could resurface the article and bring it to the discussions.
And so, I’ve been quietly been changing the idea of Quaker Ranter from a classic old-school blog to a daily email newsletter. I’ll still collect interesting Quaker links, as I’ve been doing for years with QuakerQuaker. But now I’ll annotate them and give them context. If there’s a side story I think is interesting I’ll tell it. I have a long train commute and writing fun and geeky things about Friends makes it interesting.
I think that something like this could help bring Quaker newcomers up to speed. Our insider language and unexplained (and sometimes dated) worldviews create an impediment for seekers. We kind of expect they’ll figure out things that aren’t so obvious. Learning factoids and histories a day at a time can give them some context to understand what’s happening Sunday morning. If that’s not enough, I also have an Ask A Quaker feature where people new to Friends can ask questions. I’ll be liberally pitching Friends Journal articles and QuakerSpeak videos because I think we’re doing some of our best Quaker media work, but I’m also all about spreading the love and will share many other great resources and blogs.
As with all my projects I also hope to get people contributing so it becomes a community watering hole. If you want to get involved, the first step is to sign up for the free daily email list. At some point, this will probably outgrow the free tier of the email service I’m using, and I will start to have to pay to send thesee emails out. For those of you with a little extra to give, Quaker Ranter Membership is a way to help offset these costs.
And let your friends know about it! Just send them to quakerranter.org/email to sign up.
Great tweetstorm by lifelong Friend Susanna Williams on why she left Quakers and why she remains so attached to Quakers:
Quakerism has ruined me for other faith experiences- I was empowered from an early age to have a direct & personal relationship with God, to give vocal ministry (as I first did when I was 12), to dive into silent worship.
Where are the new Quaker meeting plants? Where are the dinner worship groups? Where is the connection with the Spirit? Where is the space for Friends to encounter and share authentic faith journeys?
This reminds me of some of the themes I wrote about in The Lost Quaker Generation (turning fifteen this year) and 2013’s Quakerism Left Me by Betsy Blake. Should the kind of Friends community Susanna’s looking for really be all that rare? Click on the link to read the 10-part story.
Two things on the internet that I consistently like are NeimanLab and Kottke.org. The former is Harvard’s journalism foundation and its associated blog. They consistently publish thought-provoking lessons from media pioneers. If there’s an interesting online publishing model being tried, Neiman Labs will profile it. Kottke is one of the original old school blogs. Jason highlights things that are interesting to him and by and large, most of the posts happen to be interesting to me. He’s also one of the few breakout blogging stars who has kept going.
So today Neiman Labs posted an interview with Jason Kottke. Of course I like it.
There are a few things that Jason has done that I find remarkable. One is that he’s threaded an almost impossible path that has held back the centrifugal forces of the modern internet. He never went big and he never went small. By big, I mean he never tried to ramp his site up to become a media empire. No venture capitalist money, no clickbait headlines, no pivot to video or other trendy media chimera. He also didn’t go small: his blog has never been a confessional. While that traffic when to Facebook, his kind of curated links and thoughts is something that still works best as a blog.
Although I don’t blog myself too much anymore, I do think a lot about media models for Friends Journal. Its reliance on non-professional opinion writing prefigured blogs. It’s a fully digital magazine now, even as it continues as a print magazine. The membership model Kottke talks about (and Neiman Labs frequently profiles) is a likely one for us going into the long term.
Oh dear: a few weeks ago Wess Daniels started a Twitter discussion about the new Mac app Cardhop. In the thread he asked me about other apps which apps I find essential. I thought I’d type up something in ten minutes but then the draft post kept growing. I’m sure I still missed some. I guess I didn’t realize how particular I am about my computing environment. 🙂
Okay, maybe it’s a bit OCD but I hate cluttered Mac menubars running along the top of my screen. This app was just rebuilt for High Sierra and is an essential tool. I have most everything hidden and have set up a keyboard shortcut (the little-used right “option” key) to toggle the full menubar icon set.
This is my favorite calendar app. It sits in the menubar, ready to give a beautiful agenda view with just a single tap. It can open up to a full view. Manage calendars is easy and the natural language processing is suburb.
Just released, this is Fantastical’s newest cousin, an app for managing contacts from Flexibits. It works with whatever you have set up for contacts on your Mac (I use Google but iCloud is fine too). Given Flexibit’s track record, and Cardhop’s resemblance to the discontinued Cobook, this is likely to be a winner for me.
I’ve been a Chrome user since the week it debuted but lately I’ve been trying to switch to Safari, wanting its superior battery management and syncing of bookmarks and tabs with iOS. Many of Safari’s annoyances have lessoned as Apple itinerated with each release. There are enough extensions now that I can get by. I am, though, one of those weird people whom John Gruber identified: wannabee Safari users who really like Favicons in tabs. Fortunately, Faviconographer has come along. There are occasional oddities (floating icons, icons that don’t match site) but overall it improves the Safari experience enough to make it a win over Chrome.
Uses the built-in content filtering system built into Mac Safari. Good syncing with the iOS app. “Content filtering” (aka blocking) has become an important security concern and let’s face it: the web runs so much better without all the crap that some sites throw in along with their content. You can whitelist sites that respect readers. Honorable mention in Chrome or as an alternative for Safari is uBlock Origin, a great blocker (and distinct from standard uBlock, which I don’t recommend).
Lets you remap the generally useless Caps Lock key. I have it mapped Brett-Terpstra style so that a single click opens Spotlight search and a hold and click acts as a hyper key (imagine a shift key that you can use for any keystroke).
I used to think VPNs were a luxury but with people hacking in on public Wi-Fi accounts and the loss of privacy, I’ve signed up for this easy-to-use VPN service. One account can power multiple devices so my laptop and phone are secured.
It’s been around for years. I currently have 13,000 notes stored in Evernote, including every issue of the magazine I work for going back to the mid-1950s. There was a time a few years ago when I was worried for Evernote, as it kept chasing quirky side projects as its main app got buggier and buggier. But they’ve had a shake-up, ditched the distractions and have built the service back up. Most of my projects are organized with Evernote.
There are a gazillion writing apps out there that combine Markdown writing syntax with minimalist interfaces (Bear, IaWriter, Byword) but Ulysses has edged its way to being my favorite, with quick syncing and ability to post directly to WordPress.
You should be using a password manager. Repeat: you should be using a password manager. 1Password is rock solid. They’ve recently changed their economic model and strongly favor subscription accounts. While I’ve tried to limit just how many auto-pulling subscriptions I have, I understand the rationale and have switched.
A great email app for Mac and iOS that can display and sort your Gmail accounts (and others too). Almost too many options if you’re the kind to fiddle with that sort of thing but easy to get started and great with just the defaults.
Google and Apple and clouds
The Big‑G should get a shoutout: it powers the databases for my email, calendar, contacts, and photos. All my hardware has migrated over to Apple, helped in large part by the opening up of its ecosystem to third-party apps.
What’s also useful to note is that all of the data-storing services are cloud based. If my phone or laptop disappeared, I could borrow a new one and be up to speed almost immediately. Since many of these apps run on databases run by Google, I can also switch apps or even have multiple apps accessing the same information for different purposes. There’s a real freedom to the app ecosystem these days.
Marlborough (Pa.) Friends meetinghouse at dusk. c. 2006.
A few weeks ago, reader James F. used my “Ask me anything!” page to wonder about two types of Friends:
I’ve read a little and watched various videos about the Friends. My questions are , is there a gulf between “conservative” friends and liberal? As well as what defines the two generally? I’m in Maryland near D.C. Do Quakers who define themselves as essentially Christian worship with those who don’t identify as such?
Hi James, what a great question! I think many of us don’t fully appreciate the confusion we sow when we casually use these terms in our online discussions. They can be useful rhetorical shortcuts but sometimes I think we give them more weight than they deserve. I worry that Friends sometimes come off as more divided along these lines than we really are. Over the years I’ve noticed a certain kind of rigid online seeker who dissects theological discussions with such conviction that they’ll refused to even visit their nearest meeting because it’s not the right type. That’s so tragic.
What the terms don’t mean
The first and most common problem is that people don’t realize we’re using these terms in a specifically Quaker context. “Liberal” and “Conservative” don’t refer to political ideologies. One can be a Conservative Friend and vote for liberal or socialist politicians, for example.
Adding to the complications is that these can be imprecise terms. Quaker bodies themselves typically do not identify as either Liberal or Conservative. While local congregations often have their own unique characteristics, culture, and style, nothing goes on the sign out front. Our regional bodies, called yearly meetings, are the highest authority in Quakerism but I can’t think of any that doesn’t span some diversity of theologies.
Historically (and currently) we’ve had the situation where a yearly meeting will split into two separate bodies. The causes can be complex; theology is a piece, but demographics and mainstream cultural shifts also play a huge role. In centuries past (and kind of ridiculously, today still), both of the newly reorganized yearly meetings were obsessed with keeping the name as a way to claim their legitimacy. To tell them apart we’d append awkward and incomplete labels, so in the past we had Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (Hicksite) and Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (Orthodox).
In the United States, we have two places where yearly meetings compete names and one side’s labelled appendage is “Conservative,” giving us Iowa Yearly Meeting (Conservative) and North Carolina Yearly Meeting (Conservative). Over time, both of these yearly meetings have diversified to the point where they contain outwardly Liberal monthly meetings. The name Conservative in the yearly meeting title has become partly administrative.
A third yearly meeting is usually also included in the list of Conservative bodies. Present-day Ohio Yearly Meeting once competed with two other Ohio Yearly Meetings for the name but is the only one using it today. The name “Ohio Yearly Meeting (Conservative)” is still sometimes seen, but it’s unnecessary, not technically correct, and not used in the yearly meeting’s formal correspondence. (You want to know more? The yearly meeting’s clerk maintains a website that goes amazingly deep into the history of Ohio Friends).
All that said, these three yearly meetings have more than their share of traditionalist Christian Quaker members. Ohio’s gatherings have the highest percentage of plain dressing- and speaking- Friends around (though even there, they are a minority). But other yearly meetings will have individual members and sometimes whole monthly meetings that could be accurately described as Conservative Quaker.
I might have upset some folks with these observations. In all aspects of life you’ll find people who are very attached to labels. That’s what the comment section is for.
The meanings of the terms
Formal identities aside, there are good reasons we use the concept of Liberal and Conservative Quakerism. They denote a general approach to the world and a way of incorporating our history, our Christian heritage, our understanding of the role of Christ in our discernment, and the format and pace of our group decision making.
But at the same time there’s all sorts of diversity and personal and local histories involved. It’s hard to talk about any of this in concrete terms without dissolving into footnotes and qualifications and long discourses about the differences between various historical sub-movements within Friends (queue awesome 16000-word history).
Many of us comfortably span both worlds. In writing, I sometimes try to escape the weight of the most overused labels by substituting more generic terms, like traditional Friends or Christ-centered Friends. These terms also get problematic if you scratch at them too hard. Reminder: God is the Word and our language is by definition limiting.
If you like the sociology of such things, Isabel Penraeth wrote a fascinating article in Friends Journal a few years ago, Understanding Ourselves, Respecting the Differences. More recently in FJ a Philadelphia Friend, John Andrew Gallery, visited Ohio Friends and talked about the spiritual refreshment of Conservative Friends in Ohio Yearly Meeting Gathering and Quaker Spring. Much of the discussion around the modern phrase Convergent Friends and the threads on QuakerQuaker has focused on those who span a Liberal and Conservative Quaker worldview.
The distinction between Conservatives and Liberals can become quite evident when you observe how Friends conduct a business meeting or how they present themselves. It’s all too easy to veer into caricature here but Liberal Friends are prone to reinventions and the use of imprecise secular language, whileConservative Friends are attached to established processes and can be unwelcoming to change that might disrupt internal unity.
But even these brief observations are imprecise and can mask surprisingly similar talents and stumbling blocks. We all of us are humans, after all. The Inward Christ is always available to instruct and comfort, just as we are all broken and prone to act impulsively against that advice.
Worshipping?
Finally, pretty much all Friends will worship with anyone. Most local congregations have their own distinct flavor. There are some in which the ministry is largely Christian, with a Quaker-infused explanation of a parable or gospel, while there are others where you’ll rarely hear Christ mentioned. You should try out different meetings and see which ones feed your soul. Be ready to find nurturance in unexpected places. God may instruct us to serve anywhere with no notice, as he did the Good Samaritan. Christ isn’t bound by any of our silly words.
Thanks to James for the question!
Do you have a question on another Quaker topic? Check out the Ask Me Anything! page.
Barring a very improbable series of events we will more than likely be looking at President Trump once the numbers have been tallied overnight. And not just him but a radicalized Trumpian Congress, Senate — and because of the successful stonewalling against Obama’s nomination — Supreme Court. We’ve not just elected an authoritarian: we’ve also taken away the entire system of checks and balances that might be able to hold him back. Add to that the expansion of the raw power of the executive branch in recent years and it’s the setup for a dystopian TV show.
We’ve seen seemingly stable countries fall apart under conditions like this. We claim American exceptionalism but history is littered with the corpses of democracies that didn’t make it. This will be the biggest test of our civic values in our lifetimes. We might well experience things the American republic has never seen: the imprisonment of a losing opposition leader, the rise of organized hate crimes, wholesale theft of incredible wealth by a new oligarchy, the divying up of the world back into empires… The model of a kind of alt right soft dictatorship is well developed by this point and Trump has been clear throughout both his career and his candidacy that it’s his vision.
We do not get to choose our era or the challenges it throws at us. Only someone with historical amnesia would say this is unprecedented in our history. The enslavement of millions and the genocide of millions more are dark stains indelibly soaked into the very founding of the nation. But much will change, particularly our naivity and false optimism in an inevitable forward progress of our national story. We must respond with courage and grace. We’re going to get a lesson in what’s really important. Time to engage.
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