Love is unconditional and accepts us for who we are

March 15, 2006

I tried to post this as a com­ment on “this piece by James Riemermann”:http://feeds.quakerquaker.org/quaker?m=299 on the Non­the­ist Friends web­site but the site expe­ri­enced a tech­ni­cal dif­fi­cul­ty when I tried to sub­mit it (hope it’s back up soon!). James describes his post as a “rant” about “conservative-leaning lib­er­al Friends,” and one theme that got picked up in the com­ments was how he and oth­ers felt exclud­ed by us (for that is a term I use to try to describe my spir­i­tu­al con­di­tion). Rather than loose the com­ment I’ll just post it here.
Hi James and everyone,
Well, I think I was one of the first of the Quak­er blog­gers to talk about conservative-leaning lib­er­al Quak­ers back in July 2003. I too am not sure it’s any­thing worth call­ing a “move­ment.”
I hear this feel­ing of being exclud­ed but I’m not sure where that’s com­ing from. When James had a real­ly won­der­ful, thought-provoking response to my “We’re All Ranters Now” piece, I asked him if I could “reprint” the com­ment as its own guest piece. It got a lot of atten­tion, a lot of com­ments. I did­n’t real­ize you were using non​the​ist​friends​.org as a blog these days but “Robin M”:http://www.quakerquaker.org/contributors_robin_m/ of “What Canst Thou Say”:http://robinmsf.blogspot.com/ did and has added a link to your post from “QuakerQuaker.org”:www.quakerquaker.org, which again is a val­i­da­tion that yours is an impor­tant voice (I can pret­ty much guar­an­tee that this is going to be one of the more fol­lowed links). You and every­one here are part of the family.
Yes, we have some dis­agree­ments. I don’t think Quak­erism is sim­ply made up of who­ev­er makes it into the meet­ing­house. I think we have a tra­di­tion that we’ve inher­it­ed. This con­sists of prac­tices and val­ues and ways of look­ing at the world. Much of that tra­di­tion comes from the gospel of Jesus and the epis­tles between the ear­li­est Chris­t­ian com­mu­ni­ties. Much of what might feel like neu­tral Quak­er prac­tice is a clear echo of that tra­di­tion, and that echo is what I talk about that in my blogs. I think it’s good to know where we’re com­ing from. That does­n’t mean we’re stuck there and we adapt it as our rev­e­la­tion changes (this atti­tude is why I’m a lib­er­al Friend no mat­ter how much I talk about Christ). These blog con­ver­sa­tions are the ways we share our expe­ri­ences, min­is­ter to and com­fort one another.
That peo­ple hold dif­fer­ent reli­gious under­stand­ings and prac­tices isn’t in itself inher­ent­ly exclu­sion­ary. Diver­si­ty is good for us, right? There’s no one Quak­er cen­ter. There’s muli­ti­ple con­ver­sa­tions hap­pen­ing in mul­ti­ple lan­guages, much of it glo­ri­ous­ly over­lap­ping on the elec­tron­ic path­ways of the inter­net. That’s won­der­ful, it shows a great vital­i­ty. The reli­gious tra­di­tion that is Quak­erism is not dead, not moth­balled away in a liv­ing his­to­ry muse­um some­where. It’s alive, with its assump­tions and bound­aries con­stant­ly being revis­it­ed. That’s cool. If a par­tic­u­lar post feels too carp­ing, there’s always the “elder­ing of the back but­ton,” as I like to call it. Let’s try to hear each oth­er from where we are and to remain open to the min­istry from those who might appear to be com­ing from a dif­fer­ent place. Love is the first move­ment and love is uncon­di­tion­al and accepts us for who we are.
I bet­ter stop this before I get too mushy, with all this talk of love! See what I mean about being a lib­er­al Quaker?
Your Friend, Martin

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.