This week’s featured Friends Journal article is Selling Hope by Tom Hoopes. Hoopes is a teacher at George School, one of the two prominent Quaker boarding schools in the Philadelphia area, and he talks about the branding challenges of “Quaker values” which historic Quaker schools so often fall back on when describing their mission. We often describe these with the simplistic “SPICES” forumulation (Eric Moon wrote about the problems over-emphasizing these). Hoopes encourages us to expand our language:
We can use any number of descriptors that do not sound so haughty and nearsighted. I think we should continually lift up some key pieces of vocabulary that really do make the Quaker way distinctive. Here is a brief list, to which I am sure Friends can add others: “that of God in every person”; “the Inner Light”; “continuing revelation”; “discernment”; “sense of the meeting”; “rightly led and rightly ordered”; “Friend speaks my mind”; “the still, small voice within”; “way opening”; “clerking”; “query”; “worship sharing”; “expectant waiting”; “centering down”; “Quaker decision making”; “Quaker tradition”; “faith and practice”; “seeking clearness”; “Quaker testimonies”; and of course, “meeting for worship.”
Longtime FJ readers will remember a much-discussed 2008 article by Hoopes, “Young Families and Quakerism: Will the Center Hold?” It certain spoke to my condition as a parent struggling with family life among Friends:
Let’s look at some hard realities facing many Quaker parents of young children today. They are frequently exhausted and frazzled from attending to their children’s needs in addition to their own all week long. They desperately need a break from their own children, and they may feel guilty about that fact. They are often asked — or expected — to serve as First-day school teachers or childcare providers. Hence, their experience of meeting is not one of replenishment, but of further depletion.
I wish I could report that Philadelphia Friends took the 2008 article to heart.
Friends Journal
Quakers