Reading John Woolman 2: The Last Safe Quaker

August 10, 2006

08/10/200612/06/2023 · Martin Kelley

Reading John Woolman Series:
1: The Public Life of a Private Man
2: The Last Safe Quaker
3: The Isolated Saint

Someone who only knew Woolman from articles in popular Quaker periodicals might be forgiven for a moment of shock when opening his book. John Woolman is so much more religious than we usually acknowledge. We describe him as an activist even though he and his contemporaries clearly saw and named him a minister. There are many instances where he described the inhumanity of the slave trade and he clearly identified with the oppressed but he almost always did so with from a Biblical perspective. He acknowledged that religious faithfulness could exist outside his beloved Society of Friends but his life’s work was calling Friends to live a profoundly Christian life. Flip to a random page of the journal and you’ll probably count half a dozen metaphors for God. Yes, he was a social activist but he was also a deeply religious minister of the gospel.

So why do we wrap ourselves up in Woolman like he’s the flag of proto-liberal Quakerism? In an culture where Quaker authority is deeply distrusted and appeals to the Bible or to Quaker history are routinely dismissed, he has become the last safe Friend to claim. His name is invoked as a sort of talisman against critique, as a rhetorical show-stopper. “If you don’t agree with my take on the environment/tax resistance/universalism, you’re the moral equivalent of Woolman’s slave holders.” (Before the emails start flooding in, remember I’m writing this as a dues-paying activist Quaker myself.) We don’t need to agree with him to engage with him and learn from him. But we do need to be honest about what he believed and open to admitting when we disagree. We shouldn’t use him simply as a stooge for our own agenda.

I like Woolman but I have my disagreements. His scrupulousness was over the top. My own personality tends toward a certain purity, exemplified by fifteen years of veganism, my plain dress, my being car-less into my late thirties. I’ve learned that I need to moderate this tendency. My purity can sometimes be a sign of an elitism that wants to separate myself from the world (I’ve learned to laugh at myself more). Asceticism can be a powerful spiritual lens but it can also burn a self- and world-hatred into us. I’ve had friends on the brink of suicide (literally) over this kind of scrupulousness. I worry when a new Friend finds my plain pages and is in broadfalls and bonnets a few weeks later, knowing from my own experience that the speed of their gusto sometimes rushes a discernment practice that needs to rest and settle before it is fully owned (the most personally challenging of the traditional tests of Quaker discernment is “patience”).

John Woolman presents an awfully high bar for future generations. He reports refusing medicine when illness brought him to the brink of death, preferring to see fevers as signs of God’s will. While that might have been the smarter course in an pre-hygienic era when doctors often did more harm than good, this Christian Scientist-like attitude is not one I can endorse. He sailed to England deep in the hold along with the cattle because he thought the woodwork unnecessarily pretty in the passenger cabins. While his famous wearing of un-dyed garments was rooted partly in the outrages of the manufacturing process, he talked much more eloquently about the inherent evil of wearing clothes that might hide stains, arguing that anyone who would try to hide stains on their clothes would be that much more likely to hide their internal spiritual stains (all I could think about when reading this was that he must have left child-rearing duties to the well-inclined Sarah).

Woolman proudly relates (in his famously humble style) how he once tried to shut down a traveling magic act that was scheduled to play at the local inn. I suspect that if any of us somehow found ourselves on his clearness committee we might find a way to tell him to… well, lighten up. I sympathize with his concerns against mindless entertainment but telling the good people of Mount Holly that they can’t see a disappearing rabbit act because of his religious sensibilities is more Taliban than most of us would feel comfortable with.

He was a man of his times and that’s okay. We can take him for what he is. We shouldn’t dismiss any of his opinions too lightly for he really was a great religious and ethical figure. But we might think twice before enlisting the party pooper of Mount Holly for our cause.

Packing our own bags at the checkout line

May 30, 2006

05/30/200610/14/2010 · Martin Kelley

Over on Beppeblog, “Liberal Quakerism is no longer Quakerism”, the first of a multi-post series. In part one, Beppe looks at our difficulty articulating a collective voice that might proclaim “Truth.” Individualism has really taken a hit on Quakers, that’s for sure. In this day and age, how can a group set itself apart as a “religious society” – a coherent community of believers? I don’t find fulfillment in my own self and I’m an awfully slow learner when I try to figure out things myself. I need other’s wisdom but books and blogs only take me so far.

As Dave Carl reminds us in the comments, the inward Christ is available to all, everywhere. But just because you can have a visitation while standing in the supermarket checkout line doesn’t make the supermarket a religious society or the cashier a minister. Many of our meetings are good for the casual seeker who wants a stress-free meditation center. The RSOF seems to serve many seekers as an in-between point: a place of entry back into the Christian tradition (for those who have been alienated by false prophets) but not a final destination in itself. If you want to get serious you often have to leave. That’s a shame, not only for the lost seeker, but for our own religious society which sees a constant “brain drain” leaking-out of gifted ministers.

I turn on the TV and radio and hear all sorts of perversions of the gospel being spouted out (yesterday’s Memorial Day pap was particularly annoying – hasn’t any of these Christians read the Sermon on the Mount?!?). The world still needs the kind of radical, back-to-the-roots Christianity that Quakers have long held up as an alternative. But how can we unite to speak with that prophetic voice if we have no collective voice.

I’m not as pessimistic as all this sounds. I think most Friends want something more. We’re constantly lifing up the example of dead Friends with prophetic voices and there’s a strong pride in our history of social justice. Our modern culture of individuality blinds us to how these voices got nutured and how those old-timey Friends were able to come together to speak out these truths. But Friends have often been lured away from our calling and every age has had faithful Friends who have been willing to hit their heads against the brick walls of frustration time and time again in order to remind us of who we are. The back-and-forth of reaching out into the world and pulling back into our tradition is actually itself part of our tradition and Quaker bodies have often seen healthiest when we’ve been able to hold both together.

PS: Check here for Beppe’s second post, which argues that “Liberal Quakerism continues to be Quakerism.”

Love is unconditional and accepts us for who we are

March 15, 2006

03/15/200610/14/2010 · Martin Kelley

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 nontheistfriends.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

Testimonies for twentieth-first century: a Testimony Against “Community”

February 1, 2004

02/01/200411/03/2016 · Martin Kelley

I propose a little amendment to the modern Quaker testimonies. I think it’s time for a moratorium of the word “community” and the phrases “faith community” and “community of faith.” Through overuse, we Friends have stretched this phrase past its elasticity point and it’s snapped. It’s become a meaningless, abstract term used to disguise the fact that we’ve become afraid to articulate a shared faith. A recent yearly meeting newsletter used the word “community” 27 times but the word “God” only seven: what does it mean when a religious body stops talking about God?

The “testimony of community” recently celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. It was the centerpiece of the new-and-improved testimonies Howard Brinton unveiled back in the 1950s in his Friends for 300 Years (as far as I know no one elevated it to a testimony before him). Born into a well-known Quaker family, he married into an even more well-known family. From the cradle Howard and his wife Anna were Quaker aristocracy. As they traveled the geographic and theological spectrum of Friends, their pedigree earned them welcome and recognition everywhere they went. Perhaps not surprisingly, Howard grew up to think that the only important criteria for membership in a Quaker meeting is one’s comfort level with the other members. “The test of membership is not a particular kind of religious experience, nor acceptance of any particular religious, social or economic creed,” but instead one’s “compatibility with the meeting community.” ( Friends for 300 Years page 127).

So what is “compatibility”? It often boils down to being the right “kind” of Quaker, with the right sort of behavior and values. At most Quaker meetings, it means being exceedingly polite, white, upper-middle class, politically liberal, well-educated, quiet in conversation, and devoid of strong opinions about anything involving the meeting. Quakers are a homogenous bunch and it’s not coincidence: for many of us, it’s become a place to find people who think like us.

But the desire to fit in creates its own insecurity issues. I was in a small “breakout” group at a meeting retreat a few years ago where six of us shared our feelings about the meeting. Most of these Friends had been members for years, yet every single one of them confided that they didn’t think they really belonged. They were too loud, too colorful, too ethnic, maybe simply too too for Friends. They all judged themselves against some image of the ideal Quaker – perhaps the ghost of Howard Brinton. We rein ourselves in, stop ourselves from saying too much.

This phenomenon has almost completely ended the sort of prophetic ministry once common to Friends, whereby a minister would challenge Friends to renew their faith and clean up their act. Today, as one person recently wrote, modern Quakers often act as if avoidance of controversy is at the center of our religion. That makes sense if “compatibility” is our test for membership and “community” our only stated goal. While Friends love to claim the great eighteenth century minister John Woolman, he would most likely get a cold shoulder in most Quaker meetinghouses today. His religious motivation and language, coupled with his sometimes eccentric public witness and his overt call to religious reform would make him very incompatible indeed. Sometimes we need to name the ways we aren’t following the Light: for Friends, Christ is not just comforter, but judger and condemner as well. Heavy stuff, perhaps, but necessary. And near-impossible when a comfy and non-challenging community is our primary mission.

Don’t get me wrong. I like community. I like much of the non-religious culture of Friends: the potlucks, the do-it-yourself approach to music and learning, our curiousity about other religious traditions. And I like the openness and tolerance that is the hallmark of modern liberalism in general and liberal Quakerism in particular. I’m glad we’re Queer friendly and glad we don’t get off on tangents like who marries who (the far bigger issue is the sorry state of our meetings’ oversight of marriages, but that’s for another time). And for all my ribbing of Howard Brinton, I agree with him that we should be careful of theological litmus tests for membership. I understand where he was coming from. All that said, community for its own sake can’t be the glue that holds a religious body together.

So my Testimony Against “Community” is not a rejection of the idea of community, but rather a call to put it into context. “Community” is not the goal of the Religious Society of Friends. Obedience to God is. We build our institutions to help us gather as a great people who together can discern the will of God and follow it through whatever hardships the world throws our way.

Plenty of people know this. Last week I asked the author of one of the articles in the yearly meeting newsletter why he had used “community” twice but “God” not at all. He said he personally substitutes “body of Christ” everytime he writes or reads “community.” That’s fine, but how are we going to pass on Quaker faith if we’re always using lowest-common-denominator language?

We’re such a literate people but we go surprisingly mute when we’re asked to share our religious understandings. We need to stop being afraid to talk with one another, honestly and with the language we use. I’ve seen Friends go out of their way to use language from other traditions, especially Catholic or Buddhist, to state a basic Quaker value. I fear that we’ve dumbed down our own tradition so much that we’ve forgotten that it has the robustness to speak to our twenty-first century conditions.

Related Essays

I talk about what a bold Quaker community of faith might look like and why we need one in my essay on the “Emergent Church Movement” I talk about our fear of meeting unity in “We’re all Ranters Now.”

Jesus goes Lo-Fi

October 13, 2003

10/13/200310/14/2010 · Martin Kelley

Last night my wife Julie and I (and baby Theo) went to a service at Circle of Hope church at 10th and Locust. Very Gen‑X oriented, it goes to some trouble to not look or feel too churchy. It meets on Sunday night on folding chairs in a spartan room above a convenience store. The minister gave a low-key non-sermon, played a clip from a pop movie, gave out index cards with scripture verses for people to read aloud while music played. There are guitars and tamborines but it’s more lo-fi/punk than folksy twelve-string. The language is Christian but not churchy. It’s big into house-church “cells” as the small-scale community building block. Theology seemed secondary to community, which could also be described as the practice of living a Christian life.

The elements I found interesting were the same ones I would find worrisome were I to stay. Almost everyone was a twenty- and thirty-somethings and it had the feel of a “scene,” in that there was a dominant style and demographic to the participants. While I suspect there’s a little too much of a social component to the community, I have to admit to a certain intoxication to being in the midst of so many age peers. There was a definite sense that I could belong there and that my participation would be welcomed and encouraged. It was quite a change from the invisibility I often feel among Friends as a convinced thirty-something with a concern for traditional Quakerism.

While I have been in large gatherings of “young adult” Friends, they’ve tended to be dominated by non-practicing kids of Quakers who are there primarily to see their high-school-era friends. The group at Circle of Hope chose to be there and their primary identification with one another is through this worship group, which allows for deeper (and bolder) fellowship than the young adult Friends gatherings I’ve been to.
But could I belong at a place like Circle of Hope? Probably not. I’m too Quaker, crazy enough. I didn’t join in their communion since I don’t believe in outward sacraments. I wouldn’t like the idea of a prepared ministry, and the entertainment of showing video clips and playing music would grate on my beliefs. While I know there are many paths to the divine, I agree with Friends’ experience that the path least likely to become encumbered with false idols and barriers is the one that is most stripped of artifice and programming, the one that allows an unmediated direct experience and obeyance of Christ as manifested in the moment.

But am I too hung up on Quaker practice? Many local Friends meetings could be more accurately described as meditation groups, there being little common faith and many members who don’t believe in the possibility of the divine presence during worship. With Circle, I’m confronted with the one of the central dilemmas behind the last 150 years of Quakerism, namely: is it better to participate with:

the programmed (often younger) people boldly espousing faith who might be too socially oriented and flighty; or
the silent worshippers who threaten to replace faith with process , are tone-deaf to generational change and have trouble transmitting faith to their children or responsibility to their sucessors.

You can’t quite reduce all the splits between Hicksites, Gurneyites, Beanites, etc. to this dichotomy but it is a factor in most of the schisms. I suspect I would eventually be as frustrated by Circle as I currently am with cultural Quakerism but for entirely different reasons. Perhaps I should follow the advice of a current article in theooze and official take some time to “detox from the church.”

Quaker Ranter

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