From the BBC of all places:
While known as a traditionally quiet community within Christianity, in Kenya their gatherings are loud and proud. For some, being ‘noisy’ is the reason young people are still being attracted to the Church.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p072kcm0
I like this interview on the Italian mafia by Isaac Chotiner in Slate, “The Mafia Is More Powerful Than It’s Ever Been.”
It seems that this perpetual cynicism may be the greatest threat of our era. Is the child of irony? The grandchild of government conspiracy theories? Maybe the cause doesn’t matter as much as the effect.
The mob thrives on chaos. It likes chaos. It likes to be the alternative authority that you go to because you can’t get anything done through the legitimate state. For that very reason, I think there’s no doubt that it promotes that chaos. It likes civic distrust. It likes cynicism. It can profit from that. I think the great tragedy of Italy is that, to a large extent, it’s kind of succeeded.
I think that if we wanted to construct a Quaker critique of the current American government – and the type of corporatized corruption we see in Russia and the petrostates, it would best start with the political culture that deny basic facts, gaslight citizens with ever-changing rationales, and creating chaos that can let financial hucksters reap billions. These are not governments based on integrity and fair playing fields.
Love is the hardest lesson in Christianity; but, for that reason, it should be most our care to learn it.
I haven’t posted anything on the horrific mass shooting because like most of you, I’ve been in shock, trying to learn and trying to make sense of something that will never make any sense. I don’t have any profound insights on the shooting. I don’t want to claim I know the real reason this happened and I don’t want to mansplain a list of fixes that will keep it from ever happening again. I’m grieving for the victims and their families.
I ache for my LGBTQI family who are too used to random violence, both mass and personal. I worry for the way the shooter’s ethnicity and allegiance will only be used to justify more bigotry and violence. I’m sick of living in a world where ISIL thinks mass shootings are a justifiable political statement and I’m sick of living in a country where the NRA and its politicians think it’s okay to sell military-grade assault weapons. I pray for simple things: love, healing, consolation. And I cry inside and out. Life and love will win out.
And, from Friends Journal:
One of the coolest activists of her (or any) generation is gone. Juanita Nelson’s obituary is up on the national war tax coalition’s site. My favorite Juanita story was when some agents came to arrest her at home and found her dressed only in a bathrobe. They told her it was okay to go into her bedroom to change but she refused. She told them that any shame was theirs. She forced them to carry her out as her clothes fell off. Talk about radical non-cooperation!
Pam McAllister pointed out on her Global Nonviolence: Stories of Creative Action Facebook page that this story is online. Here’s a bit more of Juanita herself telling that bit:
Seven law enforcement officers had stalked in. I sat on the stool beneath the telephone, my back literally to the wall, the seven hemming me about in a semicircle. All of them appeared over six feet tall, and all of them were annoyed.
“Look,” said one, “you’re gonna go anyway. You might as well come peaceful.”
There they stood, ready and able to take me at any moment. But no move was made. The reason was obvious.
“Why don’t you put your clothes on, Mrs. Nelson?” This was a soft spoken plea from the more benign deputy. “You’re not hurting anybody but yourself.” His pained expression belied the assertion.
The essay where that came from is much longer and well worth reading.
Hold onto your broadbrim hat! After 58 years of black and white, COLOR is on the way to Friends Journal starting in AUGUST 2013. To announce it, FJ’s first Vine video:
This was what we were working on last week, when I tweeted out asking how many Quakers does it take to shoot a seven-second video!
As you might all expect, I’m really happy with the move. Color won’t add very much to the overall budget just 1.5 percent!) but it should help us reach new readers. I’m also hoping it will give lapsed readers a reason to open the magazine again and see what we’ve been doing the last few years. Subscriptions start at a very reasonable $25. If you sign up before July 8, you’ll get August’s very first color issue!
Over in the NYTimes columnist David Brooks talks about Two Theories of Change. He’s talking about modern American politics but it seems relevant to Friends. Here’s his summary of a new paper by Yuval Levin of the University of Chicago:
[Thomas] Paine believed that societies exist in an “eternal now.” That something has existed for ages tells us nothing about its value. The past is dead and the living should use their powers of analysis to sweep away existing arrangements when necessary, and begin the world anew. He even suggested that laws should expire after 30 years so each new generation could begin again
[Edmund] Burke, a participant in the British Enlightenment, had a different vision of change. He believed that each generation is a small part of a long chain of history. We serve as trustees for the wisdom of the ages and are obliged to pass it down, a little improved, to our descendents. That wisdom fills the gaps in our own reason, as age-old institutions implicitly contain more wisdom than any individual could have.
For Brooks, the Paine folllowers are Tea Party activists who think it’s fine to “sweep away 100 years of history and return government to its preindustrial role.”
Visting 1806’s “A portraiture of Quakerism: Taken from a view of the education and discipline, social manners, civil and political economy, religious principles and character, of the Society of Friends”
Thomas Clarkson wasn’t a Friend. He didn’t write for a Quaker audience. He had no direct experience of (and little apparent interest in) any period that we’ve retroactively claimed as a “golden age of Quakerism.” Yet all this is why he’s so interesting.
The basic facts of his life are summed up in his Wikipedia entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Clarkson), which begins: “Thomas Clarkson (28 March 1760 – 26 September 1846), abolitionist, was born at Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, England, and became a leading campaigner against the slave trade in the British Empire.” The only other necessary piece of information to our story is that he was a Anglican.
British Friends at the end of of the Eighteenth Century were still somewhat aloof, mysterious and considered odd by their fellow countrymen and women. Clarkson admits that one reason for his writing “A Portraiture of Quakerism” was the entertainment value it would provide his fellow Anglicans. Friends were starting to work with non-Quakers like Clarkson on issues of conscience and while this ecumenical activism was his entre – “I came to a knowledge of their living manners, which no other person, who was not a Quaker, could have easily obtained” (Vol 1, p. i)– it was also a symptom of a great sea change about to hit Friends. The Nineteenth Century ushered in a new type of Quaker, or more precisely whole new types of Quakers. By the time Clarkson died American Friends were going through their second round of schism and Joseph John Gurney was arguably the best-known Quaker across two continents: Oxford educated, at ease in genteel English society, active in cross-denominational work, and fluent and well studied in Biblical studies. Clarkson wrote about a Society of Friends that was disappearing even as the ink was drying at the printers.
Most of the old accounts of Friends we still read were written by Friends themselves. I like old Quaker journals as much as the next geek, but it’s always useful to get an outsider’s perspective (here’s a more modern-day example). Also: I don’t think Clarkson was really just writing an account simply for entertainment’s sake. I think he saw in Friends a model of christian behavior that he thought his fellow Anglicans would be well advised to study.
His account is refreshingly free of what we might call Quaker baggage. He doesn’t use Fox or Barclay quotes as a bludgeon against disagreement and he doesn’t drone on about history and personalities and schisms. Reading between the lines I think he recognizes the growing rifts among Friends but glosses over them (fair enough: these are not his battles). Refreshingly, he doesn’t hold up Quaker language as some sort of quaint and untranslatable tongue, and when he describes our processes he often uses very surprising words that point to some fundamental differences between Quaker practice then and now that are obscured by common words.
Thomas Clarkson is interested in what it’s like to be a good christian. In the book it’s typeset with lowercase “c” and while I don’t have any reason to think it’s intentional, I find that typesetting illuminating nonetheless. This meaning of “christian” is not about subscribing to particular creeds and is not the same concept as uppercase‑C “Christian.” My Lutheran grandmother actually used to use the lowercase‑c meaning when she described some behavior as “not the christian way to act.” She used it to describe an ethical and moral standard. Friends share that understanding when we talk about Gospel Order: that there is a right way to live and act that we will find if we follow the Spirit’s lead. It may be a little quaint to use christian to describe this kind of generic goodness but I think it shifts some of the debates going on right now to think of it this way for awhile.
Clarkson’s “Portraiture” looks at peculiar Quaker practices and reverse-engineers them to show how they help Quaker stay in that christian zone. His book is most often referenced today because of its descriptions of Quaker plain dress but he’s less interested in the style than he is with the practice’s effect on the society of Friends. He gets positively sociological at times. And because he’s speaking about a denomination that’s 150 years old, he was able to describe how the testimonies had shifted over time to address changing worldly conditions.
And that’s the key. So many of us are trying to understand what it would be like to be “authentically” Quaker in a world that’s very different from the one the first band of Friends knew. In the comment to the last post, Alice M talked about recovered the Quaker charism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charism). I didn’t join Friends because of theology or history. I was a young peace activist who knew in my heart that there was something more motivating me than just the typical pacifist anti-war rhetoric. In Friends I saw a deeper understanding and a way of connecting that with a nascent spiritual awakening.
What does it mean to live a christian life (again, lowercase) in the 21st Century? What does it mean to live the Quaker charism in the modern world? How do we relate to other religious traditions both without and now within our religious society and what’s might our role be in the Emergent Church movement? I think Clarkson gives clues. And that’s what this series will talk about.
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