Lazy guy I am, I’m going to cut-and-paste a com­ment I left over at Rich the Brook­lyn Quak­er’s blog in response to his post “What This Chris­t­ian Is Look­ing For In Quakerism”:http://brooklynquaker.blogspot.com/2006/04/what-this-christian-is-looking-for-in.html. There’s been quite a good dis­cus­sion in the com­ments. In them Rich pos­es this analogy:
bq. Dur­ing the Great Depres­sion and World War II, I have been told that Franklin Roo­sevelt ral­lied the spir­its of the Amer­i­can peo­ple with his “fire­side chats”. These radio broad­casts com­mu­ni­cat­ed infor­ma­tion, pro­ject­ed hope, and called for spe­cif­ic respons­es from his lis­ten­ers; includ­ing some acts of self-sacrifice and unselfish­ness… Often peo­ple would gath­er in small groups around their radios to hear these broad­casts, they would talk about what Roo­sevelt had said, and to some extent they were guid­ed in their dai­ly lives by some of what they had heard.

Rich then sup­pos­es what a lis­ten­er sit­ting in front of the radio might by think­ing. I thought it was an inter­est­ing anal­o­gy and thought it pro­vid­ed anoth­er way of think­ing about the rela­tion­ship of Quak­erism and Chris­tian­i­ty and espe­cial­ly of a Quaker-styled Chris­tian­i­ty. Let’s start with a lis­ten­er who’s fig­ured out that the speak­er’s a real per­son and not just elec­tron­ic fuzz

The year is 1933.
Twelfth day Third Month.
“Cue Franklin Delano Roo­sevelt’s first fire­side chat”:ftp://webstorage2.mcpa.virginia.edu/library/nara/fdr/audiovisual/speeches/firesidechat_01.mp3
Our lis­ten­er sit­ting in front of the radio would hear FDR’s voice with­out know­ing who he is. The infor­ma­tion would be there but there would be no par­tic­u­lar weight attached to it. They might lis­ten to it but they’d be just as like­ly to turn the knob and catch the much more enter­tain­ing Bob Hope special.
A bul­ly sit­ting near­by in the room might rebuke the lis­ten­er: “Don’t touch that dial! Lis­ten to what he’s say­ing! That’s the PRESIDENT!” The lis­ten­er, know­ing noth­ing about our polit­i­cal sys­tem, would just hear a call to unearned author­i­ty. The bul­ly’s rebuke would have the weight of fear – what might the bul­ly do if I don’t lis­ten?!? – but it will have tak­en the lis­ten­er’s atten­tion off of FDR and onto the bully.
Let’s say that instead there’s a gen­tle soul in the room who gives tes­ti­mo­ny. They share with our lis­ten­er how valu­able they’ve found FDR’s advice to be in the past. They’re sim­ply say­ing, “it’s worth lis­ten­ing to this guy, he says some good stuff.”
As the lis­ten­er starts appre­ci­at­ing FDR’s coun­sel, our near­by friend might start teach­ing about the role of the Pres­i­den­cy in Amer­i­can his­to­ry. They could intro­duce con­cepts like checks-and-balances, they could tell sto­ries of past Con­sti­tu­tion­al crises, they would talk about oth­er types of polit­i­cal sys­tems. Our lis­ten­er would slow­ly gain a vocab­u­lar­ly that would­n’t change the mes­sage but which would pro­vide a way of talk­ing about it. The friend would be tap­ping on the social his­to­ry of gen­er­a­tions of Amer­i­cans who had strug­gled to under­stand how to orga­nize them­selves: the friend would be teach­ing our col­lec­tive wis­dom. By under­stand­ing it our lis­ten­er would be in a bet­ter posi­tion to effec­tive­ly act on FDR’s advice (per­haps they’d real­ize they need to lob­by their sen­a­tors to get FDR’s next bud­get passed).
A decon­struc­tion­ist might argue that “The Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca” is a social con­struct, but that does­n’t mean the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence isn’t an amaz­ing, inspir­ing doc­u­ment that says some­thing pro­found­ly truth­ful about human existance.
Tak­ing the anal­o­gy full cir­cle, it’s almost as if lib­er­al Friends today are afraid of teach­ing the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence because it might offend the Russ­ian, Ital­ian and Kore­an immi­grants. We still believe in it and most of the immi­grants are fig­ur­ing out pieces of it hit-and-miss, but we’re just incred­i­bly awk­ward talk­ing about it since we’ve lost our lan­guage. If we just start­ed speak­ing plain­ly again, that would give the immi­grants a chance to say “hey that’s inter­est­ing but you know we did it this way back in the old coun­try.” I won­der if we’d open up the con­ver­sa­tion to a rich­er lev­el of sharing?
The beau­ty of Quak­erism is that we know that the qui­et tes­ti­mo­ny and hum­ble invi­ta­tion are gifts we can share with one anoth­er and with all we meet. I’m think­ing again of the Bri­an Dray­ton’s formulation:
bq. We are also called, I feel to invite oth­ers to share Christ direct­ly, not pri­mar­i­ly in order to intro­duce them to Quak­erism and bring them into our meet­ings, but to encour­age them to turn to the light and fol­low it.
The mes­sage we share mat­ters not sim­ply because it’s Christ’s but because it’s wise. We have much to share.
*Nam­ing the Church*
The meet­ing I attend, “Middletown”:http://www.pym.org/pym_mms/middletownpa_cdq.php, is going through Acts in Bible Study and today the clerk for­ward­ed some fas­ci­nat­ing com­men­tary from “1863 by a fel­low named J. W. McGarvey”:http://www.ccel.org/m/mcgarvey/oca/OCA11.HTM. He talks about the names we give one anoth­er and the Source and it reminds me of the dis­cus­sion over on Rich’s blog. Here’s a sample:
bq. The New Tes­ta­ment usage in ref­er­ence to names is this: When the fol­low­ers of Jesus were con­tem­plat­ed with ref­er­ence to their rela­tion to him as their great teacher, they were called dis­ci­ples. When the mind of the speak­er was fixed more par­tic­u­lar­ly on their rela­tion to one anoth­er, they were styled brethren. When their rela­tion to God was in the fore­ground, they were called chil­dren of God. When they were des­ig­nat­ed with spe­cial ref­er­ence to char­ac­ter, they were called saints. But when they were spo­ken of with the most gen­er­al ref­er­ence to their great leader, they were called Chris­tians. A prac­ti­cal obser­vance of the exact force of each of these names would soon con­form our speech to the prim­i­tive mod­el, and would check a ten­den­cy to exalt any one name above anoth­er, by giv­ing to each its prop­er place.
The rest of the arti­cle is worth a read, though I can’t whole-heartedly endorse it. It ends up argu­ing for the kind of non-denominational Chris­tian­i­ty that I find kind of shal­low (maybe I just watch too much of “Mar­cus Grodi”:http://www.chnetwork.org/ewtn.htm Catholic con­ver­sion shows to buy into this sim­plicis­tic Protes­tanism, though I sus­pect Fox would have been more sym­pa­thet­ic to McGar­vey than to Grodi).
*Com­ing togeth­er as church*
I’d like to give a shout-out to the Ohio Year­ly Meet­ing (Con­ser­v­a­tive) min­is­ters who came togeth­er a “wor­ship oppor­tu­ni­ty last Sixth Night”:http://www.localquakers.org/Ministers.htm (Sat­ur­day to you world­ly folks) at “Marl­bor­ough Meeting”:http://www.localquakers.org/Marlborough.html. The email invi­ta­tion from Chip Thomas got wide enough cir­cu­la­tion among Philadel­phia Friends that I saw it three times. The min­istry was ten­der and the fel­low­ship after­wards very wel­com­ing. It was nice to see this form of out­reach from Ohio, I’d love to see more. Friends in the Philadel­phia area will get anoth­er chance when Marl­bor­ough hosts anoth­er gath­er­ing of min­is­ters on Sixth Month 24.