A recent article on the art and science of taste and smell in the New Yorker had a paragraph that stood out for me. The author John Lanchester had just shared a moment where he suddenly understood the meaning behind “grainy,” a term that had previously been an esoteric wine descriptor. He then writes:
The idea that your palate and your vocabulary expand simultaneously
might sound felicitous, but there is a catch. The words and the
references are really useful only to people who have had the same
experiences and use the same vocabulary: those references are to a
shared basis of sensory experience and a shared language. To people who
haven’t had those shared experiences, this way of talking can seem like
horse manure, and not in a good way.
How might this apply to Quakerism? A post-modernist philosopher might argue that our words are our experience and their argument would be even stronger for communal experiences. I once spent a long afternoon worrying whether the colors I saw were really the same colors others saw: what if what I interpreted as yellow was the color others saw as blue? After turning around the riddle I ended up realizing it didn’t matter as long as we all could point to the same color and give it the same name.
But what happens when we’re not just talking about yellow. Turning to the Crayola box, what if we’re trying to describe the yellowish colors apricot, dandelion, peach and the touch-feely 2008 “super happy”. Being a Crayola connoisseur requires an investment not only in a box of colored wax but also in time: the time needed to experience, understand and take ownership in the various colors.
Religion can be a like wine snobbery. If you take the time to read the old Quaker journals and reflect on your spiritual experiences you can start to understand what the language means. The terms stop being fussy and obscure, outdated and parochial. They become your own religious vocabulary. When I pick up an engaging nineteenth journal (not all are!) and read stories about the author’s spiritual up and downs and struggles with ego and community, I smile with shared recognition. When I read an engaging historian’s account of some long-forgotten debate I nod knowing that many of the same issues are at the root of some blogospheric bruhaha.
Of course I love outreach and want to share the Friends “sensory experience.” One way to do that is to strip the language and make it all generic. The danger of course is that we’re actually changing the religion when we’re change the language. It’s not the experience that makes us Friends – all people of all spiritual persuasions have access to legitimate religious experiences no matter how fleeting, misunderstood or mislabeled. We are unique in how we frame that experience, how we make sense of it and how we use the shared understanding to direct our lives.
We can go the other direction and stay as close to our traditional language as possible, demanding that anyone coming into our religious society’s influence take the time to understand us on our terms. That of course opens us to charges of spreading horse manure, in Lanchester’s words (which we do sometimes) and it also means we threaten to stay a small insider community. We also forget to speak “normal,” start thinking the language really is the experience and start caring more about showing off our vocabulary than about loving God or tending to our neighbors.
I don’t see any good way out of this conundrum, no easy advice to wrap a post up. A lot of Friends in my neck of the woods are doing what I’d call wink-wink nudge-nudge Quakerism, speaking differently in public than in private (see this post) but I worry this institutionalizes the snobbery and excuses the manure, and it sure doesn’t give me much hope. What if we saw our role as taste educators? For want of a better analogy I wonder if there might be a Quaker version of Starbucks (yes yes, Starbucks is Quaker, I’m talking coffee), a kind of movement that would educate seekers at the same time as it sold them the Quaker experience. Could we get people excited enough that they’d commit to the higher costs involved in understanding us?
Amen Martin! You ask, “Could we get people excited enough that they’d commit to the higher costs involved in understanding us?” So what is it going to take to make this happen. Or, is it already being birthed by God in the hearts of so many Friends who are returning to the Source of our faith?
I’ve always been frustrated by our Yearly Meeting. We have a wonderful Treasure in our corporate understanding of the faith as reflected in NCYM©‘s Faith and Practice. Yet, we seem slow to share our faith and spread the Good News. On the other hand, I’m not so sure what that “sharing” of our faith should look like.
It would be a shame to “market” Quakerism like many protestant groups. Ohio Yearly Meeting seems to be moving forward in a direction that pushes the limits of what has traditionally been considered “Conservative Quaker outreach”. They must be applauded for their effort…and it is paying off. Witness the number of new Meetings OYM is birthing.
Now if NCYM© could begin to do outreach…what would it look like? God knows and perhaps God is speaking to us even now as to the direction God wishes us to take. May we be faithful to listen to that Voice and to act upon what we hear.
Love and peace,
Craig
The “Three-Legged Stool” of scripture, reason,and tradition,
has been a way of describing the Episcopal Church
I am finding this image of a stool with three equal legs a very appealing picture as a Quaker.
What would a three ‑legged Quaker stool look like?
For me the first leg would be, experiential-the direct experience
with God,second leg contemplative-communal worship under
leadership Spirit of Christ,three leg activism — peace/justice-
doing the work of Christ in the World.
Three-legged stool will topple if any one overbalances the other.
What I find today among Quakers is how can we keep this balance?
Paul
@Craig: definitely the most glaring part of the Quaker message that Conservative Friends haven’t followed is the need to spread the Good News. Ohio’s experiments are certainly interesting, if sometimes ironic (in some ways they’re the most forward thinking and liberal yearly meetings in the world). I definitely hope they continue experimenting.
@Paul: I’m not a carpenter so I won’t try to figure out the perfect number of legs for a stool. But the piece that’s missing from your three legs is tradition. We don’t have to make all this up as we go along. Others have come before us and we are part of an old family. Quaker journals from generations past and the Bible are all important touchstones that gives us the language to understand and talk about the direct experience with one another.
Many Friends today misunderstand the Quaker understanding of continual revelation and think that whatever pop culture idea intrigues them can be rolled up into Quakerism as long as we tweak the names of a few terms. You get some Friends pulling in New Age ideas as others pull in Christian Evangelical ones, as others explore Buddhism and others go Presbyterian. You can name just about any American spiritual movement or sub-movements and find a Quaker advocating it as the next Quaker thing, blogging about it and getting all offended when other Friends don’t want to write it into Faith and Practice or don’t think it an appropriate workshop at a Quaker gathering.
It’s not easy to balance tradition with new experiences and revelation – just look at how many Friends have hurt each other and their neighbors around issues of slavery and same-sex acceptance. Trying new things can get us out of our rut and can help us understand ourselves in a fresh way. But our shared history and our hundreds (thousands) of years of prayer and discernment need to be one of the legs of any stool we build.
You are right,
We are not Quakers in isolation but are part of a
living faith that spans 2000 years.
First leg would be, experiential-the direct experience.
God speaks to us not only today but in the livesof our sisters and brothers who have went before us.
The three-legged stool for me is a metaphor to describe how we take into consideration Experiential, Contemplative, Activism, each one informing the other two, to discern truth.
The phrase “whatever pop culture idea intrigues them” jumps out at
me as not very respectful.
I’m intrigued by any number of popcultural/mainstream/philosophical
ideas because the “speak to my condition”.
I agree with you about the need to look deeper into our own tradition. Compare Catholicism though: that huge, huge denomination has/had Teilhard, Ricouer, liberation theology, Rosemary Ruether, Rene Girard (I think he’s Catholic), conservative and reactionary thinkers, the current Pope.
Quakers are just not that large a tradition. New ideas are just
in the nature of things, going to come from the outside.
@Rudy, well yes, I don’t have all that much respect for some of the silly ideas that people have tried to label Quaker. New ideas are fine but insisting that anything any Quaker believes is de facto Quaker means the term doesn’t mean anything. I find it very disrespectful and very distracting to those of us who are trying to understand what this tradition means.
Martin, I am not trying to convince you to respect the ideas; I have a lot of trouble with New Age stuff in particular. And I imagine that you *do* respect some of the ideas on your list. What I am having trouble with is just the “whatever pop idea intrigues them” expression, which sounds to me like you’re dissing the people who
hold the ideas.
I understand that you are trying to say that they shouldn’t say that
Buddhist/Evangelical/whatever ideas are ‑Quaker- ideas, and I can
see how irritating that could be, but why the snide dismissal as
“pop ideas” that simply “intrigue” them? As opposed to “deep ideas
that speak to their condition, but are simply not Quakerism?”
I often find Buddhist writings that speak to me, though I’m not
a Buddhist Quaker. The Epistle of James is often said to have a Buddhist tone; I recall reading that connection years before I became a Quaker, and learned that James was a favorite among Quakers. There has got to something deep going on there.
I may be overly sensitive about this; I recall being upset with a friend who dismissed ideas of mine he disagreed with as “fashionable”, as though I had just absorbed them from People
Magazine.
I am not sure what to say to the other part of your feelings, about the Everything Can Be Quakerism being disrespectful to the tradition, or to people trying to recover the tradition. I sort of sense what you mean, but I’m not sure what those people could do differently, especially since the Quaker tradition of the future might include the ideas of those people.
Oops, as soon as I left the keyboard I had a few additional thoughts…
The majority of Friends in the world are Evangelical, and those ideas came from “outside” in the 19th century. I’m not sure what
to make of this exactly in the context of your project, but I think
it means “Evangelical Christian” is very much part of the Quaker tradition now.
On the other hand, my wife is from upstate New York, the Burned Over District, and in local history there one runs into all varieties of religion, including Jemima Wilkinson, the Publick Universal Friend; she started out as a Quaker. I think Mother Ann Lee was a Quaker originally, or at least an attender 🙂 in the UK, before starting her movement and moving to the US.
They obviously had little influence on Quaker tradition (well, except “Simple Gifts”).
I’ve experienced a vivacious young chrisian outreach church(evangelical applies, but they, and I use that word with some caution), and any number of traditional & Newman house Cathlolic churches, a few unitarians, a joyful Baptist (probably southern), a frightening christian evangelical, and quite a few methodist churches. I’ve only had the chance to visit a meeting of friends once, when I was rather young. Looking for a faith that never quite fit isn’t an easy path, but is educational.
I’ve noticed that you’re right about using language to have something to offer. Most churches that are obviously learning together, where the speaker is sharing an idea that they’re learning about, have been effective at offering something for both the new and their experienced members. Churches blessed with a good speaker, who is exploring areas of faith that the congregation really needs help understanding, create an incredibly appealing environment of learning, trust and shared seeking.
Once you experience that shared learning, a moment of a preacher trying to grasp a concept, trying to put words towards it, there’s an incredible craving to talk about it, to find helpful material on it, whether it’s a relevant quote from a bible, another religious writer, or your own experience. Having actual journals to turn to must be amazing. Of course, other people have had to struggle with the same issues of faith… being able to go to an old journal entry of someone from the same faith thinking their way through the problem must be astounding. If we think this century is a hard place for spiritual people to live, what about the last? America was growing, people moving away to seek opportunities, the economy heating up and collapsing in on itself like a bonfire every few decades.. popular clothing becoming less modest, immigrants coming into a society that’s not sure how to integrate them, or whether there are jobs to spare.. sound familiar? Most faiths I’ve been involved with don’t provide much information on how these challenges were handled a century ago.
Honestly, from what I’ve seen, faith communities that talk about challenges often form a vocabulary around them. The process of discussing it helps everyone build common meaning for the words, and a common understanding of the challenges, and as that happens, they generally start handling the challenges far more effectively. A community can be strengthened. Most religious communities that are struggling have some area where their member’s needs aren’t getting met, and they’re afraid to talk about it. I think we need words we can all understand together.
So, we start with the generic. As I’m not very familiar with your community, I’ve been trying to stick to dictionary words that aren’t too heavily laden with implications. Lay minister is a useful term sometimes, but speaker is generally just as good. I’ve also learned not to use hot words when it’s not necessary, as I often find I get burned. Evangelist is a useful word.. but it’s unfairly weighed down with some less pleasant connotations.
Generally, I find churches that talk about this type of personal experience the most helpful, and enlightening. They’ll build on terms like faith journey, which means an ongoing journey of seeking to get closer to god, or seeking.. till fairly simple, understandable terms start to carry a little more meaning
Dear Friends, I traced my family tree to the1700’s & on my fathers side. I found that they were all quakers.Many of these people were teachers, Justice of the Peace, & preachers. They believed in hard work,& strong family values.
One of the quotes„„Misconception started from an error,However an error no matter how many times repeated & no matter how honestly beleived. Still remains an error. Our words are are own experience.…Dawn