I just finishing writing about how the Quaker issues I was dealing with here have resolved themselves, in my letter of transfer from North Shore Friends Meeting to Friends Meeting at Cambridge (Mass.), and you should read that as the conclusion to this blog. In short, I’ve recommitted myself to the Quaker project after a long period of ambivalence.

You might wonder, why not revive this site then, instead of shutting it down? Partly I find it confining to have a thematic title like “The Seed Lifting Up.” Partly I want to segregate my Quaker-related writing from everything else as little as possible. (Same goes for Q and non-Q readership.) And I want to reduce the number of websites I run.

I’m not sure how long I’ll leave this up — perhaps indefinitely, though if so I’ll probably scrub it a bit, of the posts and comments I feel are not of great permanent value. On a live blog I like to avoid that, but now that it’s closed it feels different, like a manuscript that might be improved by editing.

I’d like to thank all the old school (and new school) Quaker bloggers who commented and/or inspired me to blog — Pam, Martin, Cat, Marshall, Simon, Richard, Wess, Forrest, Matt, Robin, Liz, Nancy, James, and others.

I expect to get somewhat active in the Quaker blogosphere again in the coming months. My new all-purpose blog is at www.zachalexander.com, and if you just want to keep up with Quaker posts there, you might bookmark this Google blogsearch page (feed). I’ll post a better link here when I reorganize my categories and tags.

If you want to catch up on what I’ve been up to in the last nine months, it’s included a research paper on the humanistic psychology movement, a Quaker workshop at a young adult UU conference, enjoying clothes, writing guests posts at John Remy’s site Mind on Fire, thinking about the presidential race, going to the recent YAF conference at Earlham, and taking trips to Montreal. Next week I am going to FGC for a few days — perhaps I’ll meet some virtual Quakers there?

I was scheduled to have a blog post go up on the QuakerYouth blog last week, and since it happened to be the start of National Quaker Week in the UK (and apparently Australia too), I decided to write about British Friends. Emily was on vacation in NC though and didn’t post it in time, but if you can turn you mental clock back a week or two, here’s the link to Lessons on outreach from British Friends.

It’s certainly true that early Friends were Christian – very much so. There’s plenty evidence of that.

But it’s a profound mistake to see these outward beliefs – and if you’ve read much of early Friends, you know the disdain they attached to that word “outward” – as what is essential to Quakerism.

What is essential to Quakerism is best summed up in the opening sentence of Britain Yearly Meeting’s Advices and Queries – Take heed, dear Friends, to the promptings of love and truth in your hearts.

This is the essential core of Quakerism for two reasons. Normatively speaking, it’s the most valuable pearl of wisdom they have to offer the world. And descriptively speaking, it’s arguably where the characteristic Quaker experience starts. Everything else is just interpretation of that experience (theology) or elaboration of its effects (the testimonies).

And everything else comes second. There’s no reason to assume their interpretations of their experience are the best ones, or that their discernment of those inward leadings is inerrantly true for all people at all times. Everything is open to revision based on these promptings, for us, today.

The promptings of love once moved us to repent of our involvement in the slave trade, and today are moving us to take greater care of the earth.

The promptings of truth once moved us to refuse to swear in court, and to be honest in business.

We were once moved to oppose dancing and music, but in the centuries since have felt moved to embrace them.

And I believe that today, the promptings of truth would lead us to see that all religions are basically false – outmoded belief systems from the childhood of our species, invented before we learned the intellectual humility not to claim we know things that we actually don’t. There’s much we can learn about the human condition by studying them, and we can be forgiven if the language still resonates with many us. But continuing to live in them is foolish, as foolish as living on top of an archaeological dig.

And when we realize that Christianity, like all religions, is basically false – Jesus, if he existed, was simply an extraordinary human – our relationship with Quakerism reaches a crossroads.

We can see early Friends (and Christians) as simply deluded, and let them fall into the dustbin of history. I don’t think we should do that. More charitably, we can instead see them as humans who had extraordinary experiences that are valuable for us today, worthy of study and sometimes even emulation, but couched in unacceptably superstitious terms and concepts – the only ones available in their pre-modern society. (A naturalistic/nontheistic view of the world was barely conceivable back then, and the few pioneers in that department often did not lead very moral lives, and were therefore not at all attractive to Friends.)

For many, such a re-interpretation seems so drastic that you can’t call this post-religious Quakerism “Quakerism” anymore. So be it. If “Quaker-inspired” beliefs are more truthful than “Quaker” ones, so much the worse for Quakerism – focusing on what is most “Quaker” then becomes a form of idolatry. We should always (as was suggested at the “Food for Fire” workshop last year) be willing to give up the form we call “Quakerism” if it conflicts with how we are led.

But for however much or little it’s worth, in so doing we will have carried forward the spirit of Quakerism, better than that oxymoron “traditional Quakerism” ever could.

In the words of a letter “From Friends met together at Durham” from 1659:

–let us all, in the simplicity of Truth, (which at the first was made manifest to us,) abide and dwell, and in the liberty Christ Jesus hath made us free, stand fast; that we be not again led back into the errors of those that went before us, who left the power, and got into the form, who brought in that darkness which hath so long covered the face of the earth, that no footsteps may be left for those that shall come after, or to walk by example, but that all may be directed and left to the Truth, in it to live and walk and by it to be guided, that none may look back at us, nor have an eye behind them, but that all may look forward waiting in the Spirit for the revelation of those glorious things which are to be made manifest to them.*

Glorious thing are ahead, friends, but we must look ahead to see them.

—
* Quoted in Letters, &c., of early Friends ed. A.R. Barclay, 1841, pp. 288-92. This passage is best known for being quoted in chapter 6 of Friends for 300 years, where Brinton appears to have mistaken the recipient (Friends at Skipton) for the sender.

Taking a page from the British, who had pioneered many ingenious methods of adulteration a generation or two earlier, American manufacturers, distributors, and vendors of food began tampering with their products en masse — bulking out supplies with cheap filler, using dangerous additives to mask spoilage or to give foodstuffs a more appealing color.

A committee of would-be reformers who met in Boston in 1859 launched one of the first studies of American food purity, and their findings make for less-than-appetizing reading: candy was found to contain arsenic and dyed with copper chloride; conniving brewers mixed extracts of “nux vomica,” a tree that yields strychnine, to simulate the bitter taste of hops. … Sugar was blended with plaster of Paris, as was flour. Milk had been watered down, then bulked up with chalk and sheep’s brains. Hundred-pound bags of coffee labeled “Fine Old Java” turned out to consist of three-fifths dried peas, one-fifth chicory, and only one-fifth coffee.

I didn’t know it was that bad. When I was in England I heard that one of the ways Quaker businesses distinguished themselves was that people trusted they wouldn’t pull these kinds of dirty tricks. For example, the person told me, people trusted Cadbury’s to not put sawdust in the chocolate. I was surprised that people would’ve been all that worried about that back then, but now it makes sense.

How things have changed — the current (non-Quaker, tsk tsk) management of Cadbury’s recently decided not to alert the public of a salmonella contamination in their chocolate. The article quotes a business school professor as saying the company’s Quaker founders would have been appalled.

All of which brings us to the question, why are there so few Friends today in the business world? There are certainly some, but it seems to be an occupation that in some quarter is not always looked well upon, despite the fact that everyone at meeting depends on businesspeople for the wheels they got to meeting on. It’s seems related, though I’m not sure exactly how, to issues of social class among modern (liberal?) Quakers that have been talked about recently…

If you’ve been following this blog for the past few months, you probably recall the entry “A post-Quaker vision of the Society of Friends”. When I wrote that, I was in the opening throes of a period of intellectual reorganization, which I think is mostly done now, at least for the time being.

So I’d like to share the perspective on Quakerism I’ve been coming to, including some reflections on the recent New England Yearly Meeting sessions. (It’s a little long…)

It was about a year ago that I admitted to myself that I didn’t believe in God anymore, and started associating with the nontheist Friends community. But don’t think I’ve been quite in the mainstream of that group, in the following way.

It seems most of them are basically happy with Quakerism as it is, and simply are asking for greater tolerance. I think that description fits many other marginal Quaker subcultures too, like Pagan and polyamorous Friends. At New England YM earlier this month, for example, apparently one of the “Bible half-hours” included a call by the speaker for radical inclusivity, for admitting as Friends anyone who experiences “Spirit,” even Pagans and nontheists. I heard this from Cat Chapin-Bishop (who I was incidentally very happy to finally meet :), who was visibly excited by this news.

I was glad to hear that, but not as much as Cat was. She could tell.

Part of the reason was that, as long as I’m being true to my conscience, I just don’t care that much about whether I’m accepted by any particular organization or not. Being the son of a man who got bodily carried out of at least one church meeting for speaking his mind tends to have that effect, perhaps.

Instead, I’ve been asking myself the opposite question: whether I can accept Quakerism, perceived warts and all.

Quaker religion vs. Quaker wisdom

That’s what I’ve been wrestling with more and more this past year. An article in Shambhala Sun called “Killing the Buddha” pretty much sums up exactly how I feel, if you replace “Buddhist” with “Quaker” and make the tone a notch less militant. In short, the wisdom of Quakerism is trapped within the religion of Quakerism, and we would do well to deconstruct our parochial little society and instead aim to contribute to a less sectarian and more evidence-based spiritual community for the 21st century. Sort of “Quaker Culture vs. Quaker Faith” (discussion) taken to a new level.

And if this is a “hard saying” to be dealing with on an intellectual level, it’s even harder when you add in the social. It’s been difficult to be around Quakers for the past six months, because I keep running into the same dilemma. On the one hand, when I hear someone talking about Christian doctrines, most of which I am convinced are untrue and in some cases immoral, or endorsing other kinds of superstition or dogmatism, I sometimes feel compelled to say something, to “elder” them. (If that sounds presumptuous, take it as a testament to how clear my convictions generally are on these things.) But on the other hand, I usually feel an equal-or-greater compulsion to bite my tongue, because I don’t want to be negative all the time, or “make the community revolve around me,” in the words of a Friend I met at NEYM. Also, I’m very much aware that the journey from faith to unbelief can be a long and painful one, and I’m reluctant to send anyone down that road, even though in my experience there’s light at the end.

Usually on balance, I keep quiet. (In person that is. On the blogosphere I’ve been somewhat less quiet, perhaps because the nonverbal level of communication is so absent. It feels very different to say something critical online than in person…)

But this creates a lot of internal tension, and twice now this has reached the point where I’ve felt I needed to head for the exits. [Edit: see this note below on these two anecdotes.] The first was in May when Cherice Bock gave a lecture at Beacon Hill Friends House, which hit a lot of wonderful notes about social witness and outreach, but also included a lot of good old fashioned christonormativity. I was surprised at how receptive and excited the ostensibly liberal Quaker audience was. The kicker was at the dinner afterwards, when people briefly discussed the resurrection of Jesus with no indications that anyone had a “stop in the mind” against this notion. That night I sent an email to to Boston YAF list saying I needed to suspend my Quaker activities indefinitely.

By summer I had cooled off, and decided to attend New England YM, which was the second “head for the exits” point.

It was wonderful to see people I know and meet new people (including Ethan Mitchell), and I appreciated a lot of the program, including Eden and James Grace’s workshop. But honestly, the level of dogmatic and superstitious thinking was almost intolerable. When one major speaker repeatedly used a Bronze Age metaphor of genital mutilation — “circumcising the foreskin of our hearts” — I cringed. When one committee clerk gave a ringing endorsement of the Richmond Declaration and everyone acted like that was normal, I was shocked. Essentially, this year I was finally disabused of the false impression I had gotten of NEYM when I first became a Quaker, namely, that it is a liberal yearly meeting. In reality, it is very much a half-Orthodox, half-liberal one, as the history would suggest. (And there was also a certain amount of liberal “woo woo” as well, e.g. suggestions that the spirits of our Quaker ancestors could “be here with us,” with no indication that this was meant metaphorically.)

Perhaps for that reason, it seemed right to me, as a participant in the business meeting, that NEYM remain in FUM. But it also felt wrong for me to remain within NEYM, a bit like how I wouldn’t dream of being a member of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Whither post-Quakerism?

Since then I’ve again cooled off a bit, and I’m not doing anything rash. The image that comes to me is the story of Fox telling Penn, “wear your sword as long as you can.”

That is, despite my concerns, a clean break would feel premature. I’ll probably lay down this blog soon, and possibly resign membership by the end of the year. But I’m probably going to keep attending some meetings, commenting on some blogs, writing Quakerpedia articles, and reading Letters, &c. of early Friends. I even have two possible major projects in mind for exploring these kinds of ideas, both of which which I think would be better vehicles than a personal blog: starting a forum-type website and writing a book.

But it’s hard to tell how long this kind of thing will feel like what I should be doing.

Ironically, many of the arguments for staying or leaving are the same as the ones used in the FUM controversy — to what extent must one agree with the groups one belongs to? When should one stay and work for change, and when leave? What about the more quiet or closeted dissidents who draw support from the more visible dissidents? And isn’t “division” something people of goodwill should always avoid?

While sitting there, I felt some impulsion to speak about the need, as people of integrity, to be wary of believing things that have little evidence supporting them. But this went away, in part because there was a group singing before meeting began, and the last song they sang had stuck in my head: “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen”, an old black spiritual. Eventually I stood and spoke about the need to show our love for each another by taking care of each other during hard times, even in material ways. I mentioned the traditional office of “overseers,” and how most liberal meetings laid them down in the 19th century (in part due to the influence of Progressive Friends, which I didn’t mention), and suggested we try to revive that function in some form, at least in those meetings that haven’t already. Other people spoke about their experiences needing or giving help; one spoke about how it’s difficult to know when you should help someone, and when you should just be with them.

After meeting, despite having so many people, we went around and gave our names and shared any thoughts we had that we didn’t want to share in meeting. I think this is wonderful, and I’m glad they do it. There seems to be a sentiment that it takes too much time unless you have a small group, but I think it’s worthwhile enough to do even if it takes half an hour.

During this time, someone confirmed that the meeting does in fact have an Oversight & Pastoral Care Committee, which got a good publicity boost I hope. My little sister (who wants to attend regularly now) sang a little song, which I’ve forgotten to ask her the name of.

After the close of meeting, one Friend from the Philadelphia area said her meeting there had a committee like this also. She also brought up the issue of “overseer” being an unpleasant name now due to its association with slavery. (This was also raised in the comments to Richard’s post linked to above.)

I’m not really sure what term I’d prefer. “Pastoral care” seems more clear, but it’s not ultimately a good metaphor for care of people I don’t think, being derived from “shepherd” (someone who watches sheep so they can be fleeced and eaten later). I like the term “mutual aid,” but it’s a bit moot since I’m not actively involved in one local meeting at the moment.

In the coffee hour, I met a girl applying to attend The Meeting School in New Hampshire, the uncle of a member of North Shore Friends Meeting, and a Friend who lived in the Longfellow House across from Friends Meeting at Cambridge decades ago when Henry Cadbury and others attended there. It’s a small world.

I don’t have any photos, sadly, because US Airways lost my luggage, and it’s still stuck in Seattle somehow 8 days later… :(

Así entonces escogí considerarme cuáquero [= Quaker] (luego se salir del colegio), todo el que crea en la luz interior lo puede hacer, sin bautizo ni nada más, de raíz protestante, hasta hoy en día en que hay budistas y hasta ateos que se consideran cuáqueros y así, hay algunos más ortodoxos [que curiosamente son muchas veces son los más pluralistas], mientras otros menos ortodoxos son de tendencias más conservadoras.

El cuaquerismo en sí es un religión curiosa que se ha convertido al día de hoy más bien en una espiritualidad alternativa y radical (que bien puede basarse en la evidencia y no en creencias ilógicas, así al menos yo lo pienso), si partimos del hecho de que no existen en principo ni “credo oficial” aparte del único principo ya mencionado, no hay “pastores”, ni hay “liturgia” oficial, cada grupo de personas que se reúnen deciden qué hacer en su asamblea y quién la dirigirá en cada ocasión, y así [un tema para otro post]. Aunque debido a que vivo en un lugar y vengo de una familia sin tradición ni siquiera protestante, no tuve nadie con mayormente compartir mis convicciones, un cuáquero muy solitario aunque tampoco ese fue un hecho que realmente me haya molestado demasiado.

The 7 pm business meeting ran long dealing with the FUM issue, so at 9 pm only my pal Zeke was in the room. But people kept trickling in until there were nine of us. I had expected somewhere between five to ten, since there was a big uptick in Tuesday night interest groups this year — we were “competing” with 13 other group meeting on such topics as John Woolman College (which I was bummed to miss), a NEYM Women’s Retreat, Rise Up Singing, and a slew of movie and photo showings.

After a little introduction, we went around saying our names, meetings, and what we mean (or meant, or thought others meant) by the word “God.” Most said they didn’t use the word, though one said explicitly that he came as an interested theist. I wrote most of the associations up on the chalkboard, and after we all had a turn I asked the group what they wanted to do for the rest of the time. I was prepared to talk about the history if they wanted, both in terms of “roots” and “flowers”, but felt (correctly, it turned out) that they might prefer talking about our own experiences and questions.

Thus we embarked on a group discussion for the remainder of the time, which of course is difficult to recreate. (My apologies to anyone present who I don’t represent well enough below.)

The main question that one Friend seemed to have was, Why would a nontheist be a Friend, or join any religious group at all? Another Friend, who was raised by Quaker parents and is currently an atheist, said there’s a difference between “why would such a person join?” and “why wouldn’t such a person leave?” I took him to be saying that once you’re a part of the community, you’re a part in multiple ways, and one difference isn’t going to destroy that bond. I also responded by saying that there’s a good argument for seeing Quakerism as not primarily about our beliefs, but about our experiences and practices, and that to many it is evident that nontheists can indeed participate in the life of a Quaker meeting as much as anyone else. I also referenced Robin Alpern’s essay “Why not join the Unitarians?”

There was a moment at one point where the “interested theist” Friend expressed some misgivings about his certainty of God’s existence, but then said that he was in his nineties, and without much time to engage in speculation — and he won’t have to wait long to find out firsthand anyway. He ended by saying, “I wouldn’t be surprised either way.”

“One way it’s hard to be surprised,” joked another, and we had a little laugh.

Another laugh was when we realized there were three people who all had held a certain yearly meeting office. “So this is what that job does to you!” someone said.

We also talked a little about the ambiguity of all this terminology. A moderate theist could be seen as a nontheist (and vice versa) depending on the definition of God at hand. For some “nontheist” might seem like just a euphemism for “atheist,” but I explained that most Friends who identify as nontheist mean it in a more “big tent” way, to include also agnostics, naturalists who still use the term “God” as a metaphor, and people with more liberalized conceptions of God. At this point I passed around a few copies of James Riemermann’s “What is a nontheist?”, which explains this point of view.

After this, one Friend who identified at first as agnostic then said he probably was more of a nontheist-leaning-agnostic. For him, a key part of why he felt he could not affirm particular religious beliefs and traditions was because of the arbitrariness of our births — Christianity makes more sense than Buddhism to people raised in the West, but that is simply due to acculturation, and doesn’t indicate any special rightness of the religion itself. How did I get to be the lucky one born into the right culture? he asked. I explained how I feel as though I could call myself a theist if I wanted to, since I do believe that reality transcends the self-created worlds in our heads. And that in doing so I don’t think I would be outside the liberal Quaker mainstream in terms of conceptions of God, but I feel more honest simply speaking of “reality” (and “love,” and many other concrete terms) instead of the impossible word “God”. Earlier one Friend had said something similar — preferring to use more specific alternative words.

I also passed around a “Resources” handout, which included URLs for the Nontheist Friends website and email list; David Rush’s survey of 199 nontheist Friends; the blogs Mind on Fire, Reaching for the Light, and my The Seed Lifting Up; and the Sea of Faith Network for at least a peek beyond the Quaker hedge. It also introduced the aforementioned book, which QuakerBooks of FGC may be out of for the moment, but they should be getting more, and in the meantime there’s the UK Quaker Bookshop. I had meant to print out some of the more personal stories from the site, but I ended up having less time to prepare than I expected.

On the way out, most of the small number of historical handouts I had printed (which we didn’t talk about) were taken, including the excerpts from the trial of James Nayler (1656), Jesse Holmes’s outreach letter “To the scientifically minded” (1928), and the statement from the first FGC workshop (1976).

We broke up a little prematurely when one Friend had to go, which often happens with interest groups, so I didn’t get a chance to take stock of what had happened for us at the end, or to nudge us towards some more challenging issues. But I’m happy with how it went.

[Cross-posted to the Nontheist Friends website]