Egg Nog and Quakerism

Almost every Christmas for as long as I can remember, I've had (non-alcoholic) egg nog, usually from a carton bought at the grocery store.

This year, however, I had a brilliant idea: let’s make homemade egg nog.

I looked up a recipe for non-alcoholic egg nog on the web. The ingredients were simple: eggs, whole milk, sugar, nutmeg, salt, vanilla.

I gathered six large eggs from the refrigerator and broke them in bottom of a heavy saucepan, then separated two more eggs and added the yolk. Half a cup of sugar and half a teaspoon of salt followed. I whisked this all together, then added four cup of whole milk, slowly letting it stream from the measuring cup as a I whisked it in with the eggs.

The hardest part, in these days when it is no longer safe to use raw eggs, was stirring the nog non-stop for 45-60 minutes on low heat until it thickened. Roger and I read Fanny Burney's Cecilia to each other as we stirred. When that was done, we added a teaspoon of vanilla and half a teaspoon of nutmeg and stirred.

What it tasted like was liquid custard. Our recipe called for topping it with whipped heavy cream, so we did, but that could easily be dispensed with.

The result was delicious. This is not a drink for the lactose intolerant nor the vegan, of course. Another year, perhaps, I'll tell the story of getting raw milk and free range eggs from my Amish neighbors, but this year all the ingredients came from the grocery store. With dioxides concentrated at the top of the food chain, we don’t want to be drinking non-organic whole milk on a regular basis, but once a year is probably fine.

To be honest, I had never really liked egg nog. I would drink it annually because it was part of the ritual of the holidays, but I never felt any regrets when it disappeared with the Christmas tree. It had always tasted a little weird. I now realize it's because I have been, all my life (with a few exceptions), been drinking a factory nog.

The point of this certainly is to celebrate homemade egg nog.

But it’s also for me to wonder: Why have I accepted a vaguely unsatisfying substitute for so long? I never even questioned why a drink so celebrated never tasted very good. And that leads to a broader question, which seem trite question to ask, a little bit of homey moralizing (which, of course, I would never do!) but I don't think it is. We perhaps need to keep revisiting this question in order to stay mindful, to keep from becoming complacent: Where else do we settle for a poor substitute because we never think to question what we’re doing? Do we do this with our Quaker faith? Where? How can we change?

A Portraiture of Quakerism II: Prohibitions

In volume one of A Portraiture of Quakerism, abolitionist Thomas Clarkson systematically works through the various activities, common to his English upper class, that are prohibited by the Quakers, and endeavors to explain the rational basis for these prohibitions. In this post, so it stays reasonably short, I will look only at one. His goal is to make Quakerism, which no doubt appeared at times a bizarre, fundamentalist (ie, arbitrary and irrational) and forbidding cult intelligible to people of a certain class and education. While framing his story as describing the “quaint Other,” Clarkson’s agenda, I imagine, is to render Quakerism more respectable and rational, in order, thus, to render abolitionism more respectable and rational. Notably, Portraiture appeared in 1806, a year before legislation was passed banning the slave trade (though not slavery) in the British Empire. It is true too, that over the course of 150 years, Quakerism had in fact shifted from its radical and apocalyptic beginnings (early Quakers did not think the End Times were coming soon—they thought, with the execution of Charles I that the End Times HAD ARRIVED, a concept known as Realized Eschatology)—to a group that, influenced deeply by Enlightenment thought, and the reality that the New Jerusalem had not yet descended, had become more rational. Whether this embrace of rationalism was a step forward or backwards is, of course, still debated among contemporary Quakers

To a modern Quaker reader, the prohibitions Clarkson has so far described--against gambling/lotteries/games of chance, music, dancing, theater, novels and blood sports—break into two categories: prohibitions that (in a softer way) are still strongly accepted and prohibitions that are rejected. Modern Quakers would probably accept and support the prohibitions against gambling/lotteries/games of chance and blood sports and reject the prohibitions on music, dance, theatre and novels.

The Quaker prohibition against gambling which Clarkson justifies at length we would sum up as recognition of its addictive nature—the Quakers, rationally, want to avoid a pastime that can lead to ruin. Other comments he makes as reasons to avoid gambling, lotteries and card playing—the last, which we know from Jane Austen, was a common pastime—include their tendency to be a waste of time, their tendency to habituate people to the concept of effortless gain and their tendency to excite passions.

Clarkson emphasizes rationality when he writes: “For when they [Quakers} consider man, as a reasonable being, they are of opinion, that his occupations should be rational. …. “ and “The Quakers are not so superstitious as to imagine that there can be any evil in cards, considered abstractedly as cards, or in some of the other amusements, that have been mentioned.” But cards take away from more fruitful occupations.

A chief objection, then and now, to gaming Clarkson writes is the following: “For by gaming a man learns to pursue his own interest solely and explicitly, and to rejoice at the loss of others, as his own gain, grieve at their gain, as his own loss, thus entirely reversing the order established by providence for social creatures.”

Reading this section in light of Jane Austen, I’m reminded of Lydia in Pride and Prejudice, whom we find at the beginning of the novel so engrossed in a game of lotteries at Mrs. Phillip’s that she hardly notices Wickham. This characterizes her as immature and childlike, impulsively fixated on the moment to the exclusion of all else, but also, in light of Clarkson’s words on gambling and gaming, as in an environment that excites her passions and primes her for “quick win” risk-taking—in her case, being the first married of the Bennett sisters. She does rejoice at her gain of a husband ahead of her sisters and Austen does lead us to understand Lydia’s “elevation” as a grotesque reversal of the social order, all the more galling for Lydia’s cluelessness about the sacrifices that saved her.

I think today about the state lotteries and casinos, and personally, can't help but agree with the early Quakers on the corrupting influence of this. I too think that the idea "I too could be rich tomorrow," no matter how remote, encourages people to support regressive tax laws that make it harder to build a juster society. I tend to believe that there is something insidious and destructive in the valorization of the pursuit of quick riches, especially when it is only for the very, very few and the rest are left in poverty ... but the question arises: in prohibiting gambling, lotteries and games of chance, are the Quakers merely attending to the outward shell and not the inner soul? Or, as George Lindbeck suggests in the Nature of Doctrine, does the outward (social) form of the faith largely determine the inward experience? Where do you fall on lotteries?

A Portraiture of Quakerism, I

The Quakers, as every body knows, differ more than even many foreigners do, from their own countrymen. They adopt a singular mode of language. Their domestic customs are peculiar. They have renounced religious ceremonies, which all other Christians, in some form or other, have retained. They are distinguished from all the other islanders by their dress. These differences are great and striking. And I thought therefore that those, who were curious in the development of character, might be gratified in knowing the principles, which produced such numerous exceptions from the general practices of the world.

Thus writes Thomas Clarkson, an eighteenth century abolitionist who, with William Wilberforce, worked closely with Quakers on the movement to end the English slave trade. His interest in the Quakers led him to author a three-volume book about the Society of Friends. Volume 1 was published in 1806, a year before the 1807 Slave Trade Act outlawed the slave trade (but not slavery) in the British Empire.

Clarkson explains his motivations as follows:

From the year 1787, when I began to devote my labours to the abolition of the slave trade, I was thrown frequently into the company of the people, called Quakers, these people had been then long unanimous upon this subject. Indeed they had placed it among the articles of their religious discipline. Their houses were of course open to me in all parts of the kingdom. Hence I came to a knowledge of their living manners, which no other person, who was not a Quaker, could have easily obtained.

As soon as I became possessed of this knowledge, or at least of so much of it, as to feel that it was considerable, I conceived a desire of writing their moral history. I believed I should be able to exhibit to the rest of the world many excellent customs, of which they were ignorant, but which it might be useful to them to know. I believed too, that I should be affording to the Quakers themselves, some lessons of utility, by letting them see, as it were in a glass, the reflection of their own images. I felt also a great desire, amidst these considerations, to do them justice; for ignorance and prejudice had invented many expressions concerning them, to the detriment of their character, which their conduct never gave me reason to suppose, during all my intercourse with them, to be true.

Nor was I without the belief, that such a history might afford entertainment to many.

Clarkson’s work, like Robert Southey’s Letters from England, written at almost the same time, offers a critique of English society as seen through the eyes of outsiders. Clarkson will also critique the Quakers from the point of view of a sympathetic outsider to their group.

I look forward to continuing reading this work, which can be found on-line. It will be interesting to learn more about how English Friends lived in the 18th century, not only to compare them to the “normal” English of that period, but also to compare them to Quakers in our time.

Several thoughts pop immediately to mind. First, much of my interest in Clarkson and Quakers of this period derives both from being a Quaker and from my interest in Jane Austen. Austen brushed up against Quakers during her life, and she was a great fan of Clarkson. We know she read his History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade. As a Clarkson admirer and as a subscriber to circulating libraries, as well as a voracious reader, she almost certainly read A Portraiture of Quakerism.

Second, although Quaker numbers were to dwindle to dangerously low levels by the middle of the nineteenth century, at this time, Quakers seem to have been robust. Even if they were already dwindling in numbers, they were active. For example, 300 Quakers petitioned Parliament to abolish the slave trade in 1783. Though separating themselves from the rest of society, their strong objection to slavery forced them into alliances with people like Wilberforce and Clarkson, who were not barred from becoming members of Parliament as Quakers were.

A glance at the table of contents of Portraiture shows Quakers to have been, not surprisingly, “more different” from the general society than they are today: much of the first volume focuses on what Quakers prohibited: gaming, gambling, lotteries, music, drama and novels, to name a few.

A recurring question in contemporary Quakerism in this: Should we be more of a "peculiar" people? Some Quakers do adopt plain dress and use "thee" and "thou." I have no objection to these kinds of separations and believe they can provide a frame for an alternative worldview. Mostly, however, I believe that deepening our discernment as a faith group so that we can coalesce around being lights in the world from a faith, rather than a political, perspective, is our chief task.

Against Polemics

I've found an interesting book called Postmodern Theology, edited by Graham Ward (2001). The essays I have read so far have put an emphasis on joy, community, embodiment and mutuality as the hallmarks of the Judeo-Christian ethic. Who knew the postmoderns were such a cheerful lot?

Sharon Welch, a theologian, has an essay called "Lush Life: Foucault's Analysis of Power and A Jazz Aesthetic." One timely idea she culls from Foucault, who died in 1984, is a rebuttal of polemics. In an interview late in his life Foucault said:

“polemics allows for no possibility of an equal discussion; it is processing a suspect, it collects the proofs of his guilt, designates the infraction he has committed and pronounces the verdict and sentences him…But it is the political model that is most powerful today. Polemics … establishes the other as the enemy …against which one must fight until the moment this enemy is defeated and either surrenders or disappears.”

Sadly, almost 30 years later, polemics still reigns in politics--and in religion. How many denominations, Quaker included, are threatened with being torn apart because two sides have locked into positions, each refusing to move one micron against the demonized Other?

Foucault located the future of philosophy in a post-imperialist world in non-European countries. Certainly, we've seen an explosion of global readings and perspectives on culture and history in the more than 25 years since Foucault died. However, it seems to me that most of this is still largely informed by Western European, and more specifically, French and German, philosophy, as we all process the ideas of their enormously important thinkers.

Finally, Foucault poses the question: How do marginalized people move beyond critiquing structures of domination and imperialism? How do we use what power we have in a way that doesn't involve dominating others? Foucault distinguishes between power and domination, putting him much in accord with Jesus, though Foucault would not, by any stretch of the imagination, have regarded himself as Christian.

One of his answers to the problem of domination is to veer from Utopic visions with their "certainty" and embrace a vision that acknowledges imperfection and mistakes, but nevertheless keeps on trying to build a better world. There's a huge amount of wisdom in that stance. Foucault wanted his ideas and theories not to be "grand narratives," universal and totalizing, but to fucntion as a "toolkit" from which people could choose what was useful. This humility, admission of human frailty and pragmatic idealism also aligns with the classical Christian worldview. (The Christian worldview that was not co-opted by imperialist thinking).

Welch compares this way of thinking to the creative and improvisational nature of jazz, an art form created by a marginalized group, which is more about invention than perfection.

I remember once, in a reading group in which we were discussing a visionary community, noting that these communities always seemed to fail after, at most, a couple of generations. Why? Another member of the group pointed out that we tend to hold Utopic communities to too high a standard. How many businesses last more than a few generations, he asked. When I thought of the number of cherished Baltimore businesses (the closest city to where I then lived) that had folded in my lifetime, I had to agree: most organizations are inherently ephemeral.

So as I envision us floating to work in our rafts and sending our children or grandchildren to small, caring schools or Quakerism revitalizing, and then see how these things can go wrong, I am comforted to think that we simply need to keep trying. So what is the next step?

Smaller Schools

When I worked as an education reporter some years ago, my coverage area had unexpected crisis: a sudden surge in high school enrollment leading to massive school overcrowding. This was driven, in part, by the growth of the immigrant community, which threw off the county's model for calculating population by living in larger households than the average American family.

The school board and central administration had two solutions: adding on to six existing high schools to raise their student populations from about 2,000 to about 2,500 and building a new, 2000-seat high school for between 70 and 80 million dollars.

All my instincts screamed that both of these were the wrong solution. What the school system needed to do, I thought, was acquire small buildings here and there and set up perhaps 10 new high schools of about 500 pupils. The community I covered had a charming old brick school building, that would have been perfect for such a project, needing a few million dollars for a new roof and other repairs. (This versus $70 million for a new school ... $3 million each put into ten smaller buildings would be ... $30 million ... at least something for the frugal to ponder.) The high school in that community, which was slated for a 600 "seat" (not pupil, but "seat") addition, was already well past what experienced people agreed was its former its optimal size of about 1,200 students. It was, in many ways, dysfunctional despite the best efforts of teachers and administrators to run a good school.

While I couldn't "prove" anything, what I saw, in both the above county and a neighboring more affluent county, was that once schools pass a certain size, they tend to become impersonal, bureaucratic places. Administrators can't know all the students, and kids end up herded through the system in the most efficient way possible, which often doesn't meet their individual needs. I sometimes witnessed students being treated rudely by harried school staff. I could hardly blames the staff, but also had the uncomfortable feeling I wouldn't want my children spoken to that way.

Yet, parents clamored for the larger schools with all the bells and whistles. To send a child to school without the same state-of-the-art gym as the best school in the county, and without a full-blown music program and six languages to choose from was seen as unacceptable. To have all these amenities in one place meant building large schools.

But are these the most important things? I often feel as if I am sister from another planet, and somehow miss seeing life the way the rest of the world does, but how is a state-of-the-art gym better than a small, caring community dedicated to knowledge and to knowing each student personally? Obviously, it would be ideal to have both, but as Gym Ex illustrates, students' bodies can be well served through the simplest exercise technologies.

I wish we could focus more on the soul of our schools than on their material attributes. Are students nurtured and known? If that element is in place, and academics are taken seriously, learning will follow. Quakerism, in general, with its emphasis on "small is beautiful," is well-placed to be a leader in this alternative way of thinking.

"The tender mercies of the wicked are cruel."

I decided to start, once again, rereading John Woolman's Journal and was struck by the famous story of the young Woolman killing the baby birds after he had killed their mother. This is a story that is so familiar that the last few times I have read the journal, my eyes have slipped over it unreflectively.

I have read or heard that Quaker children, when they are distressed and ask why Woolman killed the baby birds, are told he was a farm boy, understood without sentimentality the death of animals, and was trying to by merciful, because he knew the baby birds would die without their mother. He was being kind.

Yet, in the text, Woolman himself describes his act as cruel. What comes to his mind about what he has done is a scripture verse: "The tender mercies of the wicked are cruel."

This story is crucial, not just because Woolman was a tender-hearted and empathetic child who felt badly about causing distress to innocent creatures. That is a fine morality tale as far as it goes. It's heart-warming to see someone have the goodness of heart to regret the cruel results of an impulsive act of killing. It shows that the young Woolman already had an advanced moral sense: He was able to put himself, even as child, in the shoes (or nest) of more vulnerable Others and see the world from their perspective. He cared about the birds even without fear of outward negative consequences to himself for his act. This is a beautiful, St. Francis of Assisi-like tale.

Yet, I think his purpose from the very beginning was more than to tell a confessional story. With this tale, he establishes from the outset a theme that runs throughout the entire journal and pertains to all creation: Once you or I start doing even one evil thing, we create a chain reaction. It's never just one thing, period. Killing the mother bird for "sport" meant bringing suffering to her babies, which led to a "cruel mercy," and then to an anguish that might have led to hardness of heart. What we do reverberates beyond itself. I think he wants, from the start, for his readers to dwell on the paradox of a world where societies become so messed up that even mercies are cruel.Taken to it's extreme, it's the "mercy" of the torturer we know from spy movies, who warns his victim: By the end, you will be begging me for death.

"The tender mercies of the wicked are cruel." This is an unsentimental statement, a quote from Proverbs 12:10 that begins with "a righteous man regards the life of his beasts..." (Obviously, there was a childlike literalism that led Woolman to think this after killing the birds.)

What worries me about this Proverb is the application to charity. If we move to a system a individual charity, and away from the government system, what about the mercies of the wicked? Will everyone treat the poor and vulnerable with justice and compassion? History tells us no.

However, I am reading Woolman for another purpose, two, in fact. One is for the benefits that always come with reading the words of a person of universal compassion. The second it in search of the literary influences on Woolman. Certainly, the Bible as an influence hits us from the beginning as an explosion. He starts off, like a good Quaker, with "the pure river of the water of life" in Revelation. He mentions reading "some religious books" as a youth. Do we know what they were? I strongly suspect George Fox's Journal, but what else? What, beside the Bible, structures the narrative of his life?

How do we help?

Sunday at Stillwater, a man who had never attended the meeting before stood and told a disturbing story. When he'd first come in, I'd assumed he was a plain dressing Friend because of his white shirt and suspenders; however, he was a Pentecostal who had recently gotten interested in Friends. He told us he'd been working in a barber shop in Pennsylvania, cutting hair. If I understood the gist of his story correctly (this, at least, is how I pieced it together), he was laid off some months ago after his employer learned that he done prison time.

The man lost his apartment next door to the barber shop, and he and his wife and three young children headed for help to Pentecostals they knew of in the deep south. The man said he'd been credentialed as a Pentecostal minister but that the Pentecostals in the south could do nothing for him. He then left with his family and stayed with someone in North Carolina, who eventually took him to the Eastern Shore of Virginia, where he and his family stayed with yet another person. Somewhere in the narrative their vehicle--I'm not sure what kind--broke down, and they eventually borrowed a van to come to Ohio. But before that, the wife earned some money picking tomatoes.

The man said, having researched Friends and discovered Stillwater, he came to Ohio, thinking he and his family might settle in the Barnsville area. The man spoke of his criminal past, of a crime he committed at 19, and for which he served five years in prison –in part, because, if I understood, he couldn't afford a private lawyer. He indicated that the past was the past, and mentioned that God transforms hearts. He said he was already in trouble here in Belmont County with child protective services for letting his children sleep in the van in the cold. He was now using his wife's tomato-picking savings to room the family in a motel.

I had to leave before he was finished, but his story has stayed with me, for the following reasons:

Right before he spoke, a meeting member, a very lovely and distinguished woman, had talked about the injustices in the criminal justice system. Public defenders, for whatever reasons, often don't have the time to prepare an adequate defense for their clients, and thus the system, which is supposed to serve the poor, is often stacked against the poor.

I don't think God acts by accident, and I can't believe it was simply chance that caused a man, poor and with problems related to the criminal justice system, to arrive on our meetinghouse doorstep the same morning a member felt moved to speak of her concern about the plight of the poor in the legal system. What we are supposed to make of this, I don't know, but it is on my mind.

Next, this man's story stays with me because of my mixed reactions to it. Part of me thought, "It's the Joad family from The Grapes of Wrath, displaced by the economy and forced on the road, living hand to mouth out of their (borrowed) car. This is a story of our times, a story of how the most marginal are the first to be fired and thus the first to suffer the brunt of the recession. Where can he get a job? Will anyone hire him with a criminal record?"

However, another part of me said: "This man is a con artist. Why was his wife picking tomatoes? Why wasn't he? Of course he could get a job... so why is he forcing his children to wander around? What kind of education are they getting? Why are people constantly "pushing him on" down the road?"

Then, I thought, why am I so judgmental? Do I know anything, really, about his situation? Perhaps there's some good reason he can't pick tomatoes. And with jobs in short supply for everyone, it's not such a stretch to imagine he really can't find any work. Where is my heart?

The man, with his wife and children in our meetinghouse, made a strong emotional impression on me: they raised my compassion and my alarm. I kept weighing: should we help him? Shouldn't we? As Roger said, the decision is, do you help people regardless, even if you know you might be getting conned, or do you not? Most of me says, yes, of course, you help people, and you don't ask questions. But on the other hand ...

I keep thinking too, of the larger debate in our society now about who should provide the kind of aid this family needs: housing, food, a job. Should it be the government or should it be churches, meetings and other faith-based organizations? The argument, and I hear it from people I respect, is that the aid should emanate from the church and local community, one on one, based on developing relationships with the people in need. This family, by singling out our congregation, represents exactly the right model. We see their faces, we hear their voices and press the flesh of their hands as we help.

But I shy from this because inevitably, if charity is based on a personal relationship, even a brief one, in essence, I--or my meeting--is sitting in judgment on another person. Who am I (the "I" standing for my meeting) to judge? How can I judge? And yet, inevitably, in this situation I have to judge, because in the real world, our meeting lacks the resources to meet every need of every person. And maybe we don't need to meet all needs--maybe only as many as we are able to help will come to door. But it's hard to trust in that.

My impulse is to want to direct this family, these strangers in our midst, to the government social service agencies, even frayed as they are right now. I feel the agencies have more know-how and more resources than our meeting. I also want to turn to them because I believe they are objective--that they are not evaluating each person individually or emotionally, but by applying a set of standards that are used universally to determine need. This family may not get their every need met by the government, but they will be treated impartially.

I fear a system in which how much help a person receives is haphazard and dependent on his or her ability to convince my faith group that he is of the worthy poor, that he deserves aid. This is what I fear--know--will happen if we dismantle government services. People who are personable--or able to grovel sufficiently--or seem enough "like" us or enough lacking in the vices we disapprove--will receive our help. Because we can only help so many, we'll help the favorites. Then the outcast, as they always are, are left to the too few saints. I don't wish for that.

I fear it already happens in our broken health care system. As a journalist, I would sometimes cover local silent auctions or other fundraising events to help a family needing money for cancer treatments for a wife or a child's operation that wasn't covered by insurance. These were warm and bonding events for the communities involved, but in every case, what was emphasized to me was what good people we were dealing with. Good people. How much Jane Doe had contributed to the church over the years! How well-liked the parents of little John Doe who needs an operation! Always, without a fail, it was this way, and I would often wonder, what happens to the people who don't help out at church or who are disagreeable or disliked or simply not known? Do they die or go bankrupt? I don't know.

So I am troubled. I would prefer to pay taxes and have the government impartially take care of people's basic needs. Then I can develop relationships with the people who come to my church or cross my path without them on their knees, begging.

What would you do in this situation? Give money? Send the family to social services? Something else?

Fragments

There were always in me, two women at least, one woman desperate and bewildered, who felt she was drowning and another who would leap into a scene, as upon a stage, conceal her true emotions because they were weaknesses, helplessness, despair, and present to the world only a smile, an eagerness, curiosity, enthusiasm, interest.
Anaïs Nin

I feel a weariness with arguments, about universalism versus Christianity or being Christian versus Pagan. All we need to do or are asked to do is love one another. A truism. But true.

And yet--I get pulled into the arguments. And I want to say, that language matters. Language--in the great discovery of 20th century philosophy, building on Nietzsche--is not a clear window pane into reality. Language is tainted. The early Quakers knew this. Women and minorities know this. Anybody who has been damaged by the culture knows this. So when people say, oh the God stuff, it's just the different words for the same concepts ... the words themselves are the concepts, we're caught in the prisonhouse of language, and context changes concept, and there's always context, always baggage, and if the words really don't matter, why don't we all use the Christocentric language of our culture?

i feel like telling you everything
talking until my words aren't a part of me anymore
they are part of the air
and suddenly they are not my problem
and i am free

So maybe that's why I'm "just saying." (These quotes come from a blog called paperdollblewsaway.)

Last weekend, Roger and I went to Toronto. We stayed Jaya's apartment. We visited an art museum, ate Thai Food (thanks to Jaya's parents), shopped in bookstores, went to an island where it rained and sat under umbrellas at sidewalk cafes.

In the meantime, a stray dog and a stray kitten have shown up at our house: Larry and Junior. Larry was a kind old hound dog who followed us home one day. Then he followed us around the lake, to the campus proper, hung out for awhile, possibly understood people were talking about the "pound," and wandered off again. Or maybe he's simply a wandering hobo of dog and it was time to hit the road again.

Sophie brought home the stray tabby kitten, who, we were told, would be put to sleep by the shelter should we take it there. Too many cats in the world. Junior, who is a minature version of our gray tabby, Andre (hence the name junior) is so quivering with the very life force of the universe, so full of intensity and joy, that we can't imagine the death sentence. We also can't keep him. Right now, he's living outisde--and before long, we'll have to figure out what to do. It is coincidence that these animals keep all of a sudden wandering into our lives?

Tomorrow I leave for a writing class Earlham School of Religion.

I will try to stay in touch.

Least of These

Having just read C. Wess Daniel's blog on John Woolman (there's a link through Quakerquaker below and to the right on this blog), I wonder if we can tie our Quaker witness to the following, which appeared in today's New York Times. Bob Herbert writes:

"Listen to the soft-spoken new president of the U.A.W., Bob King.

“My view of the labor movement today,” he said in an interview, “is that we got too focused on our contracts and our own membership and forgot that the only way, ultimately, that we protect our members and workers in general is by fighting for justice for everybody.”

The fundamental issue is that “every human being deserves dignity and a decent standard of living,” he said, “and the whole point of the labor movement is to help make that happen.”

In Mr. King’s view, the fight to organize workers and improve their wages and benefits is important, but it’s part of a much broader effort to improve the lives of individuals and families throughout the country and beyond. He is a believer in cooperative efforts and shared sacrifice, and is unabashedly idealistic as he outlines what can only be described as a new activism on labor’s part.

He promised his members last month that the U.A.W. would be marching and campaigning and organizing — for jobs, for a moratorium on home foreclosures, for civil and human rights and against the mistreatment of immigrants, and for peace."

I find myself responding to this unabashed idealism and a vision that is not narrowly "unionistic" but wants to make life better for everyone. What do you think?

Quakers and Univeralism

I have been saying this for years but Scot McKnight at Jesus Creed said it succinctly and well in reviewing a new book by Stephen Prothero.

A pastor once said to me that Christianity, Judaism, and Islam believe in the same God but just worship him differently. I said two things back: (1) Not true, for no Jew or Muslim believes in or worships God as Trinity, and (2) just try getting an ordinary Christian, Jew or Muslim to say they think that we all have the same God.

I have believed for a long time that touchstones are to be used but the only honest way to dialogue about our faiths is to tell the truth about our faith and tell the truth of what we think of the other faith, and then to listen to the other person say the same to us and of our faith. With love from first to last, but with the truth of love and love for the truth. The worst thing we can do is to pretend we are all really saying the same thing.

But the pastor's comment is common and widespread. For instance, Swami Sivananda said, "The fundamentals or essentials of all religions are the same. There is difference only in the non-essentials." To which Stephen Prothero, author of God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter , says both bitingly and truthfully: "This is a lovely sentiment but it is dangerous, disrespectul, and untrue."

I see this sentiment to which Prothero addresses himself in his new book to be a religious colonialism. It is a way of incorporating the beliefs of another into what one person believes and clarifying, for the truly enlightened, that after all these religions are all variations on a theme. Once you get the theme, and one must be exceedingly broad-minded to grasp it, you can see that we differ only on particularities. Prothero's book is designed to rebut the whole approach of religious colonialism. Here are a few of his opening statements:
He calls this religious colonialism "naive theological groupthink -- call it Godthink" (3).

"God is not one. Faith in the unity of religions is just that -- faith." It's "an act of the hyperactive imagination."

Karl Rahner once spoke of others in other religions as being anonymous Christians. Hans Kung answered back: "It would be impossible to find anywhere in the world a sincere Jew, Muslim or atheist who not regard the assertion that he is an 'anonymous Christian' as presumptuous."

Yes, Prothero says, the world's religions share one thing: they all believe there is a problem or something's wrong. But from that point on they differ, and often dramatically. The solutions show how much they differ. They are not all climbing the same mountain but they are on different mountains.


Read more: http://blog.beliefnet.com/jesuscreed/2010/07/religious-colonialism-1.html#ixzz0t5PveqJS


I'd don't know how many times I've heard Universalist Friends say "All religions are the same." To my mind, this is modernist thought that arises from the same Enlightenment impulse that led botanists to classify plants into categories. There's nothing wrong with the Enlightenment, but we have seen its limitations and are in a period of paradigm shift. Also, as more than one postmodern thinker has pointed out, our understanding of "comparative religions" is heavily influenced by the worldview of those mid-twentieth century scholars who wrote the textbooks: primarily white Protestant males from elite East Coast college and OxCam backgrounds: not precisely a broad spectrum. What they give us, some have argued, is a distorted understanding of world religions to begin with.

I'm glad more and more people are challenging the truism that "all religions are the same." As both a Quaker and a religion reporter I chose to bite my tongue more than once when an older white male leaned over to me and said, as if revealing the secret of the ages: "Buddha and Jesus believed the same things" or "all religions are the same." After hearing the "revelation" about 50 times, I found myself having to suppress sarcasm: "Wow! Is that so? I never thought of THAT!" I've often wondered how otherwise intelligent people have gotten stuck on that groove or morphed the idea that some religions share some common tenets into a history-denying and specificity-erasing truth claim all faiths are the same.

It troubles me that so many liberal Quakers hold unreflectively to the "all the religions are the same" falsehood. The same people who deride the Christians who say with conviction "Jesus Christ is my personal savior" will in the next breath say with the same conviction that all religions are different paths up the same mountain--and if you disagree, will judge you with all the scorn of the fundalmentalist Christian towards the unsaved.

Is it "colonialism" to say that all religions are the same? Are Jews--fewer than .02% of the world's religious population--wrong to be worried about being subsumed or erased under thinking that throws us all into a common melting pot? Is a universalist worldview "dangerous?" Why or why not? Why are some Quakers so bent on this universalist worldview? Is there a way forward?

Quaker Education

Note: I started writing this before Jeremy's comment, which I will refer to later ...

When I was an education reporter, I covered home-schooling from time to time and couldn't help but notice that many home school parents wanted to do more than teach their children "at home" all the time. Many homeschool parents networked to provide enrichment for their children and a whole industry had arisen around providing classes to homeschooled children during regular school hours. For example, I did one story on a women who had made almost a full-time job out of offering Latin I through IV to homeschooled high schoolers--classes that enrolled anywhere from eight to 16 teens.

I realized that many homeschool parents were not rejecting the classroom model per se, but the constraints and problems of public and private education. Some homeschool mothers I interviewed would have liked a private school for their children, but either had too many children to afford it or too little income. Others homeschool parents tried private schools but found they mirrored too much of what they didn't like in public schools, such as discouraging substantive parental involvement or dismissing parent concerns or not teaching phonics. In other words, at least some homeschooling parents would have been glad to place their children in a school, could they have found an affordable school that lived up to their expectations.

At one point, I covered a homeschooler's "school," and I can't shake it from my mind. This school was parent run, started by two women who wanted more for their children then the loose homeschooling group they were part of. To make a long story short, they banded together, found some other interested parents, borrowed Sunday school rooms in a large church, chose a curriculum and held classes for their children two days a week, with the rest of the at-home school week structured around lessons arising from the classes. By the time I arrived, the school, which still met twice a week, had grown to cover grades 1 through 12, and enrolled 125 students.

Parents ran the school--there was no administration, though there was a parent board--and parents were clearly heavily involved in the day-to-day activities of the school. The school cost $1,000 a year per student, and students who created problems or who could not keep up with the curriculum were asked to leave.

I think about this school because it was as "out of the box" an enterprise as I saw during my time as a reporter. (There's one other one, but that will be a different post.) This was clearly a case of parents a school to fit their children's needs, not setting up a school the way a school "should be" and forcing children to fit it and parents to pay the price.

It dovetailed with other thoughts I have had over the years, chiefly involving Quaker education meeting Quaker family's needs. The biggest need I have seen is affordability. So I would suggest starting there. Find out what parents can afford to pay and work around that, rather than what a school "must" have at ... 10K or 12K a year ... or more.

I can envision a scenario in which, say, nine Quaker families decided they could each put $1-2K a year into a pot to educate their 15 elementary age children. Let's say they ended up with $17K, including donations from Quaker organizations, and some in-kind donations of supplies, etc. The first step would be for all the parents to become approved homeschool parents, and the second would be to get together and fashion a set of goals and principles. I would strongly recommend a first principle being "serving other people's children," to weed out the parents who are only it in for what they can "get" for their own offspring. Third, I would see how much collective education the 17K would buy and work from there. Maybe the parents could obtain free use of Quaker classrooms connected to a meeting. Maybe they could rent at very low cost, say $1,000 a year, from a church or community center. Maybe they would designate another $2,000 a year for supplies and opt to keep $1,000 in reserve for emergencies. This would leave $13,000.

While I don't know the details of all this or what insurance liabilities would be (and perhaps this would all have be done in homes ... I don't know) conceivably, the school could hire a part time teacher for 6K a year total--kind of an adjunct--3K a "semester" who would come in and lead school for 21/2 hours a day two days a week. This could be supplemented by a parent-run meeting for worship before the teacher began her day, and followed by parent-run recess and lunch. And to be part of the group, each parent might be required to offer a few hours of enrichment each year/quarter to all the students ... and that would be a start. Maybe a weekly service project would be another part of the school. Perhaps the rest of the money could pay someone to coordinate the school. Accreditation would not be a problem as all the parents would be homeschoolers. The key point is that it would start with affordability.

The main goals, I believe, for a Quaker school is transmitting Quaker values and serving Quaker children. Much thought needs to be given to what those values are and to what serving Quaker children means. I write this as someone whose children are past the need for this type of schooling--who are two years from high school graduation.

Jeremy Mott went on a similar track when he wrote: "Someone might try to get a little
grant from the Clarence Pickett
Fund---see website---to develop a course on Quakerism for
Quaker parents who are home-schooling their children (I think there are many of them now.) The course could also be used by any of the numerous new Quaker schools which have no Quaker teachers; but
that wouldn't be the emphasis, for Friends Council on Education already tries to help them. The
material might be based, in part,
on what Max Carter of Guilford
College has done to develop curricula on Quakerism and on world religions for the upper grades of the Friends Schools in
Ramallah in Palestine (You can
find this info in their latest newsletter on the web.) There have
got to be ways to make Quaker education less expensive, even in
the U.S.A."

What do you think? Would you be willing to trade in the "bells and whistles" for a school built around Quaker values? What should these values be?

Keep Tender

"Because thine heart was tender ... I have even heard thee." II Chronicles, 34-27

Give no occasion of stumbling; keep tender; for hardness of heart is worse than an outward plague, for that brings destruction in many ways."
George Fox, Mind the Heavenly Treasure

Since Fox would have witnessed--or at least been alive during--the last of the plagues, the strength with which he believed in "tenderness"--what we might call compassion or sensitivity--is immense. I think of the common use of the f-word and how that word alone tends to coarsen us. It is so easy to get callous. It's interesting that in a world that continues to encourage both a physical and pyschic swaggering and toughness ("get the f. out of my way!"), just as it did in the seventeenth century, Fox, from the great beyond, directs us to put a premium on ... lovingkindness. I believe he is asking for a giving up of self for other, an embrace of vulnerability, and a truly countercultural point of view that values and does not ridicule earnestness and sincerity. Around now, many people are probably asking: who would want to live in that kind of goody-two shoes world? Probably a lot of people who are suffering right now and wouldn't mind an earnest word of kindness. Also, we do remember that people like Fox and Fell are hardly namby-pampy halo heads--their writing is alive with their anger and indignation at what they saw all around them. They were quite interesting and outspoken livewires--but what moved them arose from tenderness. Or so I think. Do you?

Quakers and creeds

Oswald Chambers My Utmost for his Highest, a book of devotionals published after his death in WWI, fascinates and perplexes me. In today's reading, he sounds much like a Quaker:

"When we become advocates of a creed, something dies; we do not believe God, we only believe our belief about him. ... 'Believe also in Me,' Jesus said, not 'Believe certain things about Me.' Leav[ing] the whole thing to Him, it is gloriously uncertain how He will come in, but He will come."

I see the problem with creeds that Chambers spells out: Our beliefs about God or what God "should be," can block our direct, unmediated experience of what God IS. Quakers are rightfully concerned about having that direct experience. However, I also understand how in Quakerism the lack of structure or framework can lead to a spreading, anything-goes dilution, like wine spilled out from a container. We learn in the Bible that we need new wineskins not no wineskins.

I also wonder if Quakers make an idol--or a creed--of not having creeds.

What do you think? Leaving aside our own sense that "creeds are bad," does it help or hinder Quakers to be adamantly against creeds?

Query: Mary and Quakers

I am working on Mary, as in the Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus, and Quakerism. From what I can find, the Quakers have more or less routinely ignored Mary, except for early Quakers like Fox, who excoriated Mary worship as exhibit A in their challenge to idolatrous papacy. Am I missing any strain of Mariology in Quakerism?

Crossan, Jesus, Fox

Apologies for the long gap in posting, which has been a function of lack of internet access rather than lack of time or (heaven forfend!) thoughts ... :)

John Dominic Crossan, author of The Historic Jesus, visited ESR this weekend and was a riveting speaker. He placed Roman ideology side by side against early Christian ideology. The Roman ideological (or theological) paradigm was war leading to victory leading to peace leading to (distributive) justice. In other words crushing the enemy established peace and in a peaceful world society could be ordered in a just way so that people's economic needs were met. Jesus and his followers claimed that to achieve peace and justice, one had to start with non-violence. Non-violence leads to economic justice, which in turn leads to peace. Needless to say, we know which paradigm still dominates today.

Caesar Augustus was worshipped as human and a divine, a God and a son of God because he unified the Roman Empire and brought peace through victory. Jesus, Crossan says, who brought peace through non-violence, was worshipped in the same terms because those were a construct a first century audience in the Roman world would have understood. Further, people in those days would not have challenged Jesus' resurrection--"wonders happened all the time"'--but would have asked, " what does it mean for me? What will it do for me?"

Crossan's most important point--and one he pounded on (and one I happen to strongly agree with)--is that history matters. Jesus arrived in a moment of opportunity, where, because of historical circumstances, his ministry was allowed to flourish for several years. Twenty years earlier or later, Crossan said, and he would have been crushed instantly. That brought mind to the Quakers and their emergence at another "window" of opportunity--the era of relative religious freedom during Cromwell's reign. Twenty years earlier or later and they would have been flattened by a state apparatus designed to keep people in conformity with the dominant ideology. (I might conceptualize this a little differently but that's for another post.)

I remember several times hearing people say, "If George Fox had been born in China, he would have been a Buddhist." OK ... yes, one's faith expression is obviously influenced by one's society. But the point is, George Fox wasn't born in China, Spain or the Ottoman Empire but England. History matters. I remember Tich Nat Hanh writing that if Buddha had lived in the Roman Empire, he, like Jesus, would have been crucified. Well, perhaps ... but the point is, he wasn't. If he had been, I imagine Buddhism would be much different today.

So I wonder: what would Quakerism look like if we were more willing to embrace the possibility of miracle and more rigorous in insisting that history matters? What miracles do we miss? What realities do we distort?

Banned Quaker words and practices

The list so far:

Words:

unprogrammed
mindfulness
led

Practices:

Passivity/apathy disguised as spirituality
Trivializing words and terms, such as discernment
Watering down or using meaningless concepts
Quoting the poet Hafiz

Would it make a difference if we used the active voice and concrete words and avoided trendoid jargon? How much does language count?

Quakers get good press

Nicholas Kristof gave Quakers a shout-out in his Jan. 9 ope-ed piece on religion and women in the New York Times. I like that Kristof recognizes that religion does good in the world as well as bad:

"Yet paradoxically, the churches in Africa that have done the most to empower women have been conservative ones led by evangelicals and especially Pentecostals. In particular, Pentecostals encourage women to take leadership roles, and for many women this is the first time they have been trusted with authority and found their opinions respected. In rural Africa, Pentecostal churches are becoming a significant force to emancipate women.

That’s a glimmer of hope that reminds us that while religion is part of the problem, it can also be part of the solution. The Dalai Lama has taken that step and calls himself a feminist.

Another excellent precedent is slavery. Each of the Abrahamic faiths accepted slavery. Muhammad owned slaves, and St. Paul seems to have condoned slavery. Yet the pioneers of the abolitionist movement were Quakers and evangelicals like William Wilberforce. People of faith ultimately worked ferociously to overthrow an oppressive institution that churches had previously condoned.

Today, when religious institutions exclude women from their hierarchies and rituals, the inevitable implication is that females are inferior. The Elders are right that religious groups should stand up for a simple ethical principle: any person’s human rights should be sacred, and not depend on something as earthly as their genitals."

What do you think? Major faiths started out accepting slavery, then defending it ... then being the most vigorous forces in overthrowing it. And, in Quakerism we have, of all the amazing things, a pre-Enlightenment acceptance of female equality, based not on secularism but on revelation. I throw my lot in with a religion of love (for me, that's Jesus: love your enemy, Sermon on the Mount, Beatitudes, justice will prevail ...) as more powerful than anything else, even the hatred in its own ranks.

If on the balance organized religion is more solution than problem, how to show that? Do you think it's true?

George Fox: Dew and armor

"I will be as to the dew unto Israel." Hosea 14:5

"So God Almighty be with you all! The dew of heaven is falling upon you to water the tender plants; and the blessing of God be amongst you, which showers down amongst you." George Fox: "Mind the Heavenly Treasure."

God's blessing-- a dew or light shower--is a collective blessing, as indicated by Fox's use of the plural "you."

Community blessing is the true blessing: I agree with John Donne that no man (or person) is an island. I have been struck this past year with how gratitude for individual blessings can unintentionally smack of celebrating one's own exceptionalism. God's true blessings fall on us as a whole: the sun shining, the water flowing, the trees fruiting, peace blooming. I believe it's when we try to corner these blessings for ourselves alone that trouble follows.

I also appreciate the gentleness and simplicity of the dew image. It shows God incarnate in nature, infusing and nourishing us, not controlling us. How can we try to dominate and ruthlessly exploit a nature that is created by God and manifests God's spirit?

"Wherefore take unto you the whole armor of God" (Ephesians 6:13)

Now is the time for you to stand: therefore put on the whole armor of God, from the crown of your head to the soles of your feet, that you may stand in the possession of life." George Fox: "Mind the Heavenly Treasure."

The image of armor contrasts sharply with that of gentle dews and showers. But as we know, God's armor is faith, integrity, peace, truth, Spirit, and speaking God's truth to power. Paul understands the "upside down kingdom" and here renders a violent image gentle and insists that this gentleness will vanquish violence and evil. Given how often Christianity has been wedded to violence, how do we reclaim the original intent of the faith as a counterpoint to violence?

East Richland Friends Church

Yesterday, I went with my friend Sally to East Richland Friends Church, an Evangelical Friends congregation about 15 minutes from Barnesville.

It's a treat to live in a place with such a variety of Friends worship available--Conservative Friends, Evangelical Friends and in Pittsburgh, Liberal Friends.

The congregation was warm and vibrant, with a sense of spirit pervading the sanctuary. The church, which has a 1,000 members and 800 attenders on a typical Sunday, is growing and thriving.

East Richland reminded me of Cedar Ridge Community Church, a nondenominational emerging church begun by Brian McLaren. Like Cedar Ridge, East Richland has stage at the front of a large sanctuary flanked by two big view screens, a rock band and praise music. No donuts and bagels in the atrium, however, and no communion.

I didn't see--admittedly I've been to all of one service--any signs of Quaker distinctives. We sang praise music and listened to a sermon, but there was no period of silence, no opportunity for people in the pews to speak and no mention of such Quaker testimonies as simplicity, peace or equality. I was told that the church offers communion four times a year, which would also put it outside historic Quakerism. The service was simple and non-liturgical, but if the word "Friends" was taken from the name, I would have assumed it was a non-denominational "low" church.

It was a contrast to Stillwater, where the demographic skews much older and where a sense of sacred quietness prevails. My first thought : East Richland seems more "alive,"more a-crackle with energy, and I pondered, longingly, how can we capture this vitality and export it to our silent meetings?

But now I wonder: Is crackling energy the only sign of God's spirit? Of course not, and the somber stillness of a silent meeting can reach much more deeply into our souls. And God can work through the small often more effectively than through the large. But still I find myself poised, wondering: Do our silent meetings need an infusion of energy and vibrancy and a period of growth? Are they dying or is that my lack of faith? What is God's plan for them and how can we forward that?

What do you think?

Gossip and Quakers

Martin Kelly raises an important issue on Quaker Ranter and I'm willing to help it go viral (even though he's not asking :)). Here it is:

"Ethnographic Study Looks at Gossip in the Workplace" in the NYTimes:

The earlier studies found that once someone made a negative comment about a person who wasn’t there, the conversation would get meaner unless someone immediately defended the target. Otherwise, among both adults and teenagers, the insults would keep coming because there was so much social pressure to agree with the others.

Some interesting here. They say gossip usually spirals down until someone intervenes to defend or deflect. In one school, gossip set up rival camps; teachers eventually left and student test scores fell.

Friends (and Christians more generally) are officially against gossip, though of course we're not immune and I've seen it act as almost a kind of currency in some settings. But what are the classic Quaker tools for deflecting this natural human tendency and keeping our communities from the downward spirals of camp building? "

Factionalism, favoritism, in-groups and gossip do immense, and I would say, often unacknowledged, damage to Quaker institutions and meetings, as well as in the wider world. I've seen the "mischief making" and I've seen people more often than I'd like to have leave meetings because of it. Mostly, they don't care about the quarrel, whatever it may be, but they do care about the way people act and they are appalled at what they see. As Quakers, as upholders of the community and equality testimonies, we should be fighting gossip and factions (which are patterns for destroying community and equality) at every turn. They are against our core beliefs of how we live out God's word in the world. What do you think causes the problem, and as Martin says, how can we deflect it? What do you think of people stepping forward to protest as soon as it starts? What if you come into a situation where this behavior --and the "in-groups"--are already entrenched?