Misuse of Religion

I recently read an article for my "Interfaith Dialogue" class that was simultaneously interesting and disturbing. Written by anthropologist Ian Hogbin in 1947, it was called “Pagan Religion in a New Guinea Village.” Among other things, it showed how cynically people can exploit religious fears to seize and maintain power.

The New Guinea men studied by Hogbin wanted separation from—and hence power over— the women in the tribe: They wished to exclude the women from their “cult.” Why? This detail Hogbin never explores--he apparently never raised the question. However, he explained that the men created a story of enormous crocodile spirit monsters that the women and children had to keep away from. He also explained how the men were able to make this utter fabrication credible.

A woman came home one day and freely shared with her husband her discovery of a whirring sound created by twirling a twisted piece of wood on a string. He told her to keep her discovery a secret and passed the information to his male cohorts. They decided to say it was the voice of a spirit that the women must stay away from. Of course, to carry out this fraud, they had to kill the woman who brought them the knowledge. As Hogbin puts it:

The husband was first reluctant but at length gave consent when promised a substitute. He sent a message to her to bring his supper and as soon as soon as she stepped on the ladder of the house the men”—in Hogbin’s polite term—“despatched her”—ie, murdered her—“with their spears.” The men told the rest of the women that “she had been eaten by a fearsome spirit monster which had come into the area”—a monster whose presence was heralded by the bullroarers. This falsehood in place, the men could easily keep the women intimidated.

For reasons he doesn’t explain, Hogbin rather quaintly makes the following inexplicable statement:

The story may perhaps give the impression that the hoaxing of the women was uppermost in the men’s mind when carrying out their ritual. … I am convinced that, although this aspect of the matter cannot be ignored, it would be a mistake to pay too much attention to it.

At this point, Hogbin dropped the subject and moved on.

I think Hogbin erred not to pay much more attention to why the women were hoaxed, why that was acceptable, why religion could be openly built on a fraud that used fear to exclude women from power and why the men feared sharing their power with women. Why was murdering an innocent woman acceptable? This is the kind of behavior we openly condemn when it’s practiced by Nazis. I am glad Hogbin did not suppress it, and hence romanticize “primitive” religion, but I also wish he'd spent more time exploring the issue.

The question I have is: Why did these men want to exclude the women? Why is that, across cultures, men seem to want to keep women out?

On Memory

The New York Times ran a story a few weeks ago (Christmas Day, to be exact) about Eleanor, a town in West Virginia begun during the Depression as a New Deal resettlement community: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/25/us/25eleanor.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Eleanor,%20West%20Virgina&st=cse

The story of the town is told largely through the eyes of a girl, Marlene Crockett Carr--now an old woman--who moved there in 1935 at age 4.

The article's author, Dan Beery, describes the town as follows: "Over the years, these New Deal towns have been praised as a sound response to paralyzing poverty and criticized as flawed, communism-tinted social experiments. But in this hard time, as half-built subdivisions stand as ghostly testaments to economic failure, a place like Eleanor reflects a government action that worked, and works."

He writes that "Ms. Carr says she fears that Eleanor’s history is being pushed aside, that someday people will not know why the main street is called Roosevelt Boulevard, or even why the town is called Eleanor."

The story brought up the memory of how much all four of my grandparents, all immigrants, revered Franklin Roosevelt. To quote Woody Allen, they not only loved him, they lurved him. One set of grandparents--I don't know which--even had a framed portrait of him, a photograph tinted with rosy cheeks and enhanced blue eyes.

My grandparents had all died by 1980, so I don't know if they would have joined the Reagan Revolution. I remember them, in the 70s, scratching their heads over some of the reforms that seemed more handout than hand up. However, I find myself pondering the way in which the New Deal is often dismissed these days, when the memories handed down to me tell a completely different story.

In Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, the heroine Fanny Price, who unites a quiet facade with a sensitive, emotionally intense nature, says the following::"If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every way; but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out." Chap. 22 or Vol 2, ch 4

Mansfield Park is, on one level, a book about memory. During the course of the novel, characters remember events differently than how they occurred and we see Fanny fighing to retain memories she knows to be true in face of people, including ultimately herself, who have a vested interest in restructuring them according to a script. Fanny, significantly, owns a reproduction of one of Turner's sketches of Tintern Abbey, a ruin memorialized in a poem by Wordsworth--a poem about memory.

The Bible is about capturing the memory of "normal" events, but more so of events so elusive, so unusual, so fragile that it would be easy to dismiss them as fairy stories--or to forget them. It records the world of dreams and of God breaking through the permeable barriers of space and time into physical reality. People found it important to preserve and pass on these memories so that the powers and principalities of the world couldn't say they never happened. Or that if the powers did deny them--which they did and still do--there's an institutional memory with which to challenges the systems that pressure us to accept "reality" and nothing more.

The former publisher of International Design magazine, a publication with a long history, recently wrote about how the entrepreneurs who bought the pub a few years ago had no interest in the organization's institutional memory, firing people willy-nilly, which meant losing much of the publication's value. There's something wrong in imposing amnesia on an organization, just as it would be wrong to wipe individuals' memories to reprogram with a blank slate. In the end, the magazine itself folded--or was folded.

Something soul shrivelling--and false-- exists in presenting "now" as the only truth. George Orwell gets to heart of this in 1984.

Thus we record our thoughts because it is important to preserve --to freeze--memories that are valuable and elusive. If they are, as Fanny Price says, weak, bewildering and beyond our control, they are for that reason the stuff of the Kingdom of Heaven.

I started this, not knowing where I was going with it (the beauty of blogging!), so I'll end with a question:

Are there elusive memories you would like to preserve? What ARE the memories that are important?

Pain and the (Quaker?) world

I've been reading Quaker blogs recently about pain. Quaker Harlot James and Hystery pop to mind. I have been thinking about them probably too much. Then I came across this from Cary Tennis at www.salon.com/mwt/col/tenn/2009/09/29/envy/ (I'm not at all suggesting that any Quaker person's pain is the result of pursuing status or material good (au contraire as I think the pain derives in part from awareness of the unconscious worldliness of meetings) but that the theme of pain struck me:


Look around you. Recognize that we stand at a crucial point in history. I submit to you that your discomfort with attainment of status and goods is a form of knowledge; it is a form of seeing; you are seeing what is in front of you and naturally it makes you nauseous. It should. Because in the background the planet is burning.

Your discomfort is a form of world knowledge. You are being called; you are being nudged by the world. What you feel is not envy but contempt, and what is behind the contempt is the nudging of the world; it wants something greater from you.

Is it so far-fetched to consider that all our discomfort with present conditions is in fact the world speaking to us, begging for our help?

Does planting trees feel good? Does feeding the hungry feel good? Why is that? If the world were giving us instructions, how would it do so? Is not pleasure the world's chief instrument of instruction and guidance? Is it not pleasure that the world has used to ensure procreation?

Why would it not speak to us by giving us pleasure when we do certain things and depriving us of pleasure when we do other things?

Then we ask, what feels good to do? Has your life of constant attainment and striving ceased to give you pleasure, as you see it mirrored in the striving of others? Could it be that it feels good to be of service because that is the world's wisdom, because that is what it wants of us? Yet observe how cynically we dismiss the good feelings we get from charity work or volunteering as a kind of false do-gooderism, as unworthy of us. We say that we are buying our way out of true commitment, buying our way out of guilt with this little bit of charity work, this donation, this volunteer time.

Maybe we are not buying anything. Maybe we are indeed joyfully paying -- paying as the fruit tree pays by bearing fruit, as the bird pays by singing, as the antelope pays by running.

Could it be that our feeling of worth when we do good things is genuine? Could it be that it is only with great reluctance that we steel ourselves against our better natures, in order to participate in useless, wasteful activities? Could it be that our willingness to sacrifice our need for meaningful lives is the one thing our masters most desire in us? Could that be why this quality is the thing they stress through stultifying educational programming, through empty television and media, through the utter meaninglessness of political drama, through advertising's attempts to transform us into conditioned consumers of armchairs and cold creams: that the whole system that has taken us to this point of unimaginable calamity -- the earth, our source of life, now threatened in some fundamental way -- needs to be reorganized and reoriented. And why? Because what we have arrived at is indeed an organized calamity -- not in any conspiratorial way but more in the way of the tragedy of the commons multiplied by a million, a logical clustering of individual decisions that collectively, by deracinating a million small commons, brings us to a collective tipping point?

Why is that such a strange or novel idea? Isn't it, to the contrary, more or less obvious?


I think it is obvious but hard to accept.

I know this has taken us a long way from your personal discomfort with your attitude toward your peers, but this is my suggestion: Treat your discomfort not as something to be cured or eradicated, but as a sign of your dissatisfaction with your own current life, and a sign that you are being called to a new and deeper relationship with the world.

What do you think of this?

Shouldn't all of us with commitments to religious communities feel at least a smidgeon of hope, a soupcon of joy, and a large serving of humility because we are at least one tiny step closer to solving the world's problems? Shouldn't we embrace our pain and the pain of being in our communities and become the change we want to see? Are we being called, through our pain, to a closer and deeper relationship with our spiritual homes? I keep coming back to reaching out. It is painful for me to reach out, painful because more often than not it's a good deed that doesn't go unpunished, because the person who reaches out embraces vulnerability and gives the other the power of rejection and dismissal ... and because I love my solitude ... but I've determined that it's not me or you or us having done something wrong or been something wrong that gets us treated badly but that people treat us as they've been treated and for a long time we've been treating each other badly, thus it will take a long time for the slapdowns to be finished ... but we still keep on ...

Defending the faith

I found this on the New York Times website:

“ You might remind your children that, although much harm has been done in the name of religion, much good has, as well. Commemorate the Underground Railroad, Mother Theresa, volunteers who visit prisons and hospitals, all those who sacrifice for peace and justice. Don't let your daughters become cynical because so much good is private and evil is so public.”
— Anne W.

from a blog (?) called This I Believe.

What do you think? Do you think religion gets a bad rap? Do you think it's helpful to speak up more?

Convergence: Is "inclusiveness" the model?

C. Wess Daniel wrote a blog comment responding to my assertion that the central issue facing Quakerism is how to reconcile inclusivity with maintaining a strong core faith. He said: "So, we don't have to adhere to the terms of the debate if they are going to be locked into a question of inclusiveness. It's my contention that this question is one stemming from those still clinging to modern-liberalism, trying to rescue some kind of hegemony based in sameness rather than celebrating difference the way the postmodern does. "

I agree that modernism does try to impose a hegemony based on sameness. Modernism, in texts written primarily by white English and American males from a handful of elite universities in the early and mid parts of the last century, tried to boil the "major religions" down to a common denominator of universal assumptions. This was done for good reason: if religions could find a common ground, perhaps they would stop fighting. Of course, what happened by those embracing universalism was the creation of superficial, bland and homogenized spiritualism. Most of us, once we get past the aha moment of "all religions have a lot of common ethics" or "all religions practice the golden rule," or "Wow, Buddha sounds a lot like Christ," long for something deeper and more emotionally and intellectually satisfying. That means delving deeply into one faith tradition and struggling with its story -- and its otherness.

If we could just throw aside the question of inclusiveness and truly honor diversity by accepting that Quakerism has a particular history within the Christian tradition, then struggling with inclusivity versus faith would not be THE issue. However, Quakerism (at least liberal Quakerism) is mired in modernism. It's stuck there like an old-fashioned broken record, repeating the following worn ideas over and over: "All religions are different ways of expressing the same truth. All religions are different paths up the same mountain. We can incorporate all religions into one melting pot."

As long as a modernist notion of inclusivism is foundational to how Quakers think, we are going to have to struggle with how inclusivity dilutes the faith. One of the problems I see is that many Quakers don't perceive their worldview as modernist. It simply seems normative and true, a corrective to all the false notions of the past. They don't see themselves as caught in a particular and subjective historical moment. They don't see their concept that "all religions are the same" as the end result of a limited system of Enlightenment thinking that believes that scientific rationalism alone leads to truth and thus excludes as "irrational" diversities that don't support its presuppositions. Modernists can't stand outside the box of rationalism and critique rationalism itself. "All religions are different paths up the same mountain" is such a self-evident truth to some Quakers (despite being an immensely shaky metaphor) that they become frustrated with any challenge to it and sometimes believe that people who hold to other beliefs are ignorant or have an agenda. They believe they are straining out the impurities and superstitions within their faith tradition to produce what is clear, true and beautiful.

Religion in the world today struggles against a modernism that wants to control it and emphasize religions' universality at the expense of the different faith traditions' diversities. Many people of faith want what has made their particular faith distinct to be upheld and not softened, even if these marks of distinction are difficult for the modern mind to accept.

I have seen several house churches deal with the problem of Enlightenment thought by not accepting any doctrine that might be tainted by it. Usually this means basing the church's theology only on texts produced prior to 1700. That's a method to ensure a certain type of purity, just as accepting only those parts of a religion that are "universal" is, but it's also a wilfull distortion of the past 300 years of history just as much as Quaker universalism is a distortion of the pre-Enlightenment thought patterns of Quakerism's founders. Thus, I don't believe it's fruitful merely to ignore the Enlightenment. Enlightenment thinking has helped us differentiate between superstition and faith, tall tales and miracle, bigotry and fair assessment of differences. We need instead to critique where the Enlightenment has fallen short. Many would say in an inability to appreciate miracle, mystery and passion.

Liberal Quakerism has repeatedly made the decision to include the hyphenated Quaker: the Quaker-pagan, Quaker-Wiccan, Quaker-nontheist, Quaker-Jew, Quaker-Buddhist and in the process of helping all these people to feel comfortable has repeatedly chosen to deny the particular miracles and mysteries at the heart of the faith and has justified doing so on the basis of Quakerism's non-creedal history. The problem is that this emptying of the particulars of the faith narrative--of tranforming a (tranformative) story that we can participate in and argue with to a series of dispassionate testimonies describing abstract ideas--equality, peace, integrity, etc.--has left people hungry and empty, longing for something more.

None of this is new stuff but it leads me back to a question that is not abstract at all to me, but something I anguish over: how do I love and cherish and respect the non-Christian Quaker I share a pew with while loving, cherishing and respecting the Christian story and particularities that are of the heart of Quakerism? Therefore, I end up agreeing with Daniel that Convergence needs to define itself in ways other than through inclusivity. But how is that going to happen?

Praying with the Jesuits

"Hearts on Fire: Praying with Jesuits," edited by Michael Harter, includes a guided meditation for examination of one's conscience and I thought over the next few weeks, I'd put some of the questions out there.

First:

What have you loved in your life?

Things tasted:
Looked at:
Smelled:
Heard:
Touched:

These experiences I have cherished:

Dancing to the spirit

Last night, I went with the Olney dance class to see photographer Rose Eichenbaum's exhibit "The Dancer Within" at the Stifel Fine Arts Center in Wheeling. Eichenbaum spoke to us and took us to look at some of her photographs.

I didn't expect this to be a spiritual experience, but it was. (There was also a lovely buffet and wine bar, so we were well taken care of in both body and soul.)

The Stifel Fine Arts Center is in a beautiful, turn-of-the-last-century mansion set amid lovely grounds with a reflecting pool. Eichenbaum was a riveting and inspiring speaker, who clearly loves her work. She talked about how she was encouraged by Dance Magazine to photograph choreographers, a project that eventually turned into a book. As she began the project, she decided that she couldn't take good portraits of these artists until she got to know them a little, so she would spend an hour or more interviewing them before she started photographing them.

In her exhibit, she captioned her photos with quotes from the interviews about what inspired these men and women to dance and to choreograph. Several spoke of the desire to express spirituality through movement, and of the desire to touch audiences on a deep level with their art. Many spoke of how sensitive they are to audiences and how important the reaction of the audience is to what they do. Most said dance was something they had to do, no matter what the cost. They simply couldn't not dance. Regina, when I read your comment about having to blog, I thought of them and about how artistic expression, in whatever form, is such a deep part of who we are. For some people--and perhaps for many people-- the practice of religion is part of their artistic (and I mean that in the best sense of the word) expression of their spirituality and humanity. I think that's why religious rituals, be they Orthodox Catholic or the Quaker practice of silent worship, are so beautiful. Through them, people express the deepest parts of the their souls. And with my suspicion of everything the dominant culture states as fact, I believe the more the culture tells us that dance or poetry are a waste of time, the more we need to embrace these activities as supremely important in helping us become fully human and thus fully reflecting the image of God.

I have that learned that community is essential to religion, and so felt that, in their desire to connect deeply with audiences, these great dancers and choreographers were, in their own way, creating religious communities that they hoped would change people's lives. This was so interesting to me, because I've tended to think of dancers as possibly narcissists or at least as dancing in a private world and for themselves. But, in fact, the greatest of them don't feel fulfilled until they have touched another person's life.

Because dance has been so much a part of Sophie's life, and more recently, the life of Elena, the daughter of our friends Bill and Johanna, I have felt a growing closeness to the dance world, and that made this exhibit more meaningful to me.

I drove to Wheeling with a young student whom I was delighted to get to know better. At 15, she could be a model to many adults on generosity of spirit. Although she has come to Olney because of a bad experience at a right-wing Christian school, where she felt judged and condemned, she open-heartedly refuses to judge and condemn evangelical Christians.

I also drove with Jaya, the new admissions assistant at Olney. She's a Quaker from Canada. I really, really like her. After our experience at the exhibit, she and I decided to start a writing group at Olney (we had talked of this before, but not with serious intention), which I hope will be like the Quaker writing group I left behind in the Columbia. We meet for the first time on Sunday.

Take care everybody.

On anger

Not long ago, I suffered a petty injustice. To make it worse, I was maneuvered or manipulated into a situation where I was offered two unpalatable choices. I decided to take the more generous path and put the matter behind me. I went on with my life. In the grand scheme of things, the whole situation was tiny.

Yet the experience rankled. I found myself getting furious thinking about it. I was angry that the episode was handled so ungraciously and furious because I felt I had been "played." And more furious when I contemplated that I was "played" over something so small.

I had realized awhile ago that the person I labeled "the antagonist" carried a vein of anger under a smiling facade.

I could say that I've been that person -- and I'm sure I have and that we all have at one time or another in our lives if we're honest with ourselves-- but I don't want to go in that direction.

What struck me as I've thought about this was the viral nature of anger. This angry person was transferring his or her own pent-up rage to me. I've noticed that angry people do this, trying to alleviate their own anger by radiating it out or transfering it to others. We spread rage quickly by wronging others because we've been wronged, by retaliating, by gossiping.

I was reminded of the Westboro Church. This "church" came to Westminster. Md. when I was working for the newspaper there. The Westboro people protest at the funerals of soldiers who died in Iraq to publicize their belief that the Iraq war is God's judgement on the U.S. for tolerating homosexuality. They were due to protest at the funeral of a young local man killed in Iraq.

As religion reporter, I went to their Web site to find out more about them. The Web site spewed hate. It wasn't religious at all. It was the rantings of people filled with toxic levels of anger.

As we discussed the Westboro group in the newsroom -- the kind of language they were using to describe gay people as well as their plan to disrupt the funeral of grieving parents-- we grew angrier and angrier until one editor said "if I had a gun, I'd go and kill these people."

At that point, we realized we were being infected by their hate and becoming the thing we loathed. They were, with extreme efficiency -- a Web site and some foul language -- transmitting their anger and hostility to us. We were quickly turning into them.

Jesus understood the power of anger and hate to radiate outward and spread. He must have seen this phenomenon often in occupied Israel in the first century. He recognized how destructive it was and also that it could be--always--overcome with love. Love could radiate outward. Radical forgiveness could stop the hate in its tracks and replace it with a spirit that would allow all of us to become more fully human/humane.

So I decided, as an act of will, to love the person who'd wronged me. I made a choice not to get sucked into the vortex of hate. I didn't react or say any of the things I could have said. I kept my lips zippered.

I knew, however, that I would need grace not to harbor a grudge.

So I prayed for grace.

As it happened, this same person very recently did something generous and uncalled for to help me. Suddenly, I felt lighter, as if a weight I had been lugging around had lifted. I felt a surge of genuine good feeling toward this individual that was not merely an act of will or smug moral superiority. I felt grateful I had turned the other cheek and not said a word. I experienced the grace of knowing that demonstrably imperfect people can do things that are kind and good.

I know such stories don't often have a happy ending and that working through the injustice when the pain is not alleviated is much more difficult. But I wanted to celebrate this story and its good outcome.

Remembering Solzhenitsyn

I've thinking about Solzhenitsyn on and off since I read of his death a few days ago. Anyone who so annoyed Western intellectuals must have spoken some uncomfortable truths, I thought. I read his 1978 address to Harvard and could see how it would have upset people. Much of it also reads as archaic now that socialism and communism have fallen. All the same, I couldn't help but agree with his stance on secular humanism (he refers to it as humanism divorced from God). I think he may fall a little hard on the anti-materialist side (I believe God did make the incarnate things of the earth for people to enjoy and nobody I know of wants people to suffer want) but I agree that we can take materialism as the source of happiness to an extreme level. What do you think?

Here's a quote:

If humanism were right in declaring that man is born to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature. It cannot [be] unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It cannot be the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then cheerfully get the most out of them. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one's life journey may become an experience of moral growth, so that one may leave life a better human being than one started it. It is imperative to review the table of widespread human values. Its present incorrectness is astounding. It is not possible that assessment of the President's performance be reduced to the question of how much money one makes or of unlimited availability of gasoline. Only voluntary, inspired self-restraint can raise man above the world stream of materialism.

It would be retrogression to attach oneself today to the ossified formulas of the Enlightenment. Social dogmatism leaves us completely helpless in front of the trials of our times.

Even if we are spared destruction by war, our lives will have to change if we want to save life from self-destruction. We cannot avoid revising the fundamental definitions of human life and human society. Is it true that man is above everything? Is there no Superior Spirit above him? Is it right that man's life and society's activities have to be determined by material expansion in the first place? Is it permissible to promote such expansion to the detriment of our spiritual integrity?

Plain Secrets: Faith Practices

The chapter "The Lot Falls," in Joe Mackall's Plain Secrets: An Outsider Among the Amish, gives us a window into the workings of the Amish faith among the Swartzentruber Amish.

Sam Shetler, Mackall's Amish friend and neighbor, is chosen to be a minister. His church district has one bishop, two ministers and a deacon. As a minister, Samuel will preach and look out for the material welfare of the community.

Unlike most faiths, where a person hears a call and goes for specific ministerial training, Swartzentruber Amish ministers are called by the community (and God), work without specific training, as well as without pay or any diminution of their other duties. Most men (and it's always men) hope to be spared this heavy burden, Mackall said.

Samuel is called to become a minister at one of the church's twice yearly communions. Communions occur two weeks after a meeting of the entire baptized church body but only if the entire church body is in unity. During the pre-Communion meeting every individual in the church, male or female, publicly reaffirms his or her commitment to the church rules, known as the Ordnung. If a person has a problem with the Ordnung, he or she is supposed to air it at the meeting. Communion can't occur until any problems are resolved. Sometimes the resolution is for a group to break off and form a new Amish group with a different Ordnung.

To find a new minister, as the Swartzentruber Amish do at one pre-Communion meeting, everybody, male or female, votes. This happens the following way: a current minister stands at an open window. Everyone files by, one by one, and speaks the name of the man they'd like to become minister. A scribe writes all the names down. Any man who gets more than two votes moves on to stage two.

In stage two, the chosen men stand before the church community. In Samuel's case, he stands with seven other men. Eight hymnals are spread out in a table. In one, a "lot" is placed, a slip of paper saying "you are chosen." The books are moved all around on the table so that nobody knows which one holds the paper. Each man picks up a book. The one who chooses the book with the paper in it becomes the minister. In this case, it's Samuel.

Mackall describes other aspects of Amish faith: humility, a literal belief in aspects of the Bible, such as the creation story and the Virgin birth, that are treated more skeptically in other parts of Christendom, a need to live in a community submitting itself to Christ, adult baptism, every individual having a voice in the election of leaders and in the life of the church, staying apart from the "wicked" wider world "that the devil has planted," a peace testimony that says that violence belongs to governments and is outside of the "perfection of Christ" and a refusal to swear oaths.

For Quakers reading this, much of the above "theology," articulated in the mid-16th century, will seem familiar. There's no doubt that Quakers were influenced by much of this anabaptist understanding. Humility (which I think the Quakers would refer to as simplicity) is a part of Quakerism, as is the peace testimony and the refusal to swear oaths. Like the Amish, our leaders are unpaid and many people shy away from the burden of that responsibility. Like the Amish, Quakers must be "gathered," with every single person in unity, before true "communion" can occur. (I'm oversimplifying, but trying to show the connections.) Essentially, in the Amish willingness to give everyone a say in the community, we can see the seeds of the more radical equality of the Quakers. When I write articles about the terrible frustration experienced, say, by women in the Roman Catholic church, who have absolutely no say in who gets into leadership in the church hierarchy, I can appreciate how valuable it is for a woman to have a vote for a minister or the right to stand up and challenge the Ordnung. While Amish women may seem oppressed to the outside world, I know Roman Catholic women who would give almost anything to have privileges of an Amish woman transferred to the RC church.

On the other hand, I also understand the second class citizenship of the women that Mackall describes (how seldom women, for example, actually challenge the Ordnung, a silence or acquiescence which Mackall attributes to social indoctrination) and I better perceive how Quakers were able to take female equality before God to the next level by allowing women to take any position in the community.

Quakers, though they have had periods of withdrawal, value engagement with the "wicked" world as a way to correct present evils, though a compelling argument can be made that they have paid a high price through becoming much more conformed to that world. Many modern-day Quakers have split from the Amish in a move from Christ-centered community. I also see differences in the peace testimony: I would say the Quakers are less likely to accede to the proposition that wars are for governments and more likely to oppose all war, all the time. On the other hand, I wonder if we as a group practice day-to-day non-violence to the same extent as the Amish. I am also impressed that in an Amish minister, spiritual and material concerns have equal weight: the Amish minister is responsible for the physical needs as well as the soul of his community. I believe that Jesus meant for us to have this kind of caring for each other. Mackall, like others, is moved when he sees this caring in practice, such as during a barn raising.

Mackall admits he doesn't really "get" the faith that drives Samuel and other Amish, and while he describes their faith well, it is clear to me as a Quaker that Mackall truly doesn't "get" it. But something in him is drawn to Samuel because Samuel's life, as the Quakers would say, is a "pattern" of faithful living. For instance, when Mackall's Uncle Bob, who suffered brain damage as a child, dies, Mackall instinctively turns to Samuel's spiritual strength.

Mackall is angry that a doctor "screwed up" an operation that left Uncle Bob mentally impaired. How does a God that would let this happen square with Samuel's faith?

"God made Uncle Bob that way because everyone who knew him needed him to be exactly the way he was," Samuel says.

Mackall remembers what a friendly and open-hearted person Uncle Bob was. More than 500 people came to his funeral "sob[bing] for a man with a victimized brain and a damaged heart." Mackall drops an intellectual debate over the nature of God and simply let's Samuel's words soak in. "God made Uncle Bob that way because everyone who knew him needed him to be exactly the way he was." He feels less angry. He understands that Samuel is not trying to evangelize, but is saying what he truly believes.

"I was comforted by his words," Mackall writes. "Instead of fighting usual intellectual battles with myself or with Samuel, I simply gave myself to the moment, allowing Samuel's philosophy to be mine as long as I stayed on the farm."

What do you think? Or as the Quakers would put it: What canst thou say?

Universalism versus particularity

I read an interesting essay about atheism in the on-line Sojo. The author equated the current crop of atheists, such as Richard Dawkins, with fundamentalist Christians because both groups take the Bible literally. The writer also pointed out that it's mostly college-educated white British and American males leading the atheist charge.

One comment I found particularly interesting: In the 20th century, more blood by far was shed by atheists who could kill by reducing humans to "abstractions" than by the religiously faithful.

I was struck by the term abstraction. Many universalists I know have, in my observation, found in all religions a few abstract principles: love your neighbor, help the vulnerable, practice the golden rule. I agree that it can be fruitful to recognize these commonalities rather than condemning other religions as wrong.

But does this abstracting of a few universals diminish individual religions? Robust religion is not abstract, but lived day-to-day in particular ways. The different world religions share commonalities, but they also diverge from one another in ways that are often irreconcilable. They are not the same and they don't even necessarily worship the same God. They may not all be different paths up the same mountain.

I believe the tendency to want to make all religions the same, or find the universal principles behind all the religions, is the product of a particular historical moment. I've noticed that almost all of the zealous universalists I know are over 60 years old. Perhaps the recognition of the commonalities between religions was the great "aha!" moment of a certain generation. This was also the generation that grew up in their parents' world, where assimilating all the ethnicities into the great "melting pot" of American life was an important goal, more so than emphasizing difference.

Lately, we've come back to a celebration of the differences between religions and people. Much of the emergent conversation, as we hear over and over, is about connecting with the ancient church, appreciating the diversity in Christianity and the power of stories to change lives. Religion is not primarily about rules or abstract principles, but about narratives we can enter into. Stories provide rich depths of meaning and symbol not available in a set of principles. Different religions, like poems, come alive in their particularity.

Japanese Buddhism: In Trouble?

An article in the July 14 New York Time discussed the possibility that Buddhism might be dying out in Japan.

Some of the reasons given:

-The Japanese have an eclectic view of religion. They move easily between Shintoism and Buddhism and aspects of Christianity. The implication is that they are not wedded to Buddhism.

-Buddhism has more or less lost relevance to everyday lives in Japan.

-Buddhism suffered a blow to its credibility when it closely aligned itself with the militaristic government and policies of WWII Japan. Now its words of peace ring hollow.

-Buddhism's last stronghold was in funerals but people are increasingly avoiding the high cost of a Buddhist funeral by going to a secular funeral home or simply cremating the dead and skipping the funeral.

-Buddhism was strongest in the rural areas, where the population is fast dropping.

In universalist Quaker circles, Buddhism is more or less revered. I was told, however, by a professor Eastern religion at McDaniel College, that the Buddhism liberals love is an American cultural construct that bears little resemblance to the Buddhism practiced in most Asian countries. For example, while American Buddhism is a highly individualistic faith practice rooted in a 1960s zeitgeist, Asian Buddhism (and clearly that is a broad and varied field!) typically is based in the community, such as in ancestor worship. Asians who come to this country, he said, will often import Buddhist priests because the religious community creates good karma by serving the priests.

According to adherents.com, roughly six percent of the world population is Buddhist. It is the smallest of the four largest world religions: Christianity, Islam and Hinduism all have more than double the adherents. There are more adherents to "no religion" than to Buddhism.

What do you think can "save" Buddhism or any other religion that is losing numbers? Or to put it another way, what makes a faith strong?

Attitude or Behavior?

Cath made a comment about the Amish and our world:

The world I live in expects people to come to deep conclusions of values and attitudes and then adapt their actions to those values and ideals. The Amish engage in actions that they hope will promote certain values and attitudes--and judging from the rate at which young Amish ask to be baptized, I think they achieve their objective.

I tend to "accept" our culture's assumption that one determines one's values and then tries to live by them. This then leads to a hierarchy of values in which one discerns that some values are more important than others, and that other, secondary "values," can be jettisoned or dealt with as an afterthought. I also imagine this model leads to anxiety, because individuals inevitably will fail to live up to their values, especially without group support.

What do you think of this? Who and what determines your values? Do you have any knowledge of how other cultures (non-Amish, non-American) handle the connection between values and behavior?

Plain Secrets

In "Plain Secrets: An Outsider Among the Amish," English and journalism professor Joe Mackall writes about his friendship with the Shetlers, Amish neighbors of his in northern Ohio. The Shetlers provide Mackall a window into one of the most conservative of the Amish orders, the Schwartentrubers.

Mackall does not want to use his limited experience of one Amish group, and in particular, one family, to generalize about the "Amish" as a whole, a group which, at 180,000 to 200,000 strong in North America, outnumbers Quakers. In fact, he's at pains throughout his book to distinguish between the different groups within the Amish: Old Order, New Order, Weaver, Swiss, Beachy Amish, etc. He also doesn't want the book to focus on what he calls "appropriation" of the Amish as a means to self-discovery or as convenient symbols for pushing a particular ideology, be it nostalgia for an idealized past or a back-to-nature quest.

What he wants to do is to focus on one family, the Shetlers, and how they live as Amish.

Yet by deliberately separating themselves from us, the Amish can drive us into introspection. Mackall will spend a good deal of the book as a character in his own personal drama, the hapless "English" interacting with the Amish, and as a narrator, he will repeatedly ponder his own mixed response to people who are simultaneously both his friends and his subjects.

How do you view the Amish? I once saw them as quaint oddities on the outer fringes of society. Later, I began to grasp that religion, not rejection of technology or of the twentieth century, was the basis of their community. I recognized that the allure of modernity to them was secondary to supporting and nurturing community. While I could probably never become Amish, they've come to shine for me as an alternative to the way the "rest of us" organize society, a challenge to the notion that the way we do it is the "only" way or the "right" way. Apparently, people can thrive in a very different setting and in a society organized on very different principles. There are other ways to live.

I remember getting lost once with Roger en route from Philadelphia to his parents' house in York. I perked up as we drove by barn after barn, tidy farmhouse after tidy farmhouse and field after field of corn. I felt a deep sense of relief and comfort that so many family farms were still thriving in this country. A little while later, as we passed several buggies, I realized we were in Amish country. I remember feeling both deeply disappointed that these weren't "mainstream" farms and at the same time grateful for the existence of the Amish and the wedge they provide against modernity.

Back to the question: How do you view the Amish? What do you think we can learn, if anything, from them? And if you are Quaker, do you find it surprising that there are more Amish than Quakers in North America?

On quietude

From a post, On Quaker Monasticism and emergent and convergent friends ( a link to this story is on a list on the right side of this blog.) The writer is ruminating during her vacation to Mexico:

To be here in a foreign land without a sense of mission, without work to do, is dangerous idleness. In the future, I hope to be more conscientious about bringing all of my plans before God and listening very carefully before I commit, rather than assuming that I know the answer already. Just because a plan seems good and logical to me does not mean that that is how God wants to use me.

Yesterday's Jesus Creed blog, in contrast, discussed a book that argues for slowing our pace. (I would look up the reference but I've been having such trouble accessing this blog page that I'm afraid to leave it.) The slowing-down thread comes up from time to time on Jesus Creed and resonates with my own intuition/illumination that God's pace is much more deliberative and gentle than our culture's breakneck speediness. A slower life allows for the "weaker" to keep up, be cared for and thrive.

I think a tension runs in us between understanding the worth of that slower pace (most of us realize that there's some incalculable gift, for example, in being able to sit down for a made-from-scratch meal and enjoy it slowly with friends and family that isn't inherent in the much more efficient fast-food drive-through scenario) and the fear of sliding into laziness, idleness and sloth. Many of us fear squandering our time and gifts because life is finite and precious and we're told to multiply our talents.

Finding the balance is hard. The writer above hits the key note in her last sentence: that what's important is following where God leads us. Frantic busy-ness can be as futile, and hence, ultimately as damaging as sloth, if what we're doing is not what we're called to do.

I am reading Barak Obama's first book, I believe called Memories of my Father. It's a good book, well written and insightful. One part resonated with me vis-a-vis the topic of busy-ness. He writes of moving back to Hawaii from Indonesia to live with his grandparents and attend a Hawaiian prep school.

In the years since he has left them, he writes, his grandparents have in subtle ways given up on life. His grandfather (and his grandparents are probably in their early fifties) keeps up with a job selling insurance that he really doesn't like and isn't suited to and his grandmother goes to work every day at the bank, when she'd rather be a housewife, baking and volunteering at the library. His grandparents are dissatisfied, bickering. They've abandoned their dreams and accepted the status quo: a nice-enough apartment, enough money, security, predictability and safety. But the young Barak senses and is disturbed by their underlying misery. I think Thoreau would see them as living lives of quiet desperation.

The few sentences in which Obama conveys this information brought back my own parents and how they too, at a certain point, just gave up. There was a great deal of activity and hope when my younger brothers and sisters were preschoolers, and a great deal of excitement and enthusiasm as my mother pursued her dream of getting a college degree. There was some excitement or hope as my parents purchased a bigger house in Howard County, and perhaps some excitement for about a year when my mother started with a government job.

But at some point, my parents gave up, went to work every day, came home bored, and plopped in front of the television set, day after day, night after night. To this day, I have an aversion to television. It made me sad to see talented people give up on real life, awakened life, and this has driven me to strive for a different and less empty sort of life. I think this has helped me to embrace Olney: it will be harder, but it offers meaning.

I want to say that I think people can spend all day at work, if their jobs are where God means them to be, either to earn money or to serve him more directly, then come home and watch television and have lives filled with joy and meaning. What bothered me was not the outward circumstance of my parents; pattern of living as much as their overall evident dissatisfaction. I felt bad for them. I knew they were children of immigrants and in my mother's case, an immigrant herself, and that they were children of the Depression. Money and secure incomes were very, very important and they'd watched their own parents sacrifice for them. Both my grandmothers were cleaning ladies, as were many of the old aunts and female cousins, and they did these low-status jobs so their sons and nephews and grandsons could go to college and have a better life (and marry the daughters in the community, giving them a better life). But my parents sacrificed everything --their very selves -- for money. I knew that, according to their lights, they were doing what they felt they were supposed to be doing, and that if it didn't bring them happiness, they didn't know what else to do. So they gave up. Bought lottery tickets. Dreamed vaguely of --what else? -- having the money not to work.

So can we say that idleness, laziness and sloth might be defined as not doing that which God calls us to do? That, ironically, that idleness can masquerade as busy-ness and hard work, when in fact, that work is keeping us from the harder, albeit probably slower, work that God is calling us to do?

Anyway, I struggle with the urge to busy-ness versus the deeper voice that usually says slower is better. And I don't want to sound harsh towards people who are doing the best they can. In some ways, people who sacrifice their very selves for duty need to be honored and not criticized. None of this is easy.

Jane Austen and miscellany

What's my favorite Jane Austen novel? I love Persuasion, but my favorite is Sense and Sensibility, which is not her best, I know, I know! I also love Pride and Prejudice, and have spent a lot of time struggling with Mansfield Park, so that I know it very well.

Roger is concerned that I'm losing interest in religion by blogging about Jane Austen. Nothing could be further from the case!

In fact, this morning I went with the First Day students to a three-hour service at Israel Baptist Church. It was a rousing African-American-style worship. The women wore the most beautiful hats. It was about as different from Quakerism as you can get and a treat to experience.

We continue to sort through the basement, which has the advantage of being about 30 degrees cooler than the rest of the house. We found a box of stuff we moved here 13 years ago and never opened. That will be part of the yard sale. Roger also brought a van load of stuff to the dump. As I may have said before, the overhead of keeping stuff changes when you have to move it: for example, I had about 20 spare gift boxes in the basement but there was no way I was going to move them to Barnesville, so out they went.

I am keeping the faith that we will find a renter, Sophie's situation will work out and somehow we'll arrive with our furniture in Barnesville at the appointed time. And praying that the price of crude oil doesn't inflate to $150.00 a barrel by July, as some are predicting. If so, that will make driving a moving van of furniture to Barnesville cost a small fortune. I look back with longing on the wonderful days of just a year ago, when I had no idea what the price of crude was. And as I keep saying to myself, (leaving aside the personal inconvenience to *moi!*) if spiking gas prices really do cause some changes, such as widespread use of public transportation, that would be a good thing.

I fantasize about a country in which we transport ourselves and our goods in new ways. We gently float down rivers to get from point A to point B. We travel by train. Small towns that were once fueled by train traffic are revitalized. We use the streetcar to get to work and buy our houses based on proximity to the streetcar line. This use of public transportation has the effect of bringing us together as communities, and helps the have nots and the marginalized join the larger society. The threat of global warming begins to fade. Sounds like the New Jerusalem, huh?

But as long as I'm fantasizing, I might as well get back to Jane Austen, who at least incorporated a lurking dark side into her fictions.

What is your favorite Jane Austen? And why? Maybe I'll explain my Sense and Sensibility preference in another post.

On Atheists

Below is a recent exchange from The Jesus Creed Blog, edited slightly to remove cryptic references. What do you think of it? Does every spiritual community need an atheist to keep it honest?

“I feel a closeness and kinship to anyone who struggles to know God.”

Right with you there.

And I feel a similar kinship with devout atheists and anyone actively seeking to discredit spirituality, for I see the work of the Spirit in them - they just don’t know it yet.

But the in-between stuff, the comfort zones - that’s not interesting to me. Spirit is fluid and disruptive.

In his Letters from Prison, Bonhoeffer shared something of great importance,

“I often ask myself why a ‘Christian instinct’ often draws me more to the religionless people than to the religious, but which I don’t in the least mean with any evangelizing intention, but, I might almost say, “in brotherhood.” While I’m often reluctant to mention God by name to religious people – because that name somehow seems to me here not to ring true, and I feel myself to be slightly dishonest (it’s particularly bad when others start to talk in religious jargon; I then dry up almost completely and feel awkward and uncomfortable) – to people with no religion I can on occasion mention him by name quite calmly and as a matter of course…”

Another personal hero, A.W. Tozer, said something that seems equally appropriate to this conversation,

“if someone can talk you into being a Christian, someone better can talk you out of it.”

Comment by John L — May 10, 2008 @ 10:27 am
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John L, that’s one of my favorite passages in LPP by DB. I, too, feel tremendous kinship with atheists, agnostics and those who “seek to discredit” spirituality. I used to say that every spiritual community needs an atheist to keep it honest.


Comment by Julie — May 10, 2008 @ 10:52 am
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Julie: I have come over the past year or so to just accept the mystery and uncertainty and try to avoid absolutisms. Not because there are no absolutes or truth but because I’ll never have any sort of certain grasp of it. And may not be meant to. It does not mean I don’t believe or have a sense of what I must do to live it out. Since I am indeed no expert on scripture, it was kind of a relief to know others that are had some similar thoughts. And JC and EW has supplied me with just that…knowledgable folks who don’t shame me for asking and wrestling around with questions such as the one that started this thread.

I read this two days ago. It was written by Evelyn Underhill: “Perfect clearness in religion often really means just shallowness, for, being what we are, we cannot expect to get eternal life into sharp focus.” And in the next paragraph: “It is also true there are moments in life of communion when the soul DOESN’T wish to see, to fully comprehend….It is not in our comprehension, but in God’s will, that our peace abides.”

I think I am rediscovering the peace she is talking about. Only this time, it feels as though it has dug in so much deeper, like a dandelion root, penetrating further into my soul.


Comment by Nancy — May 10, 2008 @ 11:49 am

The dialogue above challenges me to see the seeker in the atheist, agnostic and non-theist, and to love that person. I am often moved by the generosity of the Jesus Creed blog community.

Shane Claiborne: Comfort becomes Uncomfortable

In Chapter 4 of The Irresistible Revolution, Shane returns from India to work and study at Wheaton and Willow Creek Church. He experiences culture shock as he makes an abrupt transition from lepers and the dying to wealthy white Americans. In this chapter, he "longs" for more contact between the rich and the poor, and for each to see the face of Christ in the other. He believes more interaction between rich and poor will end poverty.

Certainly many groups, such as the Church of the Savior, have organized, in part, around putting rich and poor together. Claiborne yearns for the peaceable kingdom, a yearning that permeates the Bible.

One "comfort" he discusses is Willow Creek's refusal to hang crosses because crosses are not "seeker sensitive" or comfortable to people who may have been wounded by earlier church experiences.

He writes: "I fear that when we remove the cross, we remove the central symbol of the nonviolence and grace of our Lover. If we remove the cross, we are in danger of promoting a very cheap grace. Perhaps it should make us uncomfortable." In light of the Quakers' shedding of earthly symbols, what do you think of Claiborne's comments?

Catholicism: Defender of the rational?

Below are excerpts from two intriguing Washington Post op-ed pieces today about the Pope. (Note: For all that I write about Catholicism, I am not and never have been Catholic.) It sounds to me as if the Pope, Shane Claiborne and Quakers might have a lot in common:

"Any tendency to treat religion as a private matter must be resisted," [the Pople] told the country's Catholic bishops on Wednesday. "Only when their faith permeates every aspect of their lives do Christians become truly open to the transforming power of the Gospel."

That is a demanding and unsettling standard for the right and the left alike. Benedict asked a pointed question: "Is it consistent for practicing Catholics to ignore or exploit the poor and the marginalized, to promote sexual behavior contrary to Catholic moral teaching, or to adopt positions that contradict the right to life of every human being from conception to natural death?"

This is the thinking of a communitarian counseling against radical individualism. "In a society which values personal freedom and autonomy," he said, "it is easy to lose sight of our dependence on others as well as the responsibilities that we bear towards them. . . . We were created as social beings who find fulfillment only in love -- for God and for our neighbor." It is this attitude that Benedict described as "countercultural." Dionne, April 18, 2007


I think it can't be said too often that radical individualism is NOT countercultural. It may have been in 1970, but not any more.

And more:

First, despite charges of dogmatism, the church is the main defender of reason in the modern world. It teaches the possibility that moral truth can be known through reflection and argument. It criticizes what Pope Benedict XVI has called the "dictatorship of relativism" -- a belief "that does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires." "Being an adult," says Benedict, "means having a faith which does not follow the waves of today's fashions or the latest novelties."

Secularism has traditionally taught that human beings will eventually outgrow religious conviction and moral absolutism -- that skepticism is evidence of maturity. Benedict contends that modern men and women, unguided by reasoned moral beliefs, turn toward adolescent self-involvement. Their intellectual growth is stunted. In a world where all moral claims are seen as equally true and equally false -- the world, for example, of the modern university -- human conscience is reduced to biology or prejudice. Moral behavior may continue to ride in grooves of socialization or genetics, but moral assertions are fundamentally arbitrary -- always trumped by a two-word response: "Says you."

By asserting that the human mind can grasp moral truth, Catholicism also defends the reliability of reason against the superstitions of our time.

And this is important for a very practical reason: because a belief in human rights is also a moral conviction. Catholicism teaches that relativism and a purely material view of man have disturbing social consequences. "The criterion of personal dignity," wrote Pope John Paul II, "which demands respect, generosity and service -- is replaced by the criterion of efficiency, functionality and usefulness: others are considered not for what they 'are,' but for what they 'have, do and produce.' This is the supremacy of the strong over the weak."

Gerson, April 18, 2008

What do you think?

Shane Claiborne: Intro to Irresistible Revolution

In his introduction to Irresistible Revolution, Claiborne lays out a familiar dualism or stereotype: on the one hand the Christian who focuses on the afterlife with little interest in addressing the suffering of this world, and, on the other hand, the social activist who is only interested in changing the material world, with little concern for the life of the spirit.

Claiborne identifies himself with what we might call the third or emerging church way: as a deeply faith-filled Christian whose faith motivates him to help build the Kingdom of God in this world.

“Many of us are refusing to allow distorted images of our faith to define us,” he writes. That's a terrific line, I think.

He says he doesn’t fit into old liberal/conservative boxes. He doesn’t like labels. He does, however, identify himself with postmoderns, who are interested in religious experiences and stories, rather than religious doctrine or political ideology.

“The time has come ... for a new kind of Christianity, a new kind of revolution,” he says.

What this might look like gets spelled out in the rest of the book.

An aside: In his author’s note he writes that his goal is to speak truth in love. He teases us with his struggle over whether to write this book and why he chose Zondervan as his publisher, but never explains this.

Claiborne understands that he is speaking to an audience for whom the word “Christian” may be tainted. He wants to wrest back the term from the zealots, the rule makers, the heaven-only-after-death crowd.

This interests me. I’ve certainly known people who see how some (not all) Christians behave (narrow-minded, judgmental, and hypocritical) and thus recoil from calling themselves Christians because they don’t want to be identified with that group. Others, like Claiborne, assert: I’m a Christian and I’m not like that. I’m a different kind of Christian, and people like me are out there and growing in numbers.

The question: Should we move away from calling ourselves Christians because over time different groups have hijacked the term and abused it or should we claim the term (and the rich tradition of good behind it that includes Francis of Assisi, John Woolman and other selfless followers of Christ) and try to rightly represent it to the world? Would Claiborne resonate with you more if he didn’t identify himself, boldly, as a Christian? Is he OK because he calls himself not only a Christian but a radical? Would he lose credibility if he tried to deny his Christian heritage?