That was Zen; this is Tao

David Plotz at his Blogging the Bible series at Slate.com has a good post today. He's always funny in a gentle way, but today he supplies a pun that will live in infamy. I will rebuke him not, however. Writing on the Book of Proverbs, ch 30:

Solomon wraps up his proverbial duties after 29 chapters and hands the pen off to someone named Agur. Solomon writes in a straightforward, didactic style, but Agur is elusive, preferring riddles. For example: "Four are among the tiniest on earth, yet they are the wisest of the wise; Ants are a folk without power, yet they prepare food for themselves in summer; The badger is a folk without strength, yet it makes its home in the rock; The locusts have no king, yet they all march forth in formation; You can catch a lizard in your hand, yet it is found in royal palaces." (This is less a proverb than a Zen koan. Or perhaps, since this is the Hebrew Bible we are talking about, a Zen Cohen.)

Judge Fell: Quaker liberal?

I've resumed my journey through The Beginnings of Quakerism by Willam Braithwaite that I started before the Quakerism 101 class but had laid aside for a couple of months.

Today, I was taken with this passage concerning Margaret Fell's husband, after a paragraph that noted that he would often sit in his "justice-room" with the door ajar at Swarthmore Hall to hear Quaker preaching:

Thomas Fell protected the new [Quaker] movement, but he never identified himself with it. He showed many kindnesses to Friends, and shielded them from persecution: his wife says that during his last illness he became more than usually loving to them, having been always a merciful man to God's people. But the same breadth of judgment which enabled him to appreciate the deep spirituality of Quakerism would also give him unity with true-hearted men outside the Quaker pale, and he no doubt preserved to the last the catholicity which had thrown Swarthmore open to ministers and religious people of all kinds.

The Beginnings of Quakerism at 104.

If this is accurate, then I think we can identify Judge Fell as perhaps the first Quaker liberal. As we're told, he never accepted the label of Quaker, but this brief description paints a picture of a kind of person we all know from our meetings. He is kind and protective, a minister of justice. He permitted his home to be a sanctuary to the dissenters of his day with a wide front door. He obviously had a sentimental fondness for Quakers, especially at the end of his life. We might say he shared their values, if not their identity, and was the quintessential friend of Friends. He may well have live a sanctified life.

I know I would have loved him and enjoyed his company; he's the kind of man I've always been attracted to. I would also admire his cool reserve and his "unity with true-hearted men" and "catholicity" -- he was a universalist of the best sort, accepting, non-exclusive. But more than this, I love his honesty: despite his obvious sympathy with the Quakers and other dissenters, he did not "join" the movement, but served and supported it from a different position.

Today, I imagine he'd be like one of those long-time attenders of the meeting and surprises everyone when they learn he isn't a member. His insights and wisdom would be sought out and followed. He is probably a quiet and significant financial contributer to the meeting, and perhaps has made significant witness -- perhaps a war tax resister? -- with a kind of steady, solid depth that makes him "the kind of Friend I'd like to be" to most members of the meeting. Every meeting needs men and women like this in its midst.

Nevertheless, he would be clear in his own mind he was not himself a Quaker. Perhaps he was a skeptic by temperament, constitutionally incapable of commitment. But more likely he was simply fastidious and could not in good conscience "join" the Quakers without having experienced the convicting conversion experience that was at its core. He perhaps felt like Groucho Marx who didn't want to join any club that would accept somebody like him as a member.

Today, I think we have a lot of members of our meetings who are like Judge Fell in the strength of their character and their high-mindedness, except that they do not share his scruples against claiming membership in the Quaker movement. My sense is that a great many of the beloved elders of our Society came to Friends during the pre- and post-World War II era, the cream of the progressive religious and political traditions (the New Deal and the Social Gospel) -- especially in the college-town Beanite meetings -- who were attracted to Quakerism by its "values" and by their experiences in Quaker-run projects (e.g., CPS and AFSC work camps), but who never accepted the necessity of the conviction and conversion that was the heart of the Quaker experience, though many of them were deeply "spiritual" in their own ways. They lived the lives of saints and prophets.

Initially, these newer, convinced Friends were familiar from their childhood with the biblical narrative and the Christian ethos that was common to traditional Quakers. This common religious vocabulary helped the newer and older Friends to talk with each other in meaningful ways, but for these Friends Quaker Christianity was accepted as an historical artifact rather than a defining characteristic or commitment, something incidental rather than essential to the movement. Instead of drawing their identity and role models from Abraham, Moses, David, Isaiah, Peter, Paul, or even Fox, Fell, Barclay, Penn, Pennington, Woolman, etc., they think of themselves more as heirs to the abolitionists, womens suffrigists, labor union organizers, civil rights martyrs, and peace protesters -- Quaker and non-Quaker alike.

In due time, acceptance the Bible as an important source of religious truth and authority (second only the authority of the Living God who continues to teach and instruct within our hearts) degraded into no authority and familarity with this heritage weakened. The Bible and its story and images is no longer the common tongue among liberal US Friends; it is, at best, one of many sources of sacred texts. (This is an opinion I expect Judge Fell might hold if he were among us today.)

The difference, of course, is that today, the meeting might encourage a man or woman like Judge Fell to become a formal member of the Quaker movement, despite his inability to commit to or identify with (what once was) its central tenets. It's not enough, somehow, to remain a friend and protecter and supporter of Friends because of an insignificant difference of religious opinion -- such as faith in a living God -- if it doesn't bother us, why should it bother you?

All of which creates the situation I faced recently where I was asked to preface statements I make about God to the 4-year olds I teach in First Day School (e.g., "Jesus is our great teacher" "God lives within you") with "I believe. . . " lest I indoctrinate them and thwart their individual spiritual development. When I protested that this qualification was unnecessary because "we" believe in God, I was told, "I'm a Quaker and I don't believe in God", and therefore my statement was disrespectful as well as untrue.

I don't think I would have had this problem with Judge Fell; or he with me.

Welcome back

I've learned from experience never to begin a presentation by apologizing, but for some reason I've begun a lot of my recent posts apologizing for not writing recently. So I won't, even though I've just missed the first calendar month (Feb. 2007) since I began this blog (June 2005). Here are two of the things that have kept me busy away from the blog.

Lovely Wife and I had a wonderful four-day vacation to New York in late January. Eldest Daughter and Dan-her-Man were out of town and let us stay in their beautiful apartment at 1 Main Street, Brooklyn, which is in the DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) neighborhood, right between the Brooklyn & Manhattan Bridges on the East River.

We did a lot of the typical New York tourist stuff: museums (the Cloisters, MOMA, Natural History, American Indian); a Broadway show (The Apple Tree); Times Square at night; ate in gems of restaurants; enjoyed subway musicians, like this man playing his Chinese banjo with a snake-skin head; walked the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges, etc. Our poor calves were as tight as the bridges' suspension cables from so much walking, but we loved every minute of it. (Thanks to Sister Holly for coming to care for Mother Holly and Children.)

We especially enjoyed visiting the meetinghouses of New York Yearly and 15th Street Monthly Meetings on 15th Street and Rutherford Place in Manhattan, across from Stuyvesant Park. We first went there on Friday evening to be sure we knew how to get there, and then again on Sunday morning for worship.

It was a good meeting with powerful ministry about witnessing to what we have ourselves seen, based on I John 1 ("For the life was manifested, and we have seen it, and bear witness. . . ). I especially appreciated the ministry of the Friend who reminded us that we were witnessing for our Lord (which made me wish I could remember how to sing "Who'll be a witness for my Lord? My soul'll be a witness for my lord!" [click on Play Sample]).

Afterwards, I enjoyed meeting Rich the Brooklyn Quaker (on the right) and Lorcan and learning some of the history of the meetinghouse, including how it once sheltered free blacks in its coal room during the New York draft riots of 1863 (but not, Lorcan says, as part of the pre-war Underground Railroad).

Lorcan then helpfully directed us to the former Orthodox meetinghouse that is now a synagogue on Gramercy Park. (The Orthodox meetinghouse -- of quite a different architectural style -- was sold when the two meetings merged in the 1960s.) I have now visited Morningside, Brooklyn, and 15th St meetings in New York City and have enjoyed each one.

* * * * *

Quakerism 101. Upon returning home, I started leading a 7-week Quakerism 101 class. (Session 7 was to be last night, but we cancelled it because of the snowstorm that is still blizzarding as I type.) It was the third time in as many years that I've led it, but this year I did almost all of the teaching (my co-leader acted as my support person, like an elder) and, because I chose almost all new readings than those in the Philadelphia YM course we've used before, I had a lot more preparation to do. It was time consuming, but it was a labor of love.

More so than in previous years, I presented Quakerism from more explicitly Christian perspective, emphasizing the less well understood spiritual foundation of Quakerism somewhat more than the more familiar outward signs (e.g., "silent" worship, testimonies). I told the class on the first day of my bias and that there are other perspectives on Quaker theology and history and that they were under no obligation to take my word for any of it, so I felt more free to teach it from my viewpoint without distracting qualifications or disclaimers.

There were about 30 participants, some of whom are long-time Quakers (only one of whom, though, was raised in a Quaker family, and in our meeting), others who have begun to attend more recently, a couple of teachers from Friends School, and a handful who have never attended meeting who came on the recommendation of a spouse or friend. (Several were from other meetings in town.) This range of diverse experience was a challenge, but I was pleased that attendance held up and that the large and small group discussions consistently seemed engaged and energetic.

Here's the reading list I used:
Books:
Silence and Witness: The Quaker Tradition by Michael L Birkel
Quakers in America by Thomas Hamm
Encounter with Silence by John Punshon
Essays on the Quaker Vision of Gospel Order by Lloyd Lee Wilson

Pamphlets:
Creeds and Quakers: What's Belief Got To Do With It? by Robert Griswold (Pendle Hill Pamphlet 377)
Living in Virtue, Declaring Against War: The Spiritual Roots of the Peace Testimony by Steve Smith (Pendle Hill Pamphlet 378)
Members One of Another by Thomas Gates (Pendle Hill Pamphlet 371)
The Inward Light: How Quakerism Unites Universalism And Christianity by Samuel Caldwell
George Fox's Message is Relevant for Today by Lewis Benson (New Foundation -- Publication 2) (I couldn't find a source to buy this on-line except an e-bay auction asking $30 to buy-it-now for a 12 page pamphlet [but in new condition!].)

(Thanks to Martin Kelly for suggesting Silence and Witness and to the publisher for finally putting out a more affordable paperbound edition of Quakers in America ($25 vs. $40 for the hard-bound edition.) Even though we only read excerpts from the books, this was a pretty hefty reading list and it may have been a bit much. Nevertheless, most people seemed to have read most of the readings each week.

(If I lead this course again, I would like to use Marshall Massey's remarkable essay-in-progress on doctrines, dogma, and confession of faith if it is available in print.)

I guess my bias shows in my reading list, too. I didn't realize until after I had completed it that each book (except the Benson pamphlet) was written by a contemporary, living Quaker. While this wasn't by design, it did give me an unexpected source of hope for the survival of the Gospel during these troubled times.

But what I really want to say about my experience leading this class is that there is among Friends -- longtime and new attenders alike -- a hunger for information and a systematic way to learn about and study the phenomenon of Quakerism within a framework of familiar categories so it can be compared and contrasted to other religious communities and traditions they may be familiar with. It seems that almost everyone who comes to our meeting understands pretty well how Quakerism is similar to other religious traditions, but they also want to know what makes Quakers unique and worthy of their commitment. Books can help do this, of course, but learning together, interactively, is what it feels like people want and need.

We've now had more than a hundred people in three years participate in Quakerism 101 in our meeting. Many were relatively new to the meeting, and almost all of them have continued to attend meeting regularly and have increased their commitment to it. If I may generalize from our meeting's experience to other largish FGC-affiliated meetings, the fact that so many are willing to make such a commitment to learn about what Quakerism is tells me that there is pent up demand (as economists would say) for teaching ministry in our meetings.

This is a different hunger than that which my Friend Tom is feeding with the multi-week workshops he's been leading in our meeting that have more of a spiritual formation or devotional focus, e.g. how to praying without ceasing, vocal ministry, epistles of George Fox, readings from Pennington and Barclay, etc. Those workshops are also very well attended and received and have deepended the participants' spiritual lives and commitment to the meeting. They are, I believe, ultimately more valuable than the generic Q-101 course. But both are necessary if Quakerism is to have any kind of self-identity, it seems to me.

A glimmer of gold in the night

Up late. Mind racing. Plumbing and carpentry projects. Committee meetings that need to be called. A sudden influx of work at the office. A suprising and hopeful upcoming trip to New York. Beginning of Quakerism 101 next week. My beloved's snoring. Everything but sleep.

I turn on the light and pick up the Stringfellow anthology on the nightstand I've been dipping into now and then (mostly then, recently), open it up at random, and find the following:

The Christian faith is distingished, diametrically, from mere religion in that religion begins with the proposition that some god exists; Christianity, meanwhile, is rejoicing in God's manifest presence among us. Religion describes human beings, mind you, usually sincere and honorable and intelligent ones, searching for God or, more characteristically, searching for some substitute for God -- that is, some idea of what God may be like -- or would be like -- and then worshiping that idea and surrounding that subsitution with dogma and discipline. But the gospel tells us when and how and why and where God has sought us and found us and offered to take us into God's life. . . .

In short, religion supposes that God is yet to be discovered; Christianity knows that God has already come among us. Religious speculation suspects there is God, somewhere, sometime; the gospel reports God's presence and action in this world even in those circumstances of which we are unaware. Religion suppresses the truth because the truth obviates religion.

From: William Stringfellow, Private and Public Faith, 1962, pp 14-17, reprinted in A Keeper of the Word: Selected Writings of William Stringfellow, ed. Bill Wylie Kellermann, Erdmans, 1994, pp 120-21.

Telling the stories and singing the songs

As I write this, Only Son and I are listening to a rebroadcast of Game 7 of the 1991 World Series between the Minnesota Twins and Atlanta Braves. The Twins are changing radio broadcasters this year, and the new station has been airing back-to-back all 14 games of the 1987 and 1991 World Series (with 30-second commercial breaks between innings instead of the usual 2 minutes). We've resisted listening round-the-clock (it is Christmas, after all), but we've been listening to this game from the first pitch.

Any of you who are real baseball fans will remember this game, and the series -- many believe it was the best game of the best World Series ever. The score was 0-0 through ten innings. Each team had opportunities to score but couldn't, sometimes because of spectacular fielding plays, once by an inexplicable base-running mistake. Twice late in the game each team had bases loaded with one out but hit into a double play. It was close and it was exciting.

Even though I know how the game "turned out," I'm on pins and needles. Many details I'd forgotten are coming back anew, brought out by the real-time radio announcers describing the game and the sound of the roaring crowd's surge and gasps. The fact that I know who won isn't taking away the experience of the game at all, and it really isn't the point.

Listening together with Only Son makes a difference. He was only five months old when the game was played, asleep in his mother's arms for most of it, except for being startled every couple of innings at some exciting play or another. We've reminisced about the game before, and have heard highlights of it, but this time we're listening to it together, pitch by pitch, inning by inning.

But the point of this post isn't about baseball, it's about Christmas. I know how that story turns out, too, but I never tire of retelling it, or of hearing it told. It always is alive for me, always fresh, always teaching something new, something deeper, something hidden that I'd missed before.

It's like this for all the important stories. It isn't how the story "turns out" that matters. The importance is in the telling, especially the retelling together in community where all listen together.

Here's one new insight I picked up this year. As the children get older, I've been reading more of the prophets during our Advent Sunday evenings in addition to the Matthew and Luke pasages. This year, I reached a few verses back from the Peaceable Kingdom passage of Isaiah 11 and it was like unwrapping a gift. Here's how that chapter starts:

There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse,
A branch shall grow out of his roots.
And the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him,
The spirit of wisdom and understanding,
The spirit of counsel and might,
The spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.
And his delight shall be in the fear of the Lord.

He shall not judge by what his eyes see,
or decide by what his ears hear;
but with righteousness he shall judge the poor
and decide with equity for the meek of the earth.;
and he shall smite the earth with the rod of his mouth
and with the breath of his lips he shall slay the wicked.

Righteousness shall be the girdle of his waist,
and faithfulness the girdle of his loins.

I love the spirits that rest upon the branch of Jesse, and the promise to "decide with equity for the meek of the earth." To a lawyer, this is a striking passage. The coming Messiah will not necessarily be even-handed in his application of the Law, deciding for the little guy only when the Law is on his side; the text says that he will decide for the meek, which either means that the Law is always on the side of the meek, or that the Law isn't a neutral set of principles after all but is a tool or weapon for righteousness.

And what is this about smiting the earth with the rod and slaying the wicked with his mouth and breath of his lips? And the girdles? These are amazing images, to me, and helps me understand "the fear of the Lord" in a new way.

I don't intend to meditate on the passage just now, but just to mention how telling the same story again can open new doors of understanding.

(As I was typing the last sentence, Gene Larkin hit in the winning run and the Twins won 1-0.)

* * * * *

This was a very good Christmas for singing. We sang carols during the adult education hour before meeting yesterday, and then after the Christmas Eve evening meeting for worship, this afternoon at a Catholic Charities shelter, and then again at a gathering of friends at a friend's house. The singing was vigorous and enthusiastic (even though it wasn't shape note). There is nothing that makes me feel better than singing.

* * * * *

Speaking of singing, we just watched the movie Joyeux Noel twice over the past few days, and I recommend it highly. It tells the story of Christmas Eve 1914 when German, Scot, and French soldiers met in no-man's-land and, well, fraternized (i.e., acted like brothers). The film is very nicely done with only a few over-the-top moments.

I had first heard of the incident from John McCutcheon's song Christmas in the Trenches, and again in an NPR interview with one of the last survivors of the events. (Apparently, in real life this happened at more than one place along the front. Also, a certain corporal Hitler was disgusted when he learned what happened and refused to participate.) The thing that Joyeux Noel and Christmas in the Trenches have most in common was that it was the soldiers' singing that started everything.

This does not surprise me. Singing the old songs again is a lot like retelling the old stories. It keeps alive a common memory over time, like passing a bit of genetic material from generation to generation. If singing could encourage soldiers to lay their arms down once, it can do so again.