A prayer of passwords

From a list recently found in a drawer:

lovelife
incarnation
jerusalem
focus
innerlight
makepeace
livelove
peacenow
loveoneanother
rememberme
truelove
walkinlight
singforjoy

Meme book tag

OK, Rich. I will continue the meme -- the first I've ever been tagged with -- but I just can't find it in myself to continue the tagging. Partly because so many of those bloggers I read regularly enough that I would consider tagging have already been tagged, and partly because I don't know how! Do you actually have to leave a comment on their blogs? I never kept chain letters going, either, but I still don't take responsiblity for when the truck ran over grandma and the puppy. . . . But it still seems a little much to me. Tag yourself.

The instructions are:

1. Pick up the nearest book of 123 pages or more. No cheating!
2. Find page 123
3. Find the first 5 sentences
4. Post the next 3 sentences
5. Tag 5 people

Actually, there are two books equidistant from where I sit. Here's the sixth, seventh, and eighth sentences from the first:

Three hundred women and some men came. A Declaration of Principles [sic]* was signed at the end of the meeting by sixty-eight women and thirty-two men. It made use of the language and rhythm of the Declaration of Independence: When it course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to assume among the people of the earth a position different from that they have hitherto occupied . . . .

* The document was actually captioned A Declaration of Sentiments


From, A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn, discussing the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, an event that has an obvious Quaker connection.

Here's the other:

2. Load the paper in the machine. See "Loading Paper" on page 22.
3. Ensure that the proper paper source is selected.

From, Canon Office All-in One Pixma MP830 User's Guide.

My life in six words? Impossible!

Lovely Wife and I took a walk this morning -- it's her birthday. We stopped in a little gift-bookstore and I fell in love with a little book I found there, Not Quite What I was Planning, published by the on-line magazine Smith. Inspired by (the possibly apocryphal ) Ernest Hemmingway's famous six-word story, "For sale: baby shoes. Never worn," the book is a collection of six-word memoirs submitted by what must have been thousands of readers and writers. They range from the cute to the funny to the poignant. Here are a few of my favorites:

Born, childhood, adolescence, adolescence, adolescence, adolescence.

It's like forever, only much shorter.

Tequila. Amnesia. Coincidence? I think not.

It was embarrassing, so don't ask.

Followed white rabbit. Became black sheep.

Thank God I lived through Vietnam.

I'm ten, and have an attitude.

Never really finished anything, except cake.

Did I miss a deadline again?

Many risky mistakes, very few regrets.

Started small, grew, peaked, shrunk, vanished.

Thank god the suicide attempt failed.

Complacency

John Punshon writes on page 61 of his Encounter with Silence: "Once adopted, Quaker worship can be dangrous. Its characteristic sin is complacency." I know I've also mused here on the difference between contentedness (which I think is a virtue) and complacency (which is not), but I can't find the link to that post at the moment.

Anyway, I was moved by the wisdom and truth in this monolog in the Arlo & Janis cartoon strip yesterday. (You can see it here.) Arlo is talking over the breakfast table to Janis in four panes:

We really are lucky when you think abou it!

We have food, a nice home, a kid in college! We have each other -- and our health!

Yes sir, we should look at the big picture.

Or would that be the little picture?

It reminds me of another paradoxical dichotomy I may have written about here before. When Paul Wellstone died in October 2002, a lot of us began to wear green buttons that quoted him: "Stand up! Keep fighting!"

I remember worshiping at Morningside Meeting in New York City shortly thereafter. I was wearing the green button and I was moved to say: "I would like another button for my other lapel, a red one, maybe, that reads: "Sit down! Stop fighting!"

The Christian life is in constant tension between being simultaneously prophet and peacemaker, and I need to have both reminders to keep that tension in its proper balance.

Quaker anarchism?

My Friend Phil Grove posted the following comment on my post the other day:

Glad to see you writing again! About the 1640s -- I'm very curious about the fact that the anarchist Diggers, led by Gerrard Winstanley, arose in England at about the same time as the Quakers, and that Winstanley later became a Quaker. It seems to me that Quakerism has an affinity with certain forms of anarchism, and that anarchism should be discussed more by Quakers. Are there other historical connections between Quakerism and anarchists?

I'm not qualified to give a definitive answer, especially about the Diggers, but I do have some observations and book knowledge of early Quakers that may be helpful.

First, it's best to be very cautious before using a term like "anarchism" which became popular in the 19th century to categorize someone in the 17th century. The Wikipedia entry on anarchism records the first use of the term as being by Royalists during the English Civil War to describe people like the Levellers, Diggers and Quakers who they perceived as fomenting social unrest. (Actually, the Wikipedia entry says "fomenting social disorder", but I would deny that at least for the Quakers: they were not promoting disorder but rather a gospel order that merely seemed disorderly to those vested in the current arrangement.) There is little doubt that these groups (and remember that labels don't denote terribly precise categories and were all given as terms of derision by their opponents) radically opposed the current regime, but that doesn't mean that they were in principal opposed to any human government or outwardly coercive authority.

It is especially hard to tag the anarchist badge on the Quakers. Fox more than once accepted that the biblical understanding that the magistrate had a God-given role to protect the innocent and punish evil doers. See his letter quoted here.

Most of Fox's criticism of the government was that it had perverted its Godly duty: it punished the righteous (like the Quakers) and protected the guilty (like their tormenters). So he wasn't against good government; he was against bad government, and they understood the distinction. Quakers were well-known for their active role in court proceedings and lobbying in Parliament which I take to be a confirmation of the legitimacy of government as an institution, if not an endorsement of its current occupant or policies.

Furthermore, while George Fox and the early Friends might fairly be called anarchists in their critique of the organized churches of their day, Fox and Margaret Fell showed a very practical and realistic understanding of the propensity for even the Children of Light to run beyond their guide and to confuse their ego (or libido) with the will of God. This is why they set up the system of monthly, quarterly, and yearly meetings for discipline that enabled the movement to survive and thrive during the persecutions of 1660-1689. These meetings did not use coercive force or violence, of course, but they did function as an effective church government to maintain unity and peace among its members. Not all Friends approved of this kind of church government and some found it to stifle movings of the Spirit. But it is hard for me to imagine the Quaker movement having survived in any recognizable form without this structure. (Of course, when the structure lost its juice and became calcified, it led to the divisions among Friends in the 19th century, a disaster from which we have not yet recovered.)

Finally, the enthusiasm with which the Quakers joined William Penn in establishing Pennsylvania is hard to square with any kind of principled anarchism inherent to the Quaker experience, at least in the early years. Penn's basic philosophy, which I take to be consistent with Quaker thinking in general, was that "governments depend on men rather than men upon governments, because if the men are good, the government cannot be bad; or if it is, they will cure it; but if men are bad, government will never be good." (See here for more detail on Penn's Holy Experiment.) Penn's Experiment lasted about 75 years -- at least, that's how long Quakers participated in the Assembly. Whether you consider the Experiment a failure or merely a limited success, there is probably a lot of material from that era that would support a more anarchist-leaning critique of the legitimacy government and of Christians ever participating in it.

What I know about the Diggers leads me to think of them as being animated more by a radically egalitarian or communist (to use other anachronistic terms) spirit, not as anarchists opposed to any human government per se. For example, their concerted action in digging up the common lands for food production seems to me to have required a good deal of organization and discipline. (Perhaps their premature dissolution indicates that they didn't have enough of either.)

All that said, I think that Quakers have always carried an anti-authoritarian gene in their DNA -- the affinity you're probably talking about -- and they probably share this gene with others who would characterize themselves as anarchists, or who would be so characterized by their enemies.

I understand that there is likely be a degree of congruence and overlap between Quaker understanding of the liberty afforded them by the gospel and what is generally known as Christian anarchism, taking care not to confuse anarchism with antinominalism (or anarchism with anarchy). A church whose governor is an invisible but living spirit may appear to be anarchic, but to the religious anarchist that's only an illusion. (I would like to concede here that a deeply loving community can live peacefully and responsibly without external coercive based solely upon the reason and strength of its participants and doesn't need the assistance of a Living God to bind it together, but I'm not sure I believe that it's true [not that very many religious communities have done better over the years]).

On an almost completely different note, writing this reminded me of John Sayles' great short story, The Anarchist's Convention, which I believe I may have referred to before in this blog. I first heard it read by Jerry Stiller on NPR's Selected Shorts more than 15 years ago and I'd love to hear it again.