You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
A lifetime of Quaker practice and inquiry comes to play in the reflections of Stillwater. The essays are submitted in all due humility, even as reminders to myself. Still, they’re open to all as an invitation.
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For these essays and more, visit Thistle/Flinch editions.
The kids raise a valid point when they notice how much we teach them about Quakers back then – but what about now?
Yes, what about NOW!
We need to get our act more together and acknowledge many of the remarkable ways we continue to witness today, usually in individual callings that deserve more support from the rest of us. So maybe the kids’ question can help us better focus on our greater purpose.
I’d like us to proclaim more of the courageous work of Friends internationally, too – I can think of examples in Cuba and Kenya in our own time.
Not all of the action involves peace and forgiveness issues, either.
Consider, too, two points from a visit to an Evangelical Friends Church on the other end of the Quaker spectrum from my own Meeting:
“Is Jesus Christ going to be exalted and praised?”
Her shocked look haunts me, considering the big Quaker gathering where I’m headed. I think, Yes, but in ways you wouldn’t recognize.
Also, humbly, as another realizes from one difficult exchange with a customer at her business previously that week: “I may be the only Jesus they’ll see.”
Now we’re talking business.
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For similar thoughts, check out Religion Turned Upside Down.
Decades ago, faced with a question of just what Friends believe, I embarked on an exploration that might provide a more inclusive answer than “Some believe this …” or “Most do that …”
To the surprise of many, the Religious Society of Friends does have a rich underlying theology, one so radical our First Publishers of Truth (one of the original names for the Quaker movement) couldn’t voice it in its fullness in the earliest years before settling into a system of practice rather than fully pursuing its intellectual implications.
Call it an alternative Christianity if you will, but even Friends need to understand its dimensions.
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For more, check out my essays, Religion Turned Upside Down.
You know the disclaimer, “Any resemblance of the characters to real people living or dead …” Something along the lines of purely unintentional.
But let’s be frank. The fiction is that you can create a character without having someone real in front of you, somewhere in your past or present. No, you need flesh and blood somewhere. Anything else would be a caricature.
It’s a special problem when you’re composing in a semi-autobiographical vein. You’re trying to be true to the dictum, Write about what you know. The details, especially.
(Oh? What, then, makes it fiction? Other than changing a few dates?)
Admittedly, the personalities work best when you take your inspiration and abstract it, so that a real individual would no longer recognize himself or herself – or those who were no way involved will imagine they, themselves, were.
And, by way of further confession, I’ll note that my most recent outings have led me to new characters lacking immediate introductions for me – but I’ll know them when I meet them if I haven’t already come across them here and there in pieces.
But back to the argument at hand.
I have one character, Nita, who runs through four of my five Hippie Trails novels and is a major character in the new one I’m writing, set years later. She was inspired by impressions I had of a friend’s girlfriend – or more accurately, mostly his impressions conveyed to me at the time – as I sat down to draft a half-dozen years or so later. She becomes a catalyst for much that happens around her.
In reality, we all drifted away.
And then, a few years ago, I met her again.
Nothing like I’d remembered. Or the idealized character in my fiction, now infused with another two or three people I’ve met. The lines blur.
I can say this person never did X, Y, or Z, unlike the character. Or that these two worked together on a controversial project or became known for certain accomplishments. In fact, she doesn’t resemble the other one at all, not anymore, if she ever did.
Still, it’s an eerie feeling. Something other than deja vu. Something still spurring gratitude for the inspiration.
For more on the series, click here.
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In the buildup of national elections, once again a major influence remains the elephant in the room. I’m referring to the legacy – make that plural, legacies – of the hippie outburst, especially in contrast to those on the Vietnam war side of the divide.
The wounds and tensions haven’t gone away. Just look at the continuing proliferation of POW-MIA black flags across the landscape, on one side.
For the other, the lines are much more hazy yet festering. As I’ve been arguing, hippies came – and still come – in all varieties and degrees, and likely nobody ever fit what’s become the media stereotype. With the end of the military draft, the movement lost a crucial motivating force and focusing definition.
Complicating the situation was the distancing many youths on the antiwar side felt when it came to politics. With its support of the military at the time, liberal politics were tainted with outdated Cold War ideologies like those of the conservative side. For hippies, radical was the label of honor. And the Democratic Party base of the left was splintered as its youthful potential allies had nowhere to turn or direct their forces in the political arena.
The horror meant going from a hawkish LBJ administration to one of Richard Nixon.
Fast-forward now to the present American landscape. Gone are the grandparents and parents of many of the now senior baby boomers – the core of the hippie movement versus the older generations. Yet political candidates still tiptoe around many of the reality issues, beginning with marijuana and other illicit substances, as if they’re too hot to touch. Let’s get real. Want to talk about litmus tests?
As we look at candidates, ask where each stands on a scale of continuing issues from the hippie stream. I find it enlightening.
Well, we have Bernie running straight true to the cause. Hillary, more cautiously so. But on the right? Let me suggest being wary of anyone in the pro-war camp who hasn’t served. Period. As for other life experiences?
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All of this returns me to my Hippie Trails series of novels. I’d love for you to come along. Just click here.
While walking to Quaker Meeting one Sunday morning, I heard a familiar hymn from my childhood wafting from the open doors at St. Mary’s. About a block later, still humming along, I realized it was the Protestant hymn, “Faith of Our Fathers.”
Well, I thought it was a Protestant hymn, especially now that this music is as likely to be heard in American Catholic services as in the mainstream Protestant ones, which have been drifting toward the newer pop-influenced praise songs. (A musically literate friend, by the way, dubs the rocking chants the Rupture songs.)
Imagine my surprise in learning the hymn in question was written to commemorate the English Catholics martyred in the schism that created the Church of England!
Either way, the questions remain, Whose father? And which faith?
And, as a digression seen in genealogy, we can add that it’s often the mother’s faith that’s followed.
Still, any way you want to look at this, I think it reflects a widespread sense of an earlier “golden age” of faith. Early Quakers, for instance, insisted that they weren’t intent on reforming Christianity, but rather restoring it to a richness from “before the great darkness of apostasy that set upon the church,” something I’d deduced meant from before the first Nicene Council.
And, for balance, many later Quakers looked and still look to the upheavals of that first generation or two of the Society of Friends as a golden era of faithful devotion, something a closer reading of history will challenge.
Now that image of the early church has in turn been challenged in my reading of Richard E. Rubenstein’s When Jesus Became God, which focuses on the tribulations leading up to the Nicene Council and then flowing out of it.
The fact that both major sides in this confrontation were so violent, often as roving mobs, continues to rattle me, along with their allegiance to priests and bishops and the secular power those clergy already carried, even when Christianity itself was at odds with the Roman empire.
More subtle is the emerging schism between the Greek-speaking Christians of the eastern Mediterranean, with their complexity of thought and love of philosophical speculation, in contrast to the more action-oriented Latin-speaking Christians to the west, who lost much of the subtlety of the debate. Already, the tensions between the metropolitan bishops, or theoretically equal “popes,” of the eastern Mediterranean sea and Rome were mounting. If Rubenstein is right, the schism between the Eastern Orthodox churches and the Roman Catholics was taking shape even before the Nicene Council, no matter how later history records the tragic events.
All of this leaves me asking just when the church moved from synagogues and home-based circles into a priestly class abetted by passionate mobs in the streets.
As Rubenstein repeats, there came a point when Jews were no longer part of the discussion but were rather persecuted.
Now, let us consider. Could that be when “the dark night of apostasy” arose?
Seeing radical religion continued through an elder-and-student succession over the generations also sets it apart from the wider society. In practice, it also invokes a circle of learning, all working together.
Sometimes, as in monasteries, the circle receives support from the wider society. At other times, it is based in circles of families whose identity somehow stands apart from the wider society. Upholding those values requires passing the teachings and practices down through the families.
This has been the history of the Jewish people, for starters, the preservation of a unique vision of justice and philanthropy, a critical stance from the mainstream, the independent role of prophecy in which political and social rulers are placed under a more absolute authority, monotheism rather than polytheism.
We see it, too, to some extent in minority and ethnic communities as they attempt to maintain their unique identities and cultures.
The Amish, of course, stand out in America as they pursue this.
One of the complications is that it can lead to a relatively small gene pool when it comes to finding a spouse.
In the Church of the Brethren, the annual sessions, which alternated between the East Coast and the Midwest, were often followed by marriage announcements. In other words, it was the place to go if you were looking. The shared values heightened the chances for a successful union, we can suppose.
For Quakers, the boarding schools allowed for some wider mixing than one would find in the home village. Still, the lines could tangle in time, even with a strict ban on first-cousin marriages. I remember a conversation with one young couple who told me they were also third cousins or some such. Don’t think it was aunt and uncle, but it seemed that complicated at the time.
Maybe that’s why I wasn’t shocked by the complex, tangled family lines presented in Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex or even the incest. (As others have noted, the reason the incest taboo is so universal is simply that the practice has likewise been so universal.)
In the novel, persecution leads to brutal oppression and massacre. The generations are torn apart. And then, somehow, they continue. What shocks most is the violence and hatred and related moral failures of the more “civilized” ships that fail to come to the rescue of innocent victims. But that returns us to thoughts of the wider society, doesn’t it.
Here’s a quote I’ve long treasured:
The statement commonly heard in some circles, “All religions lead to the same goal,” is the result of fantastically sloppy thinking and no practice.
It’s by a not-yet-30 Gary Snyder, “now making it in Japan” as the contributor’s blurb proclaims, where he’d gone to immerse himself in Zen Buddhism. I love the youthful bravura, not just “slopping thinking” but “fantastically sloppy.” And, of course, I totally agree with his conclusion that all religions don’t lead to the same goal, much less arise from the same promptings.
His very next sentence, though, continues to jolt me:
It is good to remember that all religions are nine-tenths fraud and are responsible for numerous social evils.
Ouch! Remember, he’s already deep in what would be years of Zen study in Japan and he’s aware of social evils in even that track? And fraud? Despite the many shortcomings I could cite in Quaker action past and present, “social evils” and “fraud” do not come up on my radar, even acknowledging the years when entertainment was taboo. As for the ashram? Well, I’m discovering much I didn’t see at the time.
Still, it’s that one-tenth that redeems the rest, the three elements Snyder values at the conclusion of the essay:
… contemplation (and not by use of drugs), morality (which usually means social protest to me), and wisdom …
The essay – “Note on the Religious Tendencies,” originally published in 1959 in Liberation magazine and republished a year later as “Notes from Kyoto” in Seymour Krim’s The Beats anthology (“Raw, penetrating stories, poems and social criticism by Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and many others” – Snyder was not yet famous) has not reappeared in his later collections, as far as I’m aware. I am curious if it’s merely been overlooked or if he’s rather backpedaled from its brashness. I still love to reflect on it, though.
“Social protest,” I might add, for me comes in traditions that challenge the conventions of the larger society at large. Think Amish, for instance. Just living, that is, as a witness.
A statement by the Roman Catholic chaplain during a coffee table conversation back in my freshman year of college has stuck with me: “It’s easy to be ecumenical when you’re all losing members.” Remember, that was back in the ’60s, before the real declines kicked in.
At the time, I’d recently abandoned the mainstream Protestant teachings of my childhood and anything else that smacked of religion. It would be another five or six years before I’d venture into anything vaguely spiritual, and that would be by way of the physical exercises known as Hatha Yoga as they led on into meditation and then the monastic life of the ashram.
(Ecumenical? I may have jettisoned the teachings, but I was still a tad scandalized by the fact the chaplain smoked cigars, something that was definitely taboo among the clergy I’d known.)
One of the lessons of daily practice in ashram was the importance of upholding a tradition and delving ever deeper into it rather than importing from others. I remember Swami’s negative reaction when I introduced some Hindu chants that didn’t come down through our line. Sometimes, too, we’d have visitors who were essentially hopping from one yoga ashram or Zen center or Tibetan temple or otherwise exotic circle to the next, the way a tourist might “do” Europe. We were told to be polite but not expend too much energy on them, sensing their desire was basically superficial or shallow.
Over the years I’ve come to appreciate the unique aspects of different communities of faith practice. In each tradition, to go deep requires focus – and no one can do everything, much less do it well. “Ecumenical,” to my ears, has usually conveyed a sense of generic blandness, a reach for the lowest common denominator, an erosion of something.
But not always. Sometimes, especially in smaller localities like mine, it’s been a means of sharing resources for action. The soup kitchen and food pantry are two examples, along with the monthly gatherings of the clergy for mutual support.
An annual Thanksgiving service is a highlight, too, welcoming all faiths to participate. I’ve come to see it as a festival of prayer and music, along with a dash of Quaker silence or holy dance by an Indonesian congregation. It can be a sampler of what each of us does best – and perhaps even aspects we don’t get in our own traditions. If anything, I hope each of us comes away with a renewed appreciation for what we do uniquely as part of a broader mosaic.
Regulars at the Red Barn no doubt are aware I’m among those who feel religion is important. Not just any religion, even though it can be a starting point. And not exclusively mine, no matter my reasons for touting its virtues.
My perspective, to be candid, values the prophetic stream as it runs through the centuries of the Bible, along with an alternative Christianity that emphasizes the Holy Spirit and practice based in small circles with elders and personal experience. As I said, not just any religion, no matter how much my understanding has drawn on yoga and Zen and Tibetan Buddhism or Native American wisdom. Admittedly, the elements I hold high can be found outside the Judeo-Christian mainstream, and much I’ve learned from them has informed my own faith journey.
In reflecting on ecumenical sharing, I might also point to ways contrasting faith communities can occur within a denomination. Ways Irish Catholics might differ from, say, Italian or Brazilian. In the Quaker world, not everyone meets in silent worship – many have pastors and choirs, and we might note there are more Friends in Nairobi than in Philadelphia.
One remarkable presentation of this is found in a book I received for Christmas from a future Episcopal priest. Several years would pass before I actually got around to reading it, but the impressions last.
Rodger Kamenetz’ 1994 The Jew in the Lotus initially struck me as a cutesy title with its twist on the Tibetan Buddhist chant, Aum Mane Padme Hum, which is sometimes translated as the jewel in the lotus. But the narrative is more a discovery of faith through personal encounter. Beginning as a secular, or non-observant, Jew, the author is invited to be part of a delegation who will meet with the Dalai Lama to discuss their faith. He seems to be there purely as the neutral observer. In the journey and its preparations, though, Kamenetz discovers how little he knows about his Jewish legacy and how radically different the practices of the other members of the party could be. His eyes are opened to new ranges of thought and feeling. What the Dalai Lama most wants to learn is ways his followers might survive apart from their homeland – something Jews have been doing for millennia. But that doesn’t prevent some lively discussion of esoteric teachings about dakini, as he sees them, and thousands of angels everywhere, as some of Kamenetz’ companions experience them, or of Kabala, too – things new to Kamenetz.
Religion, then, can lead to wider ways of viewing the world around us. There’s more to life than materialism or empirical thought can embrace. How, after all, can you discuss love or hope or selfless service from a concrete reality basis?
Or, as St. Paul observed, trying to speak of these can easily sound like folly.
So who’s to say there aren’t angels dancing in the snowflakes? Or on the tip of my beloved’s nose? Sounds like a good start for a poem, if you ask me.
Jnana's Red Barn 