The 353rd annual sessions of New England Yearly Meeting of Friends were held last week, and it was wonderful to be among the hundreds of Quakers of all ages who gathered at Bryant University in Rhode Island for the six-day gathering.
Since the regional yearly meetings are the top level of the Quaker system of church government, their decisions affect all of their constituent local congregations – in New England, that’s about 100, ranging from rural or small to large and urban. And since our group decisions are reached without ever taking a vote, resolving our differences when it comes to joint action can be quite an exercise. (We had several of those.)
One of the issues we did unite on was to publicly renounce what’s known as the Doctrine of Discovery, which originated in papal pronouncements that lands held by native non-Christian peoples could be claimed by Christians – a perspective that was later extended into American law. Native peoples of New England told us our support is important in their attempts to change current policies for more just outcomes, and we agreed to continue working with them on this concern.
The Bible half-hours each morning were led by Michael Birkel of Earlham College who used quotations from early Quakers to show how scriptural language shaped their thinking and tender communications to each other. What emerged was an awareness of the depth and intimacy of their experiences in times of great turmoil, even before they speak to us as well. His loving and often humorous examination of the texts and their wider meanings earns him my nomination to be the leading Quaker rabbi, if we acknowledged such.
There’s much more to yearly meeting than the sessions each summer. Throughout the year, committees meet and work, special programs are presented, youth retreats (especially) are conducted, and local meetings are visited.
But it’s always delightful to be among so many kindred souls, reconnecting with people I’ve known for decades and establishing new friendships, too. We get to meet and know visiting Friends from around the world – this time including Bolivians, Cubans, and Kenyans, who add much to our worship and global awareness. I suspect that much of the most important business occurs in informal one-on-one conversations over meals, while just sitting along the pathways through the campus, or during late nights in the dorm lounges. We’re also surrounded by children and teens, many of them zooming around on scooters or bicycles in their free time. It’s all high-energy.
Parting is always sweet sorrow, but we’re already anticipating next year’s sessions, which will be held in Vermont.
Every week? Every other week? Once a month? How often do you come to worship?
It’s a question that’s nagged at me ever since participating in my first Friends community. There I noticed a number of people who seemed to come every other week, meaning in practice we had two largely separate circles of people. A few years earlier, as part of a monastic practice, I had experienced what group mediation twice every day could do, how the energy would build up and the experience, deepen.
Early Quakers were much more insistent on attendance, including the Midweek Meeting. The Amish, on the other hand, gather every other week, using the off week to visit at a distance. In fairness, on many weekends we do have multiple activities scheduled, and three or four hours in the meetinghouse on Sunday is not uncommon.
Still, we must wonder. Are our lives so busy we haven’t enough time for worship? Or do we need a Sabbath from the labors of Meeting? My views have changed over the years. Yes, Sunday often becomes a time of catching up. But miss worship for a few weeks straight, and getting back into the rhythm and focus of Meeting becomes difficult – it’s easy to slip away. What I do know, often more in theory than practice, is the importance of Sabbath rest – especially the kind that helps us rediscover family and joyous playfulness. Something that’s quite distinct from leisure. Or even thank you and please come again. “There remains, then, a Sabbath-rest for the people of God; for anyone who enters God’s rest also rests from his own work.” Let that remain our invitation and refreshment.
It’s a rare book archive at your fingertips. The Earlham School of Religion’s Digital Quaker Collection, “a digital library containing full text and page images of over 500 individual Quaker works from the 17th and 18th centuries,” is an amazing site, allowing you free access to some very rare volumes, which you can view page by page in both their original typography and a much more readable contemporary typeface. While some of the works are Quaker classics that have been republished and are available in our meeting library, others are next to impossible to find.
Elizabeth Bathurst, for instance, is among the finest writers to delve into Quaker theology in the early years, yet remains essentially unknown except for the single, slim volume found here.
And then there’s the journal of Joseph Hoag, who had close connections to Dover and could claim to have visited every Quaker meeting in the United States. (He was hardly alone in that matter of visitation among Friends.) His recollections of riding across a field he imagined soaked in blood becomes especially chilling when you discover this was Gettysburg a half-century before the Civil War battle – a crossing accompanied by his vision of the nation rent asunder by the enormity of slavery.
The two volumes of Joseph Besse’s Sufferings (to use the much shortened title) records every Quaker known to have been persecuted in the first four decades of Friends. Not only is this a great genealogical resource, it also demonstrates where our meticulous practice of minuting our business originates. For perspective, consider that a fine of 10 pounds was also the price of three or four cows. But you don’t have to recalculate time spent imprisoned.
Rarities can also be found on other sites. The California Digital Library (archive.org), for example, has Fernando G. Cartland’s Southern Heroes or Friends in War Time, detailing the persecution of Quakers in North Carolina, especially, during the Civil War. Their witness needs to be better known.
Another treasure is a set of transcriptions of the surviving minutes of the first monthly meeting in Ireland, in Lurgan (Google “Lurgan Quaker Minutes” or go to cephafisher.net/LurganMinutes). Taken mostly from the “means” or men’s side of the business, these provide insights into the evolving sense of Friends community and reflect the importance of our tradition of minuting. How I love, too, those sessions marked “no business to report.”
To think, you can check ‘em out without having to travel anywhere!
As I said at the time, a question raised in a Quaker Life letter-to-the-editor a while back keeps nagging at me (the magazine, not the cereal). It said, essentially, that in light of all he keeps hearing and reading, he wonders if there’s still a place for a Republican like himself in the Society of Friends. (Obviously, he hasn’t seen the bumper sticker, either: Real Friends don’t let Friends vote for Republicans.)
It’s troubling on many fronts. For all of our claims of “seeing that of God in all people,” we can be pretty one-sided in our public views. Ditto for our proclamations of “inclusiveness” – we do carry a number of exclusionary issues, often subtle, and not just political. And we do know that many Friends are involved in party politics – to the best of my knowledge, all on one side of the political spectrum. In support of the letter writer, let me point out that Friends were instrumental in founding the Republican Party, and I believe the last two Quakers in Congress were GOP members. In addition, the Friends Committee on National Legislation makes an effort to cite individuals on both sides of the aisle when their votes coincide with Quaker values – for the record, you’ll see New Hampshire’s congressional members sometimes named there. I certainly don’t want us to be blind to the fact that saints and sinners can be found in all parties. To say nothing of the principle of the separation of church and state.
Besides, I’ve heard it said – not just of my Meeting – “I know what they believe in politically. I just don’t know what they believe in” – meaning religiously. That part really troubles me. I would hope that our faith experience is guiding our individual social activism, rather than being limited within it. Maybe we need to be more vocal about our spiritual roots and motivation in our witness, too. I would also like to hear more from the letter writer for his reasons for deciding to stand where he does.
I also keeping remembering a newspaper column a while back that argued an apocalyptic faith – one that believes in the immediacy of Christ – demands social activism. Thy kingdom come, as the prayer goes. And peace on earth. In these little newsletter essays, I’ve tried to steer clear of straight-out theology, but sometimes there’s no way of avoiding it. I really do believe ours is an apocalyptic faith, no matter how we define our individual religious convictions. Maybe the real reason that “politics and religion” are so avoided in polite conversation is because they are so intertwined and so vital, tapping into some of our deepest emotions. How many of our own hot buttons have been pushed already in this brief discourse? Maybe the letter writer also hints that the Republican Party needs more Friends, as witnesses or agents of change. Hey, has anybody noticed I got all the way down to this point without using the word Democrat?
Going through our bookshelves the other day, I was struck by how many of my first paperbacks were picked up for under a buck, new. How many, in fact, came in at under a half-buck. These were serious literature, mind you.
Yes, gasoline cost about a quarter a gallon, too, but just compare the impact of inflation over that period. While regular gas now runs up to $4, those fifty-cent paperback titles are now listing around $16, plus – more than twice as much inflation, relatively speaking.
Newspaper and magazine prices have also spiked, for a variety of reasons beginning with the cost of paper itself and distribution.
My concern as both a reader and a writer is that the figures for traditional publishing have simply become too prohibitive to take risks on unknown talent. For instance, I’m very unlikely to shell out $25 for a hardback novel, yet if that title doesn’t sell sufficiently, we’re unlikely to see the trade paperback, which can still be borderline prohibitive for modest incomes.
Public library budgets, meanwhile, keep getting shaved, forcing reductions in both new acquisitions and the staffing and open hours.
All of this means you’re less likely to find a new voice you find personally exciting. It’s all about blockbuster sales for one title rather than a wide offering catering to quirky interests and pleasures. And it’s not just commercial publishing.
Not long ago an official of an academic press related the painful decision they’d made regarding an important history manuscript that would not sell more than 400 copies, according to their marketing research. And so, in the absence of a major subsidy (such as an underwriting grant), the volume would not appear.
Since much of my own fiction falls in the category of “experimental” literature, the response I’ve received from some literary agents and presses has been that the work deserves publication but that it’s not “economically viable.”
The threshold for economically viable, I should point out, has been rising steadily through the four decades I’m reviewing.
I remember hearing the novelist Wright Morris in a televised interview where he said how lucky he was to have a niche following where a press run of eight-thousand copies was sufficient to support him. That’s hardly the case today, especially when the field has been consolidated into two publishing houses handling the bulk of American fiction.
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Even so, hundreds of new novels appear every week, many of them from small presses run as a labor of love. Few of the authors will get any notice, even though some, as I’ve found over the years, are a fine alternative to the cookie-cutter work typically found in commercial fiction. At least the Internet is opening new opportunities to be heard and discovered – and even for readers to pick up a fresh writer for a few bucks once again.
So who are you reading these days you feel speaks directly to you? Or whose style bristles in ways you find delightful? And how did you come across this author in the first place?
Maybe his or her successful niche following is around the corner if we all talk about literature as if it counts in our time. Just maybe.
It’s an ancient question after the hour of worship, along with “Has thee been fruitful?” or “How has Truth prospered?” A related question would ask just what draws each of us to sit in the communal quiet in the first place. On the one hand, there’s a need for relief from the conflicts of daily life – a desire for a time of lightness and joy. But ours is not a religion of escape, and I’ve become quite aware that the quest for social justice is also a central Biblical theme. Some weeks, in fact, we come quite close to “praying the newspaper,” as our hearts carry a world of suffering to the invisible altar.
While we reflect on the world, on one hand, we also examine ourselves in our worship. Maybe it’s impossible, if not just difficult, to be as thoroughly honest with ourselves at the deepest levels as we’d like. A therapist, after all, keeps redirecting the client back to the questions being skirted. Still, it’s important we try. Salvation, including being saved from our own negative thoughts and actions, has a root word related to healing. As I’ve been sitting on a succession of Psalms week after week, I’ve come to appreciate the authors’ growing candor – first, to admit the array of enemies, something many of us might have difficulty addressing – and then, in asking that they be smited or the petitioner be sheltered from their assault, which becomes an act of distancing and handing over the desire for revenge; it’s not, after all, no longer, “Let me smite them!” As we survey the realm of struggle around us, let me suggest that saving the world has a direct connection to saving ourselves, in all senses of the meaning. (I’ve always liked the bumper sticker, SAVE THE WHALES.)
Placing the question “Has thee been refreshed?” within this framework has a dimension of renewal and recharging for the work at hand. It’s for more than an hour, then, isn’t it.
My fondness for mountain laurel goes back to my days of living in the ashram in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. There, the undergrowth of the forest was filled with these blossoms in season.
Over the years, my own spiritual practices have undergone many changes. Even in a tradition like the one I’ve embraced, seemingly free from the annual routines of a liturgical calendar or outward emblems, there appear cyclical changes mirroring those of the seasons. Cycles, too, like those of progressing from childhood and parenthood into retirement or release. In Salem Quarterly Meeting in Ohio, the session each Fifth Month meant rhubarb in the applesauce. See it as sacrificial and special.
There are times of struggle, doubt, and distrust. Times of whirlwind passion and excitement. Times of discovery. Times of drought or deep winter, relying on what’s brought out of storage. Times of renewal and recharge.
This has manifested as periods where I’ve been able to dedicate significant time to meditation, solitude, travel in ministry, prayer, Bible study, research into history and theology, organizational service, teaching, correspondence, or writing, as well as to regular disciplines such as fasting or physical spiritual exercise (the hatha yoga sessions or even wilderness hiking). Emphatically, however, one would predominate while others would likely be absent or greatly diminished. In addition, they would be strongly impacted by the events of my daily life itself – whether I was single, married, divorced, or “in relationship,” my hours and nature of employment, my friendships and faith community, my driving patterns through the week.
The result of all of this would be a crazy-quilt tapestry or a ricochet trajectory if it weren’t for a spiraling within it. That is, over the years, various periods and interests begin to overlap one another, creating a kind of harmony or accumulated depth. My asparagus bed in New Hampshire has roots in my experience of asparagus along irrigation canal banks in Far West desert three decades earlier. A dog sitting through Quaker meeting here is a reminder of dogs sitting through predawn meditation sessions in the Pocono Mountains, or of the cats aligned on the scaffolding outside the windows, as if they, too, were deep in concentrated worship. I read a particular Psalm and see the passage taking twists I hadn’t perceived earlier.
In my own life, my childhood was filled with natural science, hiking, and camping, each with its mystical visions and moments. Adolescence led into politics, classical music, opera, and writing complicated by unrequited sexual yearning. Without romantic companionship, a Lone Ranger journey. Rejection of existing creed while ensconced in church office was followed by flight into atheism and hippie excess landing, inexplicably, in a yoga ashram with its Hatha exercises and sustained meditation. From there, into Quaker practice, though of the ABC – or “anything but Christ” variety. The ashram lessons were applied here, in circles of deepening prayer life. By steps, I moved toward Christocentric and Plain speech, and an especially faith fervent language. Among the Wilburite Friends as well as Mennonites, especially, I came to wrestle within Scripture while similtaneously undergoing repeated Dark Night journeys and questioning. Turning to therapy, I wondered if anyone could come along with me through all of this. By now I was no longer meditating to get high, or transcend, but rather to center down to the Seed. Here, with all of its committee work, I was engaged in a religion that combines mystical experience with social witness and activism. In a nutshell, then.
Each swirl also stirs up something from before. What failed in earlier marriage or relationships reappears. What has been left unfinished is not left entirely behind. What has been shredded remains to be woven. I heard this opera in its entirety a hundred times. Have I ever heard this note before?
I moved from the Midwest to the East Coast and back before heading on to the Pacific Northwest in what seemed an epiphany but instead shattered amid volcanic eruption and devastation. I left the wilderness for another kind of wilderness, back across the Midwest to the East Coast. The pendulum, as they say. Here, I now see life as both linear and circular – that is, spiraling. The spirit requires flesh, or is it that flesh requires spirit? Seasons include times that are full or overflowing, and times that are barren or dry. I now welcome the questioning that is not hostile is both essential and healthy.
My first spring in the orchard, I expected all of the trees to blossom simultaneously. They don’t. The apricots and cherry petals give way to plums, pears, and peaches. The apple blooms arrive last, when others are already gone.
Experiencing a new place through a full year or repeated years provides a much different understanding than a tourist gets – even one who spends several months there. Relocating requires a year-and-a-half to gain familiarity with the new surroundings – to get beyond the obvious, to establish friendships, to be oriented with the elements one finds essential or special. A favorite restaurant, a woodland pathway or place to swim, a boutique or gallery.
There are seasons for a person of faith, from winter to spring elation and then into fullness, dryness, struggle, or disillusionment. To harvest, perchance. Marriage? Family? Children? Extended into joy, compassion, humility, appreciation – one begins observing and naming.
The turning point in my own journey came when I accepted a new name.
One of my wife’s childhood heroes, George Washington Carver, is proof that some of the best mothers never have children of their own. After his own mother’s death as a consequence of being stolen from one slave-owning family and carried off to a plantation, before being bought back – how vile, the entire institution – young George was cared for, first, by the sickly wife of the slaveowner, and third, by an art teacher who directed him on to her own father, a college professor of botany. But most important was Mariah Watkins and her husband, Andrew.
We know very little about this black couple, except for her influence on the boy who emerged from spending a night in their barn. In another circumstance, George might have been shot. Instead, she called out for him to wash up and come inside for breakfast. What’s your name, she asked. Carver’s boy George, came the reply. No, she corrected, from now on you’re George Carver. (The Washington came later.) He lived with them while attending the Lincoln School for Negro Children. She gently instilled a deep religious awareness in him, presenting him with her beautiful, large family Bible, which he used daily for the remainder of his life, and also nurtured a sense of responsibility for the advancement of his own people. Essentially what we know about her comes in the correspondence they continued over the years. (Among the few other bits we know is that she was a midwife who cared for about 500 babies, including the painter Thomas Hart Benton.)
You can also trace the two connections between George and another great agricultural reformer, Norman Borlaug, whose Green Revolution is credited with saving the lives of a billion people.
Indirectly, then, by feeding a single child that first morning, Mariah put into motion events that would feed a billion humans – a miracle overshadowing the multitude Jesus’ disciples fed with those few loaves and fishes on the banks of Galilee.
Even though I’ve never asked previous clerks how they experienced sitting at the head of an institution founded in the 1660s, I found it humbling. The mere thought of superintending the construction of our present meetinghouse (1768) is overwhelming, as is the faithfulness that led the congregation through the Revolutionary and Civil wars. To think of the succession of mighty Quakers who came here in traveling ministry reflects the history of the movement itself, beginning with Elizabeth Hooton, who first nurtured George Fox in the emerging faith. Dover Friends sat down to worship originally in homes and barns, then in our first two meetinghouses, and finally in the room we know so well.
Visit historic Plimoth Plantation, and you get a taste of what Dover must have been like – already four years old at the time those enactors portray. It’s probably not that different from what the first Friends encountered just 3½ decades later when they stirred up what would become our Meeting. Just think of the differences in dialects and vocabulary. (Plimouth, to represent a population of slightly more than a hundred people, employs seventeen dialects, moderating them enough to make them understandable to modern visitors; Dover was likely no less divergent.) From all the evidence of smoke-filled houses, bitter winters, mosquito-infested summers, this must have been a rough-and-tumble community where Friends required generations to evolve into the sedate image we often treasure.
There aren’t many places in the United States having organizations with such long histories. We know only a portion of ours. Even so, we’ve been entrusted with this legacy, and to fulfill it and pass it on. How humbling, indeed.
From my earliest days of practicing meditation, I’ve been aware of an invisible wall of resistance or restlessness before passing into the comforting depth on the other side. For whatever reasons, it reminds me of those early experiences of a sonic boom, when planes overhead would “break through the sound barrier” – not that we sense a loud crack of arrival, but there is a distinct change all the same. Maybe it’s an awareness that the air in the room feels different – heavier, like water, is one description. Maybe it’s not that far removed from the ancient Jewish priests who “passed through the veil” to offer sacrifice in the most holy space in the Temple.
My actual experience of meditative worship has also changed, from the initial goal of getting naturally high or stoned – of transcending out of the world – to the present centering down into the essence of life, but the wall remains. Some weeks it’s more pronounced than others; other weeks it’s quite faint. Even so, coming to that point Bill Taber referred to as “soft eyes” worship, where Friends begin removing their eyeglasses, is delicious. Even the clock stops ticking.
Frequency of practice can make a difference. Sitting in meditation twice a day, for instance, generally allows a deeper session than an every-other-week or once-a-month schedule does. Suitable physical exercise, charitable activity, or spiritual reading may also guide the experience. We speak of preparing for worship, but rarely of the unspoken flow within the hour itself. What I do know is how much easier it is to pass through that barrier when I’m sitting with others. That is, as early Friends sensed, even when two or three gathered in the Name.
Jnana's Red Barn 