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Yesterday afternoon, I looked down at my computer to see a notice that someone had pushed the power button on the server that hosts this site, shutting it down. I drove into downtown Ithaca, wasn't too surprised that it wouldn't restart, and brought it home.
By 4:30am, I had all the web sites running again, but email remains down and will be for a few days. Hopefully no one's in a rush to contact me! I'm a little tired.
In a comment on my earlier piece, Zach Alexander asks:
Reading the previous two posts in the series, I'd be interested to see how you tie them together. I see no contradiction, but a very mild tension ? we should ease up on historical accuracy (I-II), but not too much (III). What is the middle ground?
Partly, the tension comes from the time between the posts, but mostly I think I've failed to be clear again. There are two separate aspects to the question of history and Quakerism:
How important is history - the stories we tell - to Quakerism?
What kind of historical practice do we apply to those stories?
My first and third posts were supposed to be about the first question - yes, history is important, critical to who "Quakers" are. In a creedless religion, we are the stories we tell. (Thanks to Will T for helping me polish that phrasing with an earlier comment.)
Because of this, I am, of course, deeply concerned about what might be described as Quaker amnesia - people arguing, as I think you have, that one piece or another is at the heart of what's valuable about Quakerism, and the rest is just... whatever. Yes, it's tempting - but wrong. Without the larger context, a small list of "key pieces" is doomed to be misleading (about Quakerism) at best.
The second post and some of the third post were more about the second question.
Here, I'm taking a position that should make academic historians uncomfortable. I don't think applying the usual rules for academic history to the stories of Quakerism is particularly useful for Quakerism. Yes, it's valuable for historians, and First Among Friends in particular is eye-opening - but not quite right.
I'm also less and less surprised by the 'tampering' with Fox's Journal and his works generally. Early Quaker writings weren't meant to be objective journalism or verbatim archives. We have to accept that they were written for the express purpose of evangelizing their readers, of telling a story their writers found compelling. I don't think it's all that different from how we look at the Bible, except with fewer translation issues. Believers see it one way, academics and other interested outsiders often see it another way.
At this point, I'm comfortable with the idea that these early Quaker documents simply are different, and communicate different things, depending on who you are. Not merely "who you are" as an individual, but "who you are" as a community. In an earlier age, I'm guessing Quakers would have thought of it as inside the hedge vs. outside the hedge, but since the hedge has come down, the lines are blurrier.
How can we make this work? My best advice would be to supplement whatever secondary Quaker history we want to read with the primary documents, or things close to the originals. And I have some ideas on making the originals easier to get to.... we'll see.
Carole Dale Spencer manages, in Holiness: The Soul of Quakerism, to describe early Quakerism as a largely coherent whole whose later schisms reflect emphasis on some components and the loss of others. While it's definitely an academic book, it is still a compelling read, and I hope this story will be told widely in more accessible forms over the years to come.
Before continuing with the review, I should note that Spencer plays to practically every bias and opinion I hold regarding Quakerism up through about the 1840s, and frequently thereafter. It's strange to me to be reading interpretive Quaker history, especially history that looks beyond the first generation, and not be spending a fair amount of time arguing with the author in my head. I find her telling of the early Quakers compelling, as well as her case for the Quietists as something better than a terrible decline. While I'm not as convinced by her doubts about Elias Hicks personally, her overall take on Hicksites makes sense to me, as do her doubts about how close Joseph John Gurney was to the heart of Quakerism. I think she's correct that John Wilbur was, as he claimed, much closer.
Where I start having doubts is in the second half of the 19th century, when the Holiness Movement per se comes through. There's a conversation worth having about forms of Quaker worship, hinted at here, but not really explored. I return pretty easily though, in her discussion of the 20th century, and overall I'm kind of dazed to agree with so much of a single telling of Quaker history, especially at this level of depth.
I suspect some potential readers will bounce off the word "Holiness", thinking that this is a plea for revival meetings. They shouldn't. Spencer's use of holiness certainly includes revival meetings (including, I think, the earliest Quaker gatherings), but it's a much richer use than that. Her use of holiness derives from the early Christian fathers, a group whose thought (as she points out) regularly parallels that of early Quakers. She emphasizes eight aspects, which she sees as integrated in early Quaker thought:
Obviously, not all of those aspects resonate with all Quakers today, and the details of many of them changed over the course of 350 years, sometimes repeatedly. I remember being blown away by Apocalypse of the Word, largely because it was startling to me that eschatology was central to early Quakers. Talking about "perfection" seems to instantly raise alarms, whether with Quakers or with, well, practically anyone, but Spencer weaves it tightly into the story.
I'll be writing more about the book for a while to come - there are lots and lots of pieces worth pursuing, even pieces I hope someone will take up and turn into complete books of their own.
Yes, it's written academically, and can be very dense, but the content is excellent. My one real complaint (and maybe this is only my copy) is that the type seems excessively light. It's all there, but reading it seems trickier than it should be. The price ($41) isn't cheap, but fortunately it's not as astronomical as some academic publishing.
I can't recommend it as light reading, but if you're up for a detailed and valuably opinionated journey through Quaker history, it's an excellent telling.
(It's also worth noting that the latest issue of Quaker Religious Thought, #110, includes reviews by Stephen Angell, Margery Post Abbott, and Jim Le Shana, with replies from Spencer.)
The Dryden Courier's editorial for this week, "Thank God It's Over", celebrates the end of a year they clearly didn't enjoy. In the midst of all that, I found this gem:
[Governor Paterson] inherited a financial mess that took many, many State administrations to perfect.
There was a lot of getting here, but I had no idea that New York State actually set out to perfect its financial mess.
That explains a few things, though!
I'm always surprised by how few reviews most books on Quakerism get on Amazon. (There are exceptions, of course.)
Maybe that's a good thing, though, as sometimes warfare can break out in the review sections and their comments. It seems pretty clear that there's a constituency appalled by the very notion of a "Green Bible", disgusted by the shift it implies from God to God's creation, from ourselves as special creations to humans as one of many creations. I suspect that's just getting started, too.
I've wondered for a while what a Quaker Bible might look like. Highlighting in gray probably isn't a great idea, but I can only imagine what comments it would draw....
2008 was a crazy roller-coaster of a political year in New York State, and I suspect it'll leave us with one hell of a hangover.
Any thoughts on the year ahead of us?
Will we have a Democratic State Senate?
Will we have a functioning Democratic State Senate?
What door will Paterson turn to for US Senate?
Will there be more indictments?
Will there be more sudden retirements from public office?
Will the feds bail out our broken budget?
What'll we see in local elections?
That's just a few starter questions. 2008 was, um, very different than I'd thought it would be. What's coming in 2009?
I last wrote back in June, so long-lost readers may be wondering how this turned out, if at all.
The main story in the garden turned out to be the animals. The chickens, ducks, and eventually rabbits and bees consumed a huge amount of time. The chickens, ducks, and rabbits came with a set of feeding and watering tasks that were daily, with weekly cleaning, moving, and other tasks. The bees only needed occasional inspection, but anything involving the bees beyond checking the bottom tray for mites meant gearing up and getting ready for a lot. I only got stung a couple of times - no major damage - but I definitely need to do more with the bees and learn more about them.
We didn't manage to build the infrastructure I'd planned for the ducks or the chickens. Thanks to Angelika's parents we have a new planting shed, which I managed to insulate and partly paint, and it has a rabbit hutch leaning against it. We didn't manage to build the duck pond or a place for the chickens and ducks to winter. The ducks are in last year's chicken coop, which they tend to ignore, with some added strawbale walls and a swimming pool I'm regularly de-icing. The chickens - last year's chickens and this year's chickens - are in a "strawbale fortress" with a clear plastic roof.
Next year's project is pretty clearly infrastructure for the ducks and chickens - a larger fenced area, the pond, and a small barn/coop with areas for the ducks and bees, as well as space for pulling the fur from the rabbits and processing honey and wax. Finances and a new baby made that impossible this year.
In plants, we had one successful bed, growing lots of lettuce and radishes. Our tomatoes never really ripened, and we've concluded that cherry tomatoes (and maybe some other small and fast tomatoes) are our future. Our peppers and broccoli perished, but we did get some leeks and garlic. We need to rip out our dull-tasting strawberries and put in a new bed of the "strawberry candy" that grows further up the hill. (Tiny but delicious berries.) The lingonberries seem to be starting all right, and the blueberries are still getting established.
Overall, I'd say it worked out well, though (as usual) we underestimated the amount of time it would take and overestimated the time we'd have in life with a newborn. Caring for the critters ate up most of the hour a day. (Writing a book and failing to find a successor as Dryden Democrats
chair until December complicated things too!)There'll be more here next year. I have some stories I still need to publish, on the shed and the bees and more, and I'll post on new developments as they happen.
The title of this post is taken from the title of section 1.3 of Carole Dale Spencer's Holiness: The Soul of Quakerism, and I think it gets to some of why I'm concerned about the willingness to throw over Quaker history in favor of our own reductions.
She's writing in the context of methodology, how her book is going to proceed, but along the way she presents a very clear statement about how Quakerism explained itself over the centuries:
In early Quakerism theology was experiential and mystical (cogito Dei experimentalis), therefore developed and formulated most effectively as autobiography. Autobiography was supplemented by biography and then sanctified by hagiography....
Along with the Bible, hagiography and its related literature (rather than doctrinal treatises) have been the primary textual means by which the Christian faith has been transferred through generations. After the Bible, the lives of saints, their journals or spiritual diaries, and their devotional manuals have been the most formative influences in the teaching of holiness.....
More important than doctrinal formulation, and essential because Quakers were theoretically non-creedal, was the actual depiction of lives through which readers could understand and measure themselves through the model of earlier saints....
The most common form of teaching and Quakers' main reading material were the journals of its saints, George Fox's Journal being the prototype (Wright, 1932). These journals were written to describe and define a life of holiness and to teach by example. (4-5)
Arriving in an unprogrammed Quaker meeting with no sense of history (as I did twenty years ago), one can pick up the form easily enough, even the worshipful goal of that form. Testimonies are readily explained - the SPICE acronym may be a cliche, but for beginners it's readily comprehensible. And beyond that, there's the Inner Light, right? No creeds, so anything else?
Well, yes. The ahistorical version of Quakerism does have some popularity, but there's a lot more in all those dusty journals. The status of those journals - as tutorials for religious belief and not simply as verbatim history - also goes a long way toward explaining why Quakers treated their history in ways that make contemporary historians shake their heads.
I wonder, though, whether this approach to transmitting religious experience can hold up - is holding up - in the current state of the world. This isn't a uniquely current problem, as I think John Wilbur faced similar challenges in his battles with the Gurneyite Orthodox. It seems, though, that the way we read (and the amount we read, and so on) keeps changing.
Handing a copy of George Fox's Journal (or even The Quaker Reader to new attenders probably isn't the best way to introduce them to the religion. Quakerism 101 classes at least provide a general overview, and hopefully encourage people to read and explore more deeply.
I worry that in many ways Quakerism - especially unprogrammed Quakerism - makes sense only in the context of a deeply literate society. The lack of liturgy and adornment means that there isn't a constant story told each Sunday, and creedlessness (and more or less lack of a catechism) leaves us needing to study Quaker experience. Studying Quaker experience is a long slow process. This makes it hard for newcomers and for people without the time to dedicate to that study, and can also make religion feel like homework.
I don't see any easy way around this, at least for those who see Quakerism as more than the simplified form and testimonies I described above. We'll have to take the hard road, and convince others that it's worthwhile.
[Finally continuing from this post and this post.]
I frequently find that many Quakers aren't particularly interested in what the early Quakers did or said - it's "ancient history," trapped in understandings we've moved beyond. Quakers are hardly unique in this, of course - many religious groups are having a difficult time justifying their beliefs in a skeptical, rationalist, forward-looking society.
I was reading an old issue of Popular Woodworking the other day, and came across this in the letters section:
The choice of the methodology depends on the project and the skills and desires of the individual, and is intrinsic to the satisfaction of working with wood. Some methods may be "better" than others and reading about them gives me options. Criticism of methodology should focus on end results, not tradition. (August 2006, 10.)
I need to be doing more woodworking, but one thing I enjoy about woodworking is that it manages to inform everything I do. Politics, cooking, editing, writing - even religion. Substitute "spiritual experience" for "working with wood", and you're right in the middle of a long set of controversies about Quakerism's relationship to its history.
After all, what does it matter, say, what George Fox thought of the Book of Revelation? I mean, come on, really - a 17th century guy who'd basically drowned himself in the Bible, talking in images that come from the most outlandish piece of that whole ancient work? How can that possibly apply to what I want to do today?
I haven't heard anyone ask exactly that, but I've heard and read much similar. Mostly from people I respect, at that.
There are definitely people fascinated by Quaker history, and I'm very glad about that. I know people who are deeply upset that George Fox's original Book of Miracles disappeared somewhere between writing and publishing, and people who regularly cite and discuss the "Valiant Sixty" and their efforts to bring Quakerism from the North of England to the South and beyond.
(If it's not obvious, I'm one of those fascinated people).
On the other hand, there's a regular undercurrent in Quakerism - not unique to Quakerism, but probably strengthened by the general idea of being non-creedal, encouraging individuals to find their own deep connection to the Light. People don't want to be 'bound by the past', finding the stories of the past to be themselves a creed to avoid. Of course, the early Quakers gave us cause to suspect many of those stories, which doesn't improve the case for the importance of history.
Zach Alexander, one of my favorite Quaker bloggers - someone who's spent time digging into Quaker history and even set up Quakerpedia, tried to demolish the case for the importance of past Quaker beliefs a while back:
What is essential to Quakerism is best summed up in the opening sentence of Britain Yearly Meeting’s Advices and Queries - Take heed, dear Friends, to the promptings of love and truth in your hearts.
This is the essential core of Quakerism for two reasons. Normatively speaking, it’s the most valuable pearl of wisdom they have to offer the world. And descriptively speaking, it’s arguably where the characteristic Quaker experience starts. Everything else is just interpretation of that experience (theology) or elaboration of its effects (the testimonies).
And everything else comes second. There’s no reason to assume their interpretations of their experience are the best ones, or that their discernment of those inward leadings is inerrantly true for all people at all times. Everything is open to revision based on these promptings, for us, today....
And when we realize that Christianity, like all religions, is basically false - Jesus, if he existed, was simply an extraordinary human - our relationship with Quakerism reaches a crossroads.
We can see early Friends (and Christians) as simply deluded, and let them fall into the dustbin of history. I don’t think we should do that. More charitably, we can instead see them as humans who had extraordinary experiences that are valuable for us today, worthy of study and sometimes even emulation, but couched in unacceptably superstitious terms and concepts - the only ones available in their pre-modern society. (A naturalistic/nontheistic view of the world was barely conceivable back then, and the few pioneers in that department often did not lead very moral lives, and were therefore not at all attractive to Friends.)
For many, such a re-interpretation seems so drastic that you can’t call this post-religious Quakerism “Quakerism” anymore. So be it. If “Quaker-inspired” beliefs are more truthful than “Quaker” ones, so much the worse for Quakerism - focusing on what is most “Quaker” then becomes a form of idolatry. We should always (as was suggested at the “Food for Fire” workshop last year) be willing to give up the form we call “Quakerism” if it conflicts with how we are led.
But for however much or little it’s worth, in so doing we will have carried forward the spirit of Quakerism, better than that oxymoron “traditional Quakerism” ever could.
While I find little to agree with in his appraisal of "unacceptably superstitious terms and concepts - the only ones available in their pre-modern society," I do applaud his careful appraisal of Quaker history prior to rejecting most of the details of its content.
I'm not sure I can join Martin Kelley in declaring that "we're all Ranters now", but it seems that Quaker history's recording of the destination the early Friends found is no longer that interesting to a lot of people who'd prefer to simply keep seeking. (Or perhaps just worth two cheers.)
So why does it matter?
It matters because Quakers claim to be a community, with shared practices and beliefs. Communities always exist in a context - which is, generally speaking, their history. Deliberate amnesia is possible but difficult, and both it and accidental amnesia often leave echoes of the original for the occasional discoverer to use as a base for later exploration and revival of the past.
Even at the level of community, though, there are suggestions like these:
In other words, we don't want to try to serve the structure Quakers created more than 350 years ago. We want to rekindle the flames and devote ourselves again to the Fire. Then, when our attention is on the Fire, we can create whatever structure is appropriate based on our condition.
Isn't that what Quakerism is truly about - being attentive so that the Letter of the law doesn't kill the Spirit?
"We want to rekindle the flame" - but apparently do so by setting aside things that came with the flame, things created if not by then with the flame. (That piece is actually fairly gentle - it doesn't seem to propose rekindling the flame by burning all that came with it.)
Reducing Quakerism to its "essentials" is always tempting. After all, the early Quakers certainly embarked on a similar reduction process for Christianity, and why not just continue the core of what they started?
It's tempting, I know.
Today's New York Times has an article on one of my favorite aspects of New York State government: the work it does to reduce energy consumption, funded by the System Benefits Charge (SBC) and Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) on our electric bills. NYSERDA, the New York State Energy Research and Development Agency, runs a variety of programs for reducing government, residential, and commercial energy consumption.
I personally took advantage of a 10% NYSERDA rebate when we did energy renovations to my 1929 house - sealing it up, insulating it, and replacing the furnace. That cut my gas bills by almost 2/3, which was both awesome and necessary for me to keep living here. The most impressive part of it all, though, wasn't the rebate - it was the emphasis on making sure that the contractors knew what they were doing, and even sending an auditor out to check the results.
Normally, I'm not excited about dedicated funds. Dedicating the federal gas tax to highways created a monster that just kept building new highways and starving out other forms of transportation. However, this tax is a little more interesting, working in reverse of the highway tax. It's a tax on energy that encourages us to use less energy, not more. That's something I can get behind.
So what's the twist? Well, it's budget season, and once again lawmakers are ravenous. It's funny though - I can't ever find legislators who actually criticize what NYSERDA does. They just want control over the money, and are happy to deploy whatever mix of good government and budgetary language they think will get them control:
"It has become larger and far more significant, which is why I thought it should be on budget," said Assemblyman Kevin A. Cahill, a Democrat representing Dutchess and Ulster Counties who is chairman of the energy committee and said he plans to introduce legislation to that effect next year. "We've reached a point where larger policy considerations should be considered. It shouldn't be a mini-pork barrel."
Right - it shouldn't be a "mini-pork barrel". It should be part of the massive pork barrel that gets chopped up every year in the budget process, by our usual team of three men in a room responding to whatever donors or blocs shout the loudest.
In NYSERDA's case, this is all work that could be done later, right? Of course a year's delay in any of this work wouldn't help, and how many people would really notice? And that $350 million is just kind of sitting there, right?
While I regularly despair of New York's labyrinth of authorities, I think it's safe for me to say that at this point I trust NYSERDA far more than I trust our legislators and their hunger for cash to fuel their perpetual re-election machine.
This isn't the first time this has come up, either. Here's a story on the 2005 grab, and a response from my Assemblywoman, enthusiastically supporting it.
Fortunately - and it pains me to say this - Governor Pataki vetoed that last attempt. We'll see what happens in 2009.
A few years ago, Angelika and I watched the Ithaca Monthly Meeting's Christmas pageant, put on by the children of the meeting. She was struck in particular by the penguin paying homage at the manger, a feature I'd never seen in a Christmas pageant before. It became a fun story about how Quakerism can be just a little different.
Sungiva got to play the baby Jesus in this year's pageant, and was generally well-received. No penguins, though! (The penguin is apparently a costume they have available, so maybe one day she'll be the penguin.)
Angelika added a penguin to our Christmas tree, as you can see here.
Penguin in our Christmas tree.
Penguins at mangers turn out to have mass-media precedents, too. I'd forgotten that in A Charlie Brown Christmas, one of the animals Lucy asks Snoopy (who's playing "all the animals") to be is a penguin.
And, of course, we really couldn't be the only ones. Here's a nativity penguin.
Sungiva is nine months old today. She might have mistaken Christmas for her birthday, as she got a lot of things and had a lot of fun, but I don't think she quite figured out what it was all about.
The mouse-bear sleeps.
Sungiva explores the mirror in a trash can.
Sungiva studies.
Sungiva enjoys her rocking horse..
One of her more fun Christmas gifts, which you can see above, is a 3-in-1 highchair. It's a highchair, but it's also a desk (shown above) and a rocking horse. She also got exciting toys, clothes, and dishes, which I'm sure you'll see in future installments.
As always, for those who want to see more Sungiva, I've also posted a gallery.
An hour a day in the garden
Light and Silence
Living in Dryden
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January 06, 2009 10:06 PM
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