'I write as another who loves the Quaker faith but increasingly wonders if he can find a place in it...' Photo: Alan Levine / flickr CC.
Christ, mystery and faith
Cap Kaylor, in the first of two articles, offers a personal reflection on Quakerism in America
There is a charming, well-worn anecdote about a devout old Quaker couple. They were awakened one night by the sound of a commotion coming from downstairs. Shaking her husband the wife said: ‘Listen, I think there is a burglar in the house. Thee needs to go downstairs and investigate.’ Dutifully, the old man reached for his hunting rifle and stealthily crept down the hallway. Sure enough, just as he came to the staircase he found himself suddenly face-to-face with the prowler coming up from below. Aiming his shotgun at the intruder the Quaker said: ‘Friend, I mean thee no harm, but I’m about to shoot where thee is standing.’
Likewise, let me assure Friends at the outset that although it may seem I’m aiming a blast in their direction, I mean no harm. I write as another who loves the Quaker faith but increasingly wonders if he can find a place in it. I have been a part of three Quaker communities, serving as clerk for one and being invited to be pastor of another. Having attended national Quaker gatherings and corresponded with American Meetings from the Atlantic to the Pacific, I have come to share the now widely held conclusion that unless the current trajectory is reversed, liberal Quakerism is headed for extinction. The patient is sick. The disease has been misdiagnosed. The prognosis may be serious, but it is too early to hang black crepe from the windows and send out death notices. With the right medicine there is still hope. But let’s first examine the symptoms.
Crisis and response
No one attending a Quaker Meeting can fail to notice the preponderance of gray and white hair. In my own Meeting it is rare for a person under thirty to join us in worship. And if they come once they rarely come again. Correspondence with other Meetings informs me that our experience is hardly unique. The decline in membership is now so undeniable that it has become a frequent topic in Friends’ journals, meetings, books and letters. The immediate response to this crisis has been a quintessentially American one – get busy!
We are urged to hold more threshing sessions, hammer out novel visions, purchase the latest ‘How To’ books that promise to rejuvenate our failing communities, rent a billboard, or invest in some entertaining internet programmes for the young, the old, the alienated, and every hyphenated demographic that may present itself. Still our numbers continue to decline. Astonishingly, it is no longer even unusual to hear voices in Meetings and on blogs suggesting that the wheel of history has turned so irrevocably against us that Quakerism must resign itself to a graceful death.
We have been doing a lot of soul searching these days and asking ourselves a lot of questions. But as far as I have been able to discover, no one has bothered to ask the deeper question of why we are headed for the same fate as the Shakers. Is it because our Quaker testimonies have become irrelevant? Equality, integrity, voluntary simplicity, and the work of peace making are urgently needed now more than ever.
Is it because Friends (who are overwhelmingly white, well-educated, and comfortably middle-class) are disconnected from the needs of the larger communities in which they live and work? Nothing, I believe, could be farther from the truth. Every Meeting that I have been a part of has networked effectively with other religious, social, and political organisations to bring about positive change in their community.
Narrative and survival
My own Meeting recently played an important role in accomplishing our city’s first LGBTQ civil rights resolution, and has organised nonviolent communication seminars and interfaith prayer events for years. It is not because Quakers have suddenly become deficient in good works or social activism that we continue to see a steady hemorrhaging of membership. We are headed gently into Dylan Thomas’ ‘good night’ because, with all the best intentions in the world, the Religious Society of Friends has unhinged itself from the one thing a faith community must have in order to survive – a narrative: a coherent story that ties everything together in our lives in a way that gives meaning to our struggles, our suffering, and our efforts to build the ‘beloved community’.
For me, more than any other writer of the twentieth century, Joseph Campbell, author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, wrote of the importance of the narrative in the human search for meaning. He introduced entire generations to the Jungian concept of the archetype and reminded us how we continually draw upon those powerful subliminal images to make sense of our own lives. We are storytellers. From those first shaggy bards gathered around ancient campfires to the elegant master of Monticello penning the Declaration of Independence we rely on stories to infuse our lives with meaning and help us understand the world in which we live.
Whether we care to acknowledge it or not, the deeper narrative from which Quakerism sprang is the Christian narrative of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, who functioned both as archetype and engine for the early Quakers. For most of our history Friends have had no trouble identifying with that Christian narrative.
Dilemma and the Christian milieu
The Religious Society of Friends began as a reform movement within Christianity, and for the early Friends there was no confusion when it came to identifying the Light with the historical person of Jesus. They lived and moved in a society that was saturated with a Christian ethos. The very stones around them proclaimed a Christian culture that we can no longer take for granted as they could. Embedded within a Christian milieu they found their meaning and their mission in the gospels.
We are now faced with a dilemma. That Christian milieu has long since faded, and seeds that were planted early in our own history have left Quakers uniquely vulnerable to the stresses and challenges of a materialistic and aggressively secular civilisation. The historic channels through which Christian faith has typically been transmitted were scripture, tradition, and sacramental ritual. They weave together to form the narrative that is the Christian community’s collective memory of the Jesus event.
Identity and engine
To a certain degree, part of the uniqueness of Quakerism has been its rejection of scripture, tradition and ritual as the principle sources of religious authority. In their place, Friends have historically elevated the individual’s experience of the Inward Light as primary. But it might now be asked whether the very thing that made Quakerism unique within Christianity is now making it uniquely vulnerable. Without scripture, tradition or sacramental ritual, what is left to re-link us to the original narrative that gave shape and substance to what began as an explicitly Christian mysticism?
We could do without a reliance on scripture, ordained ministry, or ritual while we lived in a Christian society that provided us with commonly held ethical presuppositions and a vocabulary to interpret our spiritual experiences. But that time has now past. However, without the force of at least an ostensibly Christian culture, where is the Religious Society of Friends to look for its identity and its engine?
Comments
One of the warmest articles I have read for some time.
By NeilS on 30th March 2018 - 16:27
Thank you Cap. Both articles have really helped me - especially the second. Are you due to CO e to the UK any time soon?
By Paul H on 24th May 2018 - 21:08
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