Open for transformation

Ian Kirk-Smith shares some reflections from Friends on the published version of the 2014 Swarthmore Lecture

This year’s Swarthmore Lecture, Open for transformation: Being Quaker, considers the symptoms of illness in a patient and offers some remedies in a clear and confident voice. It is a voice that, for some, contains traces of a dreaded word: preaching. Others discern leadership and a prophetic vision.

The book of the lecture provides an extended version of what was presented by Ben Pink Dandelion, this year’s lecturer, at Yearly Meeting Gathering in Bath.

Tim Rouse, a recent coeditor of The Young Quaker, echoes the views of many: ‘for me, the strength of the lecture was Pink Dandelion’s emphasis on what Quakerism should be rather than what it is’ and Anne Ullathorne, of Central England Area Meeting, welcomes a ‘call to return to the roots of our faith and to be clear about our theology’.

The book has three parts. The first considers Friends as a community rooted in spiritual experience; the second charts the change in context, particularly in the past 150 years; and the final part suggests ways of strengthening religious identity and celebrating ‘the joys of faith’.

Ben Pink Dandelion opens with a definition of the basis of belief and identifies four key insights of Quakerism: we encounter the divine directly; we have a form of worship which nurtures this encounter; we have developed practices which recognise and understand this experience (discernment); and the intimacy with the divine transforms us and our approach to humanity (our testimony). These insights, he believes, apply to all strands of worldwide Quakerism.

British Quakerism over the last 150 years, he argues, has developed a theology that is very different from that of the seventeenth century. It is a ‘recast’ faith that now has several attributes: experience is primary; our faith needs to be relevant to our age; we should be open to new light; and God’s will is revealed over time.

The author highlights some forces that have shaped this recast faith, particularly secularisation and individualism: ‘We are part of a more individualised and diffuse Quakerism’ and ‘at times pragmatism has trumped prophecy in our desires to re-work Quakerism for a modern and over-busy age’. It is a path presented as one of compromise and dilution. The book presents a personal argument for clarity and coherence in both faith and practice.

Today, instead of giving enquirers a solid signpost, some argue that a weather vane is provided. Anne Ullathorne believes that ‘we are at risk of becoming all things to all people and I would be very sad to see the Quaker church, which I love, become so diluted as to become something that George Fox would no longer recognise because we are not sure of the basis of our belief.’

Ben Pink Dandelion identifies ‘collective confusion about the heart of our Quaker way’ and paints a picture of inertia, paralysis and misunderstanding in some areas of Quakerism. He speaks of testimony having become, for some, ‘a set of optional values rather than the life we have no choice but to lead’ and worries that these confusions have ‘led us to become introspective and anxious about our future – a symptom of the head taking over from the heart, of logic supplanting faith.’

Personal transformation

Open for transformation provokes. It asks serious questions about the individual and the community, language and practice, identity and belonging, membership and boundaries. The author makes ‘transformation’ a key focus. He highlights the authenticity of an inward faith and urges a return to passion and joy, to the centrality of spiritual experience, and makes an appeal: ‘If we as Quakers want our Quaker approach to faith to be vibrant, cohesive, coherent and socially useful, we need to be clear about what we are and what we are not.’ It is a tough ask.

Marisa Johnson, executive secretary of the European and Middle East Section of Friends World Committee for Consultation, states: ‘When I think back to the lecture two sentences jump out at me: “We are a do it together faith” and “living an accompanied life”. Although it may seem that these insights are different, and even contradictory, emphasising as they do the community nature of our religious experience on the one hand, and the personal, inward relationship with the divine on the other, for me they are inextricably linked and are, indeed, the foundation of what I have come to understand, and hopefully practice, as the Quaker Way.’

What links the two, for Marisa, is a word – relationship: ‘I completely resonate with living an accompanied life, but I know many will ask: accompanied by whom? It is a sensible question, but it can only lead to exposing fault-lines in our theologies.’ For Marisa, the sense of being accompanied is a constant awareness of being in relationship to and with every aspect of life, past, present and future: ‘It leads me to seek to align my every thought and action to this awareness, to be “guided by it”. This guidance can take me to unexpected places, situations that nurture, stretch and sometimes challenge me – as a result, I change, I am transformed.’

‘Change and transformation are threatening, alarming, dangerous’ for some, but, she explains: ‘I believe that Ben is asking us to be community in the ego-sacrificial meaning of the term, and that he is inviting us to challenge the dominant paradigms of our Western culture – individualism, competition, rationality and a pervasive dualism that separates right from wrong, intellectual from emotional, belief from nonbelief.’

However, she explains: ‘The danger is that, in enforcing coherence, we end up disregarding what does not fit and even elevate them into idols.’ Some Liberal Friends, indeed, fear a conservative shift. An ‘option based’ faith represents, for some, ‘openness’, ‘tolerance’ and ‘diversity’ and all that these words imply. Choice is good. Constraints, or the perception of them, are bad.

Marisa Johnson has a measured response to the arguments and roots it in her belief in relationship. ‘“Thou shalt… decide for yourself” is a recent Liberal Quaker slogan that fits very well the prevailing spirit of our times,’ she explains. But she has a concern: ‘When relationship becomes secondary to the supremacy of the individual we have lost, altogether, the meaning and purpose of being a religious society.’

A transformed community

Alec Davison, of the Kindlers, believes the ‘stunning Swarthmore Lecture speaks with a forked tongue’ and explains: ‘Much of it deals with the nuts and bolts of keeping the Society afloat, using our book of discipline as navigation guide and training manual. Those many Friends eager to keep rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic will have much to keep them usefully occupied. But the heart of Ben’s concern, reflected in its title, is how to radically deepen the spiritual life of the Society, for only in this way can we know the vision of a “transformed” community. This is the real excitement of the lecture.’

Ben Pink Dandelion stresses experience over doctrine: ‘My starting point is the reality of spiritual experience’ and ‘As Quakers we are part of community rooted in the experience of transformation.’

Alec Davison concurs: ‘Spirit is the prompter, persistence and passion of new birth. It is prime. This process of renewal will inevitably call for surrender and some sort of death. For is it not our purpose in life to transform our false self into our true self?’

Personal transformation, Ben Pink Dandelion explains, causes us to be ‘broken and healed, opened and changed, and to see things in a new way.’ We are transformed ourselves in order to transform others. However, Alec Davison questions the readiness of some Friends for the challenge thrown down in the book: ‘Do we want to be transformed? Are we ready for it? Is the threatened discomfort likely to be too great? Dare we live adventurously or are we too set in our ways with tradition and history stifling us?’

David Olver, of Keighley Meeting, agrees with the central theme of the book and, perceptively, hits a nerve: ‘Quakerism is about being open for transformation. It has always been this way. But over time British Quakerism has changed and we have adapted our religion to fit the secular age in which we live. We now make decisions based on criteria other than those supplied by religion… Many Friends will find this acceptable but it does shift the balance between the individual and the community to favour the former.’

In looking to the roots of Quakerism, the author invites an accusation of conservatism. Tradition can limit growth. History can burden us. Nostalgia can also become very selective.

Open and living traditions, it could be argued, invite change and development. They introduce new possibilities. What exactly does ‘openness to new light’ embrace? Can one ever go backwards?

But is Ben Pink Dandelion asking Friends to go back or to look deeper? As Marisa Johnson points out: ‘He also challenges our assumption of linear progress, which makes us “wiser” than those whose experience was expressed in ways that we now regard as outdated.’

‘For Young Friends’, Tim Rouse discerns, ‘traditional Quaker orthodoxies – whether they relate to membership in a Local Meeting, or belief in gods, or any of the many ways we practice our Quakerism in the world – are far from binding. In Ben’s Swarthmore Lecture I recognized a similar willingness to look past the way we have always done things, and to look forwards to better build the republic of heaven.’

Tim Rouse also has a concern: ‘As a historian, I greatly valued the way that Ben encouraged us to look to the past to inspire us as we move into the future; that said, the lecture at times veered into an almost reactionary rejection of secular approaches and non-Christian viewpoints.

‘Although I cringed when Ben referred to “secular individualism” as if the two words meant the same thing, I found his critique of individualism very welcome; and the emphasis on collectivism and community echoed the radically participatory, godly, and democratic lines on which our Quaker movement was founded.’

A clear sense of identity

Craig Barnett, of Sheffield and Balby Area Meeting, welcomes the ambition in Open for transformation ‘to rediscover a clearer sense of our identity as a religious community with a shared understanding of our faith.’

It is, he says, not likely to be a welcome message for some Friends today: ‘For years we have told each other that Quakerism is simply an accepting space for each of us to explore our own individual journey. That is a reassuring idea, especially for those who have been hurt by dogmatic religion, but Ben reminds us that there is more to the Quaker Way than a collection of individual preferences. It is a shared spiritual tradition, with its own distinctive teachings and practices, rooted in profound spiritual experience.’

Many Friends hope the lecture will encourage a conversation about the direction of Quakerism. Craig Barnett is one of them: ‘Openness, acceptance and diversity are all important virtues, but have we given up on the possibility of a shared understanding of our Quaker practices? Are we content to be a collection of like-minded individuals, with everyone on their own different, solitary journey? Or could we work towards rediscovering a common language for our spiritual experience, and communities in which we are responsible for, and accountable to, each other?’

Alec Davison, who has a passionate commitment to nourishing the roots of Quakerism today, finds a flaw in one aspect of the book’s diagnosis and urgent appeal: ‘Sadly Ben, in his castigation of the Society’s growing secularism and individualism, is tainted by association. His burgeoning work drags us increasingly into the academic mire without producing any manuring of Local Meetings, and his home base (Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre) conducts Equipping for Ministry courses with barely a glance at equipping Friends to be ministers in their Local Meetings when the Society cries out for this.

Do academic degrees and Equipping for Ministry courses really nourish the Society when they are both focused on individual enrichment? Is that the way of collective transformation when our priority must surely be, as Ben rightly proposes in his lecture, the development of a teaching ministry?’

It is important that the annual Swarthmore Lecture prickles and prompts such passionate responses. It signals life and concern, not detachment and apathy.

At the end of Open for transformation there is a section devoted to helping Friends in Local and Area Meetings discuss the book. It is designed to ‘clarify what it is we celebrate about being Quakers, to reflect on our own experience of transformation, and to identify our gifts and needs as Meetings.’ It is an excellent inclusion and highly recommended.

‘Conscience, if its etymology is pressed, can mean our capacity to know the same thing together; yet such knowledge makes us vulnerable to words as a reminder of what, together, we have chosen to forget,’ Seamus Heaney once wrote. The lecture may be uncomfortable for some. However, the admonitory function and tone is perhaps necessary. A forensic analysis is delivered, but the prophetic vision offered may be its lasting legacy.

The arrogation to speak to, or for, a community is validated by the note Ben Pink Dandelion hits. There is an assurance and command over tradition and current practice. Open for transformation: Being Quaker elicits an encounter and demands a response. It challenges and confronts and cannot be ignored by anyone who cares for the future of our beloved Society.

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Comments

Douglas Steere once made the point that what was most important with outreach was getting prospective members in the door and seated on the bench. Later, after the Society had an opportunity to go to work on them,and vice versa, they’d come round (to Quaker Faith And Practice). For the past 50 years or so this approach has been both a strength and weakness, a blessing and a curse.

My concern is that many enquirers who have come through the Meeting House door have not “come round” and yet have become full fledged Members constituting a vocal, active and large minority within the Society. They will resist calls for spiritual or theological coherence. They will not resist secularism and individuality. They will not be persuaded to change. They will continue to unpick the 4 core Quaker insights cited by Dandelion, to the detriment of the Society.

It is too late to deny membership to or keep out those whose faith and practice is not congruent with Quakerism because they are already in. The very open - ness advocated by Steere sowed the seeds of Liberal Quaker dilution witnessed over the 20th century.

A new or transformed Quakerism? Nice thought. Nice try. But too late. Too many are already in who are in opposition to theological coherence and religious community. Too many have been the beneficiaries of: “We love you-what would you like us to be for you?” The remainder, who say “We love you and this is who we are…. You’re welcome to join if this works for you” are made to suffer.

Tim Connolly, Attender
Wilton Monthly Meeting
Wilton, Ct, USA

By tim@newnotes.net on 26th February 2015 - 15:58

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