For me, dogma is often a rather poor thing, which does not allow much inspiration, rather holds to the parroting our ancestors of faith rebelled against. Quakerism, for me, is more or a living growing tradition. In the roots of our history we live the karma of our past, in the words of the bumpersticker, my karma ran over my dogma…

I believe that we used to do a better job of incorporating Friends into this history, and sense of belonging. However, I am not sure there is an easy answer to how this ended. It is not unique to Friends, but rather, youth oriented mass culture today, writes eldership out of the social equation, and then young people wonder at their rootlessness. I’m smiling as I hear one slightly younger Friend saying, “see older Friends have a bee in their bonnet about young Friends… ” not at all. We are the generation that began the process. We forgot that there used to be traditions to mitagate the normal sense of the times of our lives.

Young adults always believe they are a complete book, and older adults always come to learn how little we ever know… In other cultures, such as the Lakota, there are mechanical ways of teaching this. But it is not about how much one generation knows and how much another thinks it knows. Rather, it is creating a loving family of older Friends and yonger Friends.

Maybe it is just the grumbling of a rather sad, aging Friend…

Thine in the light
lor

And though it may sound strange coming from a ‘liberal liberal’ Friend, I’m not necessarily against Friends like yourself wanting the sort of ‘moderately more dogmatic Quakerism’ you describe. To me it all depends on whether you want it more exclusive universally, throughout the whole Society, or just locally, in the meetings and groups you are most closely associated with. Like I said to Craig above, if you’re still willing to call me Friend I’m still willing to call you one, even if we wouldn’t fit in to each other’s local meetings.

Liz, thanks for your comment.

Lorcan, I am usually a little skeptical of birthright Quakerism, so I look forward to hearing what you have to say on your topic…

Best wishes,
Zach

Hi all, reading Dave the Kawkersaur’s comment, I must say, that I think the drift away from Quakerism by seekers, as well as the trend at looking to dogma to define us a spiritual community is a failure of folklore not theology. We, unlike say the Mennonites, have been loosing the next generation, so we do not impart to seekers who come to us, a sense of our history, a feeling of BEING Quaker.
For those who grew up Quaker, being Quaker is an immutable sense of connection to the generations that came before, so inovation is part of the flow of our history, as is being rooted in a Quaker part of ourselves… I am likely going to write more about this soon, feeling rather sad these days, so I need to be a little more thoughtful first
Thine in the light
lor
PS I also wish to think of what we might do to help pass on the folkloric, cultural aspect of Quakerism… input greatly appreciated.

I am (despite the kwakersaur monicker) one of those conservative leaning liberal Friends who BTW is also on a hesitant trek to finding himself a home in a liberal(ish) mainstream Christian denomination. Like you I found the promises implicit in ancient Friends attractive, like you I had a fascination with their faith and witness, and like you I have found a skeptical methodology slowly deconstructing the whole apparatus.

I still favour a moderately more dogmatic Quakerism. Not because I believe the First Friends got it incredibly right and liberal Friends got it all wrong. But because corporate witness and corporate commitment demands we be able to agree on at least some ground rules. Muslims, Buddhists, and Pentacostals do not have it horribly wronga nd are not going to be the fuel source for heaven’s central heating system. But just maybe they woudl be more comfy in the mosque/temple/tabernacle down the street — can we give you the contact number, you’re welcome to visit, let’s arrange an interfaith gathering sometime.

Secondly, and for much the same reasons, credibility outside our incentuous little meetinghouses requires that we hold that truth in religion is possible and that at least some matters have clarity.

Thirdly my path is Christianity. I do not see the Christian faith as having cornered the market on all spiritual wisdom. But its my path and my way. I seek to practice Christian-do in the same way the samurai seeks to practice bushi-do. Fully aware that there are other paths out there.

Which one reason I’m drifting from the Friendly camp. I seek a community that will support me in the Christian walk without requiring I join some Christocentric minority within that community dedicated to marginalizing the nontheists and the neo-pagans. I’m getting tired of renegotiating the basics.

Blessings,
Liz Opp, The Good Raised Up

Perhaps slavery, like anti Quaker laws would have died before three hundred years passed, and brutality became the out rage it did, though I have to say, that morphological studies on the remains of early slaves show they were worked until mussle was ripped from bone… but be that as it may, if we had gone to jail, as those Friends who flocked to Boston after Mary was hanged, maybe, just maybe, we would have ended this stain on our souls.

The fact is there was no gentle slavery. We may not have beaten our slaves, but the institution was preserved by deadly force. Slaves running from Quaker masters were subject to the same brutal slave catchers.

I do condemn early Friends, as lovingly as I condemn myself, we are all subject to the sins of our day. I pay my taxes for fear of jail, while knowing my labor goes to kill hundreds of thousands. I stand condemned with my dear brother George Fox, and William Penn, equal in shame for my short comings, and praying that one day I will find the courage to shake off the fear of these bloody laws, as Mary Dyer did.

As to Fox, risking his life for the freedom of his thought, while being, ever so blind to the great harm against others, I will briefly say, too tired to go into great detail, I am sure that Fox had ADHD. Many great invovators did… his intensity, his lack surity in the rightness of his cause, not a bad thing, when he also hit upon the need to center down… but, one thing about ADHD, is that one is rather concerned about the rightness of that which is before thee, and I fear that slavery took a little more empathy than he could spare in his zeal. It took the kind of empathy that say, Bonhoffer had… but none of us are complete. There was a great interview with the Dali Lama, the other day, with Barbara Walters. She asked it he was a God. He laughed and said, no… if I was, I would cure the infection in my eye that is bothering me today. She asked if he was inlightened, he said no, the inlightened know… and he had trouble remembering yesterday. He said he was only a teacher… great lesson in humility.
Oh, too tired to go on about humility about our teachers… night all… more soon. Have a dear and merry Christmas and a bright and joyous new year.
lor

You are welcome to use my name, I’m all for telling the truth, no matter what it happens to be.

I cringed only that I had done such a poor job of getting my point across.

It seems to me that you are addressing a perceived tendency to throw out all the wisdom of early Friends because they were wrong on slavery, which to my knowledge doesnt’ exist.

I personally, like Lor, think they WERE wrong on slavery (even if it wasn’t as bad in context as we might perceive it to be - as I said, I see things today that make me feel similarly) But that doesnt’ invalidate whatever insights they did have. I have learned great lessons from sexists, racist, etc., who had great insights and yet coudlnt’ see past the culture of their times (how many of us can?) but that neither makes their sexism or racism acceptable.

But, more to the point, I myself am NOT throwing out the wisdom of early Friends, for one thing. I respect it, I am often surprised or enlightened by it.

I only refuse to give them special authority, as if they were closer to God or to Truth than I am. I made the unfortunate mistake of pointing out, in this context, that they were fallible, which is easily shown by a support (be it ever so lukewarm) for slavery, which is clearly unacceptable in ANY form in hindsight.

I don’t think that their support of slavery makes them bad, and requires us to dismiss anything they might have said or written in any context. I do think that it shows that they were fallible human beings, just as we are. But even that is not why I don’t choose to vest them with especial authority, I am simply, as Lor points out, doing as other early Friends did, focusing more on what canst THOU say, and truth as my authority, rather than vice versa.

I tend to glaze over these days when I read anything that seems “academic” to me, so I don’t tend to do well trying to make sense of historical treatises. It can certianly be worthwhile to explore why Fox might have seemed to support slavery - because he couldnt’ understand the implications or the future, or because he hoped to save some real life people rather than stand on priciple.

Still, for me, owning another person, even if the relationship entirely lacks physical brutality, for example, is simply not living in the light, no two ways about it. I am a little disturbed by what I am reading as an implication that it was “not so bad” at some point. - True, it went from bad to worse (as far as I know) but that doesnt’ mean it was ever acceptable.

Assuming you don’t ask me to delete your name, however, I do plan to carefully distinguish you, as a person gifted with the knack of raising all the right questions, from those people who would reject early Quakerism altogether because of its dividedness on slavery. They are the ones I am contradicting. You are simply the one who very rightly drew my attention back to a matter that needs to be addressed. For you I have nothing but praise.

Lorcan, I agree that when we read Fox’s writings through twentieth-century eyes, they look like an accommodation of slavery. One of my points in the part of the essay I’ve already posted is that Friends didn’t yet know what “slavery” was going to mean in the New World, at the time the Balby elders and George Fox wrote their best-known statements on the matter.

Another point I made in the part you’ve read so far is that by the time Fox got to Barbados, and wrote his other known statements on the matter, he was in the same position as the Friends who visited Nazi Germany before World War II and tried to get German approval for their plans to help Jews emigrate: there were certain things that they’d have gladly said, condemning the evils they saw, but that they couldn’t say without alienating their hosts and making forward progress impossible.

It’s not entirely clear to me why you say you’d rather Fox had thundered against slavery forthrightly in Barbados. Had he done so, it would have gotten his fellow Quakers exiled from Barbados (if not imprisoned and possibly killed), and it would have gotten all their Negro converts transferred into non-Quaker ownership, where they would have been badly abused and very probably killed. There is quite a difference between saying things that might get you yourself killed, as Mary Dyer did, and as Fox did in England, and saying things that might get innocents under your protection killed. Just speaking personally, I am glad Fox was willing to say the former sorts of things, and equally glad that he was unwilling to say the latter.

Several Friends use as authority for their points, “Well Fox said, XY or Z”. I prefer Mary Dyer’s pronouncement, “truth is my authority, not authority my truth.” Even among people known as Friends, we have very classic sins for which we are called upon to atone, in each of our lives and in our history.

We cannot ignore the Black Attender benches in our meetinghouses well into the 19th century, each one of us owns the responcibility for that, and cannot address our own unconcious failings on race until we claim responsibility for the historical negatives in the patrimony and matrimony of our institutions.

Slavery, and the fifty five million souls murdered in the middle passage is one part of the burden of genocide our people bear. In order to atone, I believe we must embrace it in full, and in those times in our lives when rememberance is called for, atone with a complete sense of ownership, it was our faith that did this.

There are no saints or saviors, only God and this weak flesh who He led here to try very very hard. Our acceptance of our sins, is not so that we might wallow in a feeling of evil, corruption, of being lesser than that God intended us to be, but in the culture of Yeshua, to try hard to make good on our promice to atone for our sins, and forgive others their sins.

I find one of the weak points of latter interpritations of the life of our brother Yeshua’s ministry, the idea that he died to atone for our sins. No, we have the potential to sin in each act of consumption which makes life possible, and as such, the sacrifice we make, is a sacrifice of our ego, our labor, our love, all so that we can make things as right as we can in a world designed for some harm, for much failure, and wrong. I do not either put on Yeshua, my personal need to atone for what my people have done, nor do I try and say our sins were not very great.

I have much I could do to mitigate my own responcibility for slavery, I am decended from a family who not only had members who stood against slavery in America in the South as early as the very end of the war of 1812, walked into the alone bush in the, then, Belgin Congo to expose the genocide there in the early part of the last century, but, not a single one of my direct ancestors owned slaves*, and in fact, a close relitive openly and proudly married a Black woman in the Islands when slavery was still the law of the land in the States. None of this takes from me, as a Quaker and a more or less White American, the responsibility to atone for the sins of our people, this holocaust of human bondage.
Well, I don’t say all this, to say that thy deep writing and musing on our past is untrue or not spirit led. It might be part of thine own atonement. Rather, I offer this in the light of plain speaking, to my own condition, my own failings and responcibility to try as hard as weak flesh may, to walk with rightiousness before our God, humbled by my own sins and failings.

Thine, dearly in the light
lor

* My family has other great and dark things in our past of wars and conquest for which to atone.

Thine in the light
lor
PS Marry Christmas and a bright new year.