Peg was 85, a longtime activist Friend, with numerous arrests to her record. And last fall she seemed ready to continue working for her various causes.
But when she announced to her meeting, in a special called session, that her next witness would be her last — well, you need to read the pieces to gauge the impact.
Some Quaker FAQs – Part 6 [Links to the previous segments in this series are here. ] Last time we ended the segment with a question: Can You Sum Up Quakerism In Only Two Paragraphs? My answer was: Yes. We’ll get to that next time. And now it’s time.
And Oh, The SHAME of It! Another big fan was spinning in New York City’s Town Hall Saturday night. And the stuff splattered in a distinctly southern direction. And alas, the bathroom humor allusions were all too, er, apt.
That is, North Carolina became a splattered, a punch line on Garrison Keillor’s nationally-broadcast Prairie Home Companion Saturday night:
One additional major loss from this cultural amnesia is that there are many great examples in previous Quaker generations, and even in our own, of creative witness and resistance in situations not so different from the one we face today. We have a very rich — and potentially useful– heritage to draw on. But overall we do very little with it, I’m afraid, and the liberal Quaker ethos, which is tilted toward “Progress” and puts its faith in the future, abets that.
Moreover, the loss of independent memory is one of the most insidious of the effects of our current cultural pathology. It is one of the key tools of oppression, to make alternative traditions and stories and ways of life disappear. For us in the U.S. today, this doesn’t usually require overt repression (although in situations like Occupy Wall Street, the authorities will make exceptions); usually though, alternatives just get drowned out amid the general noise and distraction.
And overall, I see much of liberal Quakerism playing right along. But what do we do when the “Progress” that’s been our group’s polestar turns against us, putting drones above and plunging our graduates into a a peonage of debt? When the future is more ominous than promising? Quakers have been in this situation before; but if we can’t or won’t remember what earlier Quakers did, we’re crippling ourselves in figuring out how to cope.
Most Progressive/Liberal Quakers today agree that they want their worship to be based on silence, conducted by the Spirit rather than leaders like pastors. The “sense of the meeting” is that they can listen for God better in quiet waiting.
They also agree that in business meetings they will make decisions without taking votes; here they write down the “sense of the meeting” on concrete decisions, and reach this usually (but not always) by unanimous consent.
(The “not always” part opens a big can of worms, which we can’t go into in detail here; it deserves its own book, and more than one has already been written about it.)
These Friends know this decision making method can take longer; but they believe it gets them closer to what God (or whatever they call it) wants the group to do. And the patience (or endurance) involved can also be a valuable spiritual discipline.
The “sense of the meeting” also takes the form of what Quakers call “Testimonies.” You’ve likely heard about some of these (most likely peace and equality). They represent pieces of the “sense/consensus” that are ongoing actions or priorities, which are supposed to be of concern to all the members of the group that formulated them.