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AFSC interviews relative of Japanese-American Friend Gordon Hirabayashi

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 12:01:11 +0000

"A Principled Stand," co-authored by Lane and James Hirabayashi.

In 1942, Gordon Hirabayashi (1918-2012) refused to obey the 8 p.m. curfew for Japanese-Americans established after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. After turning himself in to the FBI, Gordon was sentenced to 90 days in prison, and appealed his case all the way up to the Supreme Court, with the help of Quakers and the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC).

A Quaker and a pacifist, at 24 Gordon also resisted the mass removal of Japanese-Americans and refused to fill out a special questionnaire given only to Japanese-Americans that would have made him eligible for the draft.

Gordon’s convictions were finally overturned in the 1980s through a “writ of error coram nobis” appeal, and the U.S. government ultimately offered a formal apology for discrimination and a violation of his constitutional rights.

More than 50 years later, Gordon’s brother James together with his son Lane co-authored A Principled Stand: The Story of Gordon Hirabayashi v The United States, featuring passages from Gordon’s diary and correspondence from the 1940s. Their book was published by the University of Washington Press in 2013.

I spoke with Lane Hirabayashi, a professor in the Department of Asian American Studies at UCLA, about his memories of his uncle Gordon, what he learned while writing this book with his father, and the role of the Japanese internment in the United States' history.

-Madeline

Madeline Schaefer (MS): Tell me about your relationship with your uncle Gordon growing up.

Lane Hirabayashi (LH): We all really enjoyed the Hirabayashi extended family because my grandparents ran a nursing home for the elderly Nisei who came out of camp and didn’t really have anywhere to go because of age or infirmity. It was a rambling old place with a lot of rooms and a huge yard. I actually lived there for a couple years. Then when I was four or five we moved out to the Bay Area. But every summer we’d drive up and reunite with the family at the Hirabayashi Nursing Home, and many times Gordon and his family would come down from Alberta and join us.

But I didn’t really grow up around Gordon because Edmonton and San Francisco are so far apart. I certainly remember Gordon— later on we had family reunions in the 90s where I reacquainted myself with him—but he always seemed kind of professorial to me. We had very nice conversations but it wasn’t like I knew him really well.

When my father invited me to work on this manuscript with him, I started reading parts of Gordon’s diary from the 1940s, many of his letters. Certainly I’d read the speeches and publications Gordon had written as an adult, but what I came to find was the voice of the 24-year-old was both new to me and very fresh.

I was in my 50s when I starting to work on this with my dad in 2008, 2009, I gradually felt I was getting to know the 24-year-old in some depth, and that wasn’t the same person I was seeing as a teenager: i.e., a professor of sociology, a husband, father and established citizen, already an icon in Japanese-American circles. Then, in talking with my cousin Jay, Gordon’s son, and his sisters, I realized that I was becoming familiar with the 24-year-old Gordon and getting insights into his mental world, especially his spiritual life, that I’m not sure that even his children had quite the same access to.

MS: Especially someone you’re related to. Did you know about his case growing up?

LH: Oh absolutely. And you know in a lot of Japanese families there are still feelings of trauma or stigma, even today, and people don’t want to talk about it. But the camp was an episode in our extended family’s experience that was openly discussed. I can’t remember precisely when I found out that Gordon had been imprisoned for resisting but it was no secret.

MS: Was there any tension between Japanese-American community and your family because of the publicity of Gordon’s case?

LH: It was a time of great turmoil, great conflict but there was a lot of pressure being put on the Japanese-American community to demonstrate its loyalty. I don’t know about local chapters but I’ve certainly gone into the archives and seen statements by Mike Matsuoka, one of the leaders of the JACL [Japanese American Citizens League], denouncing Gordon and Gordon’s case specifically because from the national leadership’s point of view it was just going to cause more trouble, more suspicion, and they didn’t feel that that’s what was needed…Gordon did, obviously. But I think he believed both at a constitutional level and a moral level that his stand was right and the fact that the JACL leadership and even the Supreme Court didn’t agree didn’t faze him.

I expected to find in the diaries and the letters moments of despair or maybe depression as reality began to sink in, and I didn’t find that. I was very pleasantly surprised that Gordon had an analysis—he felt his analysis about Fifth Amendment violations was correct—his lawyer was going to argue his initial case that way--and Gordon had confidence and expected that the Supreme Court was going to vindicate him.

But I also think that Gordon’s spiritual side was key too. I have to say that surprised me because I don’t remember Gordon as an overtly spiritual or religious person when I was a teenager and he was in his forties and fifties. He never quoted the Bible, I never heard him talk about Jesus… that just wasn’t the way he manifested his spirituality.

And yet in the course of reading the letters and the diaries, I think his spirituality was definitely something that sustained him.

MS: Reading his diaries, that seems to me to have been one of the main motivators for his resistance. It was beyond the constitution and based on basic human rights.

LH: I think it was a moral thing for Gordon, and also the visits that he gets from Quaker leadership and the support that folks like Floyd Schmoe–one of the leaders of the AFSC in the Seattle area–provided, really helped sustain him. And yet in terms of the Gordon I knew, I don’t remember any conversations we had that were specifically religious.

MS: He has such a strong sense of American identity which is interesting given his background in the first-generation/Issei community. Did he feel any push and pull between the two worlds?

LH: It’s something my father, the third eldest of the five kids, spent a lot of time talking to me about. He pointed out to me that my grandparents were unusual people; they were Christian in Japan before they came and that was fairly unusual. And they belonged to this Mukyokai, non-church Christianity, that a Japanese Christian, Uchimura Kanzo developed and brought back to Japan. So my grandparents were literate, they were Christians, they ran a Christian-style household. But their English was very rudimentary and they were raised and socialized in Japan so their orientation was a kind of synthesis of Western Christian beliefs, rural Japanese roots, both of which were reconfigured in terms of a Japanese immigrant experience.

Actually, the Japanese Americans in the Thomas area south of Seattle, where my dad grew up, was fairly integrated for the day. The Hirabayashis carried out their religious pursuits in the context of the larger community which was made up of white folks and Japanese Americans--these Issei/Nisei families with immigrant parents and the American-born kids. The way my father described it was that these were two separate worlds, linguistically and culturally and yet even in the ‘30s when the kids are growing up, it was a world that also had definite points of articulation.

So in that sense it wasn’t the highly segregated prewar community that sometimes you hear about maybe in San Francisco or other such communities before the war. Because the Thomas schools were not segregated, the Hirabayashi kids interacted with all the other kids in that area, and same on the religious front to a surprising extent— they worshiped together and shared a pretty fundamentalist reading of the Bible—no cards, no popular music, certainly no gambling or drinking.

It was that upstanding, fundamentalist Christian orientation that started to rub Gordon the wrong way in his teenage years and that sent him off looking for alternatives by the time he got to University of Washington. That’s when he finds Quakers and goes “wow:” in terms of the Mukyokai circle, and the Religious Society of Friends, there were some real parallels.

MS: There are very similar in the sense that each person has the possibility of direct linkage to the divine.

LH: And both are non-hierarchical. Members went around in a circle and people could talk about their religious experience, directly, exactly as they felt it. I don’t think it’s an accident that Gordon encounters the Religious Society of Friends at UW and feels an immediate kinship.

MS: It also sounds like there might of been something of an activist, social justice aspect of his mother’s religious stance.

LH: Yeah, according to my father, my grandmother was kind of unusual because she had to act within the norms and practices of the day that foregrounded men in the political sphere as well as in terms of representing the family to the outside world. Grandma, from what I’ve heard, was quite intelligent, and didn’t necessarily accept the order of things. She had a strong will. I think Gordon commented somewhere that in another day and age his mom, Mitsuko, could have been something else than a housewife, like an editor, or maybe even a CEO.

She apparently resented having to work so hard, to farm, on top of all the prejudice that the Issei faced. Sure enough, the White River Garden, this property that the Katsuno family and the Hirabayashis managed to put their hands on south of Seattle, was escheated by the state of Washington after the state alien land passed in 1921. So the Hirabayashis had lost everything one time around well before the camps, and so by the time the camps came down, it was really stressful and kind of heartbreaking for Gordon’s folks. It’s funny I use those words because my grandmother had a heart condition and I never met her because she died right after the war. You never know for sure but my father always thought that the stress of being disenfranchised twice was probably more pressure on her already weakened heart than her system could bear.

MS: Seems as if that might have inspired Gordon’s determination because he’d seen his parents face persecution by the state.

LH: Yeah, Gordon recounts that he remembers the meetings of the families gathering at the White River Garden to talk about their court case. They lost everything and my grandfather had to rent back the house that he built with his own hands from the state of Washington in 1922 because they had nowhere to go. And Gordon remembered that.

Just like his inclination towards Quakers, Gordon felt that the court was the appropriate place to take a complaint about injustice and rights and so forth; it was something that the family had done, and so in that sense he had an example to work from.

MS: How did the Quakers hear about his case?

LH: The University of Washington networks were tight not only within certain groups like the YMCA, YWCA, and the Religious Society of Friends, but there was also a growing student anti-war movement on the University of Washington campus. Looking at the names that show up in these networks, there’s total overlap. Gordon is identified in the University of Washington campus newspaper of being one of the leaders in the anti-war movement on campus. And that’s how I think the UW community got a sense of Gordon’s activities because these were reported on in the campus newspapers, these articles naming him as one of the student leaders in the anti-war movement. He’s involved with the Friends, he’s involved with the Y, he’s involved in the anti-war movement, and there was a great deal of overlap in the student membership in these groups.

But I think a real critical person is Senator Mary Farquharson. She was a Quaker and her husband was on the faculty at the University of Washington. She’s the one who asks Gordon, “I understand you’re going to protest the curfew and the removal.” When Gordon acknowledged that yeah, that’s the plan, she said, well, how about if we support you in this.

MS: One thing that I thought was really interesting was all the people he met in prison, both conscientious objectors and non-conscientious objectors. Do you have a favorite part of his diaries?

LH: I do, and one of them is about the unordinary becoming the mundane. Gordon notes that when he first got to prison and a cockroach ran across his plate, he’d throw the food away. After a couple of months though he’d just brush the cockroach aside and keep right on eating. I just thought that was kind of funny because I could imagine even jail life can become routine after a while. And the thing about the cockroach made me smile because I don’t like cockroaches.

MS: I thought to myself, wow that’s pretty bad.

LH: But it’s just very real and you can see that after a while a cockroach becomes just another part of the daily routine.

The thing that impressed me the most in terms of jail vignettes was the stint at McNeil Island Penitentiary where Gordon comes in and he’s put into this waiting area and they start segregating the prisoners, sending the blacks off to a separate block. Gordon figures that out and starts to question it. First he brings it up with a guard who gets angry with him. The guard sends Gordon to the warden; Gordon asks, “well, does this institution practice racial segregation?” And the warden says “of course not.” Gordon writes that then he knew he had the warden; Gordon starts saying well there’s this this this this and the warden says, “all right, let me look into this.” And so they start moving some prisoners around in response to Gordon’s challenge so it was no longer a situation of blatant racial segregation.

That’s when it really struck me that when you have somebody who is a prisoner of conscience, and they’re doing time, I think they do that time differently than someone that’s in there for robbery or an assault. Gordon was in the joint on a matter of principle. It just struck me that even in jail Gordon was thinking about doing good, doing right, following his religious principles and his moral beliefs.

MS: What was it like doing this project with your father?

LH: I’ve had a forty-year discussion with my dad, who passed away about a year ago, about the Hirabayashi family. Gordon’s story was something that really interested my father from a biographical and autobiographical point of view. As we started working on this project in 2009, it was really like revisiting a lot of conversations we’d had over the decades.

I’m down in L.A., my dad was up in Marin County north of San Francisco, but every summer and every Christmas, when I’d go up there, I’d inevitably go by the house and see how my dad was doing and he’d have a stack of things. And I’d go over and spend an afternoon and he’d say, hey look at this and, oh I found that and I’d sit for a half hour or hour and read as fast as I could. And we’d have some lunch or dinner, talk and I’d wind up borrowing files to read. It was a great experience because we’ve worked on many things over the years and a lot of those have been framed by our work with the National Japanese American Museum here in L.A. but this was really the icing on the cake.

The book, in terms of featuring Gordon’s voice, was really my dad’s idea. He said after finding Gordon’s personal papers in 2008, bringing them back to the States and culling through them, he felt that there was enough original material in there that no one had seen. I don’t think anybody realized that those diaries were there. My dad read them and felt right away that there was enough material to really tell Gordon’s story in Gordon’s voice from the perspective of the 24-year-old student.

When he invited me to work on it with him I was really enthusiastic because there’s been a ton of stuff that’s been written about Gordon’s cases, but as I became familiar with the material I think my dad’s vision was really true—we had enough material there to really present something new in the sense of Gordon’s personal feelings and thoughts, written right as Hirabayashi v the United States took shape.

We’d finished a first working draft of the book, University of Washington press had basically accepted it for publication and then my dad’s health really started to decline. He told me you’ve got to take it from here. I think after the book was accepted it was probably a year and half and Jim was gone.

It was tough for me, I’m still struggling with it, but I think once I get over the loss a little better, it hardly could have been any better. I spent a lot of quality time with Jim given that we’re a five or six-hour drive apart and we talked about things that were important to both of us. I think we did our best to give Gordon his due with this, and I know this was something my dad really wanted to get done. He didn’t get to live to see it, but he knew it was as good as done.

MS: The jails and camps remind me of the ways that we still have of locking up people the government considers a threat or nuisance...

LH: Definitely: Japanese Americans were subject to a penal system and there were different kinds of jails, actually. The first generation Issei, who were swept up right after Pearl Harbor were put in special internment camps run by the U.S. Justice Department. These internment camps, where Japanese nationals were jailed, were separate from the War Relocation Authority camps that the Nisei, who were U.S. citizens, went in to. But the first generation Issei, almost 2,000, they went to DOJ camps that were much more high security, penal institutions.

Many of us were horrified after 9/11 because the FBI and other intelligence agencies swept down on the Muslim and Middle Eastern American communities and picked up about 2,000 people, a number of whom were kept in detention without access to lawyers or the ordinary provisions that the Bill of Rights normally guarantees.

The parallel of the government being able to do whatever it wants during times of national crisis wasn’t lost on the Japanese American community. I was very pleased that even organizations as conservative as the Japanese American Citizens League saw this and stepped up and said “Wait a second: this is eerily familiar and we’ve got to stop and think a second.” Because after the war there was not a single conviction in terms of sabotage or espionage on the part of anyone— Issei, Nisei; not one successfully prosecuted case of sabotage or espionage. So all those people that got arrested may have seemed suspicious, but they weren’t doing anything, not at a level that would get a conviction. I’m happy to acknowledge that there was probably some spying and there were definitely some people who sympathized with Japan, whether because they were Japanese nationals or maybe they were fascists; I don’t know. But no one was blowing up bridges or bombing airports or any of the other stuff that the government thought was a rationale to detain all those people.

MS: Right. And government officials explicitly said at the time that they didn’t need to detain all those people to remain safe.

LH: And it was none other than J. Edgar Hoover who made that argument. Hoover was actually not in favor of mass removal and incarceration because he argued, at least before Roosevelt signed the Executive Order, that the FBI had picked everyone up who was suspicious or dangerous in the post-Pearl Harbor raids because they had lists and they knew who they were going after. So Hoover interestingly enough was against the policy of mass incarceration until February 19^th 1942 when Roosevelt signed E.O. 9066.

MS: Wow, Roosevelt. So often he’s seen as a hero for Democrats and liberals everywhere.

LH: He was a great president, a great leader, but not everybody’s perfect and in terms of the Japanese American issue he fell down. But when you step back and a look at his entire presidency, how does that weigh out? Did he do more good than he did damage? I think a lot of Japanese Americans can’t forgive him for the damage. But I consider myself a historian so I’m willing to read Roger Daniels’s new book and rethink how it plays out.

Racial prejudice and discrimination skewed the actions of many of the branches of the government—the officials in the President’s domain; in terms of Congress; and in terms of the Judiciary—all these officials swear to uphold the Constitution when they take office and all of them fell down. The president was convinced by misguided people in the War Department that this was necessary. Congress ratified and approved E.O. 9066; and then the judiciary didn’t want to review the constitutional issues. So you can look at Roosevelt and say that’s where the buck stops, but I would have to point out that everyone else went along with it. There’s plenty of blame to go around. When the hostility against Asians generally in the country combined with the war crisis, things got out of hand.

MS: What do you think that you’ve gotten out of this project the most?

LH: Again for me it was to get to know Gordon more deeply than I’d ever known him in person—getting to know the 24 year old. Many of the perspectives he had, many of the stands that he decided to take, I found kind of amazing. Amazing at the sense that at 24 I was in graduate school and doing comparatively well intellectually compared to how I was doing in high school. But I was not by any stretch of the imagination the person that Gordon was, and so a lot of the stands and lot of the things he was thinking…I couldn’t help but ask myself, what was I thinking at 24? I wasn’t thinking what he was thinking. And that gave me a certain understanding and a real respect for him. There was a depth to him that his personal writing revealed that I didn’t get out of the law articles or even from knowing Gordon personally.

And working side by side with my father on this, I had a lot of great conversations with him about the family. My dad’s gone, so that’s it, but there’s a satisfaction of getting this out. I really want to share it with people, and I think it contributes something to understanding who Gordon was, but also the context of his time. Because Gordon didn’t do this alone and that’s a really important part; of a lot of different people contributed to the 1940s case, a lot of people contributed to the coram nobis efforts in the 1980s. And that’s why the ending is as it is with Gordon saying, “well a lot of people say ‘Gordon this Gordon that’ but this really is a broader case; it’s the people’s case.” I think he is very sincere that this is a broader thing than just his rights and his conscience. Gordon believed in the Constitution but wanted it to work even when there is a crisis or if you happen to be a person of color. That’s in everyone’s interest.

Anthony Manousos: Reflections on the Quaker Testimonies

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 11:56:34 +0000

I was intrigued that the June/July issue of Friends Journal contains four articles reflecting on and questioning the formulation of Quaker testimonies that Howard Brinton developed in the 1940s, which has come to be known as SPICE (Simplicity, Peace, Integrity, Community and Equality).

In his article "Categorically Not the Testimonies," Eric Moon points out that "testimonies are something Quakers do, not something we talk about." Yet like many Friends, including me, he spends a lot of time talking about the Testimonies! What he says is thoughtful and valuable, however, and I agree with him that "when we codify, make creed, and canonize a few words, we limit our vision, as well as the possibility of God's work through us." It is far better, Eric says, that we share our stories about our experiences, inward and outward, with Spirit than to focus on the Testimonies as if they were Quaker dogmas.

In "Reviving the Testimonies," Michael Levi also expresses concern that the Testimonies have been turned into a dogma or creed, setting up a "false authority" that gets in the way of revelation. He also recommends that Friends share stories about how Spirit is at work in our lives.

In "Reclaiming Our Divine Birthright," Patricia Barber shares her personal story about how she tried to put on Quakerism like a new dress, and how unsatisfying this approach was. She didn't really understand Quakerism until she had a direct and transforming experience of the Divine.

Jacob Stone, on the other hand, sees value in the Testimonies since they give us something to think about. In "On Authority, a New Apologia," he argues it is important that Quakerism become a "moral system that transcends theological divisions and encourages us all to define and live a universal morality." Jacob takes a humanist perspective and believes that Quakers should be able to analyze their beliefs logically and in the light of modern science and philosophy.

This discussion is extremely important. I think Howard Brinton would have been appalled (as I often am) that many Friends have come to see his formulation of the Testimonies almost as a creed or dogma, rather than as a way of explaining how God is at work within and among us. Brinton utterly rejected creedalism in all its forms. For him, true religion sprang from a direct experience of the Divine, not statements about the Divine. For Howard, as for early Friends, the Testimonies are not about what we believe, or even what we do, they are about what Spirit is doing through us.

In Friends for 300 Years, Chapter 4, Brinton explained the origin of Social Concerns by using the image of Divine Light streaming down from above, entering a meeting, and scattering into four “testimonies,” almost like light refracted through a prism becoming a rainbow.

I love this fluid, dynamic image, especially after having seen a retrospective of the work of James Turrell, an artist who grew up in a Quaker family in Pasadena and uses light as a medium of art. As Turrell’s work discloses, physical light is mysterious energy, transforming everything, yet often taken for granted. The same is true of Divine Light. When the invisible, yet omnipresent Divine Light is refracted through the silent, centered worship of a meeting or an individual, it becomes visible through action.

One reason many Friends have lost touch with the Inward Light and rely instead on external Testimonies is that we have become too conventionally educated and “heady.” There is nothing wrong with relying on reason or on authority to some extent, according to Brinton, but they are not enough. We need the guidance of something greater and deeper than human means, something that Friends called the “Inward Light.”

I resonate with how Patricia Barber described the transforming power of the Inward Light in her life—the “divine birthright”—that enabled her to “live under the cross” and experience “abundant life.”

Her words reminded me of the traditional Christian meaning of testimony, i.e. “witnessing to the work of Jesus Christ within a person’s life” (Historical Dictionary of the Friends (Quaker), edited by Margery Post Abbott et al.) This meaning of testimony is one embraced by Evangelical Friends and is worth re-framing, as Michael Levi does, for liberal Friends.

How can I testify (i.e. provide evidence) that Spirit is at work in my life, in specific ways? How am I being stretched beyond my natural abilities and inclinations to love my neighbor, care for creation, reconcile conflicts, and promote justice?

If we ask this question honestly, as individuals and as a Meeting, and if we are willing to seek and submit to the guidance of the Inward Light, we may yet reclaim the spiritual power to which the lives of early Friends abundantly and radiantly testified.

Micah Bales : Why Conflict is Good For Us

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 12:58:21 +0000

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As a teenager, I always loved a good fight. I got a huge adrenaline rush from hashing out Very Important Issues with peers and elders alike. More importantly, I believed that having honest, open, and sometimes brutal discussion was the way to find the truth. My preference for direct speech was near-absolute, even when it alienated and hurt others. I could not understand why most people were not eager to have these kinds of conversations, why they shied away from open conflict in the pursuit of truth. Fact was, I judged most people pretty harshly for their lukewarmth and refusal to face interpersonal conflict.

I have grown a lot in the last decade. I’ve learned that my penchant for directness can be off-putting, even terrifying for a lot people. I’ve reflected on the ways that my personal intensity can damage relationships, and I’ve toned it down. As surprising as it may seem to many people who haven’t known me that long, the Micah you have come to know and love is a truly mellowcreature compared to ten or fifteen years ago. I’ve come a long way in developing that filter between thinking something and saying something. I’ve gotten a lot more gentle.

And – surprise, surprise! – I have a lot more friends now. Turns out, people are more likely to want to spend time with you when you’re not constantly calling them out on their failings and inconsistencies. It also turns out that my need to speak truth to power all the time had at least as much to do with my own brokenness as it did with anyone or anything I happened to be critiquing at the time.

In my late twenties, I chilled out a little bit; I stepped back and took it easier on others – and myself. Taking the log out of my own eye has been good for my soul. I’m a much less furious, judgmental person than I used to be. With God’s help, I hope to be healed and humbled even more.

Years in the Quaker community have taught me many ways to communicate indirectly, rather than my natural style of full-frontal truth-telling. I have learned that, quite often, it is appropriate for me to take a step back and moderate myself so that I do not frighten people with my personal intensity.

Often, this less-direct way of communicating has worked out very well. I resolved many disputes without leaving anyone feeling attacked or judged. Yet, there were times that I over-corrected; I sometimes even found myself veering into passive aggression. At other times, in order to avoid stepping on others’ toes, I failed to engage in healthy leadership that would benefit the community. As hard as it was to believe, given my adolescent disposition, I was becoming increasingly conflict-avoidant!

Why? I had a lot of reasons. To begin with, my experiences in several Quaker communities had taught me that being too assertive was dangerous, and that I could get more done through passive influence than direct argument. The Quakers I was hanging around with put a great value on being nice and conforming to a general image of harmony. I had to learn how to make change without directly, openly challenging the status quo.

Perhaps a better reason for avoiding conflict has been that as I have grown to love other people more, I am more sensitive to the fact that conflict can be painful. Why upset my friends if I don’t have to? Even worse, conflict has the potential to severely disrupt our relationships. When conflict and disagreement make the atmosphere of our community uncomfortable, it is very common for people to simply leave rather than face that discomfort. I have been a part of many small, fragile groups, and I haven’t wanted to unleash a dispute that would destroy the whole community!

Also by Micah: Give It All Away…Could Jesus Possibly Have Meant What He Said About Money?

Despite all of the risks involved, though, I am increasingly convinced that healthy conflict is an essential ingredient to growing, vibrant relationships. Without open discussion, disagreement and ruffled feathers, it is very difficult for us to be broken open and made tender to how God is calling us to live together. As immature as I was, I think that my teenage self was basically right about at least one thing: Conflict is a matter of truth, and when we refuse to engage openly in honest disagreement, we risk losing the ability to face reality together.

This is my challenge going forward, and I offer it as a challenge for all of us who desire to live in loving communities that are rooted in the truth: How can I embrace those times when I find myself at odds with others, welcoming conflict as an opportunity to speak the truth in love and listen deeply to where the Holy Spirit is leading us together? What would it look like to release my own need for control and safety so that Christ-in-me can come to live and reign in our midst? How can I invite Jesus to take risks through me, in spite of me, engaging the difficult conversations with the healing and uniting power of God?

—
Micah Bales is a founding member of Capitol Hill Friends, a new Quaker Christian community, and has been an organizer with Occupy Our Homes DC. A communications and web strategist by trade, he is employed by Friends United Meeting – an international Quaker denominational body. You can read more of his work at his blog, The Lamb’s War or follow him on Twitter.

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George Amoss Jr on the unreliability of experiential spirituality

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 12:08:59 +0000

Introduction

As veteran readers of this blog will know, my concerns about the contemporary liberal Quaker fascination with what is called “spiritual experience,” a fascination I shared earlier in my life, are longstanding. Recent events, particularly the emerging controversy about the proposed new Faith and Practice book for Baltimore Yearly Meeting, have made those concerns more urgent. In this post, I will discuss four of them: unreliability, exclusivity, inutility, and apostasy.

I’ll begin by considering what is meant by “experience” in this context.

“Experience” Defined

It appears that when a liberal Friend speaks of a “spiritual experience” she may be referring to a feeling, such as a sense of presence or unity; a thought, whether explicitly formed or inchoate (the latter may be called an intuition); an audition, perhaps of a voice; or even a vision of a sacred figure such as Jesus. Or she may refer to (what she believes is) an instance of “pure experience,” which, as noted in the previous post, would be meaningless without interpretation; in that case we can say that she offers an interpretation, however tentative, of an anomalous emotional state or intuition. Such experiences are often reported to be ineffable and yet self-validating; in other words, although their content may seem too unusual for adequate expression in words, it feels so manifestly true, meaningful, and even sacred that it is held to be beyond questioning.

By “spiritual experiences” we mean, then, discrete feelings, cognitions and intuitions, and paranormal experiences that are, as Ann Taves¹ would say, deemed religious or spiritual and felt to be self-validating. Friends may also use the adjective “mystical,” a word that resists definition.² By using such descriptors as “spiritual” and “mystical,” a person conveys that she interprets an experience as having to do with a god or other metaphysical “reality.” It has become common for liberal Quakers (and others) to assert that such experiences are of the essence of the spiritual life. In what follows, I will refer to that doctrine as experientialism, a term borrowed from Denys Turner.³

Unreliability

Friends sometimes present such experiences as evidence for the objective existence of a god or “Absolute.”⁴ But the experiences are by definition personal and subjective, internal to a single human being; from the scientific perspective, therefore, they are intrinsically untrustworthy. The attempt to use them as evidence or proof evokes the idea of “the God of the gaps,” of theism’s retreat from the advance of science and critical thinking into increasingly smaller, still-safe interstices. Such spaces can’t remain safe forever: the scientific method continues to shine light into the dark places. Perhaps it was in response to that relentless advance that Howard Brinton, Arthur Eddington and others attempted to present Quakerism as experimental science,⁵ but there is nothing scientific about basing truth claims on untestable subjective experiences. A brief reflection on the aims and methods of science — or a look at the literature on, say, appearances of the Virgin Mary⁶ — should quash any such notions.

Nor does an apparent similarity of experience among group members improve reliability. It is not surprising that people who share a belief system should report similar experiences, but such a group is no more trustworthy than the individual — recall, for example, “the miracle of the sun.”⁷ Unless we are willing to abandon critical thinking and scientific method, we cannot assert that something must be objectively real because it seems to have revealed itself in subjective experience, even when a number of people make similar reports. Some of us, however, seem willing to do just that, as if our spirituality can and should be severed from our everyday mode of being, and as if critical thought and judgment, which were crucial to the rise of the Quaker movement, must now be excluded from our spiritual life.

One result of that break is the undermining of the traditional Quaker reliance on spiritual discernment. Private revelations, including the prescriptive kind called “leadings,” are susceptible to delusion and should be subjected to group discernment, but the definition of such experiences as self-validating and therefore exempt from critical examination, a definition which the group itself accepts and promotes, effectively precludes that. Add to that the liberal concern to avoid even a hint of imposition or conflict, and it is evident why experientialist Quaker groups can be quite susceptible to failure, or indeed refusal, of judgment. Our group discernment can be as unreliable as the special experiences it was meant, in part, to test.

To the extent, then, that it insists that subjective experiences are “experimental” and can serve as evidence of objective realities, and to the extent that it abdicates its responsibility for discernment by shielding such experiences from critique, experientialist Quakerism can be said to be not only uncritical but anti-critical, not only unscientific but antiscientific. (And as a quest for certainty through unchallengeable experiences, it may also be the antithesis of faith; I’ll touch on that in another section.)

Exclusivity

It appears to be a poor basis for community as well.

Our contemporary stress on subjective religious experiences is the bastard child of what Ann Taves calls the Reformation’s “[valorization] of experience along with scripture,”⁸ midwifed by William James’s inadequate definition of religion as “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine”⁹ (and lately robed in a patchwork of popular ideas old and new). It ignores not only the Reformation’s beloved scripture, the matrix of Quaker spirituality, but also, as William Harmless notes of James’s definition, the gestalts of shared beliefs, mores, rituals, histories, and other essential social elements which have characterized human religious experience through history.¹⁰ (It also ignores the shaping influence of the general culture on our sense of what is right and even what is possible, an influence that Quakers originally took pains to separate themselves from; I’ll discuss that later in this post.) The experientialist perspective tends, therefore, to regard a Quaker community not so much as a body but as a group of individuals who report or at least seek similar subjective experiences. Because of that narrow perspective, such Quakerism is, despite its belief that it is all-embracing, effectively exclusive: they are fully included who accept the primacy of subjective experience, but others, while ostensibly welcomed, are in theory and practice excluded from communion.

An anecdote will illustrate that. About twenty-five years ago, an elderly birthright Quaker stood during worship at Homewood Meeting and said, “Whatever experience it is that people here are always talking about, I’ve never had it.” He went on to defend himself as a Friend, asserting that he had benefited from his participation in worship over the years and had contributed to the meeting community and the world by living according to his Quaker faith. But it was clear that he felt excluded from the fellowship of those real Quakers who enjoyed whatever special experience they insisted was at the heart of Quakerism.

It seems to me that a similar feeling of exclusion may lead people, especially relative newcomers, to leave us — and others to avoid making contact at all. If contemporary liberal Quakerism tends to present itself as constituted of and for people who have or who seek special or mystical religious experiences, then people who do not feel capable of such experiences, are leery of subjective experiences’ claims to truth, have a less individualistic expectation of religious community, or simply understand Quakerism differently are likely to feel that they cannot be full members of the family.

Inutility

That exclusivity appears all the more unfortunate in context of the inclusive way offered by the original Quaker faith, a faith that did not subsist in the seeking of special/mystical experiences. It was evident to Friends such as George Fox that such experiences lack salvific power. Fox saw that lesson repeated throughout history, from the failure of Christianity in his own time all the way back to the Bible’s first human being.

“Adam,” he wrote, “though he might talk later of his experiences in paradise, … had lost his divine image, and his power and dominion, in which God had created him.”¹¹ Adam is the archetype of the normal human being. The name represents that “nature” into which we all are born and in which we live, if unawares, until we are “convicted” by the light and re-formed into the image of God by the power of love. Being able to say that one has had spiritual experiences is no indication that one is, as Fox would put it, “passed from death to life” in active love.¹² But a Quaker is, in Fox’s terms, precisely one who is spiritually alive. For Fox, discrete spiritual experiences ultimately have little or no importance for Friends: what makes a Quaker is living faith in the light, life, and power that is called Christ.

If any should depart from the spirit of prophecy that had opened them, and from the power, they [might] speak those experiences which the power opened to them in the past. So might Adam and Eve speak of what they saw and enjoyed in paradise; so might Cain and Balaam, of what they saw; and also the Jews, Korah, and Dathan, who praised God on the banks, saw the victory over Pharaoh, ate of the manna, drank of the rock, came to mount Sinai, and saw the glory of the Lord. So might the false apostles speak of their experiences, and all those false christians who turned from the apostles and Christ. So may those do now who err from the spirit, although they came out of spiritual Egypt and Sodom and have known [inwardly] the raging of the Sodomites, as Lot did the outward, and the pursuit of the spiritual Egyptians, as the outward Jew did the outward Egyptians; yet if they do not walk in the spirit of God — in the light and the grace which keeps their hearts established, their words seasoned, and their faith in the power of God in which the kingdom stands — they may go forth like the false christians, like the Jews, like Adam and Eve, Cain, Korah, and Balaam, and be wandering stars, trees without fruit, wells without water, and clouds without rain; and so come to be unsavoury, trodden down, like Adam who lost paradise and the Jews who lost the holy land [by] not walking in the law nor keeping the command of God, and like the christians who lost the city, the hill, the salt, and the light since the apostles’ days and came to be unsavoury and trodden under foot of men.

Therefore, let every one’s faith stand in the Lord’s power, which is over all …. So all who are in Christ may be ever fresh and green, for he is the green tree that never withers; all are fresh and green who … abide in him and bring forth heavenly fresh fruits to the praise of God. Adam and Eve fell from paradise; the Jews fell from the law of God; many of the christians fell from their prophecies and erred from the faith, the spirit, and the grace; and the stars have fallen, as was spoken in the Revelation; yet the spirit, grace, faith, and power of God remains.¹³

Many people — even a Cain, whose desire for spiritual validation leads to fratricide — may have special spiritual experiences. But it is “the Lord’s power,” Fox tells us, that engenders the experiences, not vice versa: the experiences are secondary and ultimately impotent. What matters is whether one is living continuously in and by that power, “walk[ing] in the spirit of God,” living no longer in/as Adam but in/as Christ. That’s a matter not of having one’s normal life punctuated by special experiences but of living a qualitatively different life, of experiencing everything in a radically Christic way: not of plucking fruit from the Tree of Life but of living intentionally as a productive branch of that tree. And one enters that life not through a mystical experience or special revelation but by putting one’s faith in that power which is already, if obscurely, at work within, where it casts a critical light on the conscience, moves the heart to justice, breaks one’s unthinking thralldom to the ways of the world, and reveals the way of love from moment to moment. For the first Friends as for biblical authors, salvation is relational: to be saved is to live the life of the Just One whose nature is love. We find our justification by faith — trust in “that which can be known of God,”¹⁴ the life and power of agape-love in the heart — and we work out our salvation by living justly in that faith.¹⁵ The seeking and cherishing of special experiences diverts us from the moment-to-moment work of faith and makes of our spiritual life, to borrow Christian Wiman’s phrase, a “discipline of memory”¹⁶.

It is not only early Friends who warn us against seeking or clinging to unusual experiences: others have said the same across the centuries. And lonely contemporary voices such as that of Maggie Ross still remind us that deep spiritual life involves giving up the desire for such experiences.¹⁷ Even Thomas Merton, whom Ross and others decry as having perverted spirituality into the service of narcissism, cautioned us about that:

Hence it becomes overwhelmingly important for us to become detached from our everyday conception of ourselves as potential subjects for special and unique experiences, or as candidates for realization, attainment and fulfillment.¹⁸

The seeking of “special experience” is a form, said Merton, of “spiritual ambition.” The realization of that ambition, the attainment of such experiences, easily seduces us into believing ourselves spiritually changed when in fact we continue to walk more in the way of Adam than of Christ. But as we’ll see in the next passage from George Fox, to see ourselves honestly is the first step into the Quaker way.

Apostasy

Quakerism began in a sea change in the hearts and lives of the first Friends, a change that followed Friends’ investment of faith in the Christ-seed of light, life, and power that was, they believed, within everyone. Having found the pearl of great price,¹⁹ they abandoned everything that would divert their faith from that constant power which is Christ “who changes not.”²⁰ Through their writings, those first Friends call us to do the same, to “be still awhile from thy own thoughts, searching, seeking, desires, and imaginations, and be stayed in the principle of God in thee ….”²¹ As Fox put it in his Epistle X:

Friends,—Whatever you are addicted to, the tempter will come in that thing; and when he can trouble you, then he gets advantage over you, and then you are gone. Stand still in that which is pure, after you see yourselves; and then mercy comes in. After you see your thoughts, and the temptations, do not think, but submit; and then power comes. Stand still in that which shows and discovers; and there does strength immediately come. And stand still in the light, and submit to it, and the other will be hushed and gone; and then content comes. And when temptations and troubles appear, sink down in that which is pure, and all will be hushed and will fly away. Your strength is to stand still, after you see yourselves. Whatsoever you see yourselves addicted to — temptations, corruption, uncleanness, &c. — then you think you shall never overcome. And earthly reason will tell you what you shall lose; hearken not to that, but stand still in the light that shows them to you, and then strength comes from the Lord, and help comes, contrary to your expectation. Then you grow up in peace, and no trouble shall move you. David fretted himself, when he looked out; but when he was still, no trouble could move him. When your thoughts are out, abroad, then troubles move you. But come to stay your minds upon that spirit which was before the letter; here you learn to read the scriptures aright. If ye do any thing in your own wills, then you tempt God; but stand still in that power which brings peace.

One thing we are addicted to is the consumption of unusual experiences that we can deem spiritual and self-validating (in a double sense, it seems). But our tradition advises us to be still from our own thoughts, seeking, and desires, for they, including our prizing of special experiences, are secretly shaped by the Adamic wisdom of the world. Step aside from them, bracket them, stand still in the light that shows us our darkness, and our minds may be re-made in Christ’s spirit.²² In each moment when we “have the mind of Christ,”²³ we have no need of “spiritual” or “pure” experiences: our way of experiencing everything is spiritual and pure. But while we remain in the Adamic mind, even our attaining Mount Sinai and seeing the glory of the Lord means nothing.

The Quakerism that was expressed in such exhortations comprised a religious rejection of the wider culture’s suppositions and conventions about the spiritual life. Having passed from death to life, the Friends were continuously nourished by the “living water” of agape.²⁴ Today, however, we are returning to the cultural well, imbibing there the experientialist doctrine promulgated by contemporary religionists from Roman Catholics²⁵ to New Agers, learning to exchange faith and faithfulness for feelings. Consequently, we are not so much now “a peculiar people,”²⁶ a people who have turned away from the world’s values into the Kingdom of God, into the counter-cultural, world-changing life and power that our ancestors knew as Christ; increasingly, we are co-opted into the consumerist society, rationalizing by spiritualizing our participation in the destructive culture of self-gratification.

Conclusion?

From my perspective, then, experientialism is a deeply flawed and damaging ersatz of the Quaker way. Although firmly established in liberal Quakerism, it is not a solid foundation for the future: its anti-scientific, a-communal, and esoteric nature promises increasingly narrow appeal. Further, it cuts us off from the radical power of our tradition, exchanging living Quaker faith — that is, continually-renewed trust in and fidelity to the justifying Christ-power within²⁷ — for the seeking and enjoying of private experiences. I don’t imagine that a significant number of adherents would be willing or able to give it up, but I permit myself some hope that liberal Friends might at least come to see experientialism as an optional, rather than essential, doctrine. That could allow people with other Quaker perspectives to feel that they are integral parts of the community. And it could open a space for the powerful possibilities inherent in our tradition to become more available to all of us.

[The illustration is a detail from William Blake's Song of Experience called "The Sick Rose." Clicking on the image will take you to a reproduction of the entire illustrated poem.]

[1] Ann Taves, Religious Experience Reconsidered. See also the quotation from Robert Ellwood in note 2, below.

[2] Friend Sallie B. King, in her “Two Epistemological Models for the Interpretation of Mysticism” (Journal of the American Academy of Religion, LVI/2, p. 257), says, “But there is no generally accepted definition for ['mysticism']. Recent studies which display the variety of phenomena normally included in the category of the mystical make it doubtful that any single essence pervades the various phenomena and furnishes the necessary unifying element for the construction of a definition.” Robert Ellwood, in his Mysticism and Religion, finds it necessary to define mysticism in terms that remind me of Taves: “Mystical experience is experience in a religious context that is immediately or subsequently interpreted by the experiencer as direct, unmediated encounter with ultimate divine reality” (emphasis original).

[3] See Denys Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism. Turner uses the term partly to refer to the distortion of classic mystical theology into a cult of “experiences of inwardness” or discrete “mystical experiences” that writers like Eckhart and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing would reject.

[4] See, for example, the June, 2013 exchange between Steven Davison and me under the post “I Am the Way.”

[9] William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 34, quoted in William Harmless, Mystics, p. 15. In liberal Quakerism, the concept expressed in James’s “whatever they consider divine” is used to assert that Quakers need share no definition of what the word “God” means, thus privileging the individual’s opinion — here the doctrine of self-validating experience is useful in protecting those opinions from critique — over the Quaker tradition’s understanding of God and effectively promoting a meaningless creed of “There is that of whatever in everyone.”

[11] George Fox, Journal, p. 171 of Volume 2 of the 1831 edition of the Works. Modified for clarity.

[12] George Fox, Journal, p. 71 of Volume 1 his Works. Fox would have been referring to 1 John 3:14: “We know that we have passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren. He that loveth not [his] brother abideth in death.”

[13] George Fox’s “general epistle to Friends at the Yearly Meeting in London,” modified for clarity. Works, Vol. 2, pp. 172-173.

[14] Romans 1:19, the source of the Quaker phrase “that of God in every one.”

[16] Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer, Kindle location 1109.

[20] See George Fox, Journal, p. 146 of Volume 2 of his Works: “Thus they that come to be renewed up again into the divine heavenly image in which man was at first made will know the same God that was the first teacher of Adam and Eve in paradise to speak to them now by his Son, who changes not….” Fox was probably referring to Hebrews 13:8: “Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today, and forever.”

[22] On the light as “discovering” our darkness to us, see, for example, Isaac Penington’s “To All Such as Complain That They Want Power.” On our minds being remade in Christ, see, for example, Rom. 12:1-2 and 2 Cor. 3:18.

[25] Paul V. Mankowski, S.J.: “… what Vincentian Fr. Patrick Collins has called (approvingly) the change from ‘the experience of religious authority to the authority of religious experience.’”

[27] By “justifying” I mean “making just” — the properly Quaker reading of Paul’s teaching in such passages as Romans 4:5, in which he speaks of God “who justifies/rectifies the ungodly.” (That translation is by A. Harriet Grieb in her “The Righteousness of God in Romans,” in Jerry L. Sumney, ed., Reading Paul’s Letter to the Romans, p. 67.)

Randy Oftedahl: An Emergent Witness for Friends?

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 12:08:45 +0000

In 1966 Time magazine published a famous cover story asking “Is God Dead?,” and at the time it may have seemed to many to be a reasonable question. Membership in mainstream churches had begun its long decline; in some cases, according to Demographia.com, in traditions such as the Presbyterian, Methodist, and Congregational (UCC) churches, membership has dropped by nearly fifty percent in the fifty years since 1960. In North America, the Catholic Church has seen their numbers grow almost exclusively because of new immigrants from the global south, but otherwise has experienced huge attrition. There has been growth however, sometimes spectacular growth, in many “conservative” denominations, among groups like the Evangelicals, the Mormons, and the so-called “fundamentalist” churches. This rapid growth in the social (and political) influence of the Christian fundamentalists beginning in the 1970's, especially in the United States, may be one of the most significant events in the “Christian century”.

But now there are voices, like theologian Harvey Cox in The Future of Faith, who are arguing that fundamentalism of all kinds is dying. It may be a slow, noisy, sometimes violent death, but there are signs that the dominant influences of fundamentalist religions are at least on the decline. Whether it can be seen in the public backlash against extremists like the Westboro Baptist Church or the “Koran burning” pastor Terry Jones, or the inability of the ultra-conservative religious messages in the last election to resonate with most of the public, or most significantly, the failure of Christian fundamentalism to enlist large numbers of young people, there are reasons to think fundamentalism has passed its peak, at least for now. Add to this the growth in an outspoken and populist version of Atheism, and it may almost look like Time was merely running fast a few decades...

But there is also something else happening. A growing number of Americans (nearly a third, according to one Gallop poll) describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” Books with titles like “Christianity After Religion,” “Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time,” and “The Underground Church: Reclaiming the Subversive Way of Jesus” are gathering a growing audience. And the Emerging Church movement, seeking to live, as Harvey Cox puts it, “in a new Age of Faith rather than the old Age of Belief,” is inspiring many young people (and not a few of us old folks!) with fresh winds of the Spirit. It feels like once again, as in the old Buffy Ste. Marie song, “God is alive, magic is afoot.” And more and more people want to be a part of it.

If the Spirit of Jesus is doing wonderful new things in the world (as Quakers have always maintained), what role might the Religious Society of Friends play in this new Movement? We were - and still are - part of those declining church numbers. We never were (thankfully, IMO) part of the fundamentalist phenomenon. Do we have anything to say to those Red Letter Christians who are stepping around a doctrinal approach and are not looking for beliefs about Jesus, but are seeking the Way of Jesus? Is there anything our Quaker tradition can offer to this rising chorus?

I believe there is, and I would like to share my musings on just three things our tradition might offer as our spiritual gift (1Cor 12:4) to this new movement of the Spirit. These are not new ideas - these things have been said many times by Friends and others - but they are worth repeating.

1. As we often proclaim, Friends are, for the most part, non-creedal and non-hierarchical. When we are at our best we’ve avoided creeds, and when we are at our worst we’ve just been bad at them. One of the apparent features of the emerging church movement seems to be a general disinterest in formal creedal statements of belief that everyone is expected to conform to in order to be “in.” Friends’ attempts to wait for the Spirit to lead rather than turning to a human leader is one of our historic precedents. Our testimony on equality, so radical at the time of the early Friends, speaks to the cultural reality of the new Jesus People and the spiritual reality to which they aspire. And Friends, did anyone see something of “that Friend speaks my mind” in the People’s Microphone at Occupy Wall Street?

2. Friends have long held an abiding faith in the continuing revelation of God. We may disagree on what that revelation is, and our different branches may have different views on how that is revealed to us, but it is safe to say few Quakers believe that God went away when the canon was closed. Popular evangelists like Rob Bell and Shane Claiborne draw large crowds of young Seekers precisely because they speak of meeting the Holy Spirit through experience, not concept. For many of the speakers of this new Movement, and I can only assume for their aspiring listeners, the stories they want to hear are not about what God can do for us, but what God is doing in the world - and how can we be a part of it. Isn’t that the continuing revelation of God?

3. To these new Followers of Jesus, faith means an abiding trust in the non-violent and redemptive love of God for everyone regardless of race, religion, social status, sexual orientation, political beliefs, criminal occupation, or anything else we humans use to separate ourselves. This new Awakening expends little energy on theological debate and like many Friends does not equate Christian life with questions of reward/heaven versus punishment/hell. Sin and salvation are not so much ignored as trumped by Grace. And in a world filled with poverty, violence, addiction, exploitation, hopelessness, fear, and suffering of all kinds, the emerging church is longing for a prophetic witness for peace and reconciliation.

Like the one the Quakers are noted for.

Now everyone within the Society of Friends knows our reputation often far exceeds our reality. Friends have spent a great deal of the last two hundred years bickering over many of the same arguments the rest of the church has struggled with, and it is by no means over yet. In our individual Meetings we far too often clash over personalities, positions, and a general failure to love one another. We are just as fallen and in need of Grace as anyone else. But our best voices have always called us to turn toward the Light, “till by turning, turning we come ‘round right”, and our prophetic tradition has always found hope in the fact that there is that of God in every person.

The new movement within the Church is looking for a community of faith active in the world, engaging the world, feeding the hungry, visiting the prisoner, healing the broken, challenging the Powers and Principalities - and that is part of our Quaker heritage as well.

Friends, let us learn from this movement of the Spirit in our day. Let us join with them and pray with them and grow with them, not that they may “become Quakers” (whatever that means), but that together and across traditions, we may see what Love can do in our world today.

AFSC - Lucy Duncan: Growing and sharing food in community

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 10:58:12 +0000

Friends Southwestern Burial Ground

by Lucy Duncan

I live with my family in a 17-acre Quaker cemetery outside of the west edge of Philadelphia. My husband, Graham, is the cemetery’s caretaker. We live in the house on the grounds built in 1860. Our 11-year-old son, Simon, has known no other home.

There are a few notable Quaker dead buried there: Henry Cadbury, Margaret Hope Bacon, and Addison Hutton, but most of those buried aren't famous—they just lived simple lives.

There are many old oaks and tulip trees and one magnificent sugar maple on the grounds. The gravestones are simple: low to the ground with limited inscriptions. Once a year, we have worship under the trees, followed by a picnic. For the past few years we've been offering green burials, burying the dead soon after they die, without embalming and in a simple casket, shroud, or quilt. Though many Quakers are buried in the cemetery, we bury anyone who wants a simple interment.

The neighborhood in which the burial ground is situated is mostly working class and incredibly racially and ethnically diverse. There are many new immigrants— Indian, Pakistani, Korean, Vietnamese, South American— living next to African-Americans and European-Americans. The neighborhood association we're a part of hosts potlucks in the nearby park in the summer and the spread of food is incredible, often including traditional foods I've never tasted before.

There is a three-acre community garden in the corner of the cemetery. It's a large garden, and those who participate grow all the produce together rather than having separate plots. The woman who runs it is a master gardener. The produce is rotated every year, and often, cover crops are grown to replenish the soil. Most of the families who participate are not Quaker.

Over the years, my family has eaten strawberries, Swiss chard, raspberries, English peas, lettuce, sour cherries, and tomatoes, produce fertilized by the compost of the Quaker past, from this garden.

Recently it's become clear what a treasure these grounds are to the community— a quiet, open space in the midst of the hubbub of row houses and urban activity outside the walls.

Many neighbors have shown up for work days and put their hands and backs into tending the space. The burial ground committee is talking about expanding the community gardens, planting a memorial garden, creating more openings in the stone walls, and making the space more accessible.

Recently, an imam approached Graham about setting aside many plots for Muslim burials. I asked whether they would adhere to our gravestone policy, and he said, "Oh, yes, the fact that we don't have huge crosses and memorials everywhere and that we do Muslim-style (green) burials makes the space attractive."

For a couple years, I've thought the burial ground was a living, vivid metaphor for the transformation to which Quakers might be called.

Often we take credit for the courageous work of our ancestors or we imagine in our past a time of a unified, prophetic voice without dissension.

But the call of our ancestors—those we hold up—is to discern the calling for our current lives.

Instead of worshiping our dead, I believe they would prefer that we honor them by living contemporary lives of faithfulness in partnership with the communities in which we reside. That we mix the humus of the past with the mud of our present, and out of that create nourishing food for and with the community. That we break down the barriers that keep the richness of humanity out of our lives and meetinghouses by being with and in those communities, finding ways to be partners in service.

It seems to me this is the centerpiece of transition for Quakers. I hope that we begin to understand more deeply that our treasures, whether burial grounds, meeting houses, or Quaker practice and tradition, are not ours alone—that our continued survival and relevance is connected to sharing what we know and understand with others in and beyond our communities, and to learning with and from our neighbors. And we will indeed be changed by that encounter.

Who knows what we might grow together?

Each summer I get to sample how such nourishing food might taste. I can testify, it is sweet.