Beginner's Guide to Quakerism

New pamphlet, homemade and sent out on the snail-mail post. Details here.

Through the production of Beginner's Guide to Quakerism, I have become more involved in the general picture of Quakerism. I, as founder and clerk of Cloud Quakers, am already familiar with general issues in the Quaker world. But actually printing a pamphlet for beginners puts a new light on the problems and issues, and makes me more aware of the feelings of people on the edge of the liberal Quaker world.

Frankly, the people who are most alienated these days are the traditional Christians and traditional Christian mystics, who find that mentioning Christ, or even God, is sometimes controversial in their meetings, since people have varying interpretations of each's role in what they do and how they practice Quakerism. I think it's fair to say that what people object to about God is the society-imposed image of judgmental patriarch - if one were to define God as the Eternal, or the Great Spirit, or something similar, one might get a different reaction to what is basically the same force in our lives. But an increasing number of modern Quakers reject Christ altogether, and many reject God altogether, simply not willing to accept the traditional understanding or a variation of it as it has come down through the culture. And they maintain that they believe in all other aspects of Quakerism to the degree that they find Quakerism their spiritual home. What is to be done about this? I don't know, but I am not one to boot someone out of a meeting because their interpretation of the universe is different from mine. So I start from the perspective that, partially because we are small in number already, actually having a split over this might doom us altogether.

So it happens that I am on the cusp of this situation where I am helping to define modern Quakerism in a very rapidly changing environment. I say "rapidly" because in Quaker terms, a sea change really can happen in maybe twenty or thirty years, but that's still rapid in the big picture. In my lifetime, surely. It may be worth a book, as I think a friend of mine, a well-known Quaker author, might say. I have put my musings on how to print it on the Cloud Quaker blog, and of course I'm open to comment if you're so inclined. I am inclined to take some leadership in this general discussion, because I see the survival of Quakerism as being partially dependent on a mutual agreement of terms to use when discussing it. If some people will settle for no less than God and Jesus, the rest of modern Quakerism may have to find a way to at least talk about it without stepping on each other's toes. The world is actually big enough that we ought to be able to find safe places to worship with people who have similar world views. It's not worth actually having an argument about what words to use, and how they trigger people's memories of being mistreated in one or the other's name. But the fact remains that the damage done by mainstream Christianity, to mischaracterize the divine forces in our lives, will not go away as the rest of us struggle to find a religious base that is comfortable enough for us to develop a relationship. And I mean a relationship with the divine, not just a relationship with each other.

John Bartram play

I promised you I'd get you the link as soon as I could; this is it. https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNnWX9Lz0Kme4lp8xPnu1wQon31ISOI0eZJsksPMY1G0L3R5Hf9kVN65kC6Ea7ezQ?pli=1&key=aVAxOTZIVENvQjFZcVczYkFYMzBnRkZRbmliV3lB
This is a site where three Blue River Quarterly events are placed. The Bartram play is the first.

I want to thank Dawn Crimson; I believe it is her site.

Milhouse Cousins

(first draft of play)

 

MILHOUS COUSINS

NARRATOR
JESSAMYN
RICHARD

 

NARRATOR:

It is now 1977, after Richard Nixon has resigned, and after a famous interview with David Frost. Both Richard and Jessamyn West are looking back at their lives. Richard Nixon and Jessamyn West were second cousins, and both grew up in the same religious community, the East Whittier Friends Church. It’s evangelical, and has more in common with other evangelical churches than it does with liberal Friends Meetings.

JESSAMYN:

I was a little older than Richard Nixon, but yes, we were in the same church. I was born in 1902, but he was born in 1913, so yes, it’s possible that I held him as a baby or watched him for a while. His father, Frank Nixon, taught my Sunday-School class; he was a fiery persuasive teacher. Richard Nixon and I were actually second cousins – my mother’s father’s father and mother, Joshua and Elizabeth Milhous, were also his great-grandparents, and his mother Hannah Milhous Nixon was my mother’s cousin.

 

RICHARD:

I was born in Whittier, California, and brought up in the East Whittier Friends Church. My mother was a devout Evangelical Quaker. My father converted when he married her. She was a Milhous, so, yes, Jessamyn West was my second cousin. We both grew up in the same church community. We were poor; there was a lemon farm that had gone broke, and my father ran a store in the neighborhood which he kept open all the time.

 

NARRATOR:

The East Whittier Friends Church clearly had an influence on both of them.

 

JESSAMYN:

Richard’s mother, Hannah, was a devout Quaker. She had five sons, but two died, and it was tough; they had to take care of them, and watch them die. His father once said that he was afraid he was being punished for keeping his store open on the Sabbath. But Richard rejected Quakerism pretty much; he joined the Navy and went into politics.

 

RICHARD:

My mother was a saint. I always tell everyone that. She took care of my brothers; she took care of me; she never spanked me. Not once. People told her she would spoil me, but she didn’t care. She didn’t believe in spanking, and she didn’t. My parents were trying to avoid the bad influences that affected my brother before he died, so they sent me to a larger school which meant I had to ride a bus an hour each way every day, but they let me transfer back to Whittier in my junior year.

 

NARRATOR:

Richard Nixon and Jessamyn West grew up in the same church, with the same teachers, but they went very different directions. Nixon joined the Navy and went into politics, and didn’t mention Quakerism except when asked how he grew up. In other words, he didn’t consider himself a Quaker. Jessamyn West, on the other hand, wrote about Quakerism and spent considerable time thinking about the religion and practices she had inherited through her family.

 

JESSAMYN:

I grew up hearing stories about Indiana; in fact I’d been born in Indiana. The Milhous side of the family was all from Indiana, and they lived in the southern part, where the underground railroad came up to the north before the Civil War. I myself was not devoutly evangelical, and when I became old enough, I started looking into those ancestors in southern Indiana. They were all Milhouses, and yes, they were Richard Nixon’s ancestors too. Friendly Persuasion is about Joshua and Elizabeth Milhous, his and my great-grandparents.

 

RICHARD:

As a birthright Quaker and a government service worker, I could have got a deferment from the service. But I joined the Navy, and then went into politics. I figured you couldn’t be in politics and be a Quaker at the same time. What are you going to do, tell Russia, or China, you won’t go to war under any circumstance? It seemed to me to be fundamentally incompatible. So I gave up Quakerism altogether. I didn’t give up seeking peace, or believing in respecting people. I gave up telling people I didn’t believe in the military, or in force. I do believe in the military and in force.

 

NARRATOR:

Richard Nixon, as you may know, was Vice President under Eisenhower, and then became President in 1968. It was often pointed out that he had grown up Quaker, and he didn’t deny it. But he never said he was a Quaker either. His view toward religion was that a person could turn to it for personal moral issues, but it had no place in the politics of a country.

 

RICHARD:

To me it was all about politics, being successful. I wanted to make a difference in world diplomacy, with Russia and China, and to that end I made friends with Billy Graham and other leaders. I was friends with Catholic and Jewish religious leaders, especially the conservative ones, and I helped them. But I never pretended to be a Quaker or to use Quaker principles in my leadership. To me peace is something you get through strength, military strength.

 

JESSAMYN:

I myself thought a lot about what it meant to be a Quaker in the modern world, and even wrote a book about the history, and what it meant to be pacifist in wartime. I got tuberculosis at one point, and was sent home to die, but my mother stayed by my side and healed me. It was in talking to her that I became interested in my Quaker ancestors.

 

NARRATOR:

Jessamyn West wrote Friendly Persuasion, a book that was turned into a movie in 1956. It was about a Quaker family in southern Indiana facing the reality that the Civil War was coming through their area. It was a serious drama about the Quaker faith, and probably one of the only serious portrayals of Quakerism in the movies. Richard Nixon, on the other hand, had success in politics. In 1967 his mother died.

 

JESSAMYN:

Richard Nixon used to say that his mother was a saint. When they asked her one time if she would support his campaign, she said of course. And she said his whole life was one big campaign. But Richard Nixon didn’t talk about growing up Quaker because he didn’t consider himself Quaker. He had joined the Navy, and from then on, it was all political for him. I don’t think he even thought about what it would be like to be a Quaker and a President; to him it was a contradiction.

 

NARRATOR:

Jessamyn West went on to write many other books and short stories. Friendly Persuasion is one of her first, and definitely the best known, but she wrote many others. Nixon became president in 1968; he was re-elected in 1972. But the Watergate scandal broke, and he was forced to resign. Five men were caught breaking in to the Democratic party headquarters at the Watergate complex, and slowly their actions were revealed to have come from him.

 

JESSAMYN:

He wanted to be known for his diplomacy, for opening things up with China and Russia. Instead, he was known as the man who said “I am not a crook” and then was revealed to be a crook.

 

NARRATOR:

He was sick immediately after he resigned, but then recovered and tried to restore his legacy. It was not easy. When Frost offered to interview him, it was said that he was down to his last $500. Frost paid him $600,000 for the interviews, which aired in 1977h.

 

RICHARD:

I said this in the David Frost interview, and I’ll say it again. 1970 was a stressful time. We thought that foreign influencers were going to alter the election, and that it was a matter of national security. As president, I have the authority to take drastic measures, and I did. I told those men to break in to the Watergate Hotel, so they did. Because they were told by the President of the United States to do what they did, they should not be punished. They were doing what I believed was best for the country.

 

NARRATOR:

Some people say that if his mother were alive to see him go on national television saying that burglary and stealing were ok, she would have been horrified. We’ll never know.

In the interests of finishing my book of Quaker plays, I have decided to charge forward with the last three that I have in my mind at least conceived of. The first is Nixon (see below). The second will be Naylor or something from the 1600's. And the final one will be a woman who helped start Canada Friends. I am thinking of a few more (you can scroll back on this weblog where I put all my thoughts) - but it will take four or five (I'm shooting for a dozen) to call it a book. I have seven now.

These are some links on Nixon. One can argue that Nixon is not Quaker, and I would argue that, since he more or less renounced it as president. But he did attend a Quaker meeting in Washington as president, and he did have to account to his mother, who was a devout Evangelical Friend. Here are some links: Frost's interview with Nixon: https://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/transcript-of-david-frosts-interview-with-richard-nixon/, Teaching American History

Bartram's Flower revisited

Many thanks to the people of Blue River Quarterly, some of whom are old friends of mine, who pulled together a zoom production of Bartram's Flower, a play I wrote in 2009 for young Friends of So. Illinois Meeting.

They did a good job, and I'm sure the audience noted the advantages of putting on a play on zoom: You can have your script. Zoom tells the audience who is speaking. Sound and visuals are good. And there's no way you can trip on stage.

It has long been my contention that zoom plays will catch on and become a thing very shortly if they haven't already, with the Quakers either at the forefront of the trend or, more likely, coming along as possible. But that's for another post. I was at least proud to see them come forward for this play, which was well performed.

Bartram's Flower is on this very weblog (see template), and, if you can find the post before it (I suggest December 2009), you will find some links for resources on Bartram's life. I have to leave some of the questions open that were raised at the performance; in 2009 I knew what was fact and what I'd embellished, but now I have forgotten. I believe that most of the basic outline of the story is true and recoverable from the information out there. He is, after all, a pretty well known character.

I enjoyed the performance and it makes me look forward to putting out another book of Quaker plays, as soon as I can pull it together!

Bombing the Quaker Zoom (first draft)

 

BOMBING THE QUAKER ZOOM (first draft)

 

CAST:

Mr. Zoom

Jeremy Textwether

Imazum Bommer

Emily Genzee

Joe Jones

MR. ZOOM: Good afternoon (evening/morning), audience. I am Mr. Zoom. I am here because Zoom has developed new software that can tell us what you THINK. Now don’t look surprised. Surely you have opened your Facebook thinking about shoes, and found a shoe ad right there waiting for you? It’s the same software. Thought-to-text, we call it. And it’s incredibly accurate, I warn you. In this play you will see how people are THINKING. You will not only see the script, but the voices you hear are actually their THOUGHTS. I will be watching to monitor how well it works. And, to be quite honest, we don’t CARE what people think. We chose Quakers for our test run because we figured they were all thinking wholesome things, so they wouldn’t mind if they found out we were watching!

 JEREMY: My name is Jeremy Textwether. I am the clerk of Centerville Ohio meeting. We have to go on zoom because of quarantine. Some of our elders, like Hesitant Elder, refuse to get on zoom. So some people feel like it’s not a perfect meeting already. I am running the zoom and I do my best, but I’m not very good at the controls – sometimes I turn off the sound or the camera accidentally, that kind of thing.

 IMAZUM: My name is Imazum Bommer. My purpose is to disrupt the meeting. I will be perfectly quiet for a few minutes, like maybe five, and then I’m going to shout out all the bad words I know – like WTF, long version. Or MF long version. Or OMFG long version. That kind of thing. That will show those Quakers!

EMILY: My name is Emily Genzee. What I don’t want people to know is that I had a beautiful flowerpot, on the mantel, and it fell right before the meeting. It made such a huge mess that now I’m embarassed to show everyone my living room because they will be horrified by the mess. But the problem is, the only zoom background I can find is that swirly decorative kind and I can’t find any Quaker gray or plain kind of background. So now I have to decide whether to attend meeting or not.

JOE JONES: I am against wearing fancy clothes or using fancy backgrounds because it goes against the Quaker testimony of simplicity. I go to zoom meetings all week and these people use these fancy backgrounds, and I can’t take it. When I come to Quaker meeting I want to settle in to silence and have plain, relaxing things to look at.

 (MEETING STARTS. EMILY  HAS A FANCY SWIRLING BACKGROUND. JOE IS CLEARLY IRRITATED. IMAZUM HAS A DEVIOUS LOOK ON HIS FACE LIKE HE’S WAITING FOR HIS CHANCE.

 MR ZOOM: I wish I could just tell everyone how to use this technology; it’s not that complicated. For example, this Jeremy guy can just control everyone because he’s the host. If he wants someone’s sound off, he can turn it off.  Like right now, I think he has a few people’s sound off, but he doesn’t even realize it. They can turn it off, or he can. So he doesn’t even have to worry about zoom bombing. All he has to do is pay attention. And this Hesitant Elder guy, who’s he? Somebody who refuses to come to a meeting because he can’t handle zoom? Ridiculous!

 JEREMY: The problem with being a clerk of this meeting is that I have to pay attention all the time. I have to let people in, or be prepared to turn their sound off or something. But the other problem is I don’t quite get all the technology. So sometimes maybe I should turn off the sound but I don’t quite realize that, or I forget how to do it. It’s all very confusing. So I find it hard settling in to ordinary silent worship. I can see Hesitant’s point, that the technology just makes it all too difficult.

EMILY: I’m very worried about what people will think. Imagine if I showed them my messy living room floor? I couldn’t bear that. But, I’m afraid also that they won’t like my swirling zoom background, like maybe it’s unquakerly. What should I do? Whatever I do I don’t want to say anything, because it’s silent worship and we should only say things that we know are inspired from the silence. If I just said, “A flowerpot fell and broke on my floor,” what kind of message would that be? The problem with zoom is, since you’re doing it from home, you have to worry about your home!

JOE: I can’t bear that swirly zoom background. Emily has a lot of nerve coming to meeting with a swirling zoom background. In fact I feel like I should just say this, but it’s a rather negative thought, and I’m afraid it will be judged as not the appropriate kind of message we should have at Quaker meeting. But it is something that needs to be said. Actually I feel like strangling her. But I’d never say that. I am trying to be a good Quaker, not one who just hurts somebody that does the wrong thing!

JEREMY: We may have the kind of meeting where nobody says anything. I’m prepared for that! I just hope we can have the right atmosphere that is conducive to feeling the Divine Spirit and delivering a message that needs to be heard, You know, maybe I should say something to Margaret about a swirling background being unquakerly. But I think in the end everyone has to make up their own mind about what to do.

IMAZUM: (shouting): WTF long version! MF long version! OMFG long version! (all the other zoomers, five of them, remain deadpan like they haven’t heard a word. Mr. Zoom looks around trying to figure out what’s going on). HEY! You F-ing Quakers aren’t even F-ing listening to me! OMFG long version!

 (Note: although you could have him shouting the long version of these words, it would be scandalous, so I recommend actually saying out “WTF long version” etc. since everyone will know what happened anyway)

 MR. ZOOM: What is happening here is this. You have been listening to everyone’s thoughts. But all of a sudden this fellow wants to shout, so he shouts. But he’s on mute. Jeremy Textwether has put him on mute without even remembering that he did it. But Imazum doesn’t know that; all he knows is that if he clicks unmute nothing happens. Eventually he will figure out that nobody has heard a word he said.

JOE: This young Imazum fellow seems to be very agitated about something. Perhaps he too is upset about the swirly background! But if he has a message for the meeting, we can’t hear it, because he appears to be on mute.

 IMAZUM: What kind of meeting is this, where you want to contribute something but you are put on mute? Who do they think they are, putting me on mute? OMFG long version! WTF long version!

EMILY: I am feeling at peace about everything, of course, I am not bothered by a swirling background. I go to lots of zoom meetings, and I figure, if one time you don’t want everyone to see your living room, you shouldn’t have to let them see your living room.

 JEREMY: We will now hold hands virtually (Everyone shows hands as a sign of meeting being over) as meeting is over. I hope you had a pleasant experience and we would like to know how you experienced meeting. I am sorry Hesitant Elder couldn’t make it. He expressed apologies for not attending. He just couldn’t handle the zoom technology I guess.

 

 

 

 

CURTAIN CALL

update

 Sometimes I get reflective, even depressed, about my role as a Quaker. Am I good enough to be a leader? A lot of us have this kind of self-doubt, but in my case it's more like I need the Quakers more than they need me.

On the positive side, I have written a book and a half of Quaker plays, and there aren't many Quaker playwrights around. A visitor at a recent Cloud Quakers looked familiar, and sure enough, I think he was at a performance of Lucretia Mott, which might have been twenty years ago or more, in St. Louis. But it was the highlight of my play-directing life, as I had about 9 or 10 kids (we couldn't quite get them all up to St. Louis, about two hours, but we got most of them), and they all knew their lines pretty well, and people really liked it. It was a special occasion.

My second book of plays is all in a computer that has just frozen up. That's part of the negative side. I just have been having trouble actually producing anything, and feeling good about it, and making it all quakerly. I'm kind of stuck on Nixon, to tell the truth. He kind of got under my craw almost as bad as Trump. And I feel, watching all these people vandalizing and all, that I was almost mad enough back then to do the same. But I didn't, and I'm glad of that. Because, even if they don't have any of those cameras, that kind of stuff comes back to haunt you.

That reminds me of what I really wanted to say - that 50 years ago wasn't really all that long ago, in terms of a lifetime. Now I'm on the side of defending order, and justice, and propriety and all that. But there was a time when we were all out there wondering, if the government really let us down, shouldn't we go and make noise? I'm struck by the deep sense of woundedness of all these demonstrators. Maybe they feel like, as white rural outcasts, the world has just left them behind.

Grist for another play, I guess.