Light and Silence

The first place I encountered Quakers as more than obscure historical figures was in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. I read it while looking for a college, and somehow wound up at a (culturally) Quaker college - which of course planted many more seeds that took me here.

The world Atwood describes is harsh, and Quakers play a role somewhat like their earlier Underground Railroad work - though with more severe penalties. A few excerpts illustrate her telling:

"Five members of the heretical sect of Quakers have been arrested," he says, smiling blandly, "and more arrests are anticipated."

Two of the Quakers appear onscreen, a man and a woman. They look terrified, but they're trying to preserve some dignity in front of the camera. The man has a large dark mark on his forehead; the woman's veil has been torn off, and her hair falls in strands over her face. Both of them are about fifty. (Section 14).

Why would Quakers be so dangerous? Well, they help people. The wrong people.

I also believe that they didn't catch him or catch up with him after all, that he made it... found his way to a nearby farmhouse, was allowed in, with suspicion at first, but then when they understood who he was, they were friendly, not the sort who would turn him in, perhaps they were Quakers, they will smuggle him inland... (Section 18)

And...

"I chose them because they were a married couple, and those were safer than anyone single and especially anyone gay. Also I remembered the designation beside their name. Q, it said, which meant Quaker. We had the religious denominations marked...

"So these people let me in right away.... as soon as I was inside the door, I took off the headgear and told them who I was. They could have phoned the police or whatever, I know I was taking a chance... Anyway, they didn't. They gave me some clothes, a dress of hers, and burned the Aunt's outfit and the pass in their furnace; they knew that had to be done right away. They didn't like having me there, that much was clear, it made them very nervous. They had two little kids, both under seven. I could see their point.

"... Then the woman made me a sandwich and a cup of coffee and the man said he'd take me to another house. They hadn't risked phoning.

"The other house was Quakers too, and they were pay dirt, because they were a station on the Underground Femaleroad. After the first man left, they said they'd try to get me out of the country...." (Section 38)

Quakerism clearly isn't centered on smuggling people, and even as I watch various conflicts today I wouldn't claim this country resembles Atwood's Republic of Gilead.

Are we ready, though, to help those in need?

(Reading Atwood's The Year of the Flood, with a sort of Quaker-like group that sings Anglican-ish hymns, reminded me of her earlier Quaker discussion.)

I spoke in Meeting yesterday for the first time in a long while. I don't remember precisely what I said, but the gist of it, two long-past conversations, seems worth sharing.

When I was in high school, a friend of mine - perhaps he'd seen Spartacus recently? - objected that Christ's crimes seemed awfully weak for a full-scale crucifixion. He hadn't preached armed insurrection, or any of the kinds of things Romans typically worried about.

A few years ago, at a conference lunch, I'd mentioned this blog, and the conversation after went something like:

Are you Quaker?

Yes.

Aren't they pacifists?

Well, mostly...

So if they're pacifists, why do they cause so much trouble?

I didn't have a proper answer for him, but maybe the conversation helped. It was kind of the opposite of the earlier conversation, but at the same time not exactly.

Howard Brinton writes, in the introduction to The Guide to True Peace:

But how, the activist will ask, can we heal a sick world when we are advised to "retire from all outward objects and silence all desires in the profound silence of the whole soul" (p.2)? The answer is that there is no peace without until there is peace within.

A man who is inwardly disordered will infect all about him with his inner disorder. John Woolman, a New Jersey tailor of the eighteenth century, followed without reservation the type of religion portrayed in The Guide to True Peace, yet he was one of the world's greatest social reformers. When he went about persuading the Quakers, a hundred years before the Civil War, to give up their slaves, he did not say much about suffering and injustice. He simply pointed out to the slaveholders that they felt no inner peace.

The history of the Society of Friends shows that almost always this search for inner peace is the dynamic of Quaker pioneering in social reform. True peace comes, not by inaction but in letting God act through us. (x)

Last week, while driving through central New York, I saw two signs with calls to be Christian but totally different approaches.

The first, painted on a farm stand sign along Route 20, read:

Jesus loves you. Love him back.

I kept reflecting on that for the rest of the drive out.

Maybe it prepared me for the writing on the back window of a truck I saw parked at a Thruway rest area on the way back:

God said it
That settles it
You better believe it!

That made for a different kind of reflection.

Hymns, even new hymns, crop up in the strangest places. One of my favorites, a simple repeating verse, is:

Jesus, help me find my proper place
Jesus, help me find my proper place
Help me in my weakness
'Cos I'm falling out of grace
Jesus
Jesus

If you'd like to hear it, it's here on YouTube. I often hear it in my mind during meeting, a refrain that helps me settle.

Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground seem an unlikely source for this meditative piece, though the album it was on, also called The Velvet Underground, is definitely calmer than its predecessors. But still, this comes right after "Pale Blue Eyes", with "the fact that you are married only proves your my best friend" and "Some Kind of Love", which has always left me wondering what's going on with "put jelly on your shoulder baby."

Song meanings has speculation about what this mean, but I've yet to find a real telling of how this came to be. Even if it's connected, say, to coming down from heroin, it stays simple enough to have much broader meaning.

In one of the stranger culture mashups I've encountered, someone's even created a video for this with clips from The Passion of the Christ. I guess it makes sense to people who don't know anything about this band, or perhaps far too much about this band.