Quakers, simplicity, and Christmas

I belong to the “unprogramed” strand of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), which means that when we come together to worship we do so very simply indeed. We have a square, undecorated worship space that every Sunday is opened up twice for people who want to come to pray or meditate together for an hour while we wait for the leadings of the Spirit of Love. Nothing “programed” or pre-planned happens during that hour at all. Sometimes, we’ll sit there for the full hour and no-one will feel led to speak. Sometimes, several people will speak.
In my early experiences of this way of worshiping I found it rather strange, since I’d grown up in the Anglican church. What, no music? No stained glass? No incense? No liturgy? No priest? No ‘communion’? Just– us?
Then, I really started to love unprogramed Quaker worship– for its simplicity, its inclusiveness, its surprises and riches, and its continual, experienced affirmation of the ability of every person to dig deep and discover the workings of love inside themselves.
One part of the way we worship and are organized is that we don’t have any priests, or– as George Fox, the founder of Quakerism in England in the 17th century, called them– “hireling ministers”. Nor do we have churches (“steeple houses”). This helps us to live out the Quaker testimony of simplicity. We don’t have to raise huge amounts of money to pay for the upkeep of grandiose palaces of worship or the salaries of church officials. We are a network of worship communities (“meetings”), each of which governs itself through a monthly “Meeting for worship with a concern for business.”
Another part of the way we worship is that we don’t stick to–or indeed, have any need for– a liturgical calendar. Not for us the massive Christmas-related extravaganzas that many Christian churches here and elsewhere organize. Our Quaker meeting here in Charlottesville, Virginia does have a tradition of having someone open our meeting house for worship twice on Christmas Eve– once at 7:30 p.m., and once at 11 p.m.– and inviting anyone who wants to join a special , one-hour-long meeting for worship at those times to do so. In what some of us think is a slightly un-Quakerly, possibly even liturgical, gesture, participants traditionally each take a candle to the worship; and the candles are placed together in a group on the floor in the middle of the bare, square meeting space…

Well, that’s as complicated as it gets for us, at Christmas. I find there’s something incredibly powerful about commemorating the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, who was such a powerful teacher and role-model. Something powerful, too, about celebrating a birth at this time of year, which in our northern hemisphere is a time of long nights, biting cold, and biological dormancy: how heartening to be reminded that new life, new hope, is on the way!
Quakers are one of a number of pacifist Christian churches here in the USA (and elsewhere). These churches– Quakers, Mennonites, Church of the Brethren, Amish, etc.– all have long histories and traditions. Most are descended from peace-church communities that originally came here to the US to escape strong discrimination or even persecution back home in in Europe. They (we) draw on the original, pacifist teachings of the Christian gospels while setting aside teachings that came into the “Christian” establishment much later, in the times of Augustine of Hippo, that allow for the idea that a war might be considered “just”, etc., etc.
Here in Charlottesville we have good congregations of the Mennonite church and the Church of the Brethren. We also have many fine members and leaders in other Christian churches who are– along with a great bunch of Jewish people and people of no particular religious affiliation– strong activists in the local peace movement, the Charlottesville Center for Peace and Justice.
On Thursday evening, December 23, I was downtown participating in CCPJ’s weekly rush-hour peace vigil on the busy corner outside the local Federal Government office building. Our country so badly needs a strong reminder of the essentials of Jesus’s teachings about the need for love and nonviolence right now! I was holding up two signs, back-to-back: “Honk for peace” on one side; “Support our troops, bring them home!” on the other.
We got so many honks, and friendly waves, from passing motorists, you couldn’t believe it! At times throughout the hour, it seemed that 50% or more of motorists were honking. I particularly appreciate the guys who drive the city’s semi-touristy “trolley”-type buses. When they “honk” for us, they clang their trolleys’ bells loud and repeatedly as they cross that busy intersection. On Thursday, those clangs sounded incredibly festive!
From my long experience on that peace vigil, I can say that we get a particularly high proportion of supportive honks from African-American motorists, and a somewhat lower proportion from white motorists; a higher proportion from drivers coming into the intersection from the industrial areas south of town than from drivers coming in along the other three approaches to it; and an extremely low level of any hostile gestures at all. Last Thursday, amidst maybe 300-500 honks and friendly waves, I discerned only one gesture that seemed hostile, and that only ambiguously so.
Well, being on the peace vigil Thursday felt to me like a great, Christmas-related activity. Going to the earlier of the Christmas Eve worship sessions on Friday evening also felt like an inspiring, centering thing to do. Then yesterday, Bill and Lorna and I started our Christmas Day by opening our family Christmas presents under the small, gaily decorated cedar tree in our family room. In the afternoon we spent a large-ish chunk of time cooking. Lorna is a deeply convinced vegetarian, so we had decided to cook four or five of the vegetarian recipes from the Lebanese cookbook she gave me for Christmas last year, and produce them in time for a festive dinner for the three of us. (Neither of my older two kids could be with us for Christmas, but we had lovely phone calls from them in the morning.)
I find that cooking something you’ve never cooked before is always a little iffy. Like the first time we tried to make falafel from that cookbook, back in January… (Don’t ask!) There are especially lots of “unknown unknowns” if you’re trying to combine recipes or make substitutions to account for vegetarianism, as we were. But it all worked out unbelievably well! This was our main course: Eggplant and chickpea stew; Burghul-stuffed tomatoes and zucchinis; Feta-cheese bread (made from scratch); and Lebanese-style potato omelettes. Oh, and along the way there we also baked a double batch of chocolate cookies that had chocolate drizzled across the top of them and crushed candy-canes strewn on top of that…
Okay, I hear you say: Some of that doesn’t sound very simple. But I can tell you it was fun. Cooking together as a family is always a good thing to do! Plus, we now have a refrigerator full of fabulous left-overs.
Anyway, I guess what I also wanted to write about here is the fact that the generally “simple” way that Quakers try to organize our religious commitments and practice gives us one particular blessing that not even the members of the other historic peace churches enjoy: We still have plenty of time left over, even at Christmas or Easter, to do the pro-peace work that many of us feel led to do.
Around five or six years ago, for example, we learned that our state, the (inappropriately named) “Commonwealth” of Virginia, was planning to execute five people during the upcoming month of April. What an outrage! We had quite a good network of anti-death penalty people here at the time, including many people from different churches. But most of the rest of them were very busy in March/April, organizing “Lent” activities and making their plans for the big “Holy Week” and “Easter” services.
Lent? Holy Week? Easter? These calendar constructs mean almost nothing to most Quakers. For us, every day, every minute of every day, is holy. Certainly, even if these concepts mean something to some people in our meeting, still, there is nothing that the Quaker meeting as a whole needs to do in order to plan special liturgies for these points on the calendar, or whatever… That year, we did nearly all the organizing that was needed for an awareness-raising campaign around the death penalty that was as broad and as public as we could make it.
Okay, I’ll admit it freely. We didn’t succeed in stopping even one of those executions. We didn’t succeed in stopping the state’s practice of capital punishment. And regarding this present war our country’s in, not all the whole weight of the anti-war movement in this country succeeded in preventing it from happening. Nor have we held the Bush administration folks back from continuing to commit additioanl outrages like the most recent (and quite avoidable) assault on Fallujah.
But we carry on trying. (For my part, I find that the Buddhist teaching of “non-attachment to the fruits of one’s labors” is a real powerful teaching in this regard as in many others. When’s Buddha’s birthday, anyway?)
And as we carry on trying to point out the tragedy and the essential folly of using violence in world affairs, at least we Quakers are not held back in our efforts by any extravagantly unnecessary and diversionary calls that our religious commitment might make on our time and our resources.
Maybe that fact, and the ability of earlier generations of US Quakers to focus on the moral/existential essentials of the world, was what enabled those Quakers to play such a strong, galvanizing role in the anti-slavery movement in this country?
So, we Quakers were “right” on the fundamental immorality of slavery. When will we manage to persuade the rest of our American compatriots that we are “right” today on the fundamental immorality (and the disutility) of war?