Quaker retreat coming up

Tomorrow afternoon, I get the huge pleasure of leaving town and joining many friends (Friends) from my Quaker meeting here in a weekend-long retreat over near Richmond. I’m really looking forward to it. I know many of my Jewish friends have spent the time since sundown yesterday fasting and praying as they “take account” of all their actions over the past year, which I gather is the main point of the Yom Kippur observances. I sort of feel in need of some of the same moral and existential stock-taking… Though mind you, the main focus of this retreat is on “community building”, so it might end up a little different. Who knows?
Last week, I got to teach two classes at the Quaker school we have here in Charlottesville– Tandem Friends School. I was working with a group of 15-year-olds, leading them in two 70-minute explorations of some of the key teachings of John Woolman. They are great young people. Many of them were deeply engaged in thinking through the tough challenge of how to make the world a better place using only life-affirming and non-violent means.
We talked a lot about how, back in the 1750s, John Woolman traveled up and down the east coast of (what would later become) the US, talking to the many Quakers living and farming here then who did so on the basis of their reliance on slave labor. He and a small bunch of other Philadelphia-area Quakers had become opposed to the practice of slavery, but their dilemma was how to persuade all the other members of their beloved Religious Society of Friends that participating in the institution of slavery was not– as some Quakers still held– the ethical thing to do in those times, but was indeed an abomination.
Gradually, over the years, Woolman, Anthony Benezet, and other anti-slavery activists won more and more (Quaker) converts to their cause. Quaker shipowners in Newport RI gradually turned away from their previous, often very lucrative, engagement in slave-capturing expeditions across the Atlantic. Quaker farmers in Virginia and the Carolinas gradually found ways to manumit (free) their slaves– which often wasn’t an easy thing to do. And then, finding that there was no way to make a living on this poor soil if you had to actually pay your farm labor, most of them ended up selling up and moving either to the “new” lands of the west, or to cities, to take up various trades. (And yes, Woolman had a lot to say about the colonists’ taking of the lands from the Indians, too.)
Anyway, my fascination with Woolman stems from this. He and his allies did the slow, steady work of persuasion which over time transformed the Quakers into a solidly anti-slavery body, and was the foundation on which in the 19th century they started to build a nationwide anti-slavery movement. I would like to think that today, we American Quakers could do the same with our opposition to war and global domination. (And by and large, we don’t even have to start where Woolman did, by persuading our own co-religionists that those things are an abomination.)
Quakers are generally (and imho, quite rightly) very wary of self-aggrandisement. If we weren’t, I would have suggested my local Quaker meeting (church) or one of our bigger bodies should take out huge ads all over the country saying something like: Quakers! We were right about slavery so listen to us on war!
Nah… I guess that’s not how we do things… Just telling other people that you’re right and they’re wrong is not, after all, a very successful strategy of persuasion. In fact, as I well know, it can really put people’s backs up…. A strategy based on listening and building relationships is still– now, as always– the best way to win real attitudinal change.
Okay, I know I practice it only very imperfectly here on the blog. But I try, I try.
In Woolman’s journal (the full text of which is available online) he shows that he has listened very carefully to the arguments made by the Quaker slaveowners and slavetraders of his day, and he recounts those arguments in impressive detail– and with an impressive lack of judgmentalism– in the journal. Nowadays, reading it, you’d be more inclined to be aghast… “They believed they were actually doing the Africans a favor by bringing them here to ‘Christendom’!?!?!” “They actually used Biblical stories to try to justify slavery!?!?!” “They believed what?!?” And maybe at the time, Woolman was inwardly pretty aghast, too, given his very different view of the ethical quality of slavery. But the way he describes those forms of argument– and then, methodically, lists the responses he’d given to them– is all written in very straightforward prose. (With never an exclamation point in the whole text, as far as I can recall. Come to think of it, had they invented them then?)
So why am I writing all this here? I’m not entirely sure. I am in a Yom Kippur-ish kind of a mood. Also, the burden of just closely following the whole horrible disaster of this war every so often starts to get to me, and I need to take some time out. Re-reading Woolman, as I have done recently, helps to give our present set of struggles some good perspective. Going to the retreat should be another way to do the same thing.
There is this pesky fact that I’ll be there, Quaker-retreating away like nobody’s business, at the very same time the Iraqi referendum is being held. Oh well.. It’s not as if the referendum is going to change a huge number of things in the greater scheme of things. There will still be plenty to write about– in Iraq, in the rest of the world, when the retreat finishes, Sunday.
But before I go, I’ll post an ‘Iraq open thread’ here so y’all can have a good conversation about it in my absence. This post here, however, is not yet that thread.