Back to Basics on Community

Looking back on the week, three things stand out among the many details in a world moving too fast to keep track of (I’m completely bracketing a couple of horrific interviews with techbros that would have left my mouth agape - had I not been living through their nonsense for over a year). One of the things that hit me hard early in the week I can’t find documentation for - but I’m pretty sure I read something to the effect of the State Department designating Democratic Socialists of America a terrorist organization. Since I just joined DSA, whatever I read had me second-guessing what I write on Substack. Since I can’t find the thing I read, searches do not turn up information to that effect, and I may have gotten the details wildly wrong, I’ve shelved whatever anxieties I was harboring for a hot minute and we can move on from reflections on mustering courage under authoritarian projects.

The other things I want to write about are a deliberate return to Faith and Practice, the guidelines for Quakers in the Pacific Yearly Meeting, alongside a revisiting of some of Rosemary Radford Ruether’s reflections on community, and a night of listening to some music. The only link I can find between the readings and the music is “they happened this week,” so we’ll see if a coherence emerges, or if this will simply be a study in contrasts. (Update - writing session has gone long enough just on the “community” issue, so the basic contrast here is “community gets written about this week, music does not.” I would have talked about an evening listening to Nanci Griffith, the sixteenth-century composer Orlando Lassus, and R.E.M., but oh well.)

A few months ago, while recovering from a bicycle accident, I had an overly reactive emotional response to an incident in a meeting of a committee at my Quaker meeting. I don’t want to hash out the gossipy details, but my internal response included a layer of “I just don’t want to be a Quaker anymore.” It was a moment that felt like a stress test. I’ve had my share of denomination jumping (I left the Mennonites for the Methodists, I left the Methodists for a spiritual wilderness until I found my home with the Quakers) and I very much want to be done with uprooting my spiritual home and searching for another. So, I sat with the feeling/thought and processed it slowly. I definitely wanted to parse what in the response had a rational basis and what was coming from the emotional limits of recovery from a fall bad enough that it made my brain feel literally physically misaligned. In the midst of my processing, I did make a decision that I ended up walking back, and that walking back is probably a good thing. The overall processing of that response been a gradual ebbing back to a state of equilibrium, but I’ve still had a sense of irritation with Quakerism in general over the last few months.

So, I decided it was time to go back to the basics, pick up my copy of Faith and Practice, and see where I was at with it. Quakers don’t have fixed rules as much as we have advices and queries, although there are some core principles that are non-negotiable. Another religious text that works with queries is Rosemary Radford Ruether’s reader in feminist religious history, Womanguides: Readings Toward a Feminist Theology, which in some ways I think is her most important book (and of course it is out of print). I thought it would be interesting/helpful to find a collection of queries from each text and structure this week’s writing around them. The specific queries in each text turned out not be super useful for the purposes of structuring this writing session, but holding the two perspectives together was helpful for getting a kind of reorientation. Predictably enough, Faith and Practice was grounding, while Womanguides needled me out of seeking a too comfortable refuge.

As I read through Faith and Practice, my general sense was “yes, I believe this,” despite coming in with a sense of dissatisfaction and anticipating finding something I’d find to be an obstacle. Perhaps the quote that summarized what I was actually looking for best was a statement from Parker Palmer:

Friends are most in the Spirit when they stand at the crossing point of the inward and the outward life. And that is the intersection at which we find community. Community is a place where the connections felt in the heart make themselves known in the bonds between people, and the tuggings and pullings of those bonds keep opening up our hearts.

In the two decades I’ve worshipped with San Francisco monthly meeting, that intersection of the inward and outward life has often felt like a centrifugal force, with different committees and different members pulling toward the inward or the outward. There’s enough strength in the community to hold it all together, but the relation between the inward and the outward has felt more strained than in the Claremont meeting where I worshiped before I moved to San Francisco. In the Claremont meeting, that sense that inward and outward were going in different directions never arose. But the written reminder that community arises at that intersection, and whatever happens at that intersection is an occasion for maintenance, was one of the many grounding moments of that reading session.

But one thing I just learned is that from an engineering perspective, the difference between centripetal force (energy that directs to the center of circular motion) and centrifugal force (energy that directs away from the center of circular motion) is that centrifugal energy is fictitious. The energy pulling us toward the center is actual energy that can be measured. The feeling of being flung away from the center is simply a feeling. I don’t subscribe to a hard and fast distinction between fact and fiction (one of the first things my undergraduate English teacher told us is that the word “fact” derives from “made”), and I don’t want to succumb to a masculinist “facts over feelings” epistemology, but there is something about spiritual growth that involves a process of discerning which feelings are pointing at something true and which are not. In a sense, all feelings are pointing at something true about our subjective reality and need to be taken seriously, but there’s a kind of testing and processing of whether those feelings are pointing at something true directly, or if they’re pointing through the hall of mirrors that psychic wounds set up inside all of us. But looking at the difference between centripetal and centrifugal force from a physics/engineering perspective, rather than my preferred phenomenological perspective, provides a powerful metaphor for a sense that the Quaker commitment to unity as the basis of community is deeply rooted. I’ll come back to this in from another angle in a bit.

Ruether’s reflections on community had a stronger sense of a continuum between community and society than Faith and Practice did. Ruether roots her sense of “redemptive community” not so explicitly at the meeting point of the inward and the outward (although it is implicitly there in a very powerful way). Rather, she points to the gathering of the people of Israel after the Exodus as pointing toward a profound ambivalence of the interrelation of liberation and oppression at the heart of all community building. On the one hand, the gathering of the Israelites solidifies the Exodus’s act of being freed from slavery. On the other hand, the gathering is explicitly an all-male gathering, including a specific instruction to stay away from women in order to secure the purity necessary to reconstitute the newly freed community. So, community can both reflect a liberating impulse and exclusionary mechanisms.

Ruether traces this pull between a community that contributes to a liberated society and community dynamics of hierarchy and exclusion through four historical models of church - (1) the church as model patriarchal family, (2) the church as male Exodus community, (3) the church as eschatological bride of Christ, and (4) her own proposal of WomanChurch as a feminist Exodus community. As Ruether subjected her own Roman Catholic heritage to a feminist analysis and critique, she dug deep into foundational principles, subjecting them to a radical analysis that pointed to where those principles required radical transformation.

As I was reading through her chapter, I found myself wondering what her method would turn up if we shifted the lens from sexism to racism. Certainly, Paul looks very different when analyzed through the lens of ethnic difference than sexual difference, since his entire agenda was multiculturalism, while Ruether points towards the ways in which Paul allowed for a repatriarchalization of the early Christian community.¹ (Pamela Eisenbaum lays out the issues here very well in her “Is Paul the Father of Misogyny and Anti-Semitism.”) That question of how anti-racist struggle requires a deeper engagement with how fundamental categories are set up, the way Ruether wrestled with fundamental categories to unpack their sexism, inspired me to take my copy of Willie James Jennings’ The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race, off the bookshelf and add it to my already overflowing reading list.

One thing Black Quakers have told me - explicitly - is that the Quaker principle of “unity” too often functions to sideline their perspectives. One has recommended the substitution of “harmony” for “unity,” since harmony doesn’t imply sameness. Quaker testimony has always been explicit that “unity” does not equal “intellectual agreement,” but a word can function in more than one way. I still have a basic sense that giving up “unity” as a spiritual principle is giving up something central enough to Quakerism that we might as well throw in the towel and just do secular activism. But I’m sitting with that challenge.

But a couple of YouTube videos reminded me that that sense of listening past disagreement, whether in the service of “unity” or “harmony" is extremely important to get at the texture of anti-racist struggle. The journalist Karen Hunter and the YouTube commentator The Amazing Lucas had opposing views on Texas senate candidate James Talarico’s recent town hall and I’m embedding, rather than linking, the full videos of each because it is worth your time to hear the full arguments of both.

Earlier this week, I pushed back against a statement of a kind of individualism I saw a stranger make here on Substack. I try to restrain myself from correcting People Who Are Wrong On The Internet, but the comment was more a reminder to myself than anything:

As I turn to my local DSA chapter for a more explicit activist community (and also a community that isn’t 400 miles away), I can hold these lessons from spiritual community - the interplay of togetherness and disagreement; the necessary interrelation of inclusion and exclusion in every community dynamic - as guideposts for what frustrations to expect and how to deal with them as I develop my relations there.

In the meantime, it’s just nice to feel like I’m making myself at home again in my spiritual home.

1. This claim contains reams of scholarly debate that I won’t hash through here.