Quaker Orthodoxy: A Rant

I just made the mistake of reading a Friends Journal article that I knew would frustrate me. I saw a link to it last week, and knew better than to click on it. This morning, I clicked it anyway. Maybe I hoped for new insight on a long-exhausted topic. Maybe I forgot how painful my lack of unity with received Quaker wisdom has been. Maybe I forgot how painful it is that such a thing as “received Quaker wisdom” exists.

Over the winter, I took an on-line course through Beacon Hill Friends House on the topic of Quakers and authority. We looked at how Quaker meetings have held authority over the 350-year history of the religion, and reflected on current practices. My classmates seemed to agree that Quakers do not have clearly-articulated shared beliefs. On the contrary: Quakers in the liberal, unprogrammed tradition tend to reject the idea that we should. None of us had ever experienced a meeting that united around the shared belief that God exists, or that Christ is devine, or that these things can’t be known, or that God doesn’t exist. On the contrary, we were aware that the meetings we’d participated in included, to varying degrees, people who held all of these beliefs, and more.

We also agreed that this miscellany of beliefs creates some degree of tension in most meetings. Many Quakers I’ve spoken with aren’t sure whether their particular expression of faith will be welcomed; others know that it is disapproved of, or will make people uncomfortable. As a group of really, really nice people, we don’t want to make each other uncomfortable, and so we hold our tongues.

We also don’t want to feel judged by our meetings. Many Quakers have had painful experiences in other religious traditions, and find Quakerism a refuge from the dogmatism that wounded them. I know that when I was thinking of leaving my monthly meeting, one of my fears was that if I left Quakerism, there would be nowhere left for me to go.

This fear of judgment suppresses people of all types. During one stretch of just a few months, for instance, I had two people in my meeting tell me that they were not comfortable speaking honestly about their spiritual beliefs in worship. One was an atheist. One was a Christian. That is as sad as it is hilarious.

Hearing the same personal concern from such different people helped me understand why vocal ministry in our meeting tended to be political messages, reflections on the content of the New York Times, and Hallmark-card soft-spirituality banalities about spring flowers and the joys of children’s voices. These messages are safe, lowest-common-denominator messages that people, on the whole, find unobjectionable. It seems to me sometimes that Quakers hold “unobjectionable” to be the highest possible good.

In my experience, though, while they reject spiritual or religious orthodoxy, Quakers do have truths they take to be self-evident. These truths are not spiritual, but political and social. It was very common in my meeting to assume that everyone in the room was in agreement about political figures, world events, and proposals that made it onto state and local ballots. In addition, it was common for people to make universal assumptions about parenting, about things like what we’d feed our kids, what kinds of toys we’d buy for them, and the extent to which we’d restrict television and video games, some high degree of restriction being taken for granted. We would never have said, “I know we all believe in God...” or “everyone in the meeting should have a daily spiritual practice,” or "It's vital that our First Day School give the children a good Biblical grounding." But people often said things like, “I know we all support this candidate,” or “It’s important that we all go out Tuesday and vote in favor of this ballot proposal,” or “None of us wants our kids engaging in pretend gun play.”

I experienced many conversations among parents, both locally and at gatherings, in which categorical value statements were made in confidence that there would be agreement among everyone present. Or in which “people who...” were discussed as if it were not possible that a “person who” might be present. I have often been the “person who” in the room, and it is painful and alienating. It is frowned upon to criticize someone for their spiritual beliefs or practices, but judgments about lifestyle, parenting choices, and political choices abound.

The kid on the right takes both his
Quakerism and his cosplay seriously

Our political, social, and personal actions and beliefs ought to be the fruit of the spirit, but in meetings like mine they are taken as first principles. Expression of these shared attitudes, often coupled with implicit or explicit judgment of people whose actions and attitudes differ, seems to me to be a central way that Quakers cement their community bonds. They serve as the binding that holds the meeting together, in lieu of a spiritual or religious unity which we cannot find and aren’t sure we ought to be looking for.

I see this as a serious problem for liberal Quakers, though the broad consensus which Friends seem to share in these areas means that I am out of unity on this subject. But it seems to me that when we replace the powerful bonds of spirit with the worldly bonds of political opinion, social action, and lifestyle choices, we are significantly weakened. We abandon our unique message for one that could be delivered just as well by the Democratic Party or an NGO. We have values rather than convictions, and when God speaks powerfully to one of us we are as likely to discourage the minister as to lift her up.

This has been my experience among Friends.

Tympanometry On an Autumn Day in April

Today, I have to study for, and take, an exam on Tympanometry. I do not want to study.

I want to sleep. And before sleeping, and after sleeping, and in between sleeping, I want to lie there and think pleasantly about inconsequential things.

Tympanometry is the study of the compliance of the eardrum. The author of my textbook is a charmingly pedantic person who cannot resist pointing out that when we refer to a drum, we don't just refer to the stretched skin over the head of the drum but also to the space behind it, enclosed within wood, the resonating chamber. Therefore, the author of my textbook says, we should more properly call the eardrum the "eardrum membrane."

No one will ever do this.

There are several important things you can measure about the eardrum membrane. It is a gate which allows some to pass and denies others; when it passes acoustic energy into the middle ear, this is called admittance. When it opposes the movement of acoustic energy, this is called impedance. Once upon a time, someone coined the portmanteau word "immitance" to describe these two things together: what is admitted, what is denied.

I do not want to study the four types of basic immitance tests and their eight purposes. I want to sit in my chair and look out the dirty window into my badly-tended yard, which is miserable today with wind and rain and gray clouds so low they could almost roof your house. I would sit there with a book of poetry in my lap, and read a poem every now and then, and then look out the window for awhile, not thinking about the poem, and then turn a couple of pages and read another one.

Tympanometry measure the compliance of the eardrum: how willing is it to move when you push or pull on it by manipulating the pressure in the ear canal. If I were an eardrum, I would not be compliant at all. "What type of tympanogram are you?" would make a terrible internet quiz, but my answer would be: Type AS. I am shallow and stiff. I have low compliance. It is possible I represent ossicular fixation. That would hardly surprise me.

The ossicles are the bones of your middle ear. You were taught to call them the hammer, the anvil, the stirrup. They are the smallest bones in the human body, in particular the stirrup, which I have learned to call the stapes as I have become inculturated to the language of my field. So many common, everyday words replaced with jargon. Earwax, eardrum, hammer and anvil, ear; ceruman, tympanum, malleus and incus, helix, concha cavum, triangular fossa.

There is a poetry to it, all that latin. I'm not sorry to be learning it, except today, when I don't want to be learning. Perhaps I am a Type B tympanogram. I am an eardrum with no compliance at all. I may be perforated, or diseased.

I can tell you the normal volume of the ear canal in both adults and children when measured at 200 decaPascals of air pressure. You might not think this matters, but it does. It is diagnostically significant. But I don't care much about that today. I can tell you, too, that the goldfinch I can see through my dirty window, enlivening my depressed front yard with his ready-to-mate springtime brilliance, weighs about half an ounce. We may be proud of the tininess of our stapes, our stirrup, 3 millimeters from end to end, and the precise way its footpad rests in the oval window of the cochlea, ready to pass on--not only pass on, but to amplify--whatever acoustic energy has made it past the bouncer at the door of Club Eardrum Membrane. But I bet that goldfinch's bones would put our ossicular chain to shame.

Were you surprised to hear me say the cochlea has a window? It has two, actually, the oval window and a round one as well. It is like a hobbit house in there. There are round windows in my bird feeder, too, not the thistle feeder the goldfinches love so much but the other one, that usually has sunflower seeds and millet and the occasional peanut. A cardinal is there now, poking his beak into each of the round feeder ports, circumnavigating the feeder on its circular perch. He always hopes to find something better in the next round window, but he does not. They all have the same thing in them. They are all empty. Both the dirty window and my eadrum membrane admit the sound of the brief, irritated chirps he makes each time his beak comes up empty. He goes around twice, just to be sure, and then flies away.

When I leave to take my exam, I will first fill the feeder from the bag of seed mix I keep in the garage, and the cardinal will come back, all forgiven. The birds' love for me, for my yard, lasts only as long as the seed does, and then it quickly turns to anger or indifference. But it turns back into love the moment the feeder is full again. If they were eardrums, they'd be highly compliant. They are easily moved.

Yesterday one of my children killed a mouse by hitting it with a stick. One of the cats had caught the mouse, and I believe my son thought he was being merciful. Perhaps he was being merciful. It's so hard to say. One mouse, taken up by a cat, escapes to live whatever span of life a mouse is given. Another, broken somehow inside, can only die. It is impossible for us to know which mouse our son killed, the blessed mouse, the mouse upon whom Providence smiled that day, or the doomed mouse, the one whose small limp body I would have taken up later and, with regret, laid down again in an out-of-the-way place to fulfill its next destiny. A cat cannot be blamed for acting in accord with its nature; a mouse, whose kind have always produced enough progeny to feed the owls and the cats and the smaller hawks and still leave the world with more mice than it started with--well, what I mean to say is that a mouse cannot bear the weight of too much grieving.

Now a dark-eyed junco is pecking at the ground under the feeder, scavenging for fallen millet. I love these birds with their deep gray above and clear white underneath, and I never see one without wishing to hold it, to feel its small body rest between my palms. I would never hurt it. I would take as much pleasure in letting it go as I had in scooping it into my hands in the first place.

But I will never hold a dark-eyed junco unless it's injured, unless we find it unmoving but still breathing under the window or carried into the breezeway by a cat. I know how to make an injured bird a nest in a small box, and where to put the box to keep it warm. I know what it is like to come check the box to find the bird standing up, peering at me with sharp intelligent eyes, ready to fly again, and I know what it is like to find it still and cold. I know that there is little you can do for the injured bird besides keep it safe from opportunistic cats, and, perhaps, children a bit too eager to dispense mercy.

The first step in any examination of the ear is otoscopy, peeking into the ear canal to check for ear wax, bugs, beans, plant life, infection. A healthy tympanic membrane glows a pearlescent pink, and it refracts the beam from your otoscope into a cone of light that is not an intrinsic part of the eardrum but is nonetheless a beacon declaring that all is well. I have never seen the cone of light for myself; only pictures. But I know that one day I will.

Posted with Blogsy