Tradition, thin and thick
As they begin their roles as acolytes and altar servers, our vicar has found some children-sized “cassocks” (the typically black robe worn by priests) and “surplices” (the white over-shirt) for my kids to try on. My daughter is especially pleased: she looks at herself in the mirror, laughs, and claps her hands. Even my son, not given to dressing up, more of a concrete thinker, finds being an acolyte “fun”.
Should tradition be fun?
It is fun to dress up, hold fiery candles, process in a line with the priest and deacon, and be at the special centre of everyone’s loving (and forgiving) attention. It is fun to lead the priest into the centre of the aisle, and to hold up the Gospel as she raises her hands and reads it aloud.
Dressing up in special clothes is a striking symbolic act. It might mean that we are taking off our everyday selves - our Minecraft T-shirts and butterfly dresses - and entering into a different, special role, time, and space. As altar server, deacon, priest, or even bishop, we now serve something bigger than the individual me.
Quakers don’t like these symbols and meanings. When my daughter said to our vicar: “What about Daddy?” - i.e. What special dress will he wear? I immediately replied: “Daddy doesn’t need one, I’m a Quaker.”
Modern man in search of tradition
I’m not, technically. I follow a largely Quaker approach to daily silent prayer. I sometimes prefer Quaker ‘theological’ terms in thinking about faith, especially spirituality. I attended a local Quaker Meeting for a number of years, and loved the people, silence, and circular seating. I struggled with other aspects, yet thought of joining, and sometimes, still do. And then I see a candle or a stained glass lampshade, I smell the inside of an old wooden church, hear a plaintive tune, or simply look up at the stars: my soul groans for beauty and a ‘thicker tradition’. I want the deep clarity and homecoming of silence, but I also want fire and wine, seasons and song, a bowl of water to bless our heads, the Gospel read from the centre of the aisle. I want to feel part of the Great Church that I was born into, and, one day, will die back into and be buried by.
On the other hand, ‘thick traditions’ have a habit of getting clotted. They become overly hierarchical, wordy, legalistic, ornate. They lose contact with the true sources of spiritual life. They ossify and become corrupt. We get “awakenings” (of the Spirit) and “reformations” (of the Church) throughout Christian history. This process goes on in our personal lives, too. My mind gets busy and full. I become overwhelmed, or focussed on myriad, lesser desires. The Spirit breaks in and topples things over, leads me to the desert, sometimes into illness. I long for Quaker simplicity once again.
Some people manage to combine thin and thick. Some Anglicans and Catholics, for example, combine being a member of their local parish and diocese, taking part in its seasons and full sacramental (and sometimes ecclesiological) life, with being a lay (or even a “religious”) member of a contemplative order (like the Jesuits, the Third Order of St Francis, or even the World Community for Christian Meditation). Some, such as Terry Waite, combine both being a Quaker with membership of a more orthodox church:
I’m very happy to somehow straddle the two traditions. I’ve not given up my Anglicanism, I’m still an Anglican, but I, as you quite rightly say, call myself a Quanglican, which is somehow straddling those two rather important traditions. (1)
The great Catholic theologian, Raimon Pannikar, after years of study, and with complete sincerity, called himself a Christian, a Hindu, and a Buddhist. I have thought of calling myself a Quanglican Catholic - which sounds like a duck that is trying to fly - and going back and forth between communities, each Sunday to the next. But it seems too much, too onerous, as I parent a young family and work full-time time.
But why have labels at all? Why can't we just be [insert your name here] in search of freedom, love, and truth? This is the modern liberal critique of tradition, which is still attractive in many ways, although is somewhat dated now. Not only does it underplay the extent to which we are all ‘embedded’ (in various families, conversations, and languages), it also fails to grasp what is often most missing and longed for in the ‘post-modern’ psyche.
I recently discovered that a young therapist I know is interested in exploring Christianity. He was actually attending churches - and churches of a more traditional, ‘liturgical’ style. I’ve enjoyed his outspokenness in our professional meetings, his willingness to name some difficult, alive home truths, so I was surprised and intrigued at his attending traditional church. I asked him: What are you attracted by? By community, he said, or a search for community. By the comforting presence of older people, he said, and a place where I can feel “small”.
As much as we bristle against giving up our autonomy (and rightly so), modern liberals (such as myself) also hunger for roots, bodies, elements, and to be part of something bigger than just ‘the moment’. Practising spirituality on your own gets lonely, and can even risk your health. Drifting from church to church, we avoid our ‘shadow’. Our hearts need other hearts to warm up with. Christ is encountered with the other, as much as within. Our freedom and spontaneity are made possible by history and form.
Quakers, thin and thick
Early Quakers rejected church vestments for a number of reasons. First, in sixteenth-century England, vestments were a clear symbol of hierarchical society, of unequal power and social relations. Priests in the Church of England, at that time, needed to be male, attend Oxford or Cambridge (and therefore came from higher social classes), before being given a salaried position with considerable social status and power, often regardless of their personal integrity and closeness to God In contrast, Quakers believed in the full equality of all, that there is ‘that of God in everyone’.
Doesn’t everyone who is enlightened have something to offer? (2)
But what spirit is this that wants to exercise authority over the faith of someone else? And what spirit is this that doesn’t allow the women to speak among the men, or even to speak among themselves? All this has to be exposed by that very different spirit that gives liberty to everyone... (3)
In response to those that would still limit the priesthood to only men, George Fox, from the sixteenth century, might say:
Can’t the spirit of Christ speak in the female as well as the male? Or is he to be limited in that respect? And who would take it on himself to ‘set the limit for the holy one of Israel’ (Psalm 78: 41)? For the light is the same in the female as in the male. And it comes from Christ, the one through whom the world itself was made. So Christ is one in all and not split up. And who dares tell Christ to stop talking? (4)
In other contexts, wearing clerical vestments may be subversive and affirming. Seeing a woman robed as a priest, a gay man wearing a bishop’s mitre, or a South American sitting on the throne of Saint Peter, in Rome, are all powerful, potentially liberating signs and symbols. None of these, in themselves, reveal much about a person’s inner life or integrity. That would still need to be encountered and discerned.
Second, Quakers maintained that they had abolished the laity, not the priesthood. Instead of a set-aside religious class, they affirmed ‘the priesthood of all believers’: that the Old Testament priesthood had come to an end in Christ - ‘the veil of the temple’ had been ‘torn in two’ (Matthew 27: 51) - and that all baptized Christians were now called to be “a royal priesthood” (1 Peter 2: 5-9; see also 1 Corinthians 4:1 ). There are contemporary Catholic (Lumen Gentium) and various Protestant affirmations of this. George Fox, channelling both the prophet Jeremiah and the Gospel writer, John, proclaimed a typically radical version:
We don’t need a mass to teach us, because the spirit that gave us the scripture teaches us. It teaches us how to pray, sing, praise, rejoice, honour and worship God, and how to live and behave towards God and other people. It leads us to all the truth [we need to know], which is where we find our unity, and it is our comforter and guide and leader. It is the spirit that does all this, and not human beings out there who don’t even claim to have the spirit and the power that the apostles did. (5)
To this radical ‘thin tradition’ critique, ‘thick tradition’ may reply: Yes, and we have collectively, widely, and diversely discerned that the Spirit gives us songs, sacraments, rituals, teachings, and other forms of worship and knowledge, which, we find, don’t always need (or very often don't need) to be ‘unprogrammed’ or undecided in advance, though the Spirit that moves and breathes through them - and gives them life, or not - is certainly ‘the presence in the midst’.
And that’s a good reply, albeit wordy and long-winded. But it isn’t always like that in practice. George Fox didn’t receive the Spirit, when, depressed and longing for God, he visited various churches and ministers to help heal his “condition”. Some recommended he sing more Psalms, or smoke more tobacco, or bleed his noxious spirits, or listen at length to their “windy doctrines”.
As I had forsaken all the priests, so I left the separate preachers also, and those called the most experienced people; for I saw there was none among them all that could speak to my condition. And when all my hopes in them and in all men were gone, so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, nor could tell what to do, then, oh then, I heard a voice which said, ‘There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition’, and when I heard it my heart did leap for joy. (6)
Although Quakers rejected a formal, gowned priesthood, a defacto, voluntary leadership system developed. ‘Ministers’, ‘elders’, ‘overseers’, and ‘weighty Quakers’ - Friends with natural teaching, pastoral, and organizational gifts - emerged and became part of the ongoing tradition. Collective processes, with their own language, developed too: ‘Meeting for Worship’, ‘Meeting for Business’, ‘Monthly Meeting’, ‘Yearly Meeting’, ‘Meeting for Sufferings’. Various statements and “rules” of “Christian discipline” have been compiled since 1656, including the famous Book of Christian Discipline, first compiled by Britain Yearly Meeting in 1883, now called Quaker Faith and Practice (the latest edition being 2013), which has become a much loved, well-used source of guidance and Quaker memory the world over. (7). ‘Thin traditions’, like our bodies, inevitably thicken as they age. Perhaps all Christian churches begin in Pentecost, with holy fire and spirit, then need robust “containment” and discernment (“orthodoxy”) to go on being. (8). Quakers learned this the hard way.
James Nayler, sleep deprived and overcome by the quickening within, famously rode into Bristol in 1656 - on a donkey - while other Quakers shouted “holy, holy, holy” and covered the muddy path in front of him with branches. George Fox was livid. The establishment, outraged. Nayler was imprisoned, had a hole bored in his tongue, and was branded with a B for blasphemer on his forehead. Yet he would recover, be released, and write these words before his death:
There is a spirit which I feel that delights to do no evil, nor to revenge any wrong, but delights to endure all things, in hope to enjoy its own in the end. Its hope is to outlive all wrath and contention, and to weary out all exaltation and cruelty, or whatever is of a nature contrary to itself. It sees to the end of all temptations. As it bears no evil in itself, so it conceives none in thoughts to any other. If it be betrayed, it bears it, for its ground and spring is the mercies and forgiveness of God…I found it alone, being forsaken. I have fellowship therein with them who lived in dens and desolate places in the earth, who through death obtained this resurrection and eternal holy life. (9)
A deeper freedom
The cassocks and surplices hang on a chair in front of our bed. My children will first wear them on ‘Good Shepherd Sunday’. For them, and for many adults, vestments invite greater beauty and spontaneous fun.
Should we wear vestments or not? Perhaps the best answer is this: tradition helps us discover who we deeply are.
When we think of freedom as choice, then it is something we have. We must identify a deeper freedom, which is being what we are…Then our acts can be completely our own, utterly with external constraint, what we most deeply wish and delight to do, and also most utterly God’s acts, because all that I do springs from being rooted in God. There is no competition. (10)
I like it that Quakers don’t wear vestments, as much as I like that many Anglicans and all Catholics do. There is no competition in God.
I might keep ‘straddling’ all three traditions, as uncomfortable as it sounds, being passionately conflicted in moments, spending summers with one family, and spring with another - keep singing and listening to their different songs.
Or Quakers will become my “lay order” - a retreat house on the hill - beyond the beautiful, wounded St Mary’s. (11)
Or another such arrangement, that I can't fully know.
References:
(1) Terry Waite interviewed by Andrew Leigh, “Terry Waite on solitary confinement, hatred, and forgiveness”, retrieved from https://www.andrewleigh.com/terry_waite_tgl.
(2) George Fox, quoted in Rex Ambler (ed.), Truth of the Heart: An anthology of George Fox (20021), p. 69.
(3) Fox, as above.
(4) Fox, quoted in Ambler, p.71.
(5) Fox, quoted in Ambler, p. 15.
(6) Fox, quoted in Ambler, p. 18; George Fox, Journal, 1647; retrieved from https://qfp.quaker.org.uk/passage/19-02/.
(7) Quaker faith and practice: The book of Christian discipline of the Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Britain (fifth edition, 2013).., chapters 3-7, 12.
(8) “Containment”, that is, in a healthy, psychotherapeutic sense - i.e. having a person or process to calmly receive and hold powerful inner experiences and expressions, so that an infant, person, or group isn't traumatically overwhelmed, or ruptured, but is supported to see and begin to think, organize, and metabolize what has emerged or is emerging.
(9) Retrieved from https://qfp.quaker.org.uk/passage/19-12/.
(10) Timothy Radcliffe, What is the Point of Being a Christian? (2005), pp. 42, 46.
(11) Gerald Priestland, Reasonable uncertainty: a Quaker approach to doctrine (1982), p.10: “For if we are not to become the whole Church ourselves…we must accept our role as a kind of lay order within the existing Great Church: a quiet chapel in the great cathedral, contributing our eloquent silence to the mass.”