Tradition, thick and thin
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 with dressed-up others, 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 gesture. It might mean that we are taking off our usual, 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. 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.”
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, the Gospel, light, and life of Christ. I want to feel part of the Great Church that I was born and baptized into, and, one day, will die back into, and be buried by.
On the other hand, ‘thick traditions’ have a habit of getting clotted, like cream. They become too hierarchical, legalistic, or wordy. They lose contact with the true sources of spiritual life. They ossify and become corrupt. We get “awakenings” (of the Spirit) and “reformations” (of churches) throughout Christian history. This process goes on in our personal lives, too. My life and mind get busy and full. I become overwhelmed or focussed on many, 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, for a path of brahmacharya (renunciation, being radically centred on God).
Some people manage to combine both thick and thin. 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 being a member of the World Community for Christian Meditation). Some, such as Terry Waite, combine both Quaker membership with being part 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, 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 etc., and a clumsy, inelegant mouthful. It might be wiser to keep the traditions somewhat apart, as Pannikar does, and allow myself to be part of multiple families, much like life.
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 it is somewhat dated now, too. 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 in 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 experience of being around older people, and a place where I can feel “small”.
As much as we bristle against giving up our autonomy (and rightly so), contemporary Westerners, it has often been said, hunger for roots, ‘spiritual experience’, humility, embodied practice, and a layered foundation that connects past, present, and future. Practising spirituality on your own gets lonely. Drifting from place to place, or church to church, we don’t encounter (and integrate) our ‘shadow’ and develop greater depth. Our hearts need other hearts to warm up with. We need an encounter with the other to more fully meet and become Christ. Our freedom and spontaneity are made possible by history and form. With the support and belonging of tradition, paradoxically, we can feel more free to open up, feel vulnerable, and let go.
Early Quakers rejected church vestments for a number of reasons. Firstly, in sixteenth-century England, vestments were a clear sign and symbol of hierarchical society, of unequal power and social relations. 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)
On the other hand, wearing clerical vestments can be subversive and affirming. Seeing a woman robed as a priest, a gay man wearing a bishop’s mitre, or a Filipino sitting in the chair 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). There are contemporary Catholic (Lumen Gentium, Vatican II) and various Protestant affirmations of this. George Fox, inspired by personal encounter, and 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, but it isn’t always like that in practice. George Fox didn't experience that when, depressed and longing for God, he visited various churches and ministers to help heal his “condition”. In practice, people often become over reliant on set forms and answers, become passive, and close to the Spirit within (or the Spirit between and before us, on our doorstep).
Although Quakers rejected a formal, gowned priesthood, a sort of defacto leadership hierarchy quickly developed. ‘Ministers’, ‘elders’, ‘over-seers’, and ‘weighty Quakers’ - Friends with natural teaching, pastoral, and organizational gifts - emerged and became part of the ongoing tradition, so as to provide a less centralized, though effective, form of guidance and authority. Such an awakening of spirit, of course, necessitates robust discernment processes. Quakers learnt this the hard way.
James Nayler, sleep deprived and overcome by the quickening within, famously rode into Bristol on a donkey in 1656, while other Quakers shouted “holy, holy, holy” and covered the muddy path in front of him with branches. George Fox was livid. Society was outraged. Nayler was imprisoned by the authorities, had a hole poked in his tongue, and was branded with a B for blasphemer on his forehead. Yet he would recover, eventually be released from jail, live in the world again, 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. (6)
‘Thin traditions’ can be thickly remembered and lived.
The cassocks and surplices hang on a chair in front of our bed. My children will wear them on Sunday. For them, and for many adults, vestments may serve as an invitation to beauty and spontaneous fun.
Should we wear vestments or not? Perhaps the best answer is this: tradition helps remind us who we deeply are. We should wear church vestments if we deeply want to, and not wear them if we deeply object:
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. (7)
I like it that Quakers don’t wear vestments, as much as I like that many Anglicans and all Catholics do. In the end, I deeply want both thick and thin. I’ll probably find myself ‘straddling’ all three traditions and keep singing and listening to their different songs, holding them all in my one heart. So Christ is one in all and not split up.
References:
(1) “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) Retrieved from https://qfp.quaker.org.uk/passage/19-12/.
(7) Timothy Radcliffe, What is the Point of Being a Christian? (2005), pp. 42, 46.
