Through the Flaming Sword

What is a testimony of love?

Our witness testimonies should be grounded in the commandment of love, in the message of our minutes and communications, but more importantly, in the spirit in which we undertake our witness work. When writing minutes of conscience, we should first pray and worship. We should pray for the spirit-sap that flows through the divine vine, the spirit network in which we abide, asking the spirit of truth to enter us as individuals and to cover us as a gathering, as a committee or a meeting or whatever. We should abide in that spirit until the seed has formed. And we should season the idea until the fruit has ripened, and we should harvest it only when it is ready.

And then, when we speak, we should speak of love. We should claim divine love as our source, if we can do so with integrity. And we should proclaim this love as the path to right action. In our prophetic voice, we should hold the wrong actions we seek to change up to the light of divine love.

That voice should still carry the love in its wording and tone: heartbreak instead of anger, forgiveness instead of hate, good biting humor rather than caustic sarcasm, and heartfelt appeal rather than condemnation. And where the anger remains, and even the hate, and the impulse to lash out and to call down some divine wrath, all of which perhaps the world’s abominations do deserve—while we probably cannot cleanse ourselves altogether of these negative emotions, we can at least still humbly confess our failure and ask forgiveness. The honest and righteous expression of our negativity and our confession and repentance may be our strongest “argument”.

So that’s the tone of the testimony of love, and some of its content, some of the manner and some of the matter. But not all. We should quote scripture where and when we can, to press our case and to indict the wrongdoing. And we should quote our own saints, as well, Woolman and Penington and Mott and the rest. We should go farther than just declaring one or more of our testimonies in a perfunctory way. We should lift the bushel and let the light of our testimony fill the whole room of our discourse. 

The Bible doesn’t always have something very direct to say about some concerns; climate change is a good example. But the Bible is full of passages about love. We have quoted several in this essay. There are many more. 

And yes, some in our meetings who are allergic to the Bible are likely to start to itch. Let’s ask them to take a spiritual antihistamine. This is our tradition. This is who we are, “we” being the demographic majority of Friends, the historical majority of Friends, and our very identity as a gathered people of God. The Bible-allergic are a minority of a slightly larger minority who are trying to cut off the vine from its roots. And I speak as one who has been there, who harassed Christians for their vocal ministry and kept my meeting from teaching my kids the Bible. But I was wrong to do that, I was not in a spirit of divine love, and I should not have been allowed to hold my meeting hostage in that way.

Meanwhile, in our minutes of conscience, it should be enough to simply ask how the wrong we are challenging expresses our love for the gifts of creation, or for our neighbors, or for our children—or for our enemies, for that matter. Whoever our audience is, whatever the issue, I believe our most effective fruit is to simply raise up love and contrast it to the wrong being done. And to express our horror.

The next post offers a sample minute of conscience that tries to embody these principles.

Read part 5 here.

Why a testimony of love?

The practical answer is that it’s hard to argue against love. Arguing against love, when it’s plainly and authentically expressed, makes you look bad; it makes you look angry, spiteful, and hateful. And love is a universal antidote for all kinds of poisons. It speaks to peace as well as it does to equality, to justice as well as it does to earthcare.

But we have much more important reasons to adopt a testimony of love. I see these three:

• Love is part of our DNA as a religious society—it’s embedded in our origins and in our identity and name as a movement; love is our indigenous language.
• Love, properly understood, is not about feelings; it’s about action—it’s a commandment.
• Love speaks directly out of our Christian and biblical tradition, and it speaks directly to those for whom these traditions carry authority—it builds a moral bridge.

Love and the Quaker identity

The Religious Society of Friends gets this name from the fifteenth chapter of the Gospel of John, chapter 15, verses 12 to 17 (emphasis added):

This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know that the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask in my name. I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.

John 15:12–17

So we Quakers are friends of Jesus on the condition that we love one another with a divine love, with the love God has shown to us, and with the promise that in this friendship, we will “know everything.” From this passage, Friends adopted our collective name, we embraced the promise of continuing revelation, we embraced the commandment of love, and we embraced our mission as a people of God—to “bear fruit that lasts”.

This love is a commandment. It is not a sentiment that arises out of good chemistry with another person; it is something we do, regardless of our feelings for another. It is something we do, even when we do not feel like it. It is something we do even when we least want to do it. We are even to love our enemies. This is who we claimed we were when we adopted the name Religious Society of Friends.

Luckily for us, this love is not just an act of will for which we must struggle alone. In the passage just preceding this one, Jesus says 

I am the vine and my Father is the vinegrower. . . . Abide in me just as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing.

John 15:1, 4–5

Taken together with verses 12 to 17, I read this message as follows: We live in a spiritual union or bonded “network” that includes each of us and the spirit of the Christ and the Holy Spirit of God, and this union’s job, this vine’s job, is to do good and lasting things in the world in a spirit of love, even when it’s very hard to do, and the Spirit will guide and strengthen us in this mission.

This is the platform on which we should build our efforts to bring the reign of God on earth as it is in the realm of the Spirit. And for guidance about what to do and how to do it, about what to say and how to say it, we should turn to the Holy Spirit that has been promised to us and which we do experience in the gathered meeting:

If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of Truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither seems him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you.

John 14:15–17

Read part 4 here.

In the previous post, I said that talking like a secular social change nonprofit is wrong for us for several reasons. Here are those reasons.

Arguments against the secularization of our witness

First, it doesn’t work. Research into social change shows that you rarely can change someone’s mind with facts and arguments. People approach social issues emotionally, not intellectually. Facts may be true, but they are not the Truth. The Truth people believe in is a relationship with facts, not the facts themselves. That’s why so many Trump supporters remain Trump supporters despite his lies, cruelty, crudeness, misogyny, racism, and assaults on decency and the law. It’s their relationship with the man and what they believe he stands for that matters to them, the fact that he speaks to their condition in important ways. 

People changed their attitudes about civil rights when they saw, and felt, the water cannons and attack dogs in action on the Edmund Pettus Bridbge—when their emotions were engaged. People changed their minds about the war in Vietnam when they saw, and felt, the body bags being taken off of airplanes here at home. 

Moreover, facts often have counter-facts, “what-about” arguments that raise other true facts about something only vaguely related or not related at all. Facts cut both ways.

Second, secular language from Quakers makes no new, let alone unique, contribution to the struggle. Somebody else is already saying what we’re saying with this kind of language, and often they are doing a better job. But what are they not saying that we could say?

This is the third and most important argument against secular Quaker witness: it isn’t us, on the one hand, and also it isn’t us, on the other. By this I mean, on the one hand, that we are not a secular organization (in theory), so secular language is not our “indigenous” language; and on the other hand, we do have an indigenous language and it isn’t secular. We do have a natural, traditional, and powerful language that makes a contribution to the struggle that won’t—and couldn’t—come from any other place. Only Quakers could say the powerful things that we could be saying.

With this series, I want to recover an explicitly religious foundation for our witness life. I want to nurture a corporate witness life that instinctively presents our testimony in religious language that carries power because it stems from a leading of the Spirit. And I want to offer a  template for expressing our Spirit-led witness that reclaims our testimonial worldview and rhetoric, that brings forward our ancient and powerful tradition as Friends, and that speaks to our audiences in language that speaks to their condition, that might actually change some of their hearts and minds, because it’s religious, moral, and emotional.

The solution, I propose, is a testimony of love. A way of thinking about our testimonies and our witness actions and communications, that is grounded in the Spirit, and that explicitly invokes the commandment of love, which we have from Jesus and which lies at the core of our identity and mission as Friends.

Why a testimony of love? See the next post.

This is the first post in a series on what I’m calling a Testimony of Love, an alternative approach to how we write our minutes of conscience and communicate our testimonies.

You can download the full series as a single pdf file here.

The secularism in our witness life

The impulse to make the world a better place is one of the distinctive manifestations of Quaker spirituality. We experience the testimonial life as an essential aspect of the Quaker way, that we should live our lives as outward expression of the truths about right living that have been revealed to us inwardly. And over the centuries, we have confirmed some of these truths so consistently that we now hold them as settled testimonies.

Notwithstanding this foundation in our religious experience, however, we often fail to express this witness impulse in ways that embody its source. We often sound in our minutes of conscience like secular social change nonprofits. Very often we rely on facts and statistics and on reasonable arguments to make our case for peace, justice, earthcare, and so on. One often could read these minutes and never know that they were written by a religious community, let alone by Quakers. Instead, we borrow language from the social and natural sciences and from legal and human rights advocates.

Meanwhile, the Religious Society of Friends is a religious movement. You would think that spiritual, religious, and moral arguments and language would be our forte. Yet we seldom use spiritual, let alone religious, language to explain our motives. We sometimes do refer to our testimonies, but usually not to the promptings of the Holy Spirit that are the foundation of our testimonies and of the testimonial life. We almost never quote Scripture, even though the Bible is the foundation for virtually every one of our testimonies. We do not stand on the language of Fox or Fell or Woolman or Barclay to present a theological argument. And when we do use a moral argument to explain why something is wrong or why the course we recommend is right, we often use secular humanistic language rather than language that is explicitly religious or spiritual.

There is one exception. We tend to rely on one idea that is not actually true: that we work for peace, equality, or whatever, because we believe that there is that of God in everyone. This belief is shared by only a small minority in the wider Quaker movement; saying “we believe” in that of God, when we mean by this a kind of divine spark, is therefore a liberal Quaker conceit. It misrepresents the thinking of George Fox, from which we’ve cadged the phrase. Furthermore, I would argue that, even if we were to assert that this phrase expresses a truth behind our testimonies, it’s not the belief in that of God in another that guides our action, but the experience of God’s within ourselves. But this is a subject for a different essay.

Most of the time, I suspect that we don’t use explicitly religious language in our witness minutes and communications because the writers of the statements have failed to think this way. Sometimes, though, I suppose that they may fear that someone will be likely to object that such language doesn’t speak for them when the matter is brought before the meeting and thus the writers want to avoid a potentially long and divisive discussion on the floor about it.

However, I feel that talking like a secular social change nonprofit is wrong for us for several reasons. The next post lays out those reasons.

Read the next post in the series here.