The Blessed Community
Have you heard the Quaker joke about Henry? Henry was a young man, sitting in meeting for worship one First Day, when he felt a stirring to get up and say something. He fought the stirring back. A while later, someone across the room stood and said almost the exact same thing. At the end of the hour meeting broke and people shook hands. Then a nearby elder said to Henry, “The next time, Henry, say it thyself.”
It gradually dawns on new people that Friends live within a loose sense of community. We wash dishes or dry dishes after a potluck not because we signed up, but because the work needs to be done and we’re available. People with gifts in calligraphy, bookkeeping or carpentry often wind up with specific sets of tasks in the meeting.
Next, it dawns on people that, in our world of meditation and prayer, we live in a blessed community in our meetings and on earth. Some (or possibly all) people have a guide or a divine presence that tells them what they should do, and sometimes they reply NO!, or at other times they act a bit tired or grumpy but they say Yes Lord, and then there’s every possible response in between. The Holy Spirit usually wins out. Individuals are called to take principled stands against war and against social injustice, and when they do, they’re doing the work of the blessed community as surely as the people washing dishes. Mohandas Gandhi would go to jail for his beliefs, but in one intentional community people were a bit shocked when Gandhi cleaned the toilets. We’re grateful that Pete Seeger left Harvard and rode the rails with Woody Guthrie. Pete had his money-making musical career pretty well smashed when he was blacklisted in the 1950s, but he went on, living at a subsistence level on a plot of land with his family. In the end, Pete commanded a vast respect that his accusers never achieved. We can say the same about Henry David Thoreau. Jesus of Nazareth lived with the poor, healed people and preached nonviolent resistance against Israel’s military occupiers.
I argue that in just about all such cases, in the people who have gone elsewhere for community development work, in the people who have chosen to go to jail and in the people who have been martyred for their faith, they were simply doing some of the blessed community’s work. They were in a proper position and in a proper frame of mind to do that particular task.
Early Friends saw abject poverty inside their meetings. Thousands of Quaker farmers had been disowned of their land by the British government. In the short term Friends were led to feed the hungry among them. In the longer term they were often led to found businesses, to apprentice each other, and finally to financially set up meeting members one by one in business.
Friends thereupon learned some hard lessons about communities and business. Individual Friends would occasionally go bankrupt for diverse reasons. Some would escape their debts by moving to London.
Friends also had noble community aspirations that only sometimes worked. At least one early American commune collapsed because nobody was motivated to do the work. The town of Philadelphia was an architectural marvel, but the colony of Pennsylvania couldn’t pay off its creditors. William Penn lived a year in debtors prison in England in order to save Pennsylvania, which didn’t turn a net profit, before Friends settled with Pennsylvania’s creditors.
Far worse from a Quaker perspective, the children and grandchildren of wealthy Friends often decided to enjoy their inherited wealth and ignore the Quaker call to a Blessed community. Wealthy society would accept these descendents to the extent that they participated in the small community of wealthy society. This same social pressure encouraged a quietist philosophy. Meetings now had some financial stature in society worth protecting, worth keeping the riffraff out of meetings. Meetings disowned people for owning pianos, for having moustaches and for marrying out of meeting. Friends occasionally disowned abolitionists, and the Hicksite and Guerneyite branches of Quakerism disowned each other. By the year 1900 the Quaker influence in America had vastly diminished.
I see Friends’ ancient dangers when I look at modern business. I also see a wealthy world with a shocking number of starving people, people without jobs, and I see almost nobody doing a job that they really like.
We desire an open community that reaches out and heals people that don’t yet know they’re a part of this community. At meeting I see great numbers of doctors, nurses, teachers, librarians, social workers, psychotherapists and alternative healers, all varieties of healers doing the good work. I also see people going into fields, into places in our wider community, where there are no Quakers.
I see our Quaker community’s attitude toward business as partly, we want our community to survive, and so we do business when we must. Friends are willing to manage schools, retirement communities and political advocacy organizations. None of these businesses are privately held.
And so I see Friends as being constrained to obey any law that God has not called them to disobey. In the same way, I see Friends as being constrained to fit into the social mold, into the larger society where we do business, in any way that God has not called us to avoid.
However, we see the hazards both to society and to our smaller Blessed communities of leaving business to unscrupulous individuals. We see massive structural unemployment and know that it’s wrong. We see members and attenders of our meeting without jobs, or taking on any available job. We see a veering off of society’s goals from “better living” to “more money”, and so certain parts of society defraud the other parts. We see elections being bought by grafters so that national, state and local governments may be looted. We see the world’s society separating into an incredibly rich inherited class, a middle class in certain privileged countries and a starving, war-ravaged class in the poor countries.
And so, we may want to do a limited amount of business within our wider community, recognizing the spiritual risks of this work.
We want everyone, and people in our meetings also, to at least have an honest chance at a career. We’re moved by love of people that we know, and by regret when people are hurt, to create these jobs.
Business is seen as an enormous risk. It’s capable of bankrupting people. We shouldn’t lay the combination of incredible financial burdens plus high risk on our young individuals starting out. What was so wrong with the traditional system of apprenticeships in going business concerns?
A company should be of mutual benefit to all concerned stakeholders. We are not to feed carcinogens to our customers, nor should we disable our workers and then discard them.
A company should benefit humanity’s future.
If having an exclusive goal of investor profit causes us grief, we should find ways around this problem. Perhaps we want to set up social entrepreneurships where, in traditionally for-profit fields, a community bank holds stock in individual businesses. Slices of power on the board of directors should be given to consumers, to workers, to neighbors, to representatives of the environment.
We respect consensus process as a method of discerning wisdom.
We recognize that at certain times a committee of Friends has made a bad business decision. Most early Friends enterprises were single proprietorships or partnerships, our modern love of the Delaware Indians’ consensus process notwithstanding. We should be committed to running forensic audits of what went wrong in those instances, toward the end of improving Friends’ business process.
We recognize that at times minor business decisions are best made quickly and by one or two people. Also, some decisions require a degree of specialized knowledge that only a few of us may possess.
We recognize that at times new, strange ideas need to gain traction or buzz. We don’t shut out new ideas simply because we don’t have immediate consensus.
I’ve been working on solar inventions. I believe that the world faces a climate crisis, and that lowering the cost of common renewable energy applications is a direct route to permanently solving this crisis. I believe that our community would want me to try to invent.
If it should prove that my improvements lower the cost of stored solar heat and solar concentration, with applications in generating electricity at night, in growing crops in winter and in growing algae for biodiesel production, then I believe that we want a number of people to be released from other community duties to implement such inventions at a reasonable speed.
What I believe that I’m explicitly called to do is help other people, in their feelings of weakness and aloneness, into a position where we can work together to inhibit and eventually to end climate change.
I believe that we’ll want a number of people to examine the actual inventions.
Now, I need to ask, how do you really feel about climate change? Would you be available for a task? Can you nominate a friend?