The Earth Shall Quake

Posted on October 10, 2002 in Myths & Mysticism

It’s an old calumny that VASpider rails against, namely the idea that Quakers hold to backward ways. I had a coworker once who insisted that Quakers rode around in wagons like the Amish: I, the company’s network specialist, stood as living evidence that she was wrong. That night I drove away in my Tercel, fuming because she persisted in believing that she was right despite all the glaring evidence to the contrary.

A net pundit by the name of Chris Rettstett (who apparently runs a childrens education site) was quoted thusly in the New York Times:

“There’s something about working with technology that makes people want to become Quakers,” Mr. Rettstatt said.

I wrote in VASpider’s comments:

I’m married to a Quaker software engineer. When I passed out blog cards at a little Quaker event the other day, several people took them and promised to look me up. FCNL was one of the first Washington lobbies to put its information online. Palo Alto Friends Meeting sponsored my 1992 electonic witness in the Balkans. Dot dot dot…

To put it in my agnostic plain speech: Rettstett doesn’t know what he’s fucking talking about.

Hidden within this remark, I think I see something that VAspider might have overlooked: that the name “Quaker” denotes a timid, cowardly people who run from the 21st century. Moreover, I perceive a subtle attack motivated by the spirit of these jingoistic times against anyone who might question the wisdom of a war — any war.

It’s best, I think, to recall where the term was coined. George Fox, the most prominent of the early Quaker leaders, found himself before a cynical magistrate. When describing the experience of suddenly coming into contact with the unfiltered Spirit of God, Fox said “the earth shall quake”. The judge sneered “So you’re Quakers now?”

And so did members of the Society of Friends earn its other, better known name. Early Quakers often ended up in prisons for things like refusing to remove their hats before authorities or refusing to take oaths. They were no shirkers: they acted knowing the wrongful and cruel punishment awaiting them. Some, who went to Puritan New England, were hanged. But these men and women did not shy from controversy or new technology: they embraced it, wisely.

Quakers have, in all wars, sought actively to enter the battlefield — unarmed but in every bit of danger faced by soldiers in the trenches. They were and they remain fearless in the face of oppression: indeed the only thing that Quakers quake about is God the Almighty.

Within the Society, there’s another meaning. Quakers are the people who by their witness test the moral foundations of our government. They literally, by lobbying and demonstrating, shake up the trite banal assumptions about poverty, war, mental illness, and crime held by Right Wing idealists. They put themselves out where they are seen and where they may be harmed.

I call that courage.