Thirteen years ago I wrote a post on "Quaker culture." I had just read a novel whose Jewish and Catholic characters were described with lavish details from their Jewish and Catholic religious cultures—rituals, architecture, thought patterns, built up, elaborated, and passed on from generation to generation over many centuries. I wondered if our Quaker religious cultures aren't a bit thin by comparison.
I've recently read two more novels with dense religious settings and the same thought occurred to me. Given the temptation toward Quaker exceptionalism among some of us, maybe a bit of modesty would do us some good!
Of course it's not that simple. A beautiful and rich culture can honor God, and can do so through so many emotional and sensory channels that go far beyond the doctrines and propositions that were hallmarks of that highly contentious period of English history when we got our start. (Come to think of it, doctrines and propositions, and our conflicting feelings about them, continue to exercise us Friends to this day!) But those rich, dense, beautiful cultures can, at their worst, also exclude, entrap, and alienate.
Those two newer novels illustrate this beauty and this hazard in very different ways. I highly recommend both of them. The one I read first was Niall Williams's Time of the Child, set in a rain-soaked village in the west of Ireland in the year 1962, the year that, among other things, the first television arrives in the town. At the center of the story is an agnostic general practitioner who attends Mass faithfully, and whose relationship with the parish priests is fascinating. Also in the center of the story is his eldest daughter, who serves as his receptionist; his other two daughters have moved away. Almost every important action in the story is somehow linked, whether by intention or habit, to the region's Catholic culture and faith. I loved this story so much that I hope you'll read it without further commentary from me, so I can avoid revealing its compelling and gradually unfolding plot. Williams, in all the novels of his that I've read, somehow manages to convey love with extraordinary depth but without sentimentality.
If you still need a bit more detail to be persuaded, here's a review.
The other novel is Kate Riley's Ruth. I think it is a small miracle that this book even came to be published. It is by turns deadpan and laconic, reverent, snarky, sad, and wicked funny. Ruth's story is a near-lifetime compressed into a chain of telling incidents from a life lived in an Anabaptist commune, with similarities to Hutterite and Bruderhof communities. Ruth understands the rules, until she doesn't. Her son doesn't. She loves her husband, and despises his annoying habits. In the community she's loyal and skeptical, a total insider who is somehow not trapped.
For a time, the community seems oddly totalitarian, but the leaders confess their inadequacies. Misdeeds can lead to temporary shunning, usually on a voluntary basis! Travel to the outside world is permitted when necessary—for example, to meet and pray "with a Quaker colloquium at the Wyndham Sault Ste. Marie." "In the van Ruth had erred in wondering aloud whether Quakers might love peace more than they loved Christ, which she'd read somewhere and liked the sound of. No one responded."
(Talking about people behind their backs is not permitted in the community, but, just between you and me, it's worth listening to Ruth!)
Here are two reviews: Englewood Review of Books and Anabaptist World.
If you've read either of these books, or this post reminds you of other books you'd recommend, I'd love to know!
If I were to live in a high-context religious community, I think I would want these two needlepoint mottoes on my wall:
"Christ is the 'yes' to all of God's promises." — St. Paul.
"All knowledge is local, all truth is partial." — Ursula K. Le Guin.
Related: Ohio Byways; Core sample of a Quaker culture; Games, sports, comedies....
Rachel Muers does an amazing job of describing Friends faith, practice, worship, and diversities in a compact, even-handed, and well-organized article for the St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology, with lots of useful links. Thanks to Jim Fussell for the reference.
Kristin Du Mez, Live Laugh Love, and the librarians.
Ashley Wilcox on "Alaska in my bones," and the example Anchorage provides us.
Adrienne LaFrance wishes happy 100th birthday to Mel Brooks, "the funniest man who ever lived."
Kelly Zirbes and her band Kelly's Lot perform "Ship." Kelly's tour dates include Klamath Falls (July 25), Burns OR (August 5), Spokane (August 10), and Portland OR (August 12, with Carolyn Wonderland).
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