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FGC's Sweat Lodge: An Effort at Discernment

Posted on Thursday, February 1, 2007 at 11:00AM by Registered CommenterMarshall Massey in , , | Comments41 Comments

So FGC’s sweat lodge controversy, which has been simmering on a back burner for the past couple of years, is back steaming in the front place again.

Pick up the latest issue of Friends Journal — the February 2007 issue — and you’ll find that there, barely inside the front cover, is a full-right-hand-page letter from Bruce Birchard, General Secretary of Friends General Conference (FGC), quarreling with Chuck Fager over the issue. (Fager’s own letter about the matter was printed in the Journal last November.)

Birchard writes sternly: “Those who dismiss or belittle the voices of the many Friends who express concerns” about the sweat lodge — this being a finger pointed at Fager, the most visible of the dismissers and belittlers — “do not serve the cause of Truth in this matter.

Lordy — them is Quaker fightin’ words.

Now, some of you, dear readers, may be new to this issue, so let me talk a bit about what’s involved.

The Quaker Sweat Lodge, QSL for short, was an annual event at most FGC Summer Gatherings from 1989 through 2003. It was for the most part a re-creation of Native American sweat lodge ceremonies, from the mode of construction to the chanting of prayers in Native American tongues, although it laid claim to the status of an independent, “universalist” ceremony.

During the fifteen years that it was part of the FGC Gathering program, the Quaker Sweat Lodges became their own little semi-independent sub-gathering, largely comprised of younger folks who fell in love with the event.

A Quaker Sweat Lodge had been planned for the 2004 Summer Gathering as well — but in the spring of that year, Alice Lopez, a non-Quaker employee of the Mashpee Wampanoag (a Native American community in eastern Massachusetts), sent an impassioned letter of protest to various parties within FGC. This letter said, in part:

The sweat lodge is not an experience, it is a sacred ceremony practiced by many Native American tribes. You need to know that for Quakers to offer this is totally unacceptable and offensive to most Native peoples. …We ask that you insist that this workshop be permanently discontinued. It brings disrespect or outright sacrilege to native people’s ceremonies and is a flagrant example of racism as it is predicated on an assumption that an almost exclusively white non-Native group has the right to usurp any spiritual practice it finds meaningful. … Just because it seems to be acceptable to practitioners of Eastern religions for Friends to include yoga, or Buddhist chants, etc. doesn’t mean the use of the sweat lodge is acceptable to Native People.

In response to the letter, the planning committee for that year’s FGC Gathering immediately canceled the sweat.

The cancellation was driven by the best of motives: the planning committee didn’t want to do something deeply offensive to another religion, and it recognized that it would take longer than one spring or even one year to discern a good way to go forward with another Quaker Sweat Lodge event. Nonetheless it shocked and upset those who loved the ceremony — even as it confirmed the gut-level reservations of those who’d never felt comfortable seeing it happen at a Quaker event.

In the years since then, QSL loyalists have debated opponents of the practice at length, without coming to any agreement as to whether the practice should be resumed or permanently discontinued.

 


 

The problem that FGC is saddled with here is that the debate is between two groups whose respective hopes for Quakerism are half-way irreconcilable.

Each of these groups has the sneaking suspicion that, if it loses the struggle over the Quaker Sweat Lodge, this will be the first step toward losing more and more — until, ultimately, it will lose its chance for its kind of Quakerism altogether:

  • On the one hand, we have those who believe that every religion has an integrity that must be respected — so that when a practice like the Native American sweat lodge ceremony is removed from the religious context where it arose, and grafted into some very different religious setting like that of Quakerism, both the practice, and the religion it is grafted into, are seriously compromised.

  • And on the other, we have those who value liberal Quakerism precisely because of the freedom they feel it gives them to develop their own personal spirituality.

Many members of each of these groups really do not understand the point of view of the other side; some don’t much care to even try to understand. Some of the folks on either side become agitated when the reasons why they take the side they do are challenged.

turn of the century Sioux sweat lodge site
A turn-of-the-century Sioux sweat lodge site. A fire hole is in the foreground; the frame for a lodge is further back. How much, if anything, is going on here that we lack sensitivity to see?

 

And no matter how FGC chooses to settle the debate — by cancelling the Quaker Sweat Lodge permanently, by giving it a blank check to continue as it pleases, or by something in between — the mere fact that these two groups are butting heads over this issue, is likely to widen the gap between them further.

Now, I presume my readers are worthy souls who don’t wish to commit that same error, and are willing to invest the effort needed to learn to see the points of view of both sides. Let’s pause for a bit, then, to let the two sides explain themselves.

Here, on the one side, is Lisa Graustein, of New England Yearly Meeting’s Working Party on Racism, a member of the group opposing the Quaker Sweat Lodge. She has written,

“…I would never dream of presiding over a Bat Mitzpah or Yom Kippur service with our Young Friends. To do so, would be deeply disrespectful of Judaism and would leave the Young Friends with an ungrounded, shallow, and faulty notion of Judaism, irrespective of how we experienced those services. …

“Is our own Religious Society so spiritually bankrupt that we must go outside our own traditions to provide spiritual nurture for our young people? I am terrified that the one of the most powerful spiritual, transformative, and Quaker-confirming experiences our young people name does not come from Quakerism. We have such a rich, vibrant, and spirit-filled history and faith; why are we not sharing it — with joy, passion, challenge, reverence — with our children?”.

— Lisa Graustein & Don Campbell, “Two Views of the       
Quaker Sweat Lodge Workshop at Friends General       
Conference (FGC) Gathering”, Prejudice And Poverty
14 (Summer 2005)
, p. 10.                                     

Opponents of the QSL have two basic concerns, both of which are visible in the quotation from Graustein’s essay above.

One is about the Quaker treatment of sacred rites belonging to other traditions — a concern summarized in the catchphrase “cultural appropriation”. As Bruce Birchard says in Friends Journal, “the members of the Mashpee Wampanoag … stated unequivocally that to allow a non-Native person to perform an adaptation of a sacred Native American religious ritual was spiritually risky, deeply disrespectful, an example of racist insensitivity and white privilege.”

The other concern involves what a sweat event does to the character of Quakerism itself. After all, Quakerism began as “Primitive Christianity Revived” (the title of one of William Penn’s best-known essays). Is a sweat ritual primitive Christianity revived? Martin Kelley, another critic of the QSL, complains about “younger Friends … spend[ing] a week at a Quaker event playing Indian when they could be diving deeper into their own faith tradition.”

But now here on the other side is Chuck Fager’s view, presented on his Quaker Sweat Lodge website.

Fager is a defender of the QSL because, for him, the key issue is not the nature of what young Friends are being drawn into at FGC Gatherings, nor the faithfulness of FGC Friends to their Christian-Quaker traditions. For him, the issue is the faithfulness of FGC Friends to the principles of the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution. The defendants (the producers of the Quaker Sweat Lodge) have been deprived of a “fair trial”, of their Sixth Amendment right “to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation”, and of the presumption that they are “innocent until proven guilty”.

Fager writes, “The committee ‘procedure’ [by which the sweat lodge was cancelled] offends every meaning of ‘due process’ and good order that I know of. … If I was hired by some enemy of FGC to undermine the Gathering’s future, I could not have hatched a better scheme than this for making it happen. Karl Rove would be proud.”

Fager is not involved in this controversy as an advocate of the sweat ceremony per se. So he’s not exactly typical of the pro-QSL camp. Most of those who want Quaker Sweat Lodges to continue are more likely to say that they value QSL as a spiritual experience unavailable anywhere else. Thus (from Fager’s collection of “testimonies”), one supporter writes: “The Quaker Sweat Lodge was the most powerful spiritual experience my son has ever had. It needs to be available to other Friends.” And another confesses: “I never knew what silence could be without steam.

What the typical Quaker Sweat Lodge fan, and the untypical Chuck Fager, do feel in common is that FGC’s ban on the Quaker Sweat Lodges is a blow to their freedom to practice religion as they themselves see fit. By banning the Quaker Sweat Lodges, FGC has ceased to be “inclusive” and is on the way to becoming “creedal”.

 


 

We have now heard the primary arguments on both sides. But before we try to decide what the right way forward is, there’s still one more question we owe it to ourselves to ask: How well do these arguments stand up to scrutiny?

And unfortunately, the answer is that they don’t stand up well. Not on either side.

Let’s start with the arguments of the anti-Quaker Sweat Lodge critics. Probably the most basic is Alice Lopez’s assertion that “the sweat lodge is not an experience, it is a sacred ceremony practiced by many Native American tribes.” What this fails to square with is what the Oneida Indian Nation is now doing less than a day’s drive west of Mashpee, at “Ska:ná: The Spa at Turning Stone”, “New York State’s Largest Resort, Gaming, and Golf Complex”.

According to publicity copy, this 26-square-mile Indian-owned resort “features a vast entertainment arena, [a] casino hotel with bingo games, slots, and specialty restaurants, and [a] domed Golf Training Center.”

Ska:na spa
Ska:ná Spa: a promotional photo from its web site. We may ponder the national origin of the ritual depicted here.

The publicity copy describes the spa as a facility “blending elements of Native American healing traditions with upscale skin care and bodywork”. “Retail space,” it assures us, “figures prominently in the reception area, along with the salon for hair and nail services. This allows shoppers to visit before and after services.” (Services?) High-profile branding is everywhere: Kerstin Florian®, Naturopathica®, Kérastase®, Plantogen®, Molton Brown®, Penhaligon’s®.

At the spa, “the ultimate combination” offered is something involving a hot towel massage using oils from various native plants. “Treatments for two, dubbed ‘Dance of the Song Birds’ … can be enhanced in a private suite where the signature ritual (110 minutes) goes for $560.” Gratuities are expected in addition.

But if you don’t really need the ultimate, you can choose an interesting lesser option: to quote the publicity copy, “an authentic sweat lodge offer[ing] three-hour cleansing rituals for road warriors.” These rituals are held in a “sweat lodge made of red willow branches and draped with buffalo hides amid the resort’s golf greens, offering a cleansing, spiritual experience led by tribe members with drumming and chanting.”

And to restore your attitude after the sweat lodge ritual is finished, you can take in one of the entertainers at the resort — Josh Groban, Engelbert Humperdinck, Wierd Al Yankovic, or maybe the Chippendales, all of whom are (as I write this) slated for appearances real soon now.

I don’t think it’s too much to argue that this sort of sweat lodge, offered by an actual, official native American nation, is packaged and offered as a consumer experience, not a sacred ceremony. The very word “experience” is used as the central term describing it in the publicity copy quoted above. Moreover, as a commercial offering at a casino resort, this seems to me to prostitute the sacred aspects of traditional sweat ceremonies far worse than anything the FGC Quakers could possibly be doing.

So for the Mashpee Wampanoag to light into FGC Quakers as doing something supposedly disrespectful to the sacred character of the sweat lodge among native Americans, while a whole nation of native Americans are offering sweats to Anglos in as blatantly commercial, sensation-oriented, and meretricious a manner as we see at Ska:ná, seems to me a tad inconsistent. Is the FGC event really less sincere and respectful than the event on the Ska:ná golf course?

And this is not the only significant weakness in the anti-Quaker-Sweat-Lodge group’s position.

Graustein, as we’ve seen above, also complains that “we have such a rich, vibrant, and spirit-filled history and faith” and yet we are “not sharing it — with joy, passion, challenge, reverence — with our children”. Is this true? I have attended part or all of four FGC Gatherings, which I think is a fair sampling, plus sessions of four different yearly meetings affiliated with FGC, and many, many Sunday meetings for worship in various FGC Quaker communities. It seems to me that, in those settings, I saw plenty of ways in which FGC Friends were indeed sharing their history and faith.

If young Friends are turning to a bastardized form of native American spirituality in their Quaker Sweat Lodges, it is not because they are being deprived of exposure to FGC Quakerism, but precisely because they have been exposed, have weighed what they have been shown, and have for one reason or another found it wanting. There might be something they have to say to the rest of us about this, and if so, it might be good for the rest of us to stop attacking the Quaker Sweat Lodge and give them a listen.

 


 

So those are significant weaknesses in the anti-Quaker-Sweat-Lodge arguments. Now, what about the pro-QSL arguments?

The saddest thing about the testimonies that Fager has collected and posted on his web site is the profound lack of any comprehension of Quakerism that they display.

I never knew what silence could be without steam.” Good Lord. This rests on a mistaken idea that Quaker worship is somehow about silence. For one’s experience of silence will indeed be affected and transfigured by the intensity of a sweat; a sweat is a psychedelic, like LSD, capable of opening one’s senses up to perceptions that normal human minds tune out. In William Blake’s famous words, a sweat is all about cleansing the doors of perception.

sweat lodge fire
A sweat lodge fire at a modern Crow Indian event. The ritual encourages a deep communion with the natural elements involved, which is a good thing. But it does not necessarily draw one into equally deep communion with the Voice in the moral faculty, or with the subtle urgings of Christ in the heart.

But waiting worship, which is the original (and the only unique) form of Quaker worship, is not about having the doors of one’s perception opened — it’s about paying attention to something that every normal human mind is already connected with. Because this is so, it doesn’t depend on silence: the silence of a traditional Quaker meeting is a by-product of waiting worship, not a precondition for it.

Waiting worship isn’t about getting perceptually cleansed, so sweats and other psychedelics won’t help it along. It’s about listening to the voice in the heart and the conscience, and that voice will sound just as loud, and speak just as clearly, whether one is sitting in silence on Firbank Fell, hunkered down under fire in Basra, or standing on the corner at Twelfth Street and Vine.

Fager’s testimonies are thus an unintentional confession that — while the testifiers have undoubtedly been exposed to FGC’s history and faith — they have never learned what Friends do when they worship.

This same fact also comes out in Anglo (non-native American) talk of the sweat lodge as a “liminal” rite. George Price, founder of the Quaker Sweat Lodge, is only one of many people who have described sweat ceremonies in “liminal” terms. The idea is that a sweat participant enters the lodge as if he or she were reëntering the womb, and in the lodge, crosses a threshhold (“limen”) by which he dies to his old life and then starts over, “born again”.

Liminality is a nice metaphor; in fact, the first Christians used the same metaphor to express the meaning of water baptism. And many Friends have had powerful experiences of being reborn in God’s Spirit. (I have myself.) But Quakerism isn’t about inducing such experiences by ritual means; it’s simply about living together in faithfulness to the Guide in our hearts and consciences.

By highlighting the fact that the Quaker Sweat Lodge experience is something quite different from Quaker worship, and that the “liminal” transformation is something quite different from Quaker practice, Fager’s testimonies and George Price’s talk of “liminality” both point to the fact that the QSL truly is a different sort of religion from Quakerism. And as such, there is no real reason why the FGC Gatherings need a Quaker Sweat Lodge component, any more than they need a water baptism component, an LSD component, or for that matter a Santería component.

Fager’s own arguments, on the other hand, rest not on discoveries made experientially in a sweat, but on appeals to the U.S. Constitution. He invokes — as I’ve noted above — the right to a “fair trial”, the Sixth Amendment right “to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation”, and the presumption that a person is “innocent until proven guilty”. And this betrays as basic a misunderstanding as the business about silence and steam does.

For Quakerism is not, properly or historically, a legalistic religion, like the religion of the Pharisees or the religion of the fundamentalists. Nor is it a cult of individual rights, like the ACLU. The principles of the U.S. Constitution are in many ways admirable, but what happened to the Quaker Sweat Lodge in 2004 did not involve some sort of defiance of basic Quaker legal principles, for the simple fact that it was not a trial and conviction of Friends George Price, Breeze Richardson (née Luetke-Stahlman), and Cullen Carns-Hilliker; it was the precautionary cancellation of an event.

Let’s face it: such cancellations happen all the time. Nightclubs cancel appearances by bands if they have reason to believe the band’s audience might turn violent; doing this is not the same as convicting the band itself of some crime. Hockey players and university professors accused of some misdeed will be suspended while the matter is being investigated; there is no presumption of guilt involved, just an attitude that business as usual would not be appropriate while such a major concern remains unsettled.

The cancellation of the 2004 Quaker Sweat Lodge was a case of the same sort. Histrionics about how Price, Richardson and Carns-Hilliker were “found guilty” by the FGC planning committee are simply inappropriate.

Fager is in any case perhaps not the best choice of apologist for the pro-Quaker Sweat Lodge position. One page of his web site features photos of Quaker Sweat Lodge participants, over captions that ask, “Take a close look: is this a display of ‘flagrant racism’?” One looks at these photos, and sees that, of the dozens of people pictured, every single one is non-native American (“Anglo”). It’s like waving around a photo of the all-white membership of a country club in Philadelphia while demanding to know, “Is this a display of flagrant racism?”

Quaker Sweat Lodge participants
One of Chuck Fager’s photos of participants at a Quaker Sweat Lodge.

But it would seem, in any case, that neither side in this controversy really has much of a complaint. The native Americans have not been done any greater disservice by FGC Friends than they are doing to themselves with Ska:ná Spa. Critics of the Quaker Sweat Lodge are not being denied the opportunity to make a sales pitch for Quakerism to the kids involved. The QSL participants are not being denied a chance to practice a superior form of Quakerism at a Quaker gathering. And the QSL organizers are not being unjustly tried or unjustly convicted, they are merely having to wait while Friends sort things out.

The real problem is not that any injustice is being done to anybody. The real problem is that the two sides want to fight, and each wants to win.

 


 

Readers of this journal will already have gathered that my own view of Quakerism is different from both Graustein’s and Fager’s.

I don’t regard Quakerism as a theater for interreligious experimentation protected by the Bill of Rights. But neither do I regard the FGC Gatherings as a place from which everything non-Quaker should be excluded. To me, both sides of that debate miss the point. I am mindful that our Religious Society began as a tribal community established to set a new example of faithfulness to the teachings and example of Christ. Such faithfulness demands adaptability, but not interreligious experimentation. It demands anchoredness and focus but not exclusion.

And the key word here, I think, is “faithfulness” rather than “faith”. “Faith”, or “belief”, connotes something mental: it becomes a narrowness and rigidity of mind, and engenders institutions that are equally narrow and rigid. “Faithfulness” on the other hand is not mental but relational: it’s a matter of following Christ in whatever journey he may choose to lead us, and the journeys he leads us on have a tendency to surprise us, challenge our preconceptions, and loosen up our minds and hearts.

Thus ours has not been a rigid, changeless, religion, even though Quaker elders tried for a while to make it so. And I don’t think it can be made to become rigid and changeless now. But Quakerism does have a groundedness in Christ’s teachings and example, as expressed in Penn’s essay title “Primitive Christianity Revived”, and that groundedness is built right into the logic of every one of its practices — waiting worship, corporate discernment, prophetic witness, the testimonies of pacifism, integrity and community, and so on.

That groundedness is what determines the meaning and character of those practices, and gives them their general sense. For instance, it is loyalty, not just to pacifism, but specifically to the pacifism of Christ — the pacifism of a God whose kingdom was not of this world — that explains why Friends have historically refused to fight even when every practical worldly consideration would have found better sense in fighting. And it is worship, not just as a place where each person can come and practice something different, but as an active group attentiveness to the urgings of the living Christ in our hearts and consciences, that makes unified corporate discernments possible.

Without that groundedness, our practices decay into dysfunctional parodies of themselves. Waiting worship decays into “silent worship”, and corporate discernment into a “consensus” practice that conceals the differences between opposing parties. Prophetic witness decays into protests, and the testimonies into social and political maneuvers. To deny the importance of that groundedness is not just to lose sight of what Quakerism is about, it’s to lose possession of functional Quakerism altogether.

As a tribal faith, Quakerism is something that evolved out of prophetic Judaism, by way of Christ and the Church, in a process encompassing millennia of spiritual exploration and slow, painful recovery from errors. Quakerism’s collective awareness of the damage done by such errors — from the Inquisition on the one hand and the Münster Anabaptist commune on the other, down through Ranterism on the one hand and the Restorationist right-wing backlash on the other, to the modern extremes of the Christian Right on one the hand and Haight-Ashbury and Rajneeshpuram on the other, EFI on the one hand and FGC on the other — is one of the things that has done the most to shape it.

And thus, while modern liberal Friends’ willingness to try new things may be the first thing to catch many newcomers’ eyes, I see Quakerism’s essential shape as determined by a great deal of hard-to-come-by accumulated wisdom. Its central moving parts — worship, discernment, clerking, eldership, corporate witness, caring service, plain speech, radical simplicity, mutual accountability, intimacy and immediacy, and so forth — fit together like the parts of a well-designed engine, with a precision and an economy of design that need to be respected for the whole thing to work properly.

When the design and its precision are kept intact, the engine generates a spiritual power that I personally find astounding. I think, for example, of how it defused Puritan and Restoration intolerance of religious dissent, how it guided Friends in their ultimately successful handling of the slavery question, how it fed tens of thousands of war victims in the aftermath of World War I, how it enabled Friends to establish conscientious objection as an acceptable stance in wartime, and how it made Friends an important shaping influence on the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and early 1960s.

These were not minor accomplishments, friends; and I honestly doubt that our Society could have accomplished any of them if its internal workings had been any less coherent.

When the design and its precision are forgotten, events like the FGC Gatherings decay into twelve-ring circuses. And my impression of the FGC Gatherings is that their organizers are to some extent caught up in a constant struggle against that tendency. Their strategy over the years has been to pick an overriding theme for each Gathering — such as “…but who is my neighbor?”, the theme for this current year’s event — which will pull together at least some portion of the activities there, and so reduce the sense of its being a circus.

But of course, this does not eliminate the circus-like character of the event, which remains quite pronounced. And it doesn’t even begin to restore the FGC Gatherings to the way that they would feel were they composed of participants who’d all come together for a single common purpose. The unifying power of a theme is just no substitute for the unifying power of a common spiritual focus.

Grafting something like the Quaker Sweat Lodge onto the framework of a living Quakerism does not destroy Quakerism. But it may not be the wisest thing to do, because it clearly does not help QSL participants to understand or appreciate what Quakerism is actually all about. And without such an understanding and such an appreciation, the FGC Summer Gatherings remain a twelve-ring circus, rather than a true Quaker event.

 


 

So — is there a solution to the controversy? I think there is, although what I see as the solution is unlikely to be popular with very many people. (Remember, the two sides want to fight; they will not appreciate anything that gets in the way of this desire.)

First, the two sides need to stop quarreling. No further accusations, no impassioned web sites or impassioned downloadable essays, nothing like that. The way of peace is the way of not-fighting, and the only way to get there is by not-fighting.

Second, there must be mutual listening on a much deeper level. Participants in, and defenders of, the Quaker Sweat Lodge need to learn what waiting worship is, and learn how to practice it, well enough to see that the Quaker Sweat Lodge is no substitute, while opponents of the Quaker Sweat Lodge need to learn its rewards well enough to understand why the participants love it so. For only by getting to that point can the two sides lose their taste for quarreling.

Third, both sides need to get a psychological divorce from the native American cause. Both sides currently seem to think they are defending native American spirituality by what they are doing — the advocates of the Quaker Sweat Lodge, by encouraging sweat lodge ceremonies; the opponents, by opposing “cultural appropriation”.

But the advocates need to understand that if sweat lodge ceremonies really built up native American spirituality, the sweat lodge leaders among the Oneida wouldn’t be endorsing resort/casino endeavors like Turning Stone. And the opponents need to understand that if the culture of native Americans can survive Ska:ná, it can most certainly survive the respectful explorations of Friends, and that the brittle Mashpee Wampanoag hostility to Anglo sweats has nothing to do with the greatness of spirit that so many of the native American leaders displayed down through history — and that we ourselves so very dearly hope to learn.

(The New Testament dishes out a bit of advice about the importance of “testing the spirits” that seems very relevant to me here. Not that the spirit of native American religion is necessarily a bad one. But I think one has to wonder about the spirit behind Turning Stone, and about the one behind the Mashpee Wampanoag attitude.)

Turning Stone Resort & Casino
The main entrance to Turning Stone Resort and Casino, where the Oneida Nation offers sweat ceremonies to “road warriors” for a steep fee. Only a very small part of the overall facility can be seen in this shot.

Fourth, there’s an unsettled question as to whether the Quaker Sweat Lodge can actually be integrated into real Quaker religion or not. We’ve already seen that it aims at a different sort of goal — a liminal rebirth, a cleansing of perception — from what Quakerism is actually about.

If we cannot discover a bridge between what it aims at, and what Quakerism is about, that allows it to become a truly integral part of Quakerism, then there’s really no reason why it should remain as part of the FGC Gathering. Let it spin itself off as a separate event, the way AFSC and FCNL meetings are separate events. But if there actually is such a bridge, it’s to everyone’s benefit to discover what that bridge is and take some advantage of it. There’s a crying need for us to talk this thing out and work it through.

Finally, the fact that the young Friends involved in the Quaker Sweat Lodge have been doing something genuinely spiritual and catalytic needs to be recognized and honored, and they need to be given a chance to do the same sort of work, within the Quaker religion, that up to now they’ve only felt free to do within the tiny confines of QSL. Maybe they don’t want that chance; maybe they have no interest in the real Quaker religion. But the chance should be offered them, and if they take it up, there needs to be a two-way commitment.

Can the Quaker Sweat Lodge leaders give the rest of us the commitment, and can their opponents promise to make some room for it, so that the sweat lodge crowd can facilitate a rediscovery of waiting worship as they have already facilitated a Quaker discovery of sweats? Would they be willing to commit, and their opponents be willing to give them the same sort of space and autonomy, in which to explore Quaker practice, that they were given to explore sweat ceremonies?

Big questions, these. But these are the sorts of things that genuine reconciliation is all about. And Quakerism is not Quakerism without genuine reconciliation.

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Reader Comments (41)

My take:
Spirituality is between one person and god.
Meeting for worship can be a community building exercise.
The Quaker Sweat Lodge can be a community building exercise.
Anti-war protests can be a community building exercise.

Quakers have traditionally tried to avoid as many religious trappings as possible, but some are unavoidable because:

Listening to god is scary. God usually tells us to do something we would rather avoid. Sitting quietly can be hard because it is boring and it is easy to get distracted.

Building a community in which we feel safe makes it easier to face our (scary and challenging) connection to god. Worshiping in a group makes me feel supported and safer.

Any exercise that builds our trust in each other and makes us feel safer gives us an advantage in our spiritual development. It does not create spiritual development, but it supports it.

Mar 8, 2007 at 12:25PM | Unregistered CommenterConrad Muller

George, thank you for the note regarding Woodstock. You are quite right that it is not mentioned in the book (which merely refers to hippie "happenings", p. 138). It was merely taken by the book's readers, in the year the book came out, as vivid validation of what Turner had to say. And of course I was confusing my memory of our anthro department's discussions with the book itself. Bless you for correcting me.

In your earlier note, you wrote, "Liminality is exactly what Quakerism is all about. ...It is what a 'gathered meeting' is all about."

Liminality is exactly what Marine boot camp is all about. It takes recruits who were diverse sorts of individuals, turns them (by a very ritualized process) into a new sort of people, and in the process of doing so, creates a meltdown effect by which they bond together. They boozily celebrate it the rest of their lives at veterans' reunions.

"We few, we happy few, we band of brothers", says Henry V to his fellow soldiers at daybreak on the field of Agincourt. Archetypal liminality/communitas, produced by intense shared suffering and struggle in the course of a military campaign. (Henry V foresees the boozy reunions, too, in that speech!)

And yet the liminal experience generated by boot camp, and the liminal experience/communitas generated in a military campaign like Henry V's, are vastly different from the experience of a "gathered" (or "covered") meeting.

For that matter, the experience of Woodstock was vastly different from the experience of a "gathered" or "covered" meeting.

George, I appreciate your kind suggestion that I "open myself up to the experience" of a "gathered" or "covered" meeting. Indeed, I've been at meetings so "covered" that the participants seemed to melt into light. But there was also a sense of the divine presence and a dimension of accountability in our experience at those meetings. The meltdown and the high were not separable from the moral dimension, the upward-looking awareness, and the presence of the divine. Boot camp has the accountability, but it is only accountability to one's officers, one's fellows, and the military ideal, and there is not the turn to the divine. Woodstock had the turn to the divine, but not the accountability.

We may search through the writings of the Quaker ministers from 1648 down to the middle 1800s (when the Quaker consensus finally broke down), but we will find nothing there to indicate that they thought the experience of a "gathered" or "covered" meeting was what Quakerism is all about. Yes, of course, they did celebrate such experiences when they occurred! But what they consistently pointed to, when they were asked to explain Quakerism — and what they consistently preached, when they went out to preach Truth among the masses, or called their fellow believers to a renewed discovery of religion — was not the "gathered meeting" but the Seed: the Power which one could most reliably meet in the experience of feeling condemned by it for the things one had done that were wrong. We have not only their own written testimony, but also the testimony of independent outside observers, that this was so.

And even today, in meetings of those who genuinely practice waiting worship (i.e., genuinely "wait upon the Lord" as He/She is to be known in the Seed), the experience of "covering" is vastly different from anything a boot camp produces.

If mere liminality is the essence and source of your ministry, then my heart is grieved for you and your listeners. I hope that there is more to it than that.

Mar 9, 2007 at 07:48AM | Registered CommenterMarshall Massey

It seems to me that "waiting on the Lord" is a trap similar to seeking. It says: "one day or some time in the future if I behave myself God will speak to me". To me God is not something you wait for or believe in or seek. God is present in this moment - if we would but listen. The idea that God is something you seek is similar to the concept of heaven. In fact God is not present in the future or the past but only now. Past and future are mental constructs - useful but of the mind - they don't exist. Liminal experience is listening to God being present with God in this moment. Whether Marines in boot camp listen to God or not is up to them - do some of them hear God - I suppose they do. Do some of them have liminal experiences - I am sure some do. Are people in meeting for worship listening to God - some are and some aren't. I much perfer meeting or a sweat lodge to boot camp - but that is just me.

Mar 9, 2007 at 11:00AM | Unregistered CommenterGeorge Price

I have been a participant at many of the Quaker Sweat Lodge Experiences, both at FGC Gatherings and Yearly Meetings and at George Price's home. My experiences in them tell me that this is a way to the Spirit. Yes, the Spirit is always present, waiting on us to encounter it. Yet why attempt to shut down a practice that increases the presence of the Spirit among Friends? Especially our youth?

Mostly people cannot find the way to experience that of God in everyone. During a Quaker Sweat Lodge Experience (QSLe), as led by George Price and his students, we are more able to see that of God in everyone during the sweat. To be in the presence of so many of our youth, who "see the Light" that they never thought existed before that time, is a blessing I thank George for helping to facilitate.


The QSLE helps me to to take that experience back with me and that helps me to better practice Friends' admonition to look for that of God in every person. Just like any other FGC or YM group who create a sacred space so healing can happen.

I have also been to Native American Sweats and find that they are not comparable to the QSLE, Native American Sweats are not a Quaker thing and no Native American I've met said they were. But this line of argument is not germane (to me) as Friends use lots of other people's practices in their worship and lives.

What George did was to bring this way of blessing each other by opening that of God in each other in a space that is a sacred space that we build together. He did this with the blessing of a Native American medicine man whom I have met in North Carolina and who came to FGC Gathering at Boone, one year, to bless the QSLE. I have met with other Native American Chiefs who attended FGC and also blessed George's work.

Why are some of our more patriarchal Friends so afraid of the possibility that we can sweat together and still be Quakerly? Is it written somewhere that we can't? George's Monthly Meeting has cleared him to this ministry. Is that not the way of Friends?

Can nearly 1,000 Friends who attended the QSLE be all wrong? Why do some Friends wish to close a door to the Spirit that other Friends have found? Especially Friends who have not experienced the very Quaker Sweat Lodge Experience themselves?


Blessings,

Mar 9, 2007 at 03:37PM | Unregistered CommenterFree Polazzo

Dear Conrad — thank you very much for sharing your views. I'm grateful that you posted them here, because I think the rest of us need to hear them.

I'd like to ask you a couple of questions, though. (Let me state, at the outset, that while these questions challenge your position, they're not meant to belittle your message in any way. It's my desire to ask you these things respectfully.)

Here are my questions: If spirituality is only an individual, private affair, and if Quaker meetings are only about community building, then why do we have Quaker meetings at all? Wouldn't it be simpler to practice your spirituality in the privacy of your bedroom, and do your community building through your neighborhood association?

In my own understanding, Friends have not, historically, seen what they are doing as "spirituality", but as a continuation of a literally cosmic project that began with Christ and the apostles. That's why we have our meetings, rather than just being individuals who meditate in their bedrooms and join whatever associations their neighborhoods already offer. It's why we Friends have historically preached a variety of Christianity, rather than just quietly practising something like meditation.

It's also why we Friends have testimonies. It's why Friends went to New England to confront the Puritans there, who had never given them any trouble, and were hanged for it by the Puritans on Boston Common; it's why we struggled so hard to end slavery, and to establish equal rights for women, and to end racial discrimination in the U.S.; and it's why we have the AFSC and the FCNL as continuing Quaker efforts to change the world.

As I personally see it, most of the Quaker world still understands most of this. The pastoral, evangelical and Conservative unprogrammed Friends proclaim their understanding of the Christian part of it pretty loudly. The only part that doesn't seem to understand any of it at all is the roughly five per cent of Friends who are in liberal unprogrammed meetings where Quakerism's past and Quakerism's historic purpose are just not taught, and who, therefore, have never gotten around to understanding them.

That is how I personally see the situation. But you must have your own explanation of the same phenomena, and I'm curious as to what it might be.

Mar 10, 2007 at 07:05AM | Registered CommenterMarshall Massey

Dear Free,

Many thanks for coming here and speaking up. I think there are readers here who are very glad to read your views, just as they are glad to read Conrad's and George's.

You ask, "...Why attempt to shut down a practice that increases the presence of the Spirit among Friends? Especially our youth?" I personally think part of the answer is that, in the traditional Quaker view, the word "Spirit" refers to something rather different from what you, Free, are taking it to be. The Spirit that Quakerism traditionally focuses on is the one that moves within us in the place of heart-and-conscience, teaching us the path of the cross. The presence of that Spirit is not necessarily increased by the Quaker Sweat Lodge Experience.

"Creating a sacred space" is also not traditional Quakerism, for in traditional Quakerism all space is experienced as already sacred.

And in traditional Quakerism, having a Native American medicine man (or any other sort of priest or holy person) bless something does not make any difference, because all things and beings are experienced as already wholly blessed by their loving Creator.

(And relying on the blessing of a "medicine man"? Dear heart, how do you square that bit of authoritarian sexist stereotyping with your jibe at "patriarchalism"? Please don't tell me you think it's only wrong when the other side does it.)

Your comment that "mostly people cannot find the way to experience that of God in everyone" is one that I find very telling. The Quaker Sweat Lodge has succeeded only because your branch of Quakerism had already drifted far, far away from traditional Quakerism — so far that many whole communities within it no longer understand, practice, and teach convincement and waiting worship — and thus, so far that literal thousands of kids grow up in your branch experiencing meeting for worship as an empty silence rather than as something full to exploding with the presence of God.

I'm just one little guy, and I don't belong to any FGC-affiliated meeting, and I'm not at all sure that my personal opinion really counts for anything in this matter.

But in my personal opinion, if that situation, of meetings not understanding and practicing and teaching convincement and waiting worship, does not change; and in particular, if QSL's critics do not allow themselves to be fully convinced first, before attacking QSL — so fully convinced, so broken by convincement that the Spirit begins to palpably pour out of them — then banning QSL will probably only lead to something else arising in QSL's place.

Mar 12, 2007 at 06:15AM | Registered CommenterMarshall Massey

My biggest beef with the banning of sweat lodges at the Gathering is that it is an example of Quaker Niceness. We're Nice People, so we don't ever make anybody angry. FGC gets one letter from one person, and decides not to make them angry. I wonder if a letter from the Joint Chiefs of Staff requesting that FGC stop protesting war would be as effective?

Since when was Niceness ever a testimony?

Apr 11, 2007 at 02:32PM | Unregistered CommenterRussell Nelson

Hi, Russell! It's good of you to stop by!

My impression is that FGC banned the sweat lodge, not because of a single person's objection, but because the letter they received indicated that a whole tribe was offended. Notice the wording of the passage I quoted from the letter: "We ask that you insist that this workshop be permanently discontinued."

I certainly agree with you that "niceness" is not a testimony. On the other hand, even old George Fox expressed some respect for the powers of discernment of the native American population.

Apr 17, 2007 at 04:58AM | Registered CommenterMarshall Massey

I am enrolled full blood Lakota and I have the right to speak about your perversion of my sacred Inipi ceremony. I am frustrated and angry with this web site and I am telling you to STOP IT!

STOP LYING! STOP ARGUING! STOP PRETENDING YOU DON'T KNOW YOU ARE DOING WRONG!

I used to think you were different from other Christians but you have proven to me that you are just as racist, and culturally insensitive as the missionaries who willfully collaborated with the genocide of my people. You have shown me that you can't be trusted.

Shame on you for engaging in this ludicrous debate! There is nothing here to debate! What you are doing is profoundly offensive and you need to stop and to make amends to ALL the Native people you have wronged. What kind of Christians do you claim to be? Would your Jesus continue to do wrong over and over again after it was clearly explained to him? No! You don't know how to behave in a Christ-like way. You only know how to argue until you get what you want.

Having these sweat lodges IS RACIST. Why should white people be the only ones to define what is and is not racist? Pretending that this issue is too complicated to deal with is RACIST and cowardly! You would stop any practice that African Americans complained about so passionately, so what justifies this BLATANT RACISM towards Native people? It's a disgrace that you keep having these sweat lodges when YOU KNOW IT IS WRONG! It disgusts me that you don't have the courage to cancel them permanently. Refusing to listen to the legitimate spiritual leaders in your area and looking for loopholes and excuses and constructing these ridiculous arguments only reveals the DEEP DEEP RACISM of the Quakers!

It makes me sick to see the ridiculous lengths that all these apologists will go to in order to keep doing something that they KNOW WILL PROFOUNDLY OFFEND NATIVE people! A child can see that the only decent and Christian thing to do is to cancel the sweat lodge immediately and permanently.
You are clearly educated people who understand that Frauds make specious arguments like this all the time. There is no excuse for your willful ignorance and your deliberate lack of respect for Native people. SHAME ON YOU for choosing NOT to see though these silly arguments! I used to admire the Quakers, but now I know better. SHAME ON YOU!

Jun 23, 2007 at 04:24PM | Unregistered CommenterDenise Black Feather

Thank you for your comments, Denise.

Jun 24, 2007 at 07:23PM | Registered CommenterMarshall Massey

I can’t believe I’m hearing these lame excuses for exploitation of First Nations ppl from Quakers! The Inipi ceremony is and was and always will be the sole cultural property of the Lakota. Arvol Looking Horse, the legitimate spiritual leader of the Lakota, has closed this ceremony to outsiders. So, case closed. It is disrespectful for whitemen to ignore his decision. From an Indigenous perspective, there is nothing more to discuss.

You are clearly too ignorant about Native people to have an intelligent, respectful discussion with us about your exploitation of the thing that is most intimate to us. I’m not going to tell you that you are racist. You are. You are clearly in too much denial to deal with this. I will tell you that you are guilty of spiritual rape. You are spiritual rapists. Every single one of you that did not speak up and stop this prostitution of our sacred ceremony is a spiritual rapist.

While, there is no one Native American religion. There is ONE thing we all have in common: disenfranchisement; a sense of hopelessness, and righteous indignation at colonial occupation and rape of our homelands by YOUR greedy ancestors! The one thing that gets us through each day of dealing with the crap YOUR ANCESTORS created for us is our spirituality. It is a very intimate thing that belongs ONLY to people with BOTH genetic and cultural ties to legitimate, living Native Communities. In terms that you Capitalists can understand, it is the sole cultural property of the Lakota. That means the Lakota get to decide who can perform their ceremonies. From this discussion, you would think that every Native person had died and the grave robbers were arguing as to how to divide up the spoils.

What kind of monster would think he had a right to defile and pervert that?


Quakers, Wipe your consciences! STOP IT! STOP IT NOW! STOP ARGUING ABOUT IT AND MAKE AMENDS FOR YOUR OFFENSE! EDUCATE YOUR YOUTH ABOUT THE CRIMES OF THEIR ANCESTORS! EDUCATE! Don’t APPROPRIATE!

Declaration of War against exploiters of Lakota Spirituality
http://www.geocities.com/cuck_fuster/ArvolLookingHorse01.html

Arvol Looking Horses Statement banning nonNDNs from exploiting our ceremony
http://www.geocities.com/cuck_fuster/LakotaDeclOfWar.html
"It was decided, from March 9th, 2003 and forward, there will be NO non-Natives allowed in our sacred Ho-c o-ka (our sacred altars) where it involves our Seven Sacred Rites."
"I-ni-pi (Purification Ceremony): Those that run this sacred rite should be able to communicate with Tun-ca-s i-la (our Sacred Grandfathers) in their Native Plains tongue. They should also have EARNED this rite by completing Han-ble-c i-ya and the four days and four years of the Wi-wanyang wa-c i-pi."

"I know that most non-Native People do not understand the important protocols or have had the Traditional background to carry this sacred item properly."

Jul 2, 2007 at 02:12PM | Unregistered CommenterJim the Angry Militant NDN

Thank you, Angry Jim, for opening your heart to us here.

One thing that puzzles me is your assertion that "the Inipi ceremony is and was and always will be the sole cultural property of the Lakota." As I understand it, sweat lodge ceremonies are practiced by many native American peoples, not just the Lakota, and the other native American peoples who practice them don't have to obtain permission from the Lakota in order to do so.

If George Price, who leads the Quaker Sweat Lodge, has obtained permission to do this from spiritual leaders who were not Lakota — and I know, for example, that a Cherokee medicine man has blessed what he does — then I don't understand how Lakota could overrule that permission. The Cherokee are not underlings of the Lakota, are they? They have independent authority to permit such things, do they not?

Let me say something else, something important. On your web page dealing with the Quaker Sweat Lodge, you indicate that this web page — the one you're reading right now — is in some sense the web page of the Quakers who are doing sweat lodges. It is not.

This is only my personal site, not the web site of Quakers generally. And I belong to an entirely different branch of Quakerism, one that does not permit sweat lodges at its events.

I have no control over the people, like George Price, who are doing these Quaker sweat lodge things. My involvement, such as it is, is simply that of a person in different branch of the same religion who is concerned about the direction in which George Price's branch is going. I suppose that would be maybe comparable to the sort of involvement you could have with something the Crow Nation was doing on its own lands.

If you want to influence the people who can forbid Quaker Sweat Lodges permanently, you need to be talking to Friends General Conference at friends@fgcquaker.org.

Of course, I remain keenly interested in your views, and you are always welcome to post them here as well.

Jul 3, 2007 at 05:10AM | Registered CommenterMarshall Massey

I could not agree more. Your youth should be educating themselves about what their ancestors did to collaborate in the genocide of the American Indian and looking at ways to improve the PRESENT racist, elitist, misogynist society they inherited. Playing around with the past won't help the future. There's an illegal war going on that's ruining this country. I say we should return to our true, laudable Quaker roots and fight the slaughter in Iraq which by the way resembles the slaughter that made our present lifestyles what they are. I found this site and these Native people think we are fools. I was ashamed to be a Quaker today.

From the New Age Frauds Plastic Shamans Forum Main page:

Do you think you are "Indian at heart" or were an Indian in a past life? Do you admire native ways and want to incorporate them into your life and do your own version of a sweat lodge or a vision quest? Have you seen ads, books, and websites that offer to train you to be come a shaman in an easy number of steps, a few days on the weekend, or for a fee?

Have you really thought this all the way through? Have you thought about how native people feel about what you might want to do?

Please think about these important points before you take that fateful step and expend time, money, and emotional investment:

Native people DO NOT believe it is ethical to charge money for any ceremony or teaching. Any who charge you even a penny are NOT authentic.

Native traditionalists believe the ONLY acceptable way to transmit traditional teachings is orally and face-to-face. Any allegedly traditional teachings in books or on websites are NOT authentic.

Learning medicine ways takes decades and must be done with great caution and patience out of respect for the sacred. Any offer to teach you all you need to know in a weekend seminar or two is wishful thinking at best, fraud at worst.

Most of these FRAUDULENT operators are not the slightest bit reputable. Some, such as Robert "Ghostwolf" AKA Robert Franzone and Forrest Carter, have actually been convicted of fraud. Some are sexual predators who prey upon their followers. "Sun Bear" AKA Vincent La Duke was a serial rapist who was facing numerous charges when he died, including the rape of girls as young as fourteen.

Women should be extremely wary of any " teacher" who claims sex is part of an alleged "ceremony." Most of these FRAUDULENT operators have been caught making complete fantasies of what many whites WISH natives were like. Another way to say it is that they are outright liars and hoaxers. Some, like Carlos Castaneda, were exposed as long as three decades ago.

You probably are asking yourself, "Aren't any of these people for real and a good way for me to learn?"

We (native people and our supporters) realize that most of you do not know any better, at least not yet, but we hope you learn about these matters from more reputable sources and in a more respectful manner.

If it says New Age or Shamanism on the cover, it's not a good source for learning about natives. Find out which authors can be trusted before you pay money to operators who harm us all.

Please understand the following points about native spiritual ways:

Native belief systems are COMMUNAL, not focused on the individual's faith like Christianity, and are TRIBE-SPECIFIC. There is NO "generic Indian" form of spirituality. There are as many differences from tribe to tribe as there are between Hinduism and the Church of England. No one would think of teaching those two as the same and calling them "Indo-European," yet many of these FRAUDULENT operators teach a thrown together mishmash of bits and pieces of different beliefs.

TRADITIONAL elders are very cautious about changing rituals and mixing different customs, it does happen, of course, but only after lengthy discussions that can take decades. FRAUDULENT operators are very casual and haphazard in what they do, in a manner that shows they have no understanding of or respect for the sacred.

TRADITIONAL elders DO NOT believe that any ceremony can be done by anyone who feels like it. It's that same caution and respect for the sacred. Yet these FRAUDULENT operators will let anyone do their inaccurate version of a ceremony if they have the money. Vision quests, for example, are intended for young boys age 12 to 14, but boys don't have much money, so these FRAUDULENT operators sell "quests" for hundreds or thousands to mostly middle-aged men and women.

There is also the matter of telling people they can be shamans and charging them for it. If you were interested in Judaism, would you pay money to someone who said he could make you a rabbi in just one weekend seminar? If someone did this and then claimed Jewish objections were foolish, we would recognize he was anti-Semitic. Think about the lack of respect these operators show to native people and beliefs, and to their own followers, by defrauding people.

Native people DO NOT use the label "Shaman."

Think also about how it makes it harder for natives and whites to get along when whites have been given an untrue picture of native cultures. We have to learn to get along and we can't do that as long as whites give support to operators who push a fraudulent version of what we are like."

There are non so blind as those that will not see. I am ashamed to be associated with any group that won't see cultural appropriation as the racist act it truly is.

Read for yourselves:

http://newagefraud.org/smf/index.php?PHPSESSID=33b1fa6379e2234d6021dbabcecc8c50&topic=859.0

Jul 23, 2007 at 10:47PM | Unregistered CommenterAshamed to be a Quaker

Dear Ashamed,

Many thanks for sharing your thoughts. I am actually in full agreement with most of the points made on the web page you've copied here.

You might want to learn a little more about Friends (Quakers), however. Our community never "collaborate[d] in the genocide of the American Indian". Try using Google to do a search on the combined keywords "Quakers and Indians", and read what your search turns up. Certainly, Friends treatment of the native Americans was far from perfect; but it was nevertheless far superior to the way all other Anglo groups behaved, and collaboration in genocide was never, ever, any part of it.

Jul 27, 2007 at 09:33PM | Registered CommenterMarshall Massey

I'm so proud that you opted to discontinue sweat lodges at the plea of a Native American woman. I'm grateful that you thought long and hard over this issue. My undergraduate degree is in Native American studies, and part of my graduate work was in the same as well. I spent nearly a decade in intense study about Native Americans. I never understood what drove me, except to bear witness to terrible pain. I was bereft of joy for nearly two years in which I genuinely mourned what I learned of Native American and White history,and the doctrine of manifest destiny.

I wept through many nights after reading, studying and hearing of the rape and pillage of the people who were here first. Out of respect to Native people I don't attend sweats or encroach on that which belongs to them. I remember the faces of my Native peers and their stories and I observe their right to have something, at least one thing that we don't take away.

One native author said you took the best of everything we had, our land, our young men, our children and now you want our religion too -- will it ever end?

It is worth sacrificing something you love and find meaningful so as to not offend, especially not when we have our own religious traditions. I know that many Indians are deeply vexed about the casino selling their spiritual traditions too. What a casino does to the consternation of many traditional people does not justify white encroachment on Indian property. I consider adopting the sweats a theft.

Let us give them the honor and respect they were denied for 500 years. It is just the right thing to do in the name of honor and protocol.

Oct 9, 2007 at 05:07AM | Unregistered CommenterCaroline

Interesting topic this. I am a Cree ceremonialist from Saskatchewan Canada. My father and late uncle were Anglican ministers. My grandfather and his descendants were warriors and ceremonial lodge keepers also. I provide aboriginal awareness and cultural programming to an Addiction center.I am fifty five years old.I am also a social worker and I have conducted sweats for twenty years.

Dec 23, 2007 at 04:37AM | Unregistered CommenterJohn Cuthand

I find your topic most interesting. Please disregard my earlier post which went hay wire in the digital world for reasons unknown. I am a fifty-five year old Cree ceremonialist from Saskatchewan Canada. I work in an addictions center providing counselling and cultural programming to a cliental that is 65% Aboriginal. My father and late uncle were Anglican ministers. My grandfather and his ancestors before him going way back were ceremonial keepers. My mother is of Irish and Scots roots. There were Presbyterian ministers in the Scots line. I come from a long line of praying people. I have kept the sweat lodge ceremony for twenty years now.
I must say I am impressed with the sincerity of your sweat lodge people. I am also at peace with the Quaker people. You folks are the only people I know who made and kept a Treaty with the Indian people. I am of course thinking of William Penn.
The sweat lodge is an Indian ceremony. I am not at all comfortable with other people appropriating it then claiming ownership of it. There is no such thing as a “Quaker sweat” nor a “Celtic sweat“. Having said that I must also add I am also very troubled by Indians who exploit it for personal power and profit.
The sweat lodge can be seductive. People feel good and think so much clearer and deeper than before. It is innocent and should be treated with humility. All people are welcome to my lodge but those who conduct the ceremony should be Indians. We are out numbered and threatened. We have lost so much. It is important I believe to keep the little we have as pure and close to the source as we can. I am not saying your people are knowingly exploiting us. I feel they are sincere and open to learning. If God could speak to Moses through a burning bush then the same God could also speak to the Indians through the wind, the sun etc. I wish for a meaningful dialogue between the Quakers and the Indians as there was in Penn’s day. If we sweat together let it be the Indians who conduct the ceremony. If the Indians attend your ceremony let it be the Quaker people who lead. I hope I have been respectful and kind.

Dec 23, 2007 at 05:43AM | Unregistered CommenterJohn Cuthand

Marshall,

After Jesus’ death there were many Christian sects, and there were already many Jewish sects, some of which provided the earliest Christians. All of these sects were at war with each other. Wars which cost people their reputations, social positions, and sometimes their lives.

The collected texts we call the New Testament are often propaganda pieces from this war. Some (Luke) are not even religiously motivated.

Though all of this propaganda, and loss through translation, I think I see Jesus, the man who might have been part of God in a way the rest of us are not.

Based on this, I consider myself a Christian.

I believe Jesus said that God created the Sabbath for man, not man for the Sabbath. In the same spirit, I believe that the church, the congregation of believers not the steeple house, was created for man not man for the church.

The form of the church is unimportant, only the support it gives to the members of the congregation, to the community, is important.

An effective spiritual community does not live by bread alone, but it must have bread as well as worship. To be effective, our community must deal with both the spiritual needs, and the social and physical needs of its members.

I truly believe that spirituality is individual. I do not believe that one person can save another. If an exceptional person could save a community, why did we do away with the division between laity and the priesthood?

Unless you do not believe in continuing revelation, you must consider the bible, testimonies, Faith and Practices, etc. to be guides toward a personal relationship with God that transcends books, tradition, or law.

Sweats, or saunas, or whatever you call them have always had a mental health component. Most of the sweats I am aware of are part of anti-drug programs. Run by or sponsored by Native Americans, they welcome people of all faiths and ethnicities.

To deny someone a powerful resource for personal development or healing because you own the rights to it is no different than denying someone medicine because you have a patent on it and they can’t afford your price.

I am sorry that the only way Alice Lopez can feel better is by hurting someone. She is justified in her feelings of being dispossessed, but that does not justify her withholding help from others, especially kids.

Aside from the commercial metaphor, prayers belong to God, not to people. No one has a right to tell others how to pray. No one can own God or the means of connecting to God.

I hope this gives you a better idea of what I meant in my very brief post last year. A Friend just reminded me of this discussion, and so I reread it. It has taken me a while to respond because I have been starting a new life. At least the issues have had time to season.

If you truly believe, as your post seems to say, that we are bound by books and history, you and I will need to live with a fundamental disagreement.

In the light,

Conrad

May 26, 2008 at 03:32PM | Unregistered CommenterConrad Muller

Thank you for sharing your further thoughts, Conrad.

For the record, no, I do not agree with your assessment of the New Testament texts in general and Luke in particular. It seems to me that mere propaganda pieces would not convey the clarity of insight and inspiration that I find in the NT.

We Friends have maintained, all through our long history, that the form of the Church is important. That is why the structure of our Society differs from the structure of the Church of England, and from the structure of the Baptist churches, and from the structure of the Roman Catholic Church. If we hadn't felt the form was important, we wouldn't have made those changes.

We did not do away with the distinction between laity and priesthood because an exceptional person cannot save a community. We did away with that distinction because we agreed with Luther that all believers are members of the priesthood. This is a matter of historical record.

While we believe that only Christ can save a human being, we also believe that Christ can work through any human being to assist in the salvation of another. This is why we have human ministers. Because we labor for one another's salvation, we also have elders and overseers and clearness committees to help us in our times of spiritual difficulty, and we have a collective discipline, spelled out in our books of discipline ("Faith and Practice"), which we help one another live up to.

While we believe in continuing revelation, this does not mean that we leave books, tradition, and law totally behind. Rather, our 350-year-old testimony has been that continuing revelation fulfills the original thrust of the books, the tradition, and the law. If you happen to be associated with a yearly meeting, you might like to take a closer look at your yearly meeting's book of discipline ("Faith and Practice"). You will find that, for example, it recommends regular study of the scriptures, and it continues many of the traditions handed down from previous centuries. If you disagree with these points, your quarrel is with your yearly meeting, not just with me.

I don't believe that FGC is "denying someone a powerful resource for personal development" by saying that no sweats are to be held at Summer Gatherings. People can always go somewhere else for their sweats, after all. FGC is merely saying that its Summer Gatherings are not the appropriate place.

In the same way, FGC is not telling anyone how to pray. It is simply saying that certain sorts of prayer are better conducted somewhere else.

I have no trouble living with a fundamental disagreement with you, friend.

May 29, 2008 at 11:12AM | Registered CommenterMarshall Massey

I also know many of the principals in the 'sweat lodge issue'. I know of native people who have quietly supported this work, some of whom are deeply connected to their own traditions, and I certainly know of, and have avoided, plastic shamans.

Apr 6, 2011 at 12:33PM | Unregistered Commenterforex major currency pairs

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