Exploring the Attic of Church History: An Interview with Michael Birkel (QuakerBooks)

I confess to struggling with several of the classic texts that offer an introduction to Quakerism. Sometimes it is length but more often it is the sheer volume of information surrounding Friends, who are a writerly and relatively well documented people. As a convinced Friend I do not have a grounding in First Day school lessons (a phenomenon not necessarily unique to convinced Friends), and it is sometimes difficult to find my bearings in the intricacies of history and faith.

I was drawn to Michael Birkel’s Silence and Witness (Orbis) largely because of its intended audience. Published by a Maryknoll press and written for Christian and non-Christian readers (including Episcopalian mother-in-laws, as I advised one co-worker), Birkel encapsulates those aspects of faith that make Friends unique, and offers an introduction to Quakerism as it lives today. It is not a definitive text, but it is not supposed to be. In a style that he repeats throughout his books, and which is the mark of a gifted educator, Michael Birkel throws open the doors of knowledge for the reader in a way that encourages further inquiry and exploration.

Michael Birkel describes the leading that informs his work, the throwing open of these doors, as “to take people up to our common attic of church history and look around and see what’s up there.” For Michael Birkel, what’s up there and useful may be both early Quaker writings as well the mystical texts and practices of 5th century desert monastics. In Engaging Scripture and A Near Sympathy, both by Friends United Press and the later about John Woolman, he models a style of meditative reading rooted in befriending historic writers and “reading with” them during study or prayer. Through him we can become acquainted with John Woolman in a new and deeply personal way. Through John Woolman and other Friends we meet the biblical prophets that spoke to and inspired them. As a scholar and a seeker, Michael Birkel truly draws widely and deeply from many branches of the Christian family tree.

I spoke with Michael Birkel by phone at the beginning of the semester at Earlham College, where he is a professor in the Religion Department. Our taped conversation ran much longer than expected and many friends, both historic Quakers and early church mystics, were invited to join us for the conversation.

AC: Across your work there is a theme of befriending historic Friends or even biblical prophets through their writing and “reading with” them during spiritual study and prayer. One primary figure for you in your life and work has been John Woolman. How did you first meet him?

MB: I had heard about John Woolman, but I first read him during the summer after my first year in college, some 30 plus years ago. I remember it keenly because there were two books that I read back to back: John Woolman’s Journal and a collection of sayings and stories of the early Christian desert monastics of the 4th and 5th Century. And those two books have, in a sense, been carrying on a conversation in me ever since. John Woolman moved me to think about the inward life in a variety of ways and these early monastic texts similarly moved me to think about the spiritual life in a variety of ways.

MB: In John Woolman’s “Plea for the Poor,” which describes his theory on the spirituality of labor, he speaks on the design of creation and living in accordance with the design of creation. It has inspired me to, let’s say, “eat low on the food chain.” John Woolman also has a theology of labor. You’ve probably heard of the Protestant Work ethic, and that is “work work work” and the reward is a sign of God’s blessing on you. And John Woolman says that work is a good thing – this is the pre-industrial era, the pre-mechanical era, most work was manual labor, out there working the fields – work is helpful, it’s good for you, but too much of it isn’t good for you. And so he speaks of moderate labor as the design of creation. We should work, but if we work too much, it really shows that we are greedy for something that we can’t have, or that we are making an idol out of busyness, which is something that certainly our culture does. As a result of my reading him over the years I decided to work less than full time, so that I could have time for my inward life, and for my family life.

I would say also that John Woolman influenced me in that he deepened my experience of Quaker worship. He speaks of feeling an intimate sense of connection with other people in worship, what he calls “a feeling sense of the condition of others,” or [as] he calls it elsewhere “a near sympathy.” That phrase, that experience as he described it, that sense of profound connection to others, experiencing the collective dimension of worship, has deepened my experience of Meeting for Worship.

Another important influence on me from John Woolman is an expression that he uses that guides my interaction with others. He invites us to live with others so that we strive to “reach the pure witness” in them. That is, if you’re trying to get other people to change their minds and their hearts about something, in the interest of there being more justice in the world, the way we should do this is to try to reach what modern Friends would call “that of God in them,” that capacity of the Holy Spirit to witness what you are hearing and saying and say “you know what, this is true,” and if you reach the pure witness in others then God will do the work. The temptation of one engaging in activities for social reform is to act out of our anger. By striving to reach the pure witness we can act out of our love and draw energy from that instead.

Yet another thing I would mention that we have to offer the wider world is the particular way we have of integrating the inward life, the contemplative life, and the activist life, the reforming life. Sometimes we do that better as a group than as individuals, but we do have individuals that show us how to do it. Again it’s not a unique thing, other Christian bodies and non-Christian bodies do this, but ours is a useful pattern for it.

Further, many other religions have individual contemplative practices but not very many have group contemplative practices. You might regard Meeting for Worship in the unprogramed tradition as a group contemplative practice. It’s not simply a contemplative practice because each individual is not just thinking about himself or herself in a kind of quest for enlightenment, but rather there is always an openness to ministering to the gathered body, whether in the silence or in vocal ministry. I think one thing we show, that we hold up to the wider world, is a way of engaging the contemplative dimension of the spiritual life collectively. And that’s related, I think, to the fact that we also engage in discernment as a collective practice.

AC: I think we’ll come back to Woolman a bit later. I want to move on to Silence and Witness. Keeping in mind that it was part of a series of books put out by a Maryknoll press on different traditions of Christianity and was meant to be accessible to a non-Quaker audience, what unique message do you think it has, and what unique message do you think Quakers have, to offer an audience of both Christians and non-Christians?

MB: I entitled it Silence and Witness because I think of those as two dimensions of our experience of the religious life: the practice of silence, and witnessing for the possibility of a better world, a better human society.

I would also certainly want to talk about our testimonies. I think that if we are going to be honest we have to admit, as Quakers with all humility, that none of the testimonies are original to us. We don’t have a copyright on them. Yet the world cries out for this particular combination of ethical ideals. They’re not original: I see all of the testimonies at least hinted at in the short little book in the New Testament called the Epistle of James. If you look carefully you can find them all there, as I think early Quakers did. I think we’ve been unique in our emphasis on and our particular expressions of peace, simplicity, equality, integrity, even though our expressions of and even naming of the testimonies have developed over the centuries.

AC: I forget exactly how you word it in the introduction, but you say something like “Friends should keep in mind that they probably know all of this already.” What kind of a reaction do you usually get from Friends, both FGC Friends and FUM Friends, as well as the other branches?

MB: I’ve been humbled and pleased by the positive response that I’ve received from all kinds of Friends. I know of a Quaker meeting in the pastoral tradition that has used this text for a series of discussions in their meetings. And I know of a pastoral meeting out here in Indiana that has decided to use the book as suggested reading for people who are applying for membership. I thought, “Shouldn’t they be using their own Yearly Meeting’s Faith & Practice?” But perhaps it is supplemental to that. The response has been very positive. I say this, and I’m a little embarrassed because I don’t like to brag about myself, but I get e-mail from people I’ve never met saying “Oh this was very helpful.” The reception of the book has been very hospitable.

MB: If you’re not a Quaker I guess you’re less likely to write a Quaker out of the blue, but certainly the people with whom I worked, the editorial staff both in England where the editor of the series works, and in the US, a lot of these folks were Anglicans, some were Catholics, all of them were non-Quakers, and their reception was very positive. They said “Oh, this has really opened up a tradition that I didn’t know about before.” That’s been very heartwarming.

AC: A concept that I find repeated in your books that was new to me is a description of Quaker faith as “eschatological.” I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit, particularly how that looks different amongst Friends than other Christians, other religions?

MB: Certainly. First, a little historical background. Within the New Testament itself you find different understandings of what will be the, how shall I put it, the next life or the great curtain call on human history. Eschatology is from a couple of Greek words that mean more or less “thoughts about the last things.” Within the New Testament itself you have a variety of thinking: Some expecting a return, some soon, some not so soon. And then you have in the Gospel of John this understanding that eternal life begins now. It begins in this life. You don’t have to wait. There’s a sort of “already” quality to it, [as well as a] “not quite all of it” quality. That emphasis from the Gospel of John is something that certainly early Friends picked up. That’s why you don’t have as much talk about an afterlife in early and classical Quaker writings, and in the 18th century as well. There isn’t much speculation about what happens after this life. That’s not because they didn’t think something would happen, it’s just that the promise of that life can begin to be lived out already in this one.

Early Quakerism arose in a time when there was a lot of apocalyptic expectation. Not only was the end of the world coming, but it was coming with fireworks. There were groups like the Fifth Monarchy Men, who read the Book of Daniel and said “Successions of four monarchies, we’ll be the fifth and we will usher in this new spiritual age in England now. And we’ll use force to do it.” In the earliest Quaker writings, you can’t really tell: Is their eschatology inward, or is it outward as well? Certainly that inward dimension was there as early Friends realized “Not only is the world not going to end, but the whole of England is not going to become Quaker like we thought it would.”

MB: It is a big family, and in any one of them there’s quite a variety of theological expression and opinion, at least that’s been my experience. But I would say that among a lot of Friends there is this sense that, whether you want to put it in tradition Christian terms as George Fox did in “Jesus Christ has come to teach his people himself,” mainly now and you don’t have to wait for some big bang at the end, or whether you put it in a more universal language for other liberal Friends who would say that the promise of intimacy with the divine is present and that that promise can be realized in this lifetime and we can begin to live that out now, I certainly find that among many Friends.

AC: In Engaging Scripture you talk about what you experience as your calling in life, to “take people up to our common attic and look around and see what’s up there.” You go on to say that much of what is up there, in terms of church history, stories, doctrine, etc., can probably stay in storage, but some of it is useful.

AC: Certainly, it’s optional whether or not it stays there. I wonder if there are some things that you have discovered in the attic, like lectio divina, or meditative and prayerful reading of sacred text, that have been complementary to your own practice?

MB: There are practices described throughout Christian history that can enrich anyone across the ages, and that has been my experience. I have lived a very blessed life to be able to spend a good bit of my time reading the thoughts and descriptions of the practices of these people over the last two thousand years, and I have felt very enriched by that. As I have read these I have seen parallels in Quakerism that I wouldn’t have seen otherwise. I’ll come back to that in a moment. To answer your question, ‘What has enriched me across the tradition?’ I would say that certainly the early monastic traditions have enriched me very much, whether because they taught me patterns of interior watchfulness, [or showed] me another radical expression of Christianity and disciplines of attention and discernment and practical patterns for how love is lived out. Prayer or worship is something that I see as a very wide continuum, expressed in many, many forms. We have some of them in Quakerism, and there are others that are practiced in other branches of the Christian family.

I would say that historically Quakers have been suspicious of restricting the Holy Spirit, or, quoting the New Testament they would say “quenching the spirit.” They were very reluctant to lay down spiritual methods. They’re not as good at telling as they are at showing. So if you read early Quaker writings they will show religious practices and work and you have to step back and say “If this is what we see them doing here, what were the practices that lent or lend themselves to that?” I had learned on my own about lectio divina from the monastic tradition, years ago when I was studying the monastic tradition a lot, and then I looked at the Quaker writings that were filled with biblical allusions and references, and said to myself “I think the same thing is at work here. A similar meditative practice of reading.”

I would say the same thing is true for guidelines for discernment. Quakers have been very good at practicing discernment. We have individual discernment and are very good at the collective practice of discernment. But the early Quaker writings don’t provide guidelines. So if you read Ignatius of Loyola on consolation and desolation – two kinds of poles of movement within the spiritual life – consolation, this experience of the presence of God and the sweetness that comes with that, and desolation, a kind of experience of absence, a feeling of internal withdraw away from the goodness of life – he explores those two polarities as a way of helping you with discernment. I learned that by reading in the Ignatian tradition, and then I read John Woolman’s Journal, and said “He’s not using those words, but if you look at him practicing discernment he’s doing it along similar lines.”

A leading can come to you, and many of us think that a leading is something that comes to us out of the blue – the heavens are rent apart and lightning bolts strike and God says “This is God speaking, here’s what I want you to do,” and that does happen, it can happen for some people – but as Ignatius says, “[we must] seek God in all things.” Or as John Woolman shows us, leadings often come through very ordinary events in life. [Woolman also shows] that a leading doesn’t have to come out of guilt, although it can come out of sadness and seeing injustice in the world, a leading can also come out of joy in experiencing the love of God and what we can see [for] the possibilities for human life.

John Woolman shows us this but he doesn’t tell us this. That’s been one of the riches for me, one of the rewards, of reading in our Quaker tradition but also reading around it in the wider Christian tradition, is understanding that Quakers show better than they tell. It’s good to read what some of those other folks are doing in terms of telling, then to look at Quakers and [realize] that I don’t really have to run off to the Benedictines to learn lectio divina – although that’s a perfectly good thing to do – but I can see it at work in my own tradition. I don’t really have to run off to the Ignatian tradition to learn discernment, although that’s also a good thing to do, but if I look carefully with a kind of alertness for that showing that Quakers do, I can see it in my own tradition.

Quakers, moreover, have always read non-Quakers. Certainly George Fox was always reading non-Quaker writings. People will argue about how influential they were in his thought, but the great spiritualist and Anabaptist Hans Denck wrote a book that was in George Fox’s library, for instance. Or the German mystic Jakob Boehme was read by early Friends and 18th Century Friends. Rufus Jones loved him. Howard Brinton loved him. The 14th Century mystic in the Dominican tradition, Johannes Tauler, was read and loved by early Friends and read very much in the 19th century. You don’t have to be as [Brinton] was, a scholar in the mystical tradition, [or] like Rufus Jones who read about everything there was to read in the mystical tradition. Friends throughout the centuries have been reading works by non-Friends and [have been] enriched by them.

AC: Thinking about the individual and the corporate, I want to ask you about the term “The Lambs War,” which you discuss in the Hugh Barbour memorial volume. To early Friends “The Lamb’s War” was an inward struggle away from self will and pride toward God, but has been used more recently, largely because of Hugh Barbour’s work, to describe Friends’ involvement in the Civil Rights Movement and movements against the War in Viet Nam and nuclear proliferation. What do you think is going on there? In taking an understanding of that personal struggle and broadening it?

MB: James Nayler wrote a piece called “The Lambs War.” You have to remember here that he was living amidst a Civil War that was going on around him, and he was in fact a participant in the Civil War before he became a Friend. He was in Cromwell’s New Model Army, where I think he was a chaplain. We might describe Cromwell’s New Model Army as a Bible study group with guns. These were radical Puritans who started every day with prayer and Bible study and then went out to bring God’s kingdom to England, or at least that’s how they saw it. So there’s this war going on, and James Nayler joins Friends and leaves that behind, but he speaks of outward violence, outward conflict as being – and this is a modern term, he doesn’t quite put it this way – as being a projection of the unfinished conflict between good and evil within us. That’s the engine that drives so much violence in the world, our own unfinished conflict inside of us. So in the early Quaker experience, as you pointed out, that was an intense experience of the Light. We often think of the Light in very positive ways today, and that certainly was the case among early Friends, but they also experienced the Light not as a country fire to warm your toes on a wintry day, but as a search beacon that showed you all the parts of your soul that you’d rather pretend weren’t there. Not necessarily bad things that you’d done, it wasn’t based on guilt, but rather on our capacity to do evil, and that that’s part of our experience as human beings.

I’ll give you an example from my life. If you were to ask me when I was 17 “Are you a pacifist?” I would have said “Yes.” And if you had said “Well, why are you a pacifist?” I would have said “Well because I think violence is wrong, it’s not productive, it’s evil, and I can’t do that. I just don’t have it in me to do that.” Now if you were to ask me a number of years later “Well Michael, why are you a pacifist?” the first part of the answer would have been the same, “I don’t think violence works, it’s not a practice based in love and so forth,” but for the second half I would have given a different answer, and I would have said: “And I’m a pacifist because I’ve come to know myself and I do have the capacity to do terrible things to people.” Pacifism is a choice for me, not a necessity because I can’t be bad. That’s not a confession that I have done those things, I haven’t murdered or maimed anyone, but I’m aware of that tendency or possibility, that capacity within me, and that’s part of the Lamb’s War, to discover that about one’s self. It’s not just feeling guilty about bad things, but discovering your own potential for evil as well as for good.

That was in fact a harrowing experience for many early Friends, and this internal conflict would go on for some time. And then they would come to an experience of a sense of victory of good over evil, a sense of peace. It brought a tremendous sense of community with those who had been through a similar experience. That’s part of the power of community among early Friends. They had shared that internal struggle and come to feel the power of the love of God within them.

Now that [term] gets used in the Viet Nam war era. I know T. Canby Jones helped to popularize that expression after Hugh Barbour brought it back to light, and I would say that it was the alternative to the war “out there,” which was the Viet Nam war or the Iraq War if want to say that today. The real war is the war going on inside our soul, perhaps even collectively as a people, as a nation. What is the conflict that is happening within us that we must find an enemy, we can’t look at our own capacity for evil? We don’t have the Cold War against the Soviet Union anymore, [so] we have to create an enemy, even if we don’t have one. The Lamb’s War invites us to a different place. If you come to that sense of truth about yourself inwardly, then you don’t have to go out and make enemies and engage in conflict. Your life can be centered in God’s love rather than your own fears.

AC: You’ve touched on this a little bit already, but what books in addition to the monastic texts and Woolman have been influential for you spiritually?

MB: I certainly have been enriched by the medieval mystical tradition. I mentioned Johannes Tauler. His teacher was Meister Eckhart. Their ideals for the spiritual life are very compelling. The English mystics: The Cloud of Unknowing, Julian of Norwich. The 12th Century saw a great time of the rise of the early Cistercians and the people around them. Guigo II, [who] was the Prior of the Grand Chartreuse, that’s the Carthusian order, wrote The Ladder of Paradise, or sometimes called The Ladder for Monks. It’s a description of lectio divina. The 12th Century was a great season for the mystical life: Bernard of Clairvaux, Isaac of Stella, Hildegard of Bingen in the Benedictine tradition. I love Hildegard’s poetry. The Carmelites: John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila. But also in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, the Hesychastic tradition, there is much to be discovered. The Philokalia is a beautiful text. It’s a collection of early Byzantine and monastic texts. [There’s also] John Cassian, who was a 5th century monastic writer that shaped the Western tradition for a long time. He has a lot to say about contemplative prayer. I have to mention as well his teacher Evagrius Ponticus, who has wonderful advice for exploring our interior life and looking for the patterns of those things that threaten to disturb the inward peace of the soul.

MB: Yes, there are several things that I’m working on, and I’m not sure which order they will come to fruition. As I mentioned earlier Jakob Boehme held out a vision of a very rich cosmos, and Quakers read him in just about all periods of Quaker history. I’m trying to discern what the gifts were that he held up for Quakers. I’m doing an exploration of him to try to see what [he might offer to our era]. I’ve been looking at some of his writings, most of which haven’t been translated since about the rise of early Quakerism, so I’m looking back at his 17th century German texts and playing with the thought of doing some translations that would put him into a contemporary idiom. So that’s one project. I think Jakob Boehme might help us to understand what some people call the kataphatic. Is that a term that you’re familiar with?

MB: Historians of Western spirituality often divide things, not terribly neatly, into two categories. There are spiritual practices that engage our capacity for imagination and reflection, and that’s kataphatic. It’s two Greek words lumped together that mean “in accordance with our capacity for language,” which would include imagery as well as thought. Then there is apophatic spirituality. Apophatic spirituality seeks to render our selves open, to cease, in so far as we can, this kind of endless machinery that’s going on in our head to produce ideas, to quiet the mind and quiet the heart so that we might experience divine presence afresh. So apophatic spirituality strives for a kind of imagelessness of the mind, beyond thoughts, beyond imaginations. Early Quakers do both of these things. So I think Jakob Boehme, with his kind of rich, imaginative world might somehow have scratched the kataphatic itch of early Quakers. I’m interested in how Quakers employ our capacity for imagining as a tool in the spiritual life.

I’m also interested in the apophatic dimension of Quaker spirituality. There’s a book that was read among Friends for a long, long time called The Guide to True Peace. It was collected from French and Spanish writers of the 17th Century, therefore Catholic writers, including François Fénelon, Jeanne Guyon, and Miguel de Molinos, all writing on a kind of apophatic prayer. Two Quakers, William Backhouse and James Janson, anonymously edited some of their writings in about 1813 and called it the The Guide to True Peace. It went through many printings throughout the 18th century, and then Howard Brinton brought it out again. I think it’s still in the catalogue of Pendle Hill publications. [Editor’s Note: This edition of The Guide to True Peace is, unfortunately, out of print.] I’d like to explore that piece of writing that might tell us how Quakers interacted with other traditions in their articulating an apophatic spiritual practice.

A third project I’m hoping to work on is looking at early Quaker letters of spiritual counsel. I have been a recipient of spiritual direction myself. I have been trained as a spiritual director and so do some practice in spiritual direction. To do that I had to learn from others, not from Friends. And I think Friends certainly practiced some kind of spiritual nurture. Most of it was face to face so we don’t have the record of that anymore. But we do have letters that they wrote. So I hope to do some exploration of early Quaker letters of spiritual counsel as a way of exploring what that form of spiritual nurture was among early Friends.

So those are three projects that may keep me busy for awhile. I’m testing them as leadings. I wont write about them until I feel clearer about a leading that way.

AC: Do you have any particular Friends in mind? I know Margaret Fell produced a huge body of work, but I’m sure there are many others.

MB: Yes. I’m particularly attracted to Margaret Fell. Her letters are just beautiful. We have this wonderful recent edition of her letters that Elsa Glines did entitled Undaunted Zeal, that came out in recent years. The letters that survive of her are of many sorts. Some of them are polemical, some of them are family letters, some are letters that engage in defending Quakers against others, some are letters to the monarch saying “help us out, we are being persecuted unjustly.” But many of her letters offer spiritual nurture. As I’ve been spending time with them I’ve just been finding them immensely rewarding. We also of course have George Fox, James Nayler, William Dewsberry. Isaac Penington is of course very rich as well, and he left letters of spiritual direction. So there’s a lot to choose from. But I also like Isaac Penington a great deal. I’m glad you mentioned Margaret Fell because I feel particularly attracted to her work, her letters are a particular treasure in our Quaker attic.

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Exploring the Attic of Church History: An Interview with Michael Birkel

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