Towards a Quaker view of work?

 

Quaker Oats advertisement from The Strand magazine

Quaker Oats have nothing to do with Quakers, apart from being an occasional source of annoyance. But an advertisement which labels Quaker Oats as "the work food" and tells readers sternly "You have your work to do" plays into the Protestant work ethic that has, at times, played a part in Quaker thinking. For instance this quotation from Quaker John Bellers in 1714 is still in Quaker Faith and Practice and I've heard it quoted on numerous occasions:
"The poor without employment are like rough diamonds, their worth is unknown."

The more I look at that line, torn from its context for present-day edification, the stranger it seems. Why is the worth of the poor specifically only known if they are employed? And by whom does it have to be known? In the early 18th century when he wrote those words John Bellers would have been well acquainted with Jesus' teaching in the Sermon on the Mount as given in Matthew's gospel:

"Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they? ...

"Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin:

"And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." (Matt. 6, 26, 28-9)

But John Bellers was part of a world that was very concerned with idleness - especially the idleness of those who were forced to depend on the charity of others. His scheme for providing poor Quakers with flax to spin, at home or in prison, led to other plans including for a College of Industry which never came into being, and a Quaker workhouse, which did. From 1702 the fifty-six "Friends and Orphans" who lodged there were kept busy with various kinds of manual labour, although the boys were taught to read, write and keep accounts. They were also fed a decent diet including bread, meat and beer and kept clean by the provision of cold baths.

Bellers' statement about the poor stands out because there is so little in Quaker Faith and Practice about the experience of being employed. By comparison, a great deal is included about Quaker businesses and business ethics - from the point of view of those who own, run and invest in them. But many people and many Quakers today engage and struggle with the world of work as employees. Even more live valuable lives outside paid employment - and if we really believe in "that of God" in everyone, this might also help us to see the value in the work people do, whether it is paid or not.

When I was having a tough time at work I looked through Quaker Faith and Practice to see if there was any help to be found there. I didn't find much. It helped to told not to lower my standard of integrity but not what to do if I saw a lack of integrity in some of the things that were done by those in charge at my place of work. Bosses often present a false picture of themselves and their work to the world, particularly under the stressed conditions of a competitive market place. This seemed at times to compromise my own attempts at "strict integrity."

And how about bullying, inequality and injustice? These are commonplace in many workplaces today and Quakers are both subject to these and lookers on. It would help to find advice on how to respond and how to stand with those fellow employees who are having a hard time. Not all jobs are rewarding in any way other than in providing the employee with pay. Much work is experienced, with justification, as mere drudgery. When many people (including Quakers) are in precarious jobs we are all in need of useful, ethical and spiritually-informed advice to help us navigate the world in which we live. It's good to read the kind of over-arching vision that Quakers more than a hundred years ago articulated when looking towards a new social order but it would be helpful to accompany this with a sense of how to deal with the realities of daily life until and in order that such a vision might be achieved.

Quakers can easily be tempted to place higher value on the rich and those in well-rewarded jobs than those who earn little or nothing - as though money really was the key to understanding individual wealth. The history of poor Quakers is less recorded than the history of rich ones which is a shame. As a society we probably have more knowledge of the thoughts and spiritual insights of Quakers who owned and traded in slaves, or profited indirectly through slavery, than of how Quaker paupers, labourers and servants understood their faith. This is a considerable loss and it would be a greater shame if we continued to neglect the insights of those less valued in the world beyond our Society. 

I wonder if it's possible to separate the idea of what constitutes work from ideas that connect wealth and income with status. Work might then consist not just of something that gains a transfer of money into a bank account but might also cover housework and other domestic chores, planting a garden, cooking a meal, caring for a child or other dependent, listening to a neighbour, running an errand. It might even include activities that have no worldly value but are spiritually nourishing or simply make life seem worthwhile. Someone might work by listening to music, going for a run, playing a game with others or observing with pleasure something in the neighbourhood - a tree, a flower, a bird or a fine design on a house or wall. Could we really challenge the values of the contemporary world so far?

I don't think we can do any of this without a lot of serious listening - the kind of listening that turns many preconceived values and assumptions upside down. Instead of listening to the practised words of bosses and owners, we need to make space to hear those whose work is not so highly valued and those who have been taught not to recognize what they do as work as all. I don't know if this is possible in the Religious Society of Friends but I'd like to think that it is.

Quaker Mother and Child by Horace Pippin c.1935-40 

Quaker Mother and Child | RISD Museum 

Money, time and something else

The website for Quakers in Britain includes a section on giving.  It indicates two ways in which members of the Religious Society of Friends can contribute to Quaker work: by giving money or by giving time. Both money and time are useful and can be used well. But there are many people who have neither time nor money to spare and there's a risk that such people may come to feel they have nothing to offer the wider Quaker community - and that the Quaker community as a whole may forget what those without time and money actually provide.

Many people in Britain have less than no money. They are in debt. This isn't their fault. We live in a system where debt is a way of life. Some kinds of debt are respectable, even among Quakers who can be quite critical of debt. A mortgage is a debt. A student loan is a debt, although a debt that may never be repaid. A bank loan that underwrites a business venture is a debt. 

The debts that people working in insecure low-paid jobs or relying on benefits tend to be smaller but it's much harder to get by when these debts are incurred. Many people who have incurred debts through poverty or crisis find themselves working extra hours in an attempt to reduce of pay off the debt. These people often have caring responsibilities or illness or disabilities as well. They can't offer Quakers time or money but they are just the people we should welcome in our Meetings and as members. They have much to teach the wealthier and more fortunate people in our community. 

Some of what we might learn is purely practical. The book of  Pam Lunn's 2011 Swarthmore Lecture, Costing not less than everything, includes the following passage:
    "In the town where I live the local climate change action group recently had an interactive exhibition. ... I spent about three hours there, helping visitors use a simple online carbon footprint calculator. The people who were showing low carbon emissions and coming very close to one-planet living (in carbon terms) were the poor - people unemployed or on low incomes, with whole families living in small houses, in what many of us would regard as over-crowded conditions. I was surprised at how low some of their carbon footprints were. ... I don't regard my own home as luxurious, or my lifestyle as affluent - but on a global scale they most certainly are."

That passage is a useful reminder, and not just that poorer people in Britain may be doing less harm to the planet than the majority of Quakers. It's an uncomfortable reminder that Quakers are, by and large, affluent and liable to be surprised that poor people might set a good example. And while the paragraph draws back from suggesting that the author is herself living an affluent lifestyle in a luxurious home in local terms, that is precisely what her example suggests. If there were more people in our Meetings setting a good material example by their low carbon footprint because of their relative poverty, and if their example were valued, admired and followed, they would provide something of worth to the community of Quakers as a whole.

I think we sometimes pay too much attention to those who are able to offer time and money to Quakers, and too little attention to those among us who struggle and lack both. Because we don't have a paid priesthood, we depend on those who can afford to donate time to Quaker work and perhaps also to those whose money can fund Quaker projects. Of course their time and money is a useful and generous gift. But just as we worry about big donors to political parties wielding undue influence and power, we need to be concerned that big donors to Quakers (in terms of time as well as money) might exert too much influence on the decisions and direction of the Society. Those who possess spare time and money are often those whose life experience has been limited. There is a difference between observing need (even when we respond to it) and actually experiencing need.

There is no single experience of poverty and need. People who are poor or in need are complete, fully-rounded human beings. Each of them has something individual and specific to offer us, should they wish to join us at Meeting or become a member of the Religious Society of Friends. Each has particular spiritual insights. We can learn at least as much from those who lack time and money as from those who have both in abundance.

watercolour from the commonplace book of Quaker Elizabeth Clay

Where are the poor Quakers?

 Why are Quakers so wealthy?

Not all Quakers are wealthy. Some are poor, subsisting on benefits or working for low wages in the gig economy. Some struggle to make ends meet. But the overwhelming impression given by Quakers in Britain as a whole is of people who are, for the most part, comfortably off and who don't suffer from the day-to day money struggles that affect a large proportion of the British population. So what went wrong?

Quakers are, as our Advices and Queries make plain, a faith group with Christian roots. And the Bible, which Quakers are still advised to read, is not a book that sides with the rich. Jesus' teachings are quite clear: he brings good news to the poor and warns his followers not to lay up for themselves treasures on earth. Yet Quakers often seem quite proud of the wealth that Quaker businesses - the breweries, the banks, the chocolate factories - have created. By the mid-19th century, according to Elizabeth Isichei's research, the average Quaker was three times as wealthy as the average British citizen. I don't find that a cause for pride.

Once any group starts becoming rich it's also liable to start being defensive about its wealth. In religious groups this can be labelled the reward of providence of the gift of God. Surely we don't think like that any more. Surely we know that wealth - including Quaker wealth - was achieved in some dodgy ways. Even Quakers who didn't "own" enslaved people or take part in colonial wars reaped the benefits of a system of empire-building, war and slavery.

Wealth has other corrupting influences. It's not just that, as the Sermon on the Mount says, moth and rust will corrupt, and thieves break through and steal. It teaches people to protect themselves from any association with poor people and poverty - unless that association is one in which the rich can congratulate themselves on doing good to and instructing the poor. Separation between rich and poor becomes central to a way of life.

In the 1860s many Quaker missions had been set up. These were not based on the equality of all that we attempt today in Quaker Meetings, where anyone can minister (unless and until eldered). They included Bible readings, singing and preaching to the poor. By the end of the 1860s there were roughly as many people regularly attending Quaker missions as there were attending Quaker Meetings for Worship. The suggestion was made that Quaker Mission members should be admitted to membership of the Religious Society of Friends - though perhaps there should be a second-class, inferior kind of membership especially for them.

The proposal to admit Mission members to Quaker membership created much discussion among Friends. In 1869 Quaker Robert Barclay, in a widely-published speech, asked:

 "Do you wish to invite chimney-sweepers, costermongers, or even blacksmiths, to dinner on First Day? Do you intend to give their sons and daughters a boarding-school education? Do you intend to save the country the expense of supporting them when out of work, and give them a sort of prescriptive right to a maintenance – a right apart from the simple personal, individual act of Christian charity?"

The speech went on to explain that it would be wrong to ask labouring men to take time away from their labours so that they could attend the business Meetings in which the direction of the Society was determined. (He didn't mention labouring women because women were, at that time, excluded from such Meetings.) And he went on and on and on:

"There is the crossing-sweeper! He is a Christian; will you reject him from Christ’s visible church? He has the same Lord, the same baptism, the same faith, the same God. He will go to the same heaven as you. He will sit down at the marriage-supper of the Lamb. Nay, he may occupy a higher place in heaven than you. No, you cannot, as professing Christians, refuse to welcome him as one who Christ is not ashamed to call his brother and if you are ashamed  to do so, be very sure he will at the last day be ashamed of you before the angels of God.

           "You cannot refuse him that Christian communion, that  loving Christian sympathy and religious instruction which you desire your own child should enjoy. But is that any reason you should introduce him to what is religiously valueless, and invite him to dinner, and encourage your daughter to associate with him in her civil or social capacity? Is it any reason why you should give him a boarding-school education, which will help him to become one of the queen’s ministers? Are not these things beyond the functions of a Christian church? Must they not necessarily limit the mission of a church of Christ?"

That distinction, between wealthy Quakers and the faithful poor, was the view that prevailed. There is an absence of poor and working-class people among Quakers today because Quakers decided - perhaps by default rather than active decision - to exclude them from the Society. So today we have wealth  but are impoverished in diversity. There is important ministry that we may therefore fail to hear.

Tender Sympathy

 

"As we enter with tender sympathy into the joys and sorrows of each other's lives, ready to give help and receive it ..."

That's how it's supposed to be - and that's the experience of quite a number of Quakers. But the experience isn't universal. There are many reasons for this. Sometimes there are personality clashes - even bitter disagreements - or just a nagging dislike that lies below the surface of attempts at friendship and understanding. We're not perfect after all.

But what of those occasions when the barrier to "tender sympathy" isn't something as simple as a personality clash? What if differences of culture and life experience lie at the root of difference? Quakers aren't immune to that difficulty - and there are particular problems because the current Quaker demographic in Britain is largely white, comfortably off and middle-class. There are historic reasons for this, some of which might discomfit Quakers today.

For people in the majority or dominant group it's not always easy to share life experiences, especially troubling experiences that may have been a crucial element of a continuing spiritual journey. But at least when experiences are shared there's a fair expectation that many of the listeners will have a shared sense of the kind of life in which those experiences happened. It's usual, for instance, to assume a norm of financial stability and being respected while never being racially abused and only very rarely (when taking part in non-violent action) being stopped and searched by the police.

That shared norm makes tender sympathy quite easy. The listeners will respond with their own similar or parallel experiences and the end of spiritual sharing will be a closer sense of shared identity. It's like being part of of a big family. No wonder many people talk about their arrival among Quakers as "coming home." And no wonder that for quite a few people it isn't like that at all.

Quakers tend to listen respectfully to whatever you tell them. Quakers work hard at listening - except when they're busy talking, which also happens quite a lot. But if you tell a group of people whose life experiences are very different from your own - particularly if you come from a group that is accustomed to mild contempt or worse from white, middle-class people - sharing your deepest experiences doesn't feel nearly so comfortable. You might decide to do it anyway - after all they are nice people - but they probably don't get it. What you receive doesn't feel so much like the "tender sympathy" of equals. It feels like the slightly condescending response of a teacher or social worker or magistrate who has read a few books about your way of life but doesn't know what it actually feels like. If you're really unlucky, they may offer advice - because they've read books so they reckon they know what your life is all about.

None of this is done out of unkindness or ill-will and somehow that makes it worse. Suppose you went to Meeting for Worship - kept going to Meeting for Worship - and it was the best and deepest spiritual experience of your life. But when Meeting was over you found yourself in a group of people who were comfortable together but just slightly awkward and condescending around you. 

Would you stay or would you go?