The Friends Peace Testimony
as "Questing Beast"
Chel AveryCopyright © 1995 by Chel Avery. All rights reserved. Used by permission .
Introduction by Chuck Fager: This remarkable essay needs to be read in context. It was written in 1995 for the first of what has become a series of Quaker Peace Roundtables.
The 1995 Roundtable was sponsored by the Pendle Hill Issues Program, for which I was the coordinator. I asked Chel to prepare an overview of the Quaker Peace Testimony, because I was looking, quite frankly, for "new talent" and new thinking in the field.
This assignment was something of a gamble. Chel was then on Pendle Hill’s Hospitality and housekeeping staff, and had not been asked to do program presentations. But I knew she had a background in conflict resolution, and was aware of her exceptional intelligence and writing skill. So I asked Chel to prepare an overview of the Quaker Peace Testimony, in her own way, with only one condition: that she stick to the testimony and not get distracted by her experience in conflict resolution.
The gamble paid off. The approach to the Peace Testimony Chel took was fresh and insightful, and her many insights hold up well, even in the current situation, so different from 1995.
What, I hope you are asking, is a "Questing beast"? And what could such a thing possibly have to do with the Quaker Peace Testimony?
If you’re curious, then settle in and read on. What’s ahead is more than information; you’re in for a treat.
I want to explore some of the different ways Quakers understand and think about the peace testimony today, both as a tradition received from early Friends and as an important aspect of our personal and corporate experience of Quakerism in these times.
This presentation is not going to be about me or my story, but I'd like to start with some very brief background notes about where I come from and how I became interested in this question, so you can take into account my perspective on the subject.
I have been a Quaker and some sort of a peace activist for most of my adult life. The area where I have concentrated the largest part of my energies has been conflict management at the community level. Since 1986, I have been part of Friends Conflict Resolution Programs, which is a staffed committee of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. For five years, I was staff to that program.
One of the very curious things I learned about during my first few months as a Quaker "conflict response specialist" was the paradox in Quaker attitudes about conflict resolution. Friends are proud to offer this service to the world, and many people out there receive it gladly.
Many other people receive it gladly. The one category of community that was persistently reluctant to engage the services of a Quaker conflict resolution program was our own Monthly Meetings and other Quaker groups when they were in conflict.
It is a part of our Quaker culture that we don't like to acknowledge the conflict that we --as normal human beings--have conflicts with each other from time to time. Larry Ingle touched on this feature when he talked about how we have evolved into a decorous, respectable sort of people. A comment by another veteran Quaker peaceworker, Val Liveoak, puts it much more bluntly: she says we have "an addiction to niceness."
Whatever it is, Quakers not only resist dealing with our own conflicts, we often consider it an act of pernicious betrayal when another Friend brings one of our conflicts out into the open.
In the spring of 1994, the conflict resolution committee suggested to our yearly meetings planning committee that at our annual sessions this past summer we commemorate the anniversary of what we considered a really wonderful milestone in the internal peacemaking history of our yearly meeting. It was exactly 40 years ago that two earlier Philadelphia Yearly Meetings, one Orthodox and one Hicksite, were laid to rest, and in their place, after 128 years of division, was founded the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of today.
I, for one, am very grateful to those Friends of two generations past and to the ones who preceded them in laying the groundwork for this labor of reconciliation of which we are the beneficiaries.
The planning committee said no. They gave a variety of reasons, but the most strongly emphasized one was that they didnt want to upset any of those Friends who had resisted the reunification and might still find it a matter of pain and controversy, 40 years later.
This is the milieu of Quaker culture in which I have worked. I find it a curious thing about us, and I have looked for explanations that go beyond the mere fact that conflict avoidance is a common characteristic of white middle class cultureCwhich is what we mostly areCexplanations that have to do specifically with our Quakerness. And that search has led me to wonder about our relationship with our peace testimony, which we treasure so dearly.
Specifically, I wondered if the peace testimony has not become a brittle part of our faith--something that looms over us and that we desperately fear we cannot live up to, rather than something strong and resilient within us that we trust to go with us into times of disagreement and contention.
This idea did not come into my head all by itself. It started with something Sam Caldwell, then General Secretary of PYM, said to me a number of years ago, and which I've been chewing on ever since. He claimed that many modern activist Friends have a peace testimony that is syllogistically derived from the proposition that there is that of God in every person. If there is that of God in everyone, then to harm anyone is to harm something sacred, therefore violence is wrong. This is all fine and good, but it is a far cry from George Fox's saying, "I lived in the virtue of that life and power that took away the occasion of all wars." As I have interpreted Fox's words, at least until recently, he was saying that he had entered into a sort of relationship with the Divine by which he had been transformed into a peaceful person.
Now if there is one thing we know about George Fox, it is that this was a man who had few inhibitions about expressing his disagreements with others or venting his anger. Yet he seems to have claimed to be living in a condition that was free from the occasion of all wars. I began to wonder if our modern understanding of the peace testimony was a comparatively shallow and rigid one, one that prescribed what we must not do in terms of outward rules and reasoning rather than by inward understanding, and therefore left us unwilling to trust ourselves, and our inner guide, in situations of conflict.
So when Chuck Fager invited me to make a presentation at the Quaker Peace Roundtable, and then threw me totally off balance by telling me that I was not permitted to talk about conflict, I decided it was time to follow up on my questions about our peace testimony, and that is what I have been immersing myself in for the past several months. What do we think the peace testimony is? What does it tell us to do or not to do? Where do we believe it comes from? What is its opposite? And where does that come from?
In addition to burying my nose in books, I wanted to hear what everyday Friends in 1995 would say about those same questions. For a couple of months, I grabbed every Quaker who crossed my path and said, "Help me out here. Pretend I know nothing. Tell me about the peace testimony."
Then I went on-line, and I posted the following question in five different on-line Quaker message centers:
Do YOU have a peace testimony? If a non-Friend were to ask you "why" you/Friends have a Peace Testimony, and what it is, what would you say?
I can't tell you how many people responded, because there were a variety of ways those responses came in with varying degrees of identifiability. Some people e-mailed me more than once, and sometimes people sent me copies, or I made copies, of relevant posts that were not direct responses to my query. I believe I heard from somewhere between 50 and 70 Friends or near-Friends, including those in the U.S., New Zealand, Canada, England, Scotland and Norway.
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