They Were Holy Fools

by Hye Sung

I am not white enough to be a Quaker.

But I cannot deny how Quakerism has informed my theology and my spirituality.

I was attracted to Quakerism because of the radical legacy of the first generation of Friends. As far as I can tell, being a Quaker used to mean something. Quakers were a threat to the state. They were jailed and tortured. In the first thirty-five years of Quaker history, one in three Friends experienced some form of state-sanctioned persecution. Entire meetings were imprisoned. But new meetings kept appearing. And growing.

State repression couldn't force these Friends to abandon their faith. They knew God experimentally, and they couldn't help but live into their vision for an ocean of light and love.

They were holy fools.

They indulged in Spirit-led performance art such as “going naked as a sign” or wearing sackcloth and ashes while proclaiming judgment on the rich and powerful. They sometimes marched into church services mid-homily and argued with the priests, declaring the churches apostate "steeplehouses." Friends wouldn't keep quiet about what they saw – the hypocritical destruction of empire and the complicity of religion. They believed their words were given them by the Spirit. They couldn't keep quiet.

Sometimes, people listened.

When I first read about Friends, their fire felt familiar. Through their stories, I stumbled into a wider and deeper theological imagination that matched the God I'd already fallen in love with – the God who loves me. Apocalyptic. Pentecostal. Apostolic. Insurrectionary.

But then I came into the Religious Society of Friends and realized things weren't what I'd been led to expect from my readings of Fox, Fell, and Nayler. The corporate experience of the Spirit seemed faint. Instead of a community that formed disciples, revolutionaries, and martyrs, I found mostly comfortable white people who seemed to believe in a kind of "ethical capitalism." I didn't fit in. I wasn't "educated" enough. My opinions were "divisive."

People were polite about it, but I was definitely pushed out. They would argue that I left.

The truth is that I was drawn to an apocalyptic community, and even though I didn't find it, there's this unrelenting thread of Quakerism that keeps showing up – in how I dream, in how I worship, in my call to provoke the powers and principalities.

The structures of contemporary Quakerism failed me, but still I found something true in Quakerism.

Early Friends did not "restore" the true church, and they didn't bring God's kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. But Friends did offer us a taste of what might yet still come. The Quaker vision of "the Lamb's War" teaches me what is possible for followers of Christ even in this age. Lewis Benson writes, "The Lamb’s war, as the Quakers saw it, was not a contest between two types of institutional Christianity, but a fight to the finish between institutional Christianity and non-institutional Christianity."

Non-institutional Christianity isn't necessarily Quaker. It's not even necessarily Christian. Instead, our faithfulness might be measured by our shared commitment to the movement of God's liberatory love in this world.

Because God loves people. And this is God's commandment, that we love one another.

This is what early Friends knew, this is why they were radicals – there is no greater love than to risk your life for your friends. They wanted to be Jesus' friends, so they took this command seriously. As serious as life.

Let us love one another.