A Sacred Space for Argument

At my long-time employer, we came up with a motto: “Life’s too short for bad maps.” We tried to live by that; we tried to do good work. I still do. I don’t always succeed, but it’s a big part of what makes my paid work as a mapmaker satisfying to me.

Quakers talk about integrity in a variety of ways—honesty, fair dealing, not swearing oaths, plainspokenness—but seldom in terms of what engineers mean when they speak of structural integrity, to describe a construction that continues to function even under stresses from a variety of angles. But this to me is the key to integrity: the sense of coherence and holding together. Integrity is, in essence, the central value of good work—work that has been tested to bear its intended load, to put it in engineering terms.

When I’ve witnessed Friends come under the weight of a leading, I am struck by how we often support only part of that leading: we witness and acknowledge the strength of what we might call moral certainty. It’s a kind of passion, and to witness someone under that kind of passion has given me a lot of respect for its strength.

But passion is not craft or skill. It’s essential, but it’s not everything. And that passion, the burning urgency of the leading’s pull, often makes people impatient: the world is aflame right now, and we must form a bucket brigade right now if we are to save lives and lessen pain. Sometimes that is exactly what’s needed. But a lot of the time we also need to develop our skills by testing and improving our ability to do good work, individually and collectively.

We ask queries to discern our relationship to the Divine and our faithfulness to Right Order, to which our Society was called and then formed to bring about. Do we wrestle in our discernment? Do we encourage participants to develop the skill and experience of wrestling not to win but to get closer to a truth with structural integrity?

I go back to a 2007 interview with guitarist Leo Kottke on Minnesota Public Radio, particularly to a section where he talks about inspiration and practice. He believes very much in inspiration. For him, the music just comes: the tune, the chord progressions, the words to a song. “It’ll catch you if you’re there for it,” he explains, “and then it’s got you and you follow it . . . and you wait for something else to happen.” And so practice—the time he spent developing his craft—is the framework that gets him prepared. Kottke describes it as developing “a relationship with the experience, not with the guitar, but with the experience of connecting with this thing, wherever it is.” I think of a skilled catcher in baseball, holding up their catcher’s mitt, ready to catch the baseball as it comes in from the pitcher’s mound. The inspiration is not enough. You need the practiced ability to catch the ball.

How can we do that within our spiritual tradition? In “Truth as a Moving Target on a Local Train” (FJ Dec. 2011), Richard M. Kelly recounts a journey decades earlier. He observed two Jewish men on a train disputing over the Talmud: one spoke French, the other German, and they were arguing over a text in Hebrew. Kelly himself knew none of these languages, and in the moment he considered it an exercise in futility. Over time though, he came to realize that he had observed their discussion through the lens of seeing the Word as “fixed, eternal, unchanging”: an already complete thing to be sought out. He now realizes that arguing in love—of wrestling, as with Jacob and the angel—was itself a kind of sacredness, which we often miss in our Quaker life.

Wrestling is not my usual modus operandi. I didn’t grow up a sports kid, certainly not a wrestler, and avoided arguments with my angry father, who wanted to be right before the argument had even started. I don’t think my dad entirely got the friendly competition aspect of why people play games. When I play Scrabble with friends, I like playing to win. But I also like playing a good game with great words and scores. Indeed, I think that comes first. Our friendship frames the competition, not the other way around. Not only is winning not the only thing, but it’s also way less important than the joys of us having a good experience, measuring ourselves against each other, and admiring each other. This is maybe what people mean by sportsmanship: the two tennis players going at it and, in the end, meeting at the net with the satisfaction of a well-played game they have shared. 

The point of discernment among Friends is a commitment to the shared goal of seeking God’s will (however you translate that idea: I generally say “what is wanted” or “what is needed”). We ask queries to discern our relationship to the Divine and our faithfulness to Right Order, to which our Society was called and then formed to bring about. Do we wrestle in our discernment? Do we encourage participants to develop the skill and experience of wrestling not to win but to get closer to a truth with structural integrity?

When I mentioned an earlier version of this essay to another Friend last summer, comparing moral certainty and integrity, he suggested that I was missing a third element: love. And he was right. I’d go further and say that in seeking truth with integrity, we need to carry particular loves with us: Do we love the question? Do we love the idea of a better answer? Are we willing to follow an answer that surprises us? Do we love the others who are also wrestling alongside us?

The hardest part of this idea, I think, comes from the fact that moral wrongs aren’t theoretical: we feel them deeply. Injustice and cruelty are painful to watch (for most of us anyway; sociopathy is very much a thing). That pain goads us onward to action, to a sense of urgency. We don’t want to spend the time learning a craft, or wrestling, or discerning. The world is on fire, and if we don’t form part of the firefighting team, who will?

Earlier this year, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement forces descended on my hometown of Minneapolis and have been assaulting, arresting, and even killing people. The sense of urgency has been high. The people of Minneapolis dropped whatever else they were doing in order to record and protest, accompanying at-risk residents, especially immigrants. They have been doing what they can: loving their neighbors with a fervency and urgency we’re not used to . . . and really weren’t hoping for. The fire really is burning. The buckets are being passed down the line with purpose.

I see other causes grabbing my fellow Friends: climate change, racism, a greed-centered economy, militarism, and our history with people whose ancestors were here in 1491. I’m not suggesting any of these be put on the shelf and forgotten. But we must remember that they are marathons and not just sprints. And in that regard, spending the time to build, wrestle, and argue with integrity is as much part of our sacred work as not waiting. How can we do that?

Probably the single greatest source that historical Friends used to test and wrestle was Scripture. Biblical literacy and the printing press helped make Quakerism possible. People could read and argue about the text for themselves, and they did. For most of our history, and for most of today’s professed followers of George Fox and company, testing our leadings and our inspiration against the words of the Old and New Testaments has been central.

For Liberal (and many Conservative) Friends like those I keep company with, this test is not as central. For nontheist (or “not-quite-sure-ist”) Friends like me, it’s even more of a struggle. What is it that we are arguing with? A lot of us have brought in theories and visions from outside. For me, it’s mostly specific works of fiction that have grabbed me and transformed my world. I use these stories as lodestars. Others bring in frameworks from antiracist, feminist, anti-capitalist, and decolonialist thinkers. But without a common foundation to argue on top of, we are often left untethered from one another. Not being tied to Scripture feels (and is) freeing to a lot of people, but there is this side effect. We can’t wrestle with the truth like those two Orthodox Jews on the train in Kelly’s story if we don’t share a passion in the same way they share passion about the Talmud.

Also, we are often scared of hurting other people. We want to be supportive, and arguing doesn’t feel supportive. But when I get together every week with two non-Quaker friends to argue (and sing), that’s exactly what it is. We leave feeling like the foundation under us is shored up. And that’s because of what my Friend said: we are wrestling not to win but out of love, and to make our own truth more secure and structurally sound.

And so for me the big open task is how we might make a sacred space for argument. What does that look like? We could bring scripturalism back to the center, but I fear for many of us that cat is out of the bag. Too many of us have grounded our hearts and our souls on other words and ideas.

This is what I want in my Quaker communities: this sense that we are each working, and collectively working, on a better model of how we can be together in love. I want to know that we can argue and also give each other the strength to argue. 

One of the basic things we can do is claim and present our own sacred foundations, and work to respect those foundations in others. I don’t mean this in the arms-length, analytical “respect” that “comparative religion” often implies. Too much argument about what we call religious belief ends up as trying to prove one another wrong. This was the central barrier in trying to reach through to my dad, the angry arguer. I still believe he made a lot of mistakes, like anyone living in their own head as much as he did. I wanted to offer alternatives, and to wrestle with them, but it was very hard not to get drawn instead into the kind of argument where someone needed to win and someone needed to lose.

How do we get past this apparent need to come out of an argument with a winner and a loser? It’s so common, in religious and non-religious contexts both.

I make maps for a living, so that’s the metaphor I often come back to: I try to make “better maps” my central goal, rather than “winning” at maps. I try not to care if a good map has my name on it. I think two things are key for whatever project we are embarked on: the desire to be headed toward better, more complete understanding, and a sense that we are engaged in collective work. It is my experience that we often discover that we can join together to do common work out of what we are each already doing. We are all, one way or another, already working on different parts of the same thing. We just need to see it that way.

This is what I want in my Quaker communities: this sense that we are each working, and collectively working, on a better model of how we can be together in love. I want to know that we can argue and also give each other the strength to argue. We can find sacredness in doing work, good work, together and seeking to make that work strong and resilient. Because goodness knows, based on reading (and living through) the news these days, we’re never going to stop needing that.