Do Not Be Like a Horse or a Mule

“I will instruct you and teach you the way you should go;
I will counsel you with my eye upon you.
Do not be like a horse or a mule, without understanding;
whose temper must be curbed with bit and bridle,
else it will not stay near you.”
(Psalm 32:9-10, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)

I’ve occasionally met Quakers—perhaps you will recognize the type—who gladly tell you they felt drawn to the Religious Society of Friends because “we don’t have any priests telling us how to live our lives, we’re free to do what we want.” I grew up in the Roman Catholic Church, so I understand that sentiment, but I can’t say I’ve ever particularly shared it.

Don’t get me wrong; I appreciate the opportunity to experience communion with the Divine without priestly intercession. And I can see how people who went through churches that established elaborate sets of rules one must follow perfectly to maintain “a personal relationship with God” would find the simplicity of a Quaker meeting liberating. But I don’t have much patience, personally, for “we’re free to do what we want,” especially when it starts to drift towards “we can invent our own morality” or “we are accountable only to ourselves.”

I should unpack that a bit further. 

Should anyone ask, I usually describe myself as a moral particularist, believing that we need to understand the context of a given action before we can assess its moral value. I learned that from the philosopher Jonathan Dancy, who offered a helpful explanation on a late night talk show once: We generally agree that we should help people, he said, but “suppose you’re walking down the street and you see someone breaking into a car… You don’t say, ‘Let me help you out there!’” Or, to take a famous literary example, we believe that stealing is wrong—but when we read or watch Les Misérables, we understand why Jean Valjean broke the bakery window and took the loaves of bread for his sister’s children.

Still, I wouldn’t call that “inventing our own morality,” and the reason why has to do with my participation in Quakerdom. Friends do, after all, have something like a shared understanding that guides their actions in this world. We don’t always embrace the same principles from one meeting to the next, or even within the same meeting, but for the most part we would not argue with Jesus’s answer to the question “Which commandment is the first of all?”

“The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”  

Let’s acknowledge that not all contemporary Quakers identify themselves as Christians.

We have a wide range of ideas about God, too—including whether to refer to God or Spirit or the Divine or somesuch. Whatever we call it, though, we do tend to agree that we should love it with all our heart and so on and so forth, and that we can express that love by loving “that of God” in our neighbors. Or, as the late twentieth-century American theologian William Stringfellow put it, “Witness to the faith means loving and serving the world.”

As “citizens” of the Beloved Community, we have freedom, yes—the freedom to figure out how to obey those two commandments. Luckily for us, if we seek guidance, God will gladly provide as much help as we need. “Let me teach you, instruct you the way you should go,” God says in Robert Alter’s translation of the 32nd Psalm. Ultimately, though, God wants us to uphold the obligations we have in our covenantal relationship out of sincere love, rather than fearful compulsion. We should not require a metaphorical bit and bridle to steer us down the path of righteousness. We should walk that path willingly, confident that God has our back with every step.

“Christians are free to enter into the depths of the world’s existence with nothing to offer the world but their own lives,” Stringfellow wrote in the aptly titled Free in Obedience: 

“And this is to be taken literally. What the Christian has to give to the world is his very life… It is in exercising this ultimate freedom in her involvement in the world that the Christian also understands how to use whatever else is at her disposal—money, status, technical abilities, professional training, or whatever else—as sacraments of the gift of her own life.”

Replace the word “Christian” with “Friend,” and I think you’ve got a pretty good (and nearly universally acceptable) idea of the Quaker project.