 Quakers stop quaking? These days all meetings are executed in quiet contemplation, no quaking takes place.
David Yount, a Quaker, wrote an article in 2002 entitled, “Why Did the Quakers Stop Quaking?” The essay was prompted by an incident following a public lecture where Yount was challenged by a Pentecostal minister who suggested that Friends had lost touch with the fervour of their forbears when they ceased to quake. “I'm not good at thinking on my feet,” Yount wrote, “but I believe the response that popped into my head that day was pretty good. I suggested to him that Quakers stopped quaking when we stopped being persecuted.”
Bradford Kenney, a non-Quaker however believed that the opposite was true: “Quakers stopped quaking because they were persecuted, even imprisoned, for their wild ecstatic experiences.” And from what I can see, he is right. Quakers didn’t stop quaking when the persecution ended; they stopped quaking to end the persecution. The turnaround in the treatment of Quakers began with the Toleration Act of 1688, however the quaking had stopped many years before.
Richard Baxter was no friend of Quakerism and he wrote in 1664 that the persecution had all but stopped the quaking by then………….
At first they did use to fall into violent Tremblings and sometimes Vomitings in their meetings, and pretended to be violently acted by the Spirit; but now that is ceased, they only meet, and he that pretendeth to be moved by the Spirit speaketh; and sometimes they say nothing, but sit an hour or more in silence, and then depart.
But it was not just persecution that may have caused the cessation of quaking. There are indications that there was an intentional effort on the part of the second generation Quaker leadership to prohibit ecstatic behaviour and then to censure all reference to it from surviving manuscripts. As the movement grew and became more organized in the latter half of the 17th century, ecstatic experiences were increasingly seen by the leadership as an embarrassment.
These people were theologians and not mystics.
During a time of extremely repressed sexuality and puritanical beliefs, male Quakers experienced considerable discomfort about the effects the experience had on the body (particularly its sexual effects) and on its effects on women - women were the most likely to exhibit ecstatic behaviour.
Ministers and elders were advised to “avoid all imagined, unseasonable and untimely prophesying.” Next all travelling ministers were required to have certificates, something unheard of previously. And then there was the creation of the all-male Second-day’s Morning Meeting. This body was responsible for approving all publications issued by the society. The purpose of the organization, as revealed in its minutes, was to ensure that the Friends’ “weakness and nakedness may not be expressed in print to the whole world.”
Quaker forum – Internet
Encountering this material as a twenty-first–century Friend, I felt saddened and robbed of my spiritual heritage…….. Modern Quakerism is in many respects an invented tradition, constructed by the movement’s second generation in an attempt to replace a “corporeal, experiential spirituality with a rational, philosophical one". We are all the lesser for it.
One of the most blatant acts of censorship by Quaker leaders was the mysterious disappearance of Fox’s “Book of Miracles” shortly following his death. This account of the miraculous healings performed by Quakerism’s founder was not to emerge again until 1948, and then only in the form of a very incomplete reconstruction.
A number of people in the Quaker movement on understanding and reading of their spiritual heritage and what had been expunged and lost set about trying to recreate it in a ‘Quaker Revival movement’. This movement started in the twentieth century, but lasted only a short time…..
So effective was the revival in some quarters - whilst it lasted - that they had much the same experiences as their early predecessors……..
Quakerism is marked with trances, shaking (like convulsions), glossolalia, and visions, compar