How can we Keep from Singing?

“Hope is a choice that we make each day” -Head of School, Ramaalah Friends School

“My Dungeon Became a Palace”

A tradition Thomas Budd entered through death would find voice in those who followed. When George Fox was dragged into Carlisle prison in 1653, a jailer beat him brutally with a cudgel. Fox’s response was not silence or rage but song. “I was made to sing in the Lord’s power,” says Fox The furious jailer summoned a fiddler to drown him out, but Fox’s spiritual singing overpowered that instrument also – until the fiddler fled in shame.

This was never felt as a lonely or isolated ecstasy. It was pattern. It is a pattern to resist.

William Dewsbury, imprisoned for his faith, declared his filthy dungeon a “palace” where he sang continuous praises. Thomas Briggs wrote in his 1685 journals that cast into a bleak cell, he was so filled with divine presence that he “sung for joy.” When William Robinson and Marmaduke Stephenson—the Boston Martyrs—were led to the gallows in 1659, they marched hand-in-hand singing glorious praises to their Puritan executioners.

Fox later clarified the Friends’ understanding: “Now friends, who have denied the world’s songs and singing; sing ye in the spirit, and with grace, making melody in your hearts to the Lord.” This was not the formal psalm-singing of established churches, which early Friends rejected as inauthentic—mouthing David’s words without David’s condition. It was extemporaneous, spirit-led, generated directly from the crucible of suffering.

Solomon Eccles, a London musician who converted to Quakerism, dramatized this distinction by burning his instruments and music books in a public bonfire in 1659. Yet in his 1667 tract A Music-lector, he acknowledged that Friends approved of “the Musick that pleaseth God”—the unmediated song of the spirit. Richard Farnworth, one of Fox’s earliest converts, likewise distinguished between diversionary music and the natural outpouring of praise.

The question that trembles beneath this history: What music rises from the prison house? And what does it do to those who hear it?

III. A Knock at the Door

This historic intersection of Quakerism, torture, and song finds contemporary expression in British composer Sally Beamish’s A Knock at the Door, commissioned by Quaker Concern for the Abolition of Torture (Q-CAT). The choral work uses two contrasting choirs—one representing detainees, the other interrogators—to explore how torture fractures human souls. Near the end, the choirs reverse roles; victims become oppressors, and the boundaries blur.

Beamish said the commission was “profoundly uncomfortable,” adding: “An important factor was to emphasize that torture causes deep and lasting damage both to the victim and to the perpetrator, and that all humans are vulnerable to finding themselves in circumstances where they might become either victim or oppressor.”

Juliet Morton of Q-CAT extended this: “Torture encompasses much more than the victims and the perpetrators due to its illegal nature—structures of the nation become warped because of the involvement of judges, doctors, guards and so on. We want to raise concern for the spiritual and mental welfare of the perpetrators of torture, and those in the chain of command, as they too are damaged to the core of their being by its use.”

This is a distinctively Quaker insight: violence does not merely harm the victim; it warps the soul of the perpetrator and the society that condones it. The same Spirit that made early Friends sing in dungeons compels modern Friends to compose, perform, and bear witness through art that refuses to separate the political from the spiritual.

In Medford, New Jersey, at the TriQuarter FQA Art Show, seventeen artists and nine performers recently gathered under the theme “Growing in Compassion.” A new band called Creedless debuted. The gathering embodied what Friends have long known: that art-making in community is itself a form of testimony—to peace, simplicity, integrity. The photographs by Blair Seitz capture something essential: celebration and support woven together, a foretaste of the beloved community.

Jacob’s Rock

Jacob Hoopes was not singing when he threw a rock through the window of an ICE building on June 14th. The night was pure chaos. Harms and mistakes prosper in these scenes. Over a hundred people choking on clouds of flash grenades and tear gas, many pushing back against federal agents. The confrontation followed a citywide “No Kings” protest that had drawn thousands. Local news captured a “ghastly scene.”

Jacob was photographed that night providing first aid to an injured protester—an image the prosecution did not include in its case. He was later identified through facial recognition software. The FBI obtained his personal information from a Reed College safety officer who violated institutional policy and was subsequently fired. A SWAT team arrived at his house. Over zealous passion often spills more blood.

In pleading guilty, Jacob took personal responsibility. He admitted that throwing rocks at federal agents was morally wrong. He also recognized what the prosecutor omitted from her narrative: the larger scene of what ICE agents were doing, the assaults on protesters, the context that makes a rock in the hand of a young activist something other than simple criminal violence.

The judge who sentenced him spoke of his resilience. “You will be okay,” she consoled. The observer who recorded this moment for Western Friend wrote: “This faux-parental pat on the back disgusted me.” They connected it to Omar El-Akkad’s critique in the film SUMUD—how the rhetoric of resiliency is deployed to minimize harms inflicted on Palestinians. There is nothing kind in State Violence and oppression. Gaslit suffering doesn’t offer peace to survivors of state violence everywhere. The judge invoked an “empirically false but politically potent rationale of deterrence,” claiming a public good expected activists who crossed a line from peaceful protest to face serious consequences.