Have you ever struggled to keep the expectations of others while walking your personal walk in the Light?  Have you ever been told something isn’t Christian or isn’t Quakerly, and you secretly thought that this was silly.

Our two replicas of Edward Hicks paintings are representative of his effort to do just this.

Edward Hicks was born in 1780 just prior to a large split in the Quaker denomination, the split that ended us with the Friends General Council who have only open or silent meetings and what became more orthodox meetings like Friends United Meeting which are mostly programmed meetings, with those like our own being a mix of the two.  It was called the Hicksite split, named for Edward Hicks’s cousin, Elias Hicks.  And this split upset all of Quakerdom. Edward Hicks, the painter, was dedicated to bringing peace to the discord in the Quaker denomination.

Edward Hicks was born Episcopalian, but his mother died when he was a small child, and he went to live with a Quaker family.  The belief among Quakers at the time was that only plain walls and plain buildings were acceptable. Decoration and art were frowned upon. The idea was that only plain walls and plain buildings didn’t offer distraction from the spirit of worship. A silent calm Quakers tried to create all of the time.  Creating such distractions such as painting was considered a sin.  This included decorating buggies.  Edward Hicks, a budding artist, was sent from his Quaker home as a young man to apprentice with a buggy designer and fellow artist who made very ostentatious  designs for buggies.  Edward Hicks was a great painter of these buggies and became proficient in creating eye-catching designs in a world where the idea was to not catch the eye of others but be very discreet.  He loved to paint, but he also loved being a Quaker.  So he was caught between two worlds, one of creativity and expression and one of simplicity and plainness. How could he marry his love of art with his Quaker beliefs?

Then his cousin Elias creates a huge divide in the Quaker world, saying among other things that what God reveals to human beings is as divine as what is written in the Bible, a thought that goes back to the sixth century.  Because most schools were Presbyterian, those who followed Elias Hicks, called Hicksites, also homeschooled their children.  It arose as a huge stir.  It was the first and biggest divide to happen in Quaker history.  Edward loved peace. He asked himself how to use his skill for art to express his religious beliefs of peace, and these Peaceable Kingdom paintings are the outcomes of such questions.

Edward Hicks became a traveling minister promoting peace and speaking at different Quaker meetings against the discord his cousin was causing and other forms of unpeace in the Quaker communities.  Edward wanted to somehow use his art for spiritual education to remind people that they had a way and history of creating peaceful negotiations.  What scripture would he use?  He came upon his answer while reading Isaiah 11, the passage that Margo read today. We know this because there is a copy of one of his sermons and because he brought visual aids we still have copies of, as he preached from his art.  There are probably estimated 65-100 different versions of this Lion and Lamb called The Peaceable Kingdom.   They all have the scripture from Isaiah 11 written in the margins, some as poetry.  The animals are differently posed and different in general from one another.  As his mood gets more saddened through the years with the worsening divisions, and the divide becoming obviously permanent,  the animals in the paintings begin to look tired with dark circles under their eyes, and the Little Child leading them becomes increasingly aggressive, leading the lion by holding its mane.  As the video described, to the left are different scenes of peace making and things that need to overcome the lack of peace.  When Edward Hicks first began painting these Peaceable Kingdoms, he was very moved by William Penn’s deal with the Lenape Indians and saw it as an example of what could be achieved if Quakers focused on making peace.  So there are many of these paintings with the Natives and William Penn on the lefthand side tucked in the background.  There is also a set of paintings that have the lion and lamb scene and a gathering of Quaker men  singing in others with “Peace on Earth, Good Will to Men” written on a banner they are holding.  Sixty-two paintings hang mostly in museums around the world and they are priced a $1,000,00 and above.  The paintings are painted in a simplistic form of folk art, and maybe he could have sold them at the time.  But he gave these paintings away for free, because he wasn’t going to make any money off of his ministry, preaching or painting these scenes, and considered the paintings a major part of his ministry. Instead Edward Hicks painted signs for businesses to make money for his family.  

The two by two is a solitary picture of Noah’s Ark, but it shows a very upset lion in the foreground, perhaps thinking about what might happen to the people in the houses you see in the background.  Again, predator and normal prey are seen going into the ark in peace.

So Edward Hicks tried to find a way to get Quakers to appreciate that art has a place in the lives of its Friends, and he was able to express himself in his own unique way.  Now copies of these Peaceable Kingdom pictures are in many Quaker homes and most Quaker meetings.  Edward Hicks teaches us that sometimes we have to think outside of the box and it might not be how we are taught to think of as far as spiritual norms. We have to follow our leadings and be authentic to ourselves and to God. Things might not feel normal right now when we first step outside of the norms of a church or a religion, but the truest form of peace is being true to ourselves. Take a chance and be creative, and find a way to be uniquely you like Edward Hicks did.