Western Friend

by Noah Baker Merrill

In recent years I’ve been opened to what feel to me like hopes and invitations for the future of Friends. Part of this lies in a vital distinction between two ways of holding who we are together.

One way of seeing Quakers might be as a collection of diverse people who are, ultimately, on separate journeys of personal spiritual, moral, and activist work. We gather for broadly-defined “community”, for mutual support, and to make decisions about shared resources, but ultimately our participation in Quakerism is contingent on what it does for us – how it serves us, and whether we’re comfortable. Each of us has our own “truth”, which (while we can often learn something from each other’s “truth”) is really distinct from and ultimately unintelligible to others. It’s our unique experience of unique and separate journeys beyond number and knowing.

Another way of understanding being a Friend has two parts. One is to affirm the near-infinite diversity and subtlety of the ways we can experience that which transcends any of our words or understandings. The other is to also trust that we are all bound up in relationship with the Presence we encounter in worship, from which all leadings arise, and which underlies all of Creation. This Wholeness is active, in the sense that even as we choose to participate in the beloved community of our meetings and our religious society, it is also choosing us, and weaving us together into a People who are responsible for and responsible to one another, and to living in the shape of this same wholeness of God. In this way of understanding ourselves as Friends, while we may labor with and cherish our blessed diversity, we affirm that we can all be guided together, led together, and that we can truly find ourselves brought into the unity of the Spirit in our decisions, both small and large.

If we accept – or even allow or trust provisionally or even eke out a conditional “maybe” to a hope—that we are in relationship with this divine wholeness that is in us, through us, and beyond us, and that we are in that relationship with each other in some sense, I think everything changes. How we live moment by moment, in our meetings and families, in the world, is radically different than it is if our perspective is that we are just in a steady state situation, a collection of fragmented individuals not really headed anywhere in particular, with no greater work happening among us and through us, united merely by common principles and a shared sociopolitically-progressive culture. We still might be caring for each other, trying to be and being good people, doing good and useful work, but something crucial is absent. My sense is that that “something crucial” is the trust and the openness to being gathered as a People and formed into instruments in the service of Love.

To me, the future of the Quaker movement turns on that distinction. The more we can live into that invitation to participate in this Wholeness, the more we can come more fully alive and help the world, each other, and all of Creation participate in the Motion of Love. But we have to have faith that this is possible. And as we have faith, our faith helps it function as a fact.

What if one of our fundamental understandings as Friends was that, just as it is understood that each of us is called to ministry of some sort, each of us is responsible for each other’s liberation? This responsibility to help one another to grow in the Spirit, to be freed from all that holds us back and keeps us from living as deeply in Love as we might is what we’re touching when we ask, as early Friends did, “How does the Truth prosper with Thee? How does the Spirit fare with thee, Friend?”

It means, “I care. I see you. How can I help you come more fully alive?” What if we were to believe and to live as if our role in being here, breathing this air and living these lives is to help free the Spirit that also dwells in each of us, and that as the Spirit is helped into freedom, it comes to be expressed more fully and visibly in the world among us all? There are places where we need each other’s help to come fully alive. I’ve seen that liberation happen, and I know others have, too. George Fox knew this. He speaks so clearly to it in one of his major letters to Friends in the ministry. And that same vital knowing of that same motion of mutual liberation waits for us, too.

Opening to Love’s Vulnerability
Being a People is also about accepting responsibility for encouraging and nurturing one another’s journeys. How might the Religious Society of Friends be different if instead of coming to the table saying, “Here’s what you have to do so that I can feel safe”, each of us asked, “How can I help you to feel safe and accepted? How can I help the gifts you’ve been given to be most fully and clearly released for service?”

Not to say that we shouldn’t take care of ourselves, and that we don’t need to feel safe, too. But this is an invitation into a vulnerability that transforms. Something happens when I’m willing to say “I love you” first, trusting there’s a Love in the other that can be awakened, a Love that can be freed from guardedness, hesitancy, and loneliness. It’s a radical idea in our culture and society, but I think affirming that we are indeed our brother’s and our sister’s keeper, with a mutual charge of love and care and nurture and challenge is at the heart of what we’re called to as we seek to be faithful.

Everywhere I travel among Friends, I carry a minute from my monthly meeting that helps me to stay grounded, and to know that I’m not traveling alone. The last sentence of the minute came to a member of my oversight committee in a dream, just before waking. She rose very early one morning and knew this sentence had to be at the end of it. She came to the meeting where the minute was being drafted, and said it should be closed with these words:

“To those who receive Noah, please protect and nurture this friend, for he needs your care.”

Every time this minute is read, I am vulnerable. I’m not built up with high praise or a distinguished resume; the minute is brief and simple. My experience is that again and again this closing sentence opens the doorway into vulnerability, first in me, and then through inviting this same vulnerability in each of those gathered. And that vulnerability opens the way for us to move together into the heart of ministry – into the place where transformation happens.

That same motion is present in every message I’m led to offer, when I’m faithful. Sometimes I’m invited to speak somewhere based on work I’ve been involved in, or something I’ve written. It can be tempting in a new place to try to do really well, to “deliver”, to perform effectively, to meet people’s expectations. But that approach can make it very difficult for Love to work. It’s the times that I’m able to open myself to speak from within the embarrassing, humbling experiences of brokenness, or confusion, of loss, of seeking and wondering and doubting and yearning, and to be a channel for the Life that meets me on the other side – those are the times I have the sense I’ve been faithful, and those are the moments where Love breaks in most fully.

If we’re not willing to be vulnerable with each other, we’re not being real. And faking it with one another, even if we do it as we so often do to keep from making each other uncomfortable, is a prison. The more we’re given the opportunity to be vulnerable in love with each other, the more we can invite each other into that place of being seen, and in being seen deeply for who we are, encountering the surprising, joyful liberation through which we are transformed.
I believe that what we’re exploring here, these understandings, these ways of holding who we are and how we are, matter to the future of Friends – and that while we have much growing to do together, they’re already present and being born. Arundhati Roy says, “Another world is not only possible. She’s already on her way. On a quiet day I can hear her breathing.”

We can know and trust that the hope we need for our future is already here. It’s already arising, it’s already breaking through the cracks, growing in the wild places, and sprouting where we least expect it. Maybe it’s being quietly and carefully tended by some of us. Maybe some are shouting from the rooftops in a language we can’t understand. I know people who hear that call to help us deepen and grow into recognizing our responsibility to and for one another, into embracing Love’s vulnerability. Rufus Jones writes that if God ever spoke, God is still and always speaking. If ever Love worked through the Religious Society of Friends, Love is still trying to work, and inviting us to participate. It’s happening, just like Spring brings new growth whether we tend the garden or not. But we are called to be gardeners. The challenge for us, I think, is to attend in these times to that new growth that is truly real, to choose listening to and responding to the motion of that Love over the many other places we so often put our energy.

It’s like what James Nayler writes. He says that within us all there are many ‘plants’ that seek our nurture, and that most of them do not arise from the True Seed that grows within us and bears the fruits of what some have called the “endless life”. Where do and will we invest our life and our resources as a People?
The question isn’t about what we prefer, or what’s new or what’s old, or what’s convenient or what’s difficult, it’s about where the Life is. It is so common for us as Friends to devote our life energy to so many “good” or “needed” efforts. But all of what we’re doing may not be where things are most alive. I imagine we can all see places where our personal and corporate lives are invested in places that leave us depleted and pushed to the breaking point, without the nourishment, and replenishing that comes (in time) from all work done in Love, even if that work is very difficult. To me, that restoration is a sign that we’re truly feeding what’s most alive.

A Movement of the Spirit
It might help us as we seek to discern what’s alive from what’s not to hold our journey as if we are part of a movement, with the sense that we are being guided, and that we are going somewhere. We may not know or be able to name exactly where that “somewhere” is, but it would be great to have a sense of what it feels like when we are headed there together. And we are a part of a movement: the Religious Society of Friends, as Fox and other early Friends experienced it, was a radical expression of the transformative power of direct relationship with God at work through the gathered people. Countless Friends died for their faithfulness to this simple truth. We’re moving, when we’re faithful and attentive, in that movement, that motion of Love.

Without that movement consciousness, most of the forms of the Religious Society of Friends don’t make a lot of sense. They were created for a movement, for a People who experienced the Divine relationally, and I think Quakerism is most alive when we can feel that. Meeting for Sufferings. Corporate discernment. Traveling minutes. Epistles. Even waiting, expectant worship. We meet together expecting the inbreaking of life-giving newness, awaiting the movement of the Spirit among us, believing that we can be guided and taught together. We prepare to participate in a shared experience, not many distinct ones. And there are moments when, even if we don’t expect or trust it, we can feel that oneness.
One of the greatest gifts for me is getting to touch that sense of being part of a movement wherever I go, seeing the ways that concerns arising in one part of the “Body” that Friends make up are being expressed in other limbs, often without mutual knowledge. Without interrelationship between our monthly meetings, our local “grassroots” worshipping communities, we lose sight of that interconnectedness, that relationality. That’s why the loss – and the revival – of traveling in the ministry is so important. That’s not to say that everyone needs to travel, but I do think everyone can be encouraged to recognize that a living, dynamic traveling ministry is essential to the vitality of Quakerism. When we aren’t aware of that “circulation of the blood” in the body, in some sense, we don’t have access to the “oxygen” we need, or the sense that the same Breath is feeding us all. Coming regularly into contact with one another, or “rubbing up against each other”, as another Friend from New England says, we help polish the rough edges of our hearts and our limited understandings. We remind each other of what is most true. And we help make this real together.

A Ministry of the Whole
When we talk about what we can call “ministry”–whether it’s our activist work in the world, the work of an institution, corporate discernment, or deepening the spiritual life of meetings—it’s all basically the same work. We may use different words or have a different emphasis at times, but it’s all about understanding ourselves as part of this movement of the Spirit, and of coming to know still more deeply what guides that movement, and listening, and helping one another to respond – together.

Can you feel it? It’s just possible that the Spirit isn’t finished with this old Body yet. There may still be something new and fresh and living we’re supposed to be doing, something that has yet to be done through us, making Love visible anew in this blessed broken world, holding open space for a deep and nourishing hope in changing and challenging times. How would our lives, our meetings, our religious society be different, if we chose more and more to help one another to live in relationship with that underlying Wholeness and with one another as if this movement were still happening – as if this Love and Life and Power were still present today, and as if this Truth were still true?

Noah Baker Merrill is a member of Putney Friends Meeting in Vermont. This spring he served for two weeks as a Friend in Residence to Bridge City and Multnomah Meetings in Portland, Oregon. This article is the second based on an interview with Noah; you can read the first article here.