In 1990, I was a graduate student in Boulder, Colorado, participating in the planning of International Women’s Week. I was within a year of coming out as a lesbian. The planning committee was a diverse group varying along dimensions of age, race, ethnicity, sexual preference, gender identity and class.

In one planning meeting a Latina turned to me, a white woman, and observed that I was bringing a privileged perspective to the evening’s discussion. I remember feeling confused and becoming defensive. I felt threatened, shocked. She didn’t know me! I thought, “We are all women here. What is she talking about?”

At that point in my life I felt I had arrived at a complete understanding of the real differences between my white middle class existence and that of my friends of color. My studies and activism were influenced by a range of strong feminist anti-racist writers: bell hooks, Gloria Anzaldua, Barbara Smith, Angela Davis. And yet my strong passion for social justice— for racial justice, for women’s liberation— peacefully coexisted alongside a deeply entrenched ignorance around the ways skin privilege operated in my life. I simply didn’t see it.

Moreover, I wasn’t ready or able to see how racialized attitudes and gut responses had been deeply ingrained in me— let alone how these ingrained notions of race, when summed up across groups and communities, led to a brokenness that deeply impacts white people and our ability to engage with open and true hearts across color lines. Years later I heard the phrase “socialized without my consent.” It resonated.

I remained stuck in a confused, painful and defensive mindset around privilege for quite some time. But the experiences during that period of my life created an opening that grew in breadth and depth over years of big and small challenging interactions — some sought out intentionally and others brought on by my own ignorance. The early feelings of overwhelming fear have been joined by a deep yearning for racial healing and wholeness. It was that yearning that brought me to the White Privilege Conference in 2011, and will bring me to Albuquerque in March for the 2012 conference.

What does racial healing require of me?
The journey to my present commitment to racial healing sprouted from a hard lesson in allyship. I was actively involved in LGBTQ activism around a series of proposed bills and constitutional amendments intended to limit “special rights” for LGBTQ Coloradans. At the time we had very few straight allies, and with our community estimated to be at about 10% of the population, I didn’t see a tipping point anywhere in sight. In despair, I stepped away from it all. I realized we wouldn’t get anywhere until they get that this is about ALL of us. It’s about our collective dignity as human beings.

What was that thought? We won’t get anywhere until they get that this is about all of us. It’s about our collective dignity as human beings. A light went on for me.

After a period of working through my own feelings of anger, abandonment and disappointment, I began the tender process of learning to see through the lens of what the collective healing process—defined as broadly as our humanity needs it to be-—requires of each one of us. I am able to (but don’t always choose to) set aside the lens through which I focus on what hurts me personally as a woman or as a lesbian. I am clear: racial healing is not possible without the active participation of large numbers of white people. It requires a critical mass that I believe we have not yet reached.

My Whiteness
One of the most impactful undertakings along this journey has been the practice of considering how my whiteness has influenced my experiences and interactions in the world. The first few of these realizations were hard in coming. Now I see them almost every day. I seek to become aware of these not for the pure sport of it, but because the process helps me understand how my experiences contribute to my interpretations of the world around me.

My biweekly trip to the neighborhood grocery store provides a routine example. Not once have I given a care to whether I was dressed well enough to avoid being considered a thief. I have not been routinely suspected of shoplifting or followed by staff. I have not noticed another shopper respond to my presence by clutching their purse closer to their body or moving their cart closer. I have noticed my own deeply ingrained gut-level fear responses to people of color around me. I was trained to react in this way during my childhood. My spiritual commitment, as an adult, is to bring my body’s gut responses into alignment with my heart’s truth: no person deserves to be judged or feared because of the color of their skin.

I find another example of white privilege in my family’s past, long before I was born. My dad was raised on a small farm in central Michigan. He and his siblings endured many hardships, from the impoverished circumstances of farm life during the Great Depression to their family’s personal challenges with a patriarch who abused alcohol to treat a chronic mental health condition.

Each sibling worked hard to pave a way out of that life. My father enlisted in the Army and served in WWII. The benefits of the G.I. Bill turned out to be my father’s pathway from poverty to our family’s middle class position years later. I am the first person on my father’s side of the family to complete a college degree. My tuition was paid for with a home equity loan on my family’s house. That home was purchased with proceeds from the sale of my parents’ first home, and that first home was possible only through the benefits of the G.I. Bill.

If you are familiar with housing practices in the 1940’s and 50’s, you know that Latino, African American and Native American men who served in WWII did not come home to the same pathway to middle class life that my white father did. So while I can say that my father worked hard (and he DID!) to make his way out of poverty, I also know that skin color was no a small factor in leading to outcomes that were good for him and his family—and terrible for many others.

Together we now inhabit a world descended from these—and countless other—unjust outcomes.

I wonder if you agree. Do white people, generally, have a hard time talking about race? I came to a place in my striving to understand racism and white privilege where there was an intense readiness stirring deep within—and very few safe spaces in which to explore it openly with others. How did I get here? How did we get here? How did talking about race become so difficult?

The Religious Society of Friends inherited a priceless treasure in the publication of the book Fit for Freedom, Not for Friendship and in the labors of Vanessa Julye and Donna McDaniel to bring discussion of that work to many places where F/friends gather. When I have encountered spaces where F/friends are sharing, questioning, struggling, venting, exploring or learning together around white privilege and racism, I have noticed 1) there is a tenderness and often deep pain flowing for each of us from a wide range of racialized experiences in the world, and 2) there is a deep longing to move forward—to heal—both personally and as a community.

I pray for our community of seekers that our intense longing for racial justice and racial healing carries us in love through all that exists between where we are today and the wholeness calling out to us.

Quakers and the 2011 White Privilege Conference
Last year’s WPC was a deeply transformative experience for me. The space and the people were warm and welcoming; there was an energy that felt like a community preparing to experience something significant together. It was a feeling not unlike the anticipation that comes for me with yearly meeting: What will I learn? How will I be changed? What does God have in store for me? Who will be my guides and companions?

There was an overwhelming number of workshop choices, intermingled with keynote talks that were inspiring, informative and provocative. Despite the emotional and mental exhaustion at the end of each day’s workshops, I found myself at every evening film screening. I shared many heart-filled conversations with a friend & conference roommate from my monthly meeting; we attended the exact same conference and some of the same sessions, and yet our experiences were not at all the same!

I loved that sessions were rated “beginning, intermediate or advanced”, and I appreciated that many sessions, while addressing white privilege head-on, also honored the ways in which race dimensions of privilege and oppression intersect with dimensions of class, sex, gender and more. I found my “edges.” The conference was a blessing that has stayed with me throughout the year. I notice that I am more courageous in talking about race in settings where it feels awkward—and I take my commitment to the work of racial healing and racial justice more seriously than ever.

I would not have attended WPC had it not been for the commitment of F/friends to experience it together. And as significant of an accomplishment as it was to assemble 60+ of us there in Minneapolis last March, it strikes me as just one step in a much longer journey. I hope to see you there.

Kathryn White lives in Denver, Colorado, with her partner, Sue, and their children, Grace & Mateo. She receives much spiritual nourishment from Mountain View Friends Meeting and Intermountain Yearly Meeting.

For the past fifteen years, I have been both a Quaker and a Sacred Harp singer. I have found the two practices to be consonant and mutually enriching, each enlarging and sustaining the other. Considering each through the lens of the other has helped me to learn and understand things about both of them. I have come to see Sacred Harp singing as representing an independent discovery and application of some of the truths experienced and professed by Quakers.

The Sacred Harp, first published in Georgia in 1844, was one of hundreds of “shape-note” hymnals circulated in the 19th century. In “shape-note” notation, an inspired pedagogical innovation dating from around 1790, the musical note heads are printed in shapes corresponding to the degrees of the scale, which makes reading music and singing harmony easier by linking visual cues to musical intervals. The notation system and rudiments of music theory were taught to thousands of people in singing schools conducted by semiprofessional, sometimes-itinerant singing masters. Like many of the other shape-note hymnals, its repertoire drew on folk hymn tunes and spirituals in oral circulation and on earlier American and European religious music. The hymnal preserved, and in later editions developed, a distinctive style, termed “dispersed harmony” by its practitioners- an unaccompanied three- and four-part folk polyphony.</>

The Sacred Harp survived where so many other shape-note hymnals did not, preserving a living oral tradition with an ongoing meaning and purpose in the present day. Its survival was due in large part to its editor, B.F. White, who created a structure to promote the use of the book: he established conventions – associations or gatherings for the purpose of singing, not affiliated with any particular denomination or religious organization – which used The Sacred Harp as their songbook. Two conventions founded in the 1850’s are still meeting annually, and Sacred Harp singing has been an important part of family and community life in (mostly rural) areas of Georgia, Alabama, and Texas for generations. In the last 35 years it has spread around the country, particularly to urban centers in the Northeast and Midwest and on the West Coast.</>

We Quakers in the liberal western Yearly Meetings refer to our central spiritual practice as “unprogrammed” worship. If I were to attempt to sum up what goes on at a Sacred Harp convention for those familiar with the Quaker term, I would call it “unprogrammed singing.” Similarly, I have found it possible to explain Meeting for Worship to other Sacred Harp singers by comparing it to a Sacred Harp singing convention. Sacred Harp singing is a form of worship for many of its participants, often not the only one they engage in, and could accurately be called another form of unprogrammed worship despite its boisterous activity. Describing the non-hierarchical, non-performative practice of Sacred Harp singing to those unfamiliar with the tradition can be as difficult as explaining to non-Quakers what we do in worship in the absence of a priest, liturgy, or sermon.</>

Today’s Sacred Harp conventions last for one or both days of a weekend. Officers approved by the convention in a brief formal business session perform various tasks to ensure the smooth functioning of the singing. Prayers are offered to open and close each day and at other significant times. Local singers provide a potluck-style meal at the noon hour (traditionally called “dinner on the grounds”) for all present. Apart from this repast, and occasional short recesses, the assembled “class” sings almost continuously, one song after another, from morning to mid-afternoon. Any singer who wishes may, in turn, lead a song (“lesson”) of his or her choosing. </>

Like Quaker worship, a Sacred Harp convention, though without programming, is not without forms; it has such forms as have proved, through long experience, to serve “not as an end, but as a means toward the attainment of the end, which is communication with God, and fellowship with one another” (North Pacific Yearly Meeting Faith and Practice) – to facilitate a direct experience, both individual and shared, of the Spirit. Each convention, like each Meeting for Worship, despite being outwardly identical in form (especially insofar as selections are limited to songs from the one book), takes on its own character and shape based on the participants present, their unspoken interaction with each other, and their sensitivity to the needs of the assembled group and the workings of the Spirit. </>

In the absence of an audience or a choir director, Sacred Harp singers sing for themselves, each other, and God, each contributing his or her own peculiar individual voice to a singing the way each worshipper contributes his or her silent listening or spoken ministry to a Quaker Meeting. At a large singing, the overall effect – rather than the smooth, impersonal blend favored in other forms of choral music – is of a massive, vibrant wall of sound in which numerous individual voices may be distinguished from the texture at any given moment. While singing, the singers sit in a hollow square with one voice part on each side, facing inwards. This spatial arrangement abolishes performer/audience or choir director/choir divisions just as Quaker worship spaces abolish the altar/congregation or pulpit/congregation divisions of other religious traditions, just as Quaker belief and practice abolished the clergy/laity division. </>

The aesthetic values of Sacred Harp are different from those associated with forms of music based on performance to an audience. Each singer retains and shares aesthetic authority, as Quaker worshippers share spiritual/ministerial authority. All singers feel the musical or poetical content of a song on a personal level, while trying to help all others present get the best and fullest experience of each song, and sharing each other’s joy in collaborative music-making and fellowship. In an experience of being made tender in corporate worship, God’s love is felt on an individual level, in response to a deep personal need, yet seems to be expressed or channeled through one’s fellow worshippers. Sacred Harp singing, like Quaker worship, is “a corporate experience which, at the same time, allows a maximum freedom to its individual members” and “a strong, sustaining, group experience, coupled with individual freedom” (George Gorman, The Amazing Fact of Quaker Worship). At the best moments, literal harmony, in the musical sense, becomes an outward token of metaphorical harmony (spiritual unity). The result is a deep fellowship which “lets you see that ye are written in one another’s Heart” (George Fox, Epistle 24). </>
Sacred Harp singings confirm the truth articulated by Quakers, the basis of our belief in corporate worship and the source of its mystery, that the fullest knowledge of the Spirit is one that is not only shared with, but experienced through others – that “The sense of union with God and the sense of union with our neighbors are so closely related that one is best realized when felt in conjunction with the other” (Howard Brinton, Friends for 300 Years). </>

This experience inevitably binds Sacred Harp singers into a community. Singers in both the traditional and “diaspora” areas frequently travel to other people’s singings, extend hospitality to guests at their own home singings, and consider themselves to be part of a single nationwide Sacred Harp community. Many singers grow to cherish the personal connections with other singers – the friendships that develop over the years and the chance to renew acquaintanceships or meet new people at singings – even more than the music itself.</>

Quakerism is often described as an “experiential” faith. The Sacred Harp arose from the camp-meeting revivals of the early 19th century, which fostered a direct individual experience of the Spirit as a component of conversion and personal salvation. A significant body of new religious poetry was produced in this milieu and partially preserved in The Sacred Harp, a certain strain of which treated religion experientially – striving to articulate the individual experience of faith, of conversion, of self-doubt, of the fruits of the Spirit, or some aspect of the life of the religious community. The personal nature of these texts strengthens the emotional grip of the singing. The “experience songs” show that our core beliefs as Friends about the possibility and importance of direct personal knowledge of the Spirit are truthful enough to have been rediscovered or rearticulated independently in religious history.</>

Sacred Harp singing is beautiful, social, and an outlet for my gifts. I also find that it gives me a sense of continuity with the past, a form of community that encompasses the past and future as well as the present. Knowing that others have sung these songs for so many years, I feel a sense of perpetuating an extant sound-world of perhaps considerable antiquity. The human experience preserved in the poetry of the lyrics reawakens my sense of empathy with others, across hundreds of years. Above all, I appreciate the sense that I am participating in the work of carrying on a tradition, something that people in the past carefully kept alive for those who came after them, having found it through experience to be of value. </>

While Quakerism, with its rich history and written record, also offers an opportunity for this feeling of continuity with the past, it seems to be something that Sacred Harp singers “do” better than modern-day Quakers, on the whole. Sacred Harp singers tend to place strong conscious emphasis on preserving the distinctive features of their unique tradition and honoring those who handed it down. Our emphasis on what the Spirit is saying to us here and now, while important, can perhaps cause us to neglect to develop a relationship with our history – to treat our inheritance lightly.</>

I experience Meeting for Worship and Sacred Harp singing as each complete in itself, so that I have no desire for music in Meeting for Worship, or for silence at a Sacred Harp singing. Yet for me they are utterly complementary. I feel in no way divided between two spiritual homes – rather, the correspondences between them appear to me as tangible signs of God’s love, and workings of the Power that lies over all things.</>

David Wright grew up in Mountain View Meeting in Denver, and is now a part of University Friends Meeting in Seattle, Washington.</>

A quick search on You Tube for shape note singing and Sacred Harp turns up hundreds of clips of singing. Your local library may also have a copy of the recent documentary about Sacred Harp singing, titled, “Awake, My Soul”.
Sacred Harp singings are free (an offering may be collected) and open to the public. Two-day annual conventions in the Western U.S. include the All-California in January, the Washington State in February, the Rocky Mountain (alternates between Colorado and New Mexico) in September, and the Oregon State in October. For more information about Sacred Harp singing, and listings of annual conventions and local monthly singings throughout the United States, visit http://www.fasola.org

Does my spiritual life inform my work as an artist; or does the creative process of making art inform my spiritual life? Perhaps it is both, like an ongoing dialogue.

I seek to articulate the Light, the universal metaphor for the Life Force within and all around us; Light as a descriptor for that which is Sacred and Holy which permeates each breath. The language of articulation involves use of line, light and shadow, color, shape, rhythm and texture to describe the internal response to being alive. I work in several media: drawing, watercolor, and hand woven French tapestry.

My hands know much about the feel of wool and silk yarn, Aubusson tapestry technique, and the proper tension of a good warp. I sit at a loom built out of oak and walnut. Being a low warp, a horizontal tapestry loom, it occupies a substantial amount of floor space. Its weaving width is four lames, or sixty-three inches. The term, “lame”, refers to the amount of warp in forty centimeters, or the width of one weaver’s shoulder.

I am one weaver sitting at a loom that could fit four. This loom is my place of refuge for what needs to emerge from deep within.

I lean forward against the front beam to reach toward the loom’s center for the warp threads grouped together in a slip knot. The cotton twine is strong and smooth in my fingers. I separate out six strands, pulling each one firmly, dividing them in half, looping them around the rod at the front beam and tying them in a weaver’s knot. I reach for six more warp threads and repeat the process. Each thread must have the same tightness as the one beside it, in order to have an evenly tensioned warp. This is the foundation for a tapestry cloth of good integrity.

As my fingers reach, pull and knot, I think of how often weaving and tapestry are used as metaphors for the pulling together of many disparate elements into one complex yet integrated whole. Often seasoned mystics and leaders of workshops use “tapestry” as a way of describing the spiritual journey. Although many are not weavers and thus do not know what goes into the making of tapestry cloth, it is still a powerful and apt metaphor. It becomes even more vibrant when one engages in the daily meditative practice of weaving and knows experientially how the moment can expand into eternity through the window at the loom.

I am a second-generation tapestry artist, who has been weaving for over forty years. My mother showed my ten-year-old hands the realm of threads moving over-and-under taut warp, to create shapes and forms imbedded in woven cloth. With this, I entered into the stream of mythic figures weaving the world into being; of master weavers who passed this tradition down through the generations since time began.

Over the millennia, in regions and cultures all over the earth, old and sometimes gnarled hands have shown young small hands the feel of an evenly tensioned warp and the arc of the weft to insure a straight selvedge. Each time our hands pick up yarn and place it between taut warps, we engage in an archetypal discipline and practice honed over many centuries, days and hours.

In the ensuing years, I have come to view the loom as a threshold. Each time I sit there with my fingers moving strands of color through the warp, I enter into a place beyond words, not unlike silent meeting for worship. Weaving becomes an act of prayer.

I often slip into a meditation and a connection with forces at work far larger than me. While my fingers are in constant motion, I enter into a place of reverence and quiet listening. Here is where I can sense the internal stirrings that also embed themselves into the fibers of the tapestry. This is where nudges and leadings often make themselves known. Sometimes it is the pull to try another color here or to round out this shape more. Sometimes it is the spark of an idea for the next tapestry. Sometimes it is a knowing that I need to speak with a friend.

Strand-by-strand, section-by-section, the colors of the weft create shape and form. Foreground and background link with the warp threads so taut on the loom. The woven structure cannot be sacrificed for the image. The image must flow gracefully, in harmony with the techniques required for sound cloth. Thus, the integrity of tapestry cloth and the emerging image become inseparable. So too, does the integrity of my spiritual practice become inseparable from the outward form of my life. They are interwoven somewhere deep inside.

The act of deep listening happens away from the loom as well, when ideas for designs begin stirring within and start working their way through my hands into initial drawings or watercolors. It is like I am coaxing them forward into being. This process cannot be rushed. In the solitude of my studio, prayerful listening takes me along unexpected paths, as I follow what seems to be leading me. Sometimes it feels like a dead end; other times I seem to be heading somewhere fruitful. Always it is an act of trust and faith in what is unfolding, and requires focused attention to the Truth of what is taking shape. Often this process of ideas taking shape and form happens over the course of days and weeks, with many breaks away to work the day jobs and do the tasks of daily living.

Once the idea is crystallized and ready, I begin weaving and interpreting my black and white sketches and value studies into the palette of yarns and the language of the loom. Many details and subtle changes happen while weaving, as the tapestry informs me what needs to happen next. The techniques I use are specific to Aubusson French tapestry tradition, and I see only the back of the tapestry slowly growing before me. Often it takes about 400 hours over the course of a year to complete. Only when I cut it off from the loom can I first view the tapestry in its entirety. It is indeed like a birthing: one that has come through me, but is not of me. If I have listened well, the tapestry sings.

I look at my hands in awe. I think about the residue of memory that I carry in my fingers, not only of each woven strand, but also of my mother’s hands and those of the French master weavers who honed my skills. The stream of time flows forward and back, ebbs and flows through these hands, stories, and lives of previous centuries.

What stories rest in silence, until a moment of illumination? In many ways, the creative process is one of awakening that which has been dormant and hidden within. What invites the glow of light into the darkness, so that the story’s voice can be seen and heard?

For me, the invitation comes through engaging in the prayerful dialogue that informs both my spiritual life and my work as an artist. Time, in all its layers and dimensions, becomes integral to the process of tapestry making, as well as in the unfolding life of the spirit. Time is thematic in my work as an undercurrent: time in terms of millennia; time of the forces which molded earth’s canyons and mesas, oceans and mountains; time filled with the presence of those who have come before. I continue seeking to articulate the Light.

DIALOGUES THROUGH THE VEIL

The space between now and then
Opens like a window
Into the moment,
Inviting the presence of
Mary, the poet,
Ann, the peacemaker,
And so many others,
To leave traces
Of their thoughts
In these threads.

Currents of time and air
Flow
Into this veil of mist and memory;
This waterfall of light
On cottonwood leaves
Beside my studio.

400 hours made visible,
Like beach patterns
Of ocean on sand.

-Elizabeth Buckley

Elizabeth Buckley is a longtime member of Albuquerque Friends Meeting in New Mexico. The poem above accompanies a tapestry of the same name, which appears on the cover of the December 2011 issue of Western Friend. She recently received the American Tapestry Alliance Award for Excellence in Tapestry for this work.

When I moved from my small town to a college I learned that there was not a church of my own denomination in that college town. So I toured various churches. On my list was a Quaker meeting, so I showed up at High Street Monthly Meeting in West Chester, PA. And my mind was blown.
I was so taken with that kind of worship. I was shy, so I didn’t go to coffee hour. I split out the back door before someone could grab me. But I noticed that there was a bulletin board, and I always read bulletin boards wherever I go because I think I can learn something about a group by its bulletin board. There on the bulletin board was a notice to Friends to write a letter to Friends Committee on National Legislation – or to carbon copy to them and to write to their congressperson about universal military service.

And then it hit me. I had heard about Quakers, that Quakers are pacifists. And a disappointment came over me. Then I decided, “Well, I shouldn’t really hold it against them, because even the finest people can have their eccentricities.” So in the magnanimity of my nineteen-year-old wisdom, I forgave Quakers their peace testimony.
The thing that got me most about the meeting for worship that I experienced that morning was that it took me back to the mid-week prayer meeting of the church that I grew up in. The mid-week prayer meeting, which I especially attended with my grandfather when I was eleven, twelve, thirteen and fourteen, was the powerhouse of the church. What they would do was, after a few hymns they would go into what they called a Season of Prayer, which was based on silence. The men of the church who were there in this little Sunday School room would go on their knees, and we would listen and pray and people would offer testimonies. Sometimes there were tears. Someone would sing this or that and we would sing along.
I was in awe of my grandfather, and to see him get on his knees for anything amazed me. The spontaneity of the testimonies and the depth of the sharing from the heart was the big spiritual experience that I could most count on in those years. And that’s what Quaker Meeting reminded me of.
Just a few years later in my home church—by the time I was a senior in high school—the mid-week prayer meeting was no longer like that. It was like a mini-version of a Sunday morning worship. That set me off on a life-long journey of puzzlement. Since the cast of characters in the mid-week prayer meeting had not changed in those years, what made the difference? Why was that meeting so vital when I was younger, so alive, so full of the spirit, and then when I was older it had become routine? What could have changed that would have made it like that?
Obviously, the quality of ministry in that mid-week meeting was simply not the sum of the individual parts. And that gave me my first big clue: in an engagement with the Spirit, we’re talking about something that is greater than the sum of the parts. What I’d like to share today are four things that I’ve identified so far that seem to make the difference in terms of relating to the Spirit: the container, being present, accountability, and willingness to struggle.
The Container
I have no doubt that the spirit is among us every minute of every day. And yet it does seem that sometimes we experience it and sometimes not. What’s the difference? How do we allow ourselves – perhaps that’s the better question – to experience the spirit?
I’ve been lucky to be able to work with groups since I was twenty. And as I got into my thirties, I became more partial to a metaphor for what it is that goes on in a group. I call it The Container, with no great originality. A group can sometimes be a container that creates safety for people to expect the unexpected and experience the life of the spirit.
But container building – what is that all about?
It was late one night in the summer when my then-one-year-old daughter was experiencing a fever. The fever was going up and up, and we got scared about that, and we called the medical hotline. The medical folks said, “You need to get children’s Tylenol, and put her in a tub of lukewarm water.”
So my wife put her in the tub and I went to the all-night drugstore to get her some baby Tylenol. The drugstore was in a neighborhood I didn’t know well. But I drove to the drugstore and I got the stuff.
As I was walking back to my car, I noticed that my route to the car now had a group of young adult men standing around with each other looking a lot like a gang. My first thought was “Oh, I better not stay on this sidewalk because it will lead me right into the middle of that gang. It’s not my turf, and maybe they’re turf-conscious. Why don’t I cross the street and go to my car that way?” And then a macho spirit rose in me and I thought to myself, “No, nobody’s going to make me cross the street. I’m going to walk on the sidewalk directly to my car.”
But I didn’t get there. First I ran into this gang. And immediately one guy pushed me up against the wall and started saying stuff to me. At that point my hearing went out. I could see perfectly well. I could feel his hands pushing me repeatedly up against the house. But I couldn’t hear a thing, even though I could see his mouth moving. And what I was doing, instead of listening, was thinking, “Wouldn’t it be great to have a good idea about what to do now?”
Then I remembered a workshop that I had gone to years ago led by James Lawson, who was a colleague of Dr. King’s, about non-violent responses to violence. I remembered he had talked about what John Wesley used to do when he was mobbed. I don’t know how many of you know about the Wesley brothers who started the Methodist movement, but when they started they were very much on the margins of English society, so they got mobbed a lot.
And so John Wesley learned a style for dealing with your ordinary daily mob. He first threw off his hat, and then he swept his eyes across the crowd looking for somebody that might be a leader in the mob. He’d identify somebody, and he’d forget about everybody else, just focusing on laser-like communication with that person through speaking, unless there was too much screaming and yelling going on—then it was just with his eyes. He would focus his complete attention on that person until that person broke up the mob and allowed him to leave safely.
That’s the story I remembered in this moment when I was being pushed up against the house late at night. So I swept my eyes across the mob – actually it was just six guys – and I decided that the leader of this group was not the one pushing me. So I focused on this other guy. It was a small group, so I could say how upset I was that this was happening.
“What are you guys doing? Why are you doing this to me? I’m just out getting some medicine for my baby. What are you doing? I don’t like this.” I showed some of my anger because I was pissed off as well as being scared to death. At the same time, my arms were at my side, I was completely non-threatening in terms of my body language, and I just kept riveting my eyes on this one guy’s eyes.
After a little while he turned to the guy who was most aggressive and said something like “Let him go.” (I’m not sure what he said because I still couldn’t hear anything!) But he said something, because the guy that was manhandling me turned to him to argue that it was perfectly fine to be doing what he was doing. And the others in the gang picked up on this argument and closed in around the two guys who were arguing. I realized that it was my moment, so I moved, slowly… away… down the sidewalk. I got to my car and drove away.
What does this have to do with building a container? The way I see it, many years later, is that James Lawson taught me that the group was not just the sum of its parts, but was implicitly a container — that included me. My response in the moment of crisis re-framed the situation, elicited the container. And that, I suspect, is one of the things that makes a difference. If we only see ourselves as individuals – in our Quaker meeting or in any group we associate with – we are going to miss a big opportunity for the Spirit to move. Because the Spirit moves not only in individual parts, the Spirit moves on the group level, in what’s sometimes called Community.
Looking back now on that sidewalk scene in West Philly, I realize that the group and I were dancing a group dance. It was not simply a product of the individuals who were standing on the sidewalk. I was reaching for and acknowledging a group process in the way that I responded. At the time, I didn’t have this theory – I was just using a tool given to me by an old Methodist story. But the tool’s effectiveness gives a great illustration for what I’ve found time and again.
Recognizing the implicit container – in theological language, invoking it – brings the container forward that is full of the charismatic possibility. We can do that in our meetings.
Being Present
I got invited to work in Thailand in the ‘nineties with a group that wanted to save the rainforest. These people happened to be a movement of Buddhist monks and the villagers around them, led by a fierce abbot who ran a forest monastery. The movement was growing, but the Buddhist network that invited me thought that they could use more support. They suggested a six-day workshop about strategy and organization.
I know little about Thai politics and I don’t know the language. If you wanted a Thai expert to do this work you wouldn’t ask me. What they wanted was for me to ask people questions that they can explore, use activities that bring out their creativity, and to love them so that they can get the answers that they need. As usual, they asked for an outline of the workshop that I was going to do. I did an outline, we emailed back and forth, back and forth, and then I thought we were all set.
I landed in Bangkok, and learned it would be a substantial journey to northeast Thailand to the forest where the logging was going on and where people were in some difficulty. For one thing, there had just been an assassination of the leader of another environmentalist movement in the same area. So there was the question about of what would happen to the Buddhist abbot who was leading this forest monastery.
All the way up I kept asking other people in the car about the political situation, and what the loggers do, and other questions. The answers I got left me less and less confident about how the outline I’d prepared for this workshop. By the time we actually got to the site, I had no idea what we’d do for six days. I’d crossed the Pacific Ocean, and it’s a long way to go to find one’s mind a blank!
I was ushered into the presence of the abbot, who looked at me, and looked through me, and said, “You seem to be troubled about something.” I said, “I don’t know what to do for your workshop.” He didn’t look concerned. He said, as best I remember, “No problem. If you are present with us tomorrow morning you will know what to do.”
Quakers would believe in that, too. Being in the present moment. But you know what? I was still anxious because I still wanted a plan. That night I did sleep, because sleeping is one of my skills, but the next morning I got up just as puzzled as ever.
The abbot had said the previous evening that we would start out with a long walk, appreciating these woods that we don’t want felled around us. He went first, and the other monks followed him, then the villagers, and I trailed along behind. I said to myself, “George, you’re good at this, you’re a really good workshop designer. So what are you going to do? What are you going to do?” And every time the anxiety reached a certain point, a branch would hit my head or I would trip over a root in the ground. Of course I started to get the joke: each time my appreciation of the woods was interrupted by anxiety, I’d have an “accident.”
Finally we reached the edge of a cliff, and there was a gorgeous view across the ravine. The abbot settled us into silence and mediation, and he talked about the forest being the lungs of the world. By that time I had gotten the joke and I simply surrendered. The abbot said, “Now we’re going to have a guest from the United States lead us in a six-day workshop: George.”
And that was the instant when the design arrived. I realized that the way to work with these folks – with their huge span of education from zero-schooling for most of the villagers to the highly sophisticated strategy lieutenants – the way to be able to keep everybody on board with this workshop was to tell stories, and elicit from them the strategic principles. And that’s what we did.
At the end of each story we formed small groups to figure out what the strategic lesson was from that story. So by three or day four the workshop was really rocking and rolling. People were really listening to each other. So I pitched to them a particularly challenging strategic issue, and the small groups were working and reporting out.
During the small group reports, the abbot said, “One of the things we don’t know about is what the leadership will be in the future.” And that was the cloud over the whole workshop. Is he going to get arrested? Is he going to get assassinated? Are other leading monks going to get assassinated? It was a breakthrough moment, the moment when we acknowledged the elephant in the living room.
I said, “Okay, if that’s the question, let’s work on that. What are some things that we can do now that would prepare you for the possibility that you might lose your leader?” They really went after that, because that was the biggest anxiety in the whole place. They did well and reported out, and announced a lot of things that were brave to announce that they could picture doing.
Now the abbot had this way of sitting at the very center of the room, and there would be a sort of moat around him of no bodies because the deference toward Buddhist monks in Thailand is enormous, especially someone as charismatic as he. After I heard all these reports – we were writing up all these reports on newsprint in Thai language and also in English so I could read them – I said, “You know, when I look at this list, this looks very challenging to me. I’m not sure that you even mean it.”
They were visibly astonished to hear my skepticism. I said, “I want you to do something to show that you really mean it. If you really mean that you’re going to implement these things, I want you to fill in the space around the monk.”
At first they looked frozen. I was sweating; I knew I was taking the risk of cultural intrusion. We waited, silently. After what seemed like forever, one person moved, then another and another and they filled in all the space around their leader.
I looked at the abbot. “And what is it like for you, may I ask?” The participants held their breath. Very slowly the words came out. “I am glad you have taken this action.” He looked around. “Now I do not feel so lonely.”
The reason I tell that story has to do with the lesson about container building called being present in the moment. That is: if our participation in a group is so scripted through the roles we play and are used to playing, and if we’ve got each other in our monthly meetings in such tight boxes, there’s no room to expect the unexpected. If we aren’t willing to surrender to the moment, to what’s going on in our meeting right now, then it will be harder for the spirit to move. But if we are really open- open to the moment, open to the present- then that gives room for the spirit to be experienced in our hearts.
Accountability
West Philadelphia has a terrific trolley system connecting with Center City. One day I was riding the trolley with my then-ten-year-old son Peter. The guy in the seat behind us lit up a cigarette, even though there was a “no smoking” sign in the front of the trolley.
I thought, “Whoa, is this ever a moment of truth for me. Here’s the ten-year-old boy looking at his father: ‘What are you going to do about this?’ I can’t let this go by.”
So I turned around in my seat and I said, “Hey, it’s not okay for you to smoke. You see the sign up there, it says No Smoking. You really have to put that out.”
This was long enough ago that there was still a lot of breaking of that rule, so the guy was startled to be confronted about this. And then he smiled and shook his head, probably thinking, “Some white people are so weird and uptight.” (This guy was black.) He put out the cigarette, still shaking his head and looking at Peter, too, and he said, “You guys are standing up for yourselves, I get that. You know, I did that. I did that,” he rolled his eyes at Peter, “when I was your age.”
“Yeah?” I was immediately all ears, “What happened?”
“I was a boy in Birmingham, Alabama. I marched with Dr. King.” Peter’s eyes got as big as saucers and I said, “Tell us more, tell us more what it was like.” He said, “Oh, it was amazing. We had to disarm and weren’t allowed to carry our pocket knives, we were going be non-violent, right?” And he started talking about the dogs and the fire hoses that were used on the children. Fortunately it was a long trolley ride. He said in parting, “You know, those were the proudest days of my life. That’s when I most clearly have stood up for myself.” He winked at Peter, and off he went.
What can happen when we build a container around accountability? I confess how important my son was to that, because I would have let it go if it had just been me. Think about it: that situation was way more than the sum of the parts. These three guys on the trolley, what a dance we danced. If I had not confronted the smoker, none of that would have happened and my son would not have had that experience. Accountability, as Quakers have historically known, builds community.
Struggling Together
In my meeting we have groups we call Spiritual Accountability groups. One of the reasons we call them Spiritual Accountability groups is because we think those two words go together. It sounds like a contradiction to some of the individualism that is true in our larger culture and I think influences the Society of Friends. Our meeting is trying to get us used to the idea of saying Us, and saying, “If I feel a leading, I not only need to go through clearness about that, but to also go to a group that meets with me monthly.”
While I was engaged in a fifteen-year ministry of non-violent training, I had a Spiritual Accountability group that met with me, usually monthly, to which I needed to account for how I was operating. I found it supportive. Because I’m an individualist I also found it annoying. But it was supportive because I knew that it wasn’t just that they had my back, they had my front. In some ways that was even more important.
I’m on Worship and Ministry now in my meeting. And we’re trying to build a stronger container in that committee so that we can argue more. It has been a committee that has not allowed argument – it’s been people playing nice a lot and then working around each other’s patterns to make everything kind of hunky-dory at the end, but not really addressing some of the fundamental questions put before us as a group.
There’s another person on the committee who loves to argue, along with me. So she and I sometimes get into it, and at first the others in the committee were put off, but then they realized we were okay. Nothing broke. And we had a clerk that was willing to hold the container for us to be able to have those arguments. A few months ago I went over the line and accused her of something that was really wrong. A couple of committee members, in another context about a week later, said, “Hey George, you know what? You need to apologize for what you said. That was really over the line.” And I said, “You’re right.” I knew I had gone pretty far but it did not occur to me that I really owed an apology.
Accountability. I think it can open us to the spirit. She was, on one level, okay with it because she knew that arguing sometimes goes over the line, but on another level she was hurt so it was totally appropriate for me to apologize. In addition to the content of that of the disagreement, it was just the very idea that our fellow Quakers could challenge us when one of us gets hurt when we wrestle. It’s profound, isn’t it? It’s neat. It’s like family, or at least families with a high degree of acceptance.
But cultural patterns can get in the way of this, like the pattern of conflict aversion. Sociologists have found that avoiding conflict actually reduces the strength of the container – it’s the opposite of container-building. It results in a group/Meeting being only the sum of its parts.
Some cultures are more averse to conflict than others, which is why I call it a cultural pattern. In my lifetime I observe a trend of Quakers becoming more conflict averse, both in our relationships with each other and in the expression of our testimonies.
In the mid ‘60s a group of us created A Quaker Action Group. We decided to use non-violent direct action and civil disobedience to challenge the Vietnam War. One reason that we formed—and one reason we got as much support from Quakers as we did for doing such extreme things, like sailing a little yacht through the Seventh Fleet of the United States Navy to go to North Vietnam with medical supplies against the will of the government—was that previously there had been the Civil Rights movement. And most Friends knew in order to get justice, you have to fight for it. As Dr. King said over and over, “Freedom is not free.”
There were disagreements. In my own yearly meeting – this brings us back to the container – we had to struggle. I didn’t expect that we could gain consensus in our yearly meeting in Philadelphia to send medical aid to the North Vietnamese. When we were discussing the issue, it felt to me as if the Spirit had us by the scruff of our collective neck, and was shaking us as if to say, “You’re not going to get out of here until you say yes to this.” That’s the way it felt.
We achieved unity. Partly it came out of a tremendous lot of struggle on the monthly meeting level. And also it came out of A Quaker Action Group putting into practice – incarnating, you might say – incarnating the truth in that situation so that people could see that conflict was really okay. I believe this fourth principle for creating a strong container is willingness to struggle.
So, recognition that there’s a container at all – not just seeing each other as the sum of our individual parts, but recognizing that there’s a container – and willingness to be in the present moment, and willing to be accountable and hold each other accountable, and willingness to struggle. It strikes me, that if we have those four things going – and maybe there are others that you would name – if we have those elements on our monthly and yearly meeting levels, we would have a container so strong, so robust, the Spirit of God could move so vividly among us that the likening of ourselves to early Friends would occur more and more to us.
The key, I believe, is to shift our perceptions. So much of spirituality seems to be perceptions, doesn’t it? To shift our perceptions so that when we look at each other – the people sitting next to you, the people in the row behind, the people in this room, the people in our monthly meetings – we keep seeing not only their individual-ness (sure that’s important, let’s face it, American culture has taught us that well) but also to see the container that wants to be there. The container that, on some level, is there and can become more robust — if we pay attention to it.

To learn more about George, visit http://www.trainingforchange.org/ Thanks to Solomon Smilack of Mountain View Friends for transcribing this talk!