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.

*****

In the first few weeks of the movement, I must confess to studying its organizing principles quite carefully. I was looking for the group to be respectful of all and to be nonviolent in all its communication and actions. There were some events early on that I investigated very intently: the mass arrests in New York on the Brooklyn Bridge, protesters storming the Smithsonian, accusations of anti-Semitic motivations, or any use of violence. In each case I looked into, it became apparent that the actions were done by provocateurs (Smithsonian), renegades in the group (Brooklyn bridge, Oakland), or that things didn’t in fact happen as reported (anti-Semitic views). This is where my daughter’s observation is important: don’t be distracted and don’t believe everything you read or see.

What I have observed firsthand is that a commitment to non-violence is at the core of activities that are approved by the General Assembly, although there are individuals who sometimes argue for the use of force, both in the General Assembly and in discussion in social media. In general, Occupy Seattle is not just interested in nonviolence at the level of following rulebooks, but in capturing the spirit of nonviolence as the most powerful force for change. This dedication comes to life daily in our efforts to respect the dignity of police officers as fellow humans, not to consider them enemies. Many of us make a point of having conversations with officers and thanking them for being there and doing their jobs. Discussions on Facebook are surprisingly disciplined, with participants often explicitly declining to engage in provocation and name-calling.

All decisions are made by the General Assembly, which meets daily. Everyone is invited to participate. The GA process is led by “facilitators”, not “leaders”. Their task is to ensure that the process is helpful, and the facilitators ask for approval to facilitate each time and make it clear that they facilitate only at the group’s pleasure. The process is a secular consensus-based model that nonetheless allows the group to move forward if there is substantive agreement, if not detailed agreement. If someone disagrees with a proposal, there is a process that allows him or her to express that the matter is serious enough that it requires a change to a plan – or that the person’s conscience would require them to leave the group. Another option is to have one’s disagreement recognized by the group, without trying to block the group’s decision. Sound familiar?

Especially in the area of planning activities, especially acts of civil disobedience, I continue to see Truth emerge as an important organizing principle – there is no underhanded communication or deception involved in planning. When civil disobedience is planned, police are notified so they can prepare accordingly, and occupiers prepare for a respectful and safe arrest by the police. The goals of each activity are carefully chosen to be congruent with the principles that a good society should be based on: respect, dignity, truth, and humanity.

*****

As a group, the Occupiers are not religiously motivated, of course. That would not be compatible with representing the 99%. However, when I went to a working group on outreach, the group facilitator immediately welcomed a Quaker presence and pointed out that the 99% of course includes churches, synagogues and other religious groups. There is daily meditation/silent reflection at 6pm at Westlake Park. The sign I bring to Occupy Seattle reads, “Jesus said: sell everything and give to the poor” – Let’s at least pay our taxes. It is always met with smiles, with positive comments to the point of saying mine was the best sign in the parade. I’ve noticed people weave their way through the crowd to come and talk to me about my sign and I’ve been interviewed on radio because of it. There was even a police officer who smiled and waved at me after reading my sign.

Not only is there plenty of interest in spiritual and religious discussion – there is something even deeper than that at work in the Occupy movement. As I have pondered why this movement seems to have such power to engage people, has caught on and spread so fast, it dawned on me that it’s because the movement speaks a language that resonates deeply with people who are spiritually oriented. Occupiers speak the language of hope, deep moral values, and vision for a better future in a way that reminds me of the language of faith. Though not voiced explicitly, I think many of us hear the stirring echoes of God’s promises of peace, abundance, that we are each God’s own beloved. It taps into something deep in many of us, in much the same way that Martin Luther King Jr.’s language was both the language of legal rights for all Americans and the deeply evocative language of God’s promise and love in bringing the Israelites out of slavery.

The abundance and beauty that God promises is both the desired outcome and also the code by which God expects those in slavery to act among themselves. That seems to be the guiding principle in the Occupy movement – we not only seek a peaceful society where each person is treated as Beloved, but we choose to act today as if that society already exists. It becomes more real with every consensus-based decision, every meal that is shared, and every nonviolent conversation and nonviolent activity.

I love participating in the creation of the Promised Land, together with the woman without a shirt and the man with the swishy pink skirt. It’s like being in a gathered meeting for worship.

Susanne Kromberg is a hospital chaplain in the Seattle area. She is a member of Oslo MM (Norway) and a sojourning member of Salmon Bay MM.


Alyssa Nelson, Occupy Sacramento

Why would my shy self go alone to “occupy” a city that had never felt like home to me even after three years living there? Or as a friend put it, “You went to a PROTEST on your BIRTHDAY?!” The only explanation I can give is that it was exactly what I wanted to be doing in that moment, and that I felt grateful, exuberant, awed, and full of hope that day and since.

At Occupy Sacramento, like when I attended my first Quaker Meeting, I felt at immediately welcome downtown in Cesar Chavez Plaza, the park in front of City Hall where hundreds gathered. It felt good and right that we were there, demonstrating together against corporate and governmental corruption, showing solidarity with fellow occupiers around the country and globe. While I can’t claim to know each person’s story and rationale, I sensed a pervasive faith that we all could do something together to make the world more just and inclusive.

In the first three weeks of Occupy Sacramento (OS), I’ve been down to the park only about six times, ranging from minutes to hours. There, I’ve rallied, conversed with strangers, mediated conflicts, inquired about making donations, attended a training on civil disobedience, listened and spoken at a General Assembly, and joined in teach-ins on non-violent communication and consensus decision-making. So far I haven’t marched with the group to the sites of banks and government agencies, and in all that time I’ve only encountered one person at the park whom I had previously known.

Sometimes I feel more at home in the global, virtual landscape of Facebook than in my local physical space. The time I spend on Facebook discussing Occupy has felt most fruitful. The movement emerging publicly in Sacramento on my birthday provided a convenient photo for my online profile, which in turn laid an easy path to engage in conversations with people who probably would have ignored my ‘political’ posts if not for being willing to put aside differences in order to wish me “happy birthday, you hippie.” My diverse Facebook friend group also provides me with access to information and media I might not otherwise see. The Occupy Sacramento Facebook page keeps me informed and engaged with that community even while I’m not physically present.

Participating in person and online has helped me learn more about what is going on nationally and globally, as well as locally. In Sacramento, the issues of homelessness and the mayor’s pet initiative to build a new sports and entertainment complex with public funds reflect the politics of occupation and anti-occupation. Some of the organizers and participants in Occupy Sacramento are, in fact, homeless, and a lawyer who is an advocate for homeless rights is also providing pro bono services on behalf of the 75+ occupiers who have been arrested for civil disobedience. The nightly arrests of occupiers who stay in the park past curfew are tied to the City’s anti-homeless stance, which is politically and financially linked to the arena proposal.

Regardless of whether or not a new arena would stimulate economic growth and meet people’s desires for recreation, I feel ashamed that my city is spending so much in pursuit of the idea while effectively ignoring the thousands of people who live on Sacramento’s streets. The city has closed shelters, passed an anti-camping ordinance, drastically decreased or eliminated funding and services, and so far refused to approve a “Safe Ground” plan put forth by a coalition of homeless service organizations, non-profits, businesses, and individuals.

My first encounters with homeless Sacramentans came before I ever even thought of moving here. While I was a doctoral student studying Geography at UC Davis, a colleague organized a tour of a Sacramento homeless shelter and illegal camping sites along the river. A few years later, I helped organize an urban immersion in Sacramento for Quaker youth before the 2008 PYM Annual Gathering during which we visited a homeless shelter. Little did I know that a few years later I would be sitting in a park making new friends and discussing global finance and what it’s like not to have a legal place to exist, or staying up late writing about how my sense of home-ness was emerging alongside a growing awareness of the plight and politics of homelessness. Where to next, Spirit?

Alyssa Nelson is a member of Davis Friends Meeting in California (20 miles from Sacramento), which serves as the intake site for an Interfaith Winter Rotating Shelter (at which she has yet to volunteer). She sometimes attends Sacramento Friends Meeting.


Friends Lucy Duncan and Rick Seifert also contributed to this look at Friends and the Occupy Together movement by sharing portions of their blog posts. You can read Lucy’s blog on the website of the American Friends Service Committee, and Rick’s at The Red Electric.

Michael Birkel is a professor of religion at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana. The crowd of Earlhamites greeting Michael over the course of North Pacific Yearly Meeting’s sessions attests to the popularity of his Quakerism 101 class, often taken by freshman at Earlham. Michael began his address with a slew of wildly funny Quaker jokes- which, sadly, are not captured here, but his delight in sharing the life still found in the writings of our Quaker ancestors shines through quite clearly.

It was a delight to communicate with North Pacific Yearly Meeting Friends to consider a theme for this plenary. We settled on the title “Being Practically Spiritual.” That expression is meant a bit playfully—“oh, those Quakers, they’re practically spiritual”—but it points toward what I believe is a persistent challenge for contemporary Friends.
This probably doesn’t happen in your meetings, but in the meetings that I’ve been a part of, often there are two tendencies. On one side there are the contemplatives, the mystics, the spirituality types. People who could spend all day doing nothing for God’s sake. (If it sounds like I’m making fun of these people, let me assure you that I do so from within. I know these people well because I am one of them.) On the other side stand the activists, the people who, to quote from the vision statement of FCNL, “seek a world free of war and the threat of war, a society with equity and justice for all, a community where every person’s potential may be fulfilled, an earth restored.”

Again, these are tendencies. There are people in the middle who do both.
It’s good to have both sorts. But the challenge is that a lot of us are one or the other, not both. Sometimes these two groups do not always see eye-to-eye. Each group is sure that their camp represents the real Religious Society of Friends and wishes that the other side would simply smarten up and realize this.
How can we integrate the inward life of worship and devotion and the outward life of service and activism? How can we be practically spiritual? Fortunately, we have some good examples from our Quaker past that may help us to understand our Quaker present and to imagine our Quaker future.
I discovered some years ago that my calling in life as a historian of religion is to be a guide to the Quaker attic. Houses in my part of the world often have attics, places where old things get stored. Maybe your place of residence has an attic, or a basement, or a storage area—a place to put things. My job is to go up to the attic, poke around in old boxes and trunks, and to see what’s inside. I’ve dug around in some old chests, and I’ve come back downstairs with two bits of writing that I hope may shed some light on our topic of integrating the inward and outward life.
Fell’s Quiet Faithfulness
My first treasure is a letter from Margaret Fell. She is often remembered as a very practical, outwardly active Friend. When her first husband, Judge Thomas Fell, was on the circuit, Margaret skillfully managed the household and holdings of Swarthmoor Hall. When she came among Friends, Margaret opened Swarthmoor Hall to the early traveling Quaker ministers. Her house became Communication Central for these spreaders of the Quaker message. They could count on a place to stay, much-needed meals, and edifying spiritual conversation at Swarthmoor Hall. A few years later, when the monarchy returned and local trouble turned into state-sponsored persecution, Margaret Fell helped to organize and promote a structure that could endure these efforts to wipe out Quakerism. For these reasons, she is often remembered as the Mother of Quakerism. Clearly Margaret Fell was practical, a doer, but she could also write letters of spiritual counsel that have a way of inviting one into a mindful awareness of the presence of the Spirit.
Here is a passage from an epistle that she wrote in 1654, two years after George Fox’s vision on Pendle Hill.

Dear Brethren, in the unchangeable, everlasting, powerful truth of God. My love salutes you in the heavenly union. I am present with you, who are obedient to the measure of the eternal Light, which never changes, and who abides in the oneness of the Spirit, and in the bond of peace, which never can be broken nor taken from you. Here is freedom, which the world knows not. To the measure of God in every particular made manifest, and obeyed, and lived in, doth my love flow freely to you. My dear hearts, be faithful in every particular to your own measure of grace, made manifest and enjoyed; and in that which is eternal, wait continually… so you may come to receive living virtue from the living God, and be fed with the living bread, and drink of the living water of the spiritual rock, which they drank of in the wilderness. And be subject and patient and do not look out…Therefore stand faithful and bold for the truth upon the earth. (from Mary Garman [and others], Hidden in Plain Sight: Quaker Women’s Writings 1650-1700, p. 462.)

First, we might note that there is a lot of love in this letter. It might even be said that this is a love letter, of a spiritual sort. This is enhanced by the feeling that she has of being present with them, the powerful sense of unity with them.
She offers spiritual counsel, instructing them in a spiritual method: wait, be silent, turn inward, not looking to outward forms; wait and then see, see what is manifest; be nourished, then act. She concludes with the admonition to be faithful and bold for truth upon the earth, to act.
In this letter I find a beautiful integration of the inward and outward life. We know that Margaret Fell was a courageous voice for justice. Later in Quaker history, when they were not under constant threat of persecution from those who wanted Quakerism to be wiped out, they were more likely to advocate for justice for non-Quakers, and early Friends also did this to a degree. But in these early years, when the continued existence of Quakerism was an open question, their call to justice was often on behalf of other Friends.
When the English monarchy was reestablished and the state Church of England once again dominant, and when a vengeful Parliament passed a series of laws designed to render dissenting groups like the Quakers extinct, Margaret Fell the activist went to work. She described her activism in these words:

In the year 1660, King Charles the Second came into England, and within two weeks after, I was moved of the Lord to go to London, to speak to the King concerning the truth, and the sufferers for it, for there were then many hundreds of our Friends in prison in the three nations of England, Scotland and Ireland, which were put in by former powers. I spake often to the King, and wrote many papers and letters unto him, and many books were given by our Friends to the Parliament, and great service was done at that time. And they were fully informed of our peaceable principles and practices. I staid in London at that time one year and three months, doing service for the Lord, in visiting Friends’ meetings, and giving papers and letters to the King and council…a general proclamation from the King and council was granted, for setting the Quakers at liberty. Then I had freedom in spirit to return home to visit my children and family.
(from Margaret Fell. The Life of Margaret Fox, Wife of George Fox: Compiled from Her Own Narrative and Other Sources ; with a Selection from Her Epistles, Etc.)

Margaret Fell is one model from our tradition of someone who integrated the inward and outward life. For her, action grows out of contemplation. Her advice is to be quiet, to wait, and see what to do. Then do it. Be faithful to the measure of Light. Stand bold for the truth.
Woolman’s Exemplary Life
My second treasure from the Quaker attic is from the Journal of John Woolman, who lived an ocean away and in the eighteenth century. (Margaret Fell lived from 1614-1702, John Woolman from 1720-1772.)
John Woolman is attractive both to contemplatives and to activists because both sorts can see their concerns reflected in his eloquent life. He saw no separation between the two. His example calls both sides to a deeper commitment without asking them to abandon either path.
As John Woolman saw it, the inward principle that moves us to worship is that same principle that moves us to “exercise justice and goodness” in the wider world. What moves us to love God, he says, moves us to love other people and all creation, and to work for a better life for all. To use his words, he writes that he was convinced that:

…true religion consisted in an inward life, wherein the heart doth love and reverence God the Creator and learn to exercise true justice and goodness, not only toward all men but also toward the brute creatures; that as the mind was moved on an inward principle to love God as an invisible, incomprehensible being, on the same principle it was moved to love him in all his manifestations in the visible world; that as by his breath the flame of life was kindled in all animal and sensitive creatures, to say we love God as unseen and at the same time exercise cruelty toward the least creature moving by his life, or by life derived from him, was a contradiction in itself.
(Pg.28 All passages for John Woolman’s Journal are from Phillips P. Moulton, editor. The Journal and Major Essays of John Woolman)

True religion is both inward and outward. The most repeated word in this passage is “love”–love for God, love for neighbor, love for all God’s creation. All these types of love come from the same source and are intimately interwoven: where there is one, there are the rest, at least when religion is most true to itself.
One task of an Annual Session is to discern the shape of the Yearly Meeting’s collective ministry for the coming year. It seems fitting, then, to hear what John Woolman says about ministry. He writes in his Journal,

From an inward purifying, and steadfast abiding under it, springs a lively operative desire for the good of others. All faithful people are not called to the public ministry, but whoever are, are called to minister of that which they have tasted and handled spiritually. The outward modes of worship are various, but wherever men are true ministers of Jesus Christ it is from the operation of his spirit upon their hearts, first purifying them and thus giving them a feeling sense of the conditions of others. (31)

John Woolman, always the careful writer, packs a lot into this brief passage, so let’s spend some time listening carefully to it.
“Purifying”
First, he offers us an understanding of an inward, spiritual process, it begins with an experience of purifying.
Purifying can be a difficult word for some of us today. Does “purity” mean the same thing today as it did in his? Does it imply that we are naturally “dirty”? A careful reading of John Woolman’s writings shows that for him the opposite of purity is not usually dirtiness but rather “confusion,” or “mixture.” Purifying is a cleansing but it is also a clarification, a process of becoming clear.
What is it that needs to be purified, and what purifies it? John Woolman would say that our will (our capacity to desire and to make sound decisions) is not pure. Our desires have gotten out of hand; they are not in accord with divine love, or with the design of creation. They are not in harmony with pure wisdom.
Our motivations are not pure. They are mixed. We need to ask ourselves: why do we want what we want, even when it seems good? Because our motives are mixed, there is the ever-present risk of self-deception, projecting our own needs onto the wider world, being so attached to a cause that it serves our own sense of self-importance more than the injustice or wrong itself.
We’ve all met people like this, at times even in our own meetings. Their working assumption seems to be: if you love me, then you’ll love my leading. And, conversely, if you don’t love and support my leading, then you don’t love me. If meeting budgets are tight and we need to exercise some trimming, cutting their pet program is taken as a personal assault. Our motives can be mixed, not pure.
Purification requires a resignation (to use a traditional expression), a letting go. This is not a killing, not an act of violence on oneself, though it can be called a death. We let go, not to have less but to experience more. The traditional term for this among earlier Quakers, drawing on the language of the apostle Paul, is dying and rising with Christ.
The agent of purification, according to John Woolman, is the purifying love of Christ. It is not wrath. That makes the prospect of purification less frightening. Our vision is purified, and so is our heart.
As a result of this process, according to Woolman,

…a new life is formed in us, the heart is purified and prepared to understand clearly. “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” [Mt. 5:8]. In purity of heart the mind is divinely opened to behold the nature of universal righteousness, or the righteousness of the kingdom of God. (177)

And, he writes, there is:

…a reformation in our souls, manifested in a full reformation of our lives, wherein all things are new and all things are of God [2 Cor. 5:17-18] …This is the name by which he shall be called: the Lord our Righteousness. [Jer. 23:6] Oh, how precious is this name! It is like ointment poured out. (177)

When our vision is improved, we come to see the nature of God in a way that we had not before. The very identity of God is wrapped up in righteousness. The Biblical prophets frequently paired righteousness and justice. In the New Testament, the word for righteousness is the same as the word for justice.
We let go, we see God anew, we discover what justice really is—as something inherent to the identity of God—and our response is love. That’s the fundamental process of spiritual transformation, as I understand John Woolman.
To speak of purifying or becoming pure, we should also consider one of John Woolman’s favorite phrases for divine activity: pure wisdom.

Pure wisdom, John Woolman says, sets right bounds to our desires. Our selfishness gets out of hand, but under the influence of pure wisdom we find that our desires have boundaries. This is not a miserable experience. It is simply that we are no longer so interested in the things that once possessed us. We now realize that things, such as the desire for wealth, for power, or for a good reputation with the powerful, were a poor, fearful substitute for the direct experience of God, who satisfies our deepest desires. That’s what he means by pure wisdom setting right bounds to our desires. This purification is what we seek to do in worship. We set aside all else, simply to be present to God, to experience God’s love, and to be receptive to divine guidance.

“From an inward purifying, and steadfast abiding under it”
We have a need for vigilance, for interior watchfulness, to be aware of our own motives, to stay close to the Guide. A leading can be clear, though the expression of it can change and grow, that’s why you have gathered here for your yearly meeting. Our basic testimonies are clear, but the world changes, and we need to be guided in our response to those changes. John Woolman’s advice here is “Dwell deep.” To dwell deep is to come to the place of sound discernment.
“From an inward purifying, and steadfast abiding under it, springs a lively operative desire for the good of others.”
What might a lively operative desire for the good of others look like? Here is an inspiring statement of Quaker ideals on peace:

Peace is the state in which we are in accord with God, the earth, others, and ourselves. We know that true, lasting peace among us can finally be attained only through unity in the life of the spirit. We work to create the conditions of peace, such as freedom, justice, cooperation, and the right sharing of the world’s resources.
As we work for peace in the world, we search out the seeds of war in ourselves and in our way of life. We refuse to join in actions which lead to destruction and death. We seek ways to cooperate to save life and strengthen the bonds of unity among all people.
Do we live in the virtue of that life and power which takes away the occasion of all war?
Do we refrain from taking part in war as inconsistent with the spirit of Christ?
What are we doing to remove the causes of war and to bring about the conditions of peace? Where there are hatred, division, and strife, how are we instruments of reconciliation and love?
How do we communicate to others an understanding of the basis of our peace testimony?
As we work for peace in the world, are we nourished by peace within ourselves?

If these words sound familiar, that might be because they are taken from North Pacific Yearly Meeting’s Faith and Practice, from the Advices and Queries on Peace. This is one example of what a lively, operative desire for the good of others can look like.
But for that desire to be truly guided, it must be preceded by purification. Otherwise it might not be lively; it might not come from life and give life. It might not be operative; it may not work. For example, we may be acting out of guilt, which is backward looking, rather than love, which I see as forward looking.

“The operation of his spirit upon their hearts, first purifying them and thus giving them a feeling sense of the conditions of others”
People become ministers from the operation of Christ’s spirit upon their hearts, first purifying them and thus giving them a feeling sense of the conditions of others. What John Woolman had earlier described as a “lively operative desire for the good of others” is in parallel with “a feeling sense of the condition of others.” This is a phrase used by earlier Friends to describe a deep moment in worship, when, after coming to an inner stillpoint, a door opened to experience the collective dimension of the worshiping body. By “dwelling deep” during worship, Friends in John Woolman’s era experienced that they could come to a sense of the meeting as a whole, or of individuals in the meeting.
As they came to this “feeling sense of the condition of others,” Friends might feel an unspoken joy or pain in the community at worship. Silently, or in words if so led, they would rejoice with that joy, or they would be courageously and gently present to that suffering, surrounding it with the love of God, and even entering into that suffering, bearing the burden of those who suffered. This silent suffering with others could assist in bringing about a renewal in the inward life, a renewal so powerful that they dared to call it redemptive. Out of this deep place spring the wells of ministry.
Ministry
Among some Friends in our day, this corporate sense of meeting for worship has diminished somewhat as we have succumbed to the emphasis on the individual in our wider culture. But such experiences are still known. In worship, a person might still feel that a particular message is given to the gathered body, without knowing to whom in particular or why. Such messages do not always come with a nametag, but they arise out of the collective dimension of worship. Perhaps you have come to meeting at times feeling burdened, yet after the time of worship you feel that your burden has somehow lightened, without a word spoken about it.
Milder forms of this experience of the communal dimension of worship were and still are known. For example, in meetings for worship people still often have the experience of almost rising to speak but then hearing someone else offer substantially the same message—both worshipers attuned to the same Spirit at work in the body of those gathered.
This gift of ministering to the suffering of others helps the community to come to a more vital spiritual life. It serves to build up community and to increase love. The gathered meeting still happens among the faithful.
Friends have used the term “ministry” to refer both to inspired vocal utterances in meeting for worship and to labors in the gospel ministry—in the case of John Woolman, his labors on behalf of justice. Here, I believe, we come to the spiritual brilliance of John Woolman. He enlarged this collective quality of worship to extend beyond the walls of the meetinghouse, eventually to embrace all human suffering and injustice.
John Woolman extended the language of meeting for worship, of “a feeling sense of the condition of others,” to describe his labors as he traveled in the ministry. In his travels, he came to have a feeling sense of the condition of those who bore the burden of captivity in slavery. He spoke of coming to a feeling sense of the condition of the Native Peoples of this land who suffered injustice at the hands of colonial settlers. He had a feeling sense of the condition of the poor in the colonies and elsewhere.
He wrote of God’s kindness “in some degree bringing me to feel that which many thousands of my fellow creatures often suffer.” (173) He found his heart enlarged to yearn to enter into such an understanding of all suffering people:

Desires were now renewed in me to embrace every opportunity of being inwardly acquainted with the hardships and difficulties of my fellow creatures and to labor in his love for the spreading of pure universal righteousness in the earth. (172)

John Woolman enlarged the walls of the meetinghouse. The world became his meetinghouse. In doing this, he invited us to act for justice out of that sacred center that we encounter in worship. Just as he beckons us to a deepening of our experience of worship, he shows us a way to be social activists whose efforts grow out of the feeling sense of the condition of others.
Margaret Fell and John Woolman challenge us to bridge the divide between contemplatives and activists referred to at the start of our time together. If divine love is at the root of our worship and of our leadings to work for a better world, then both the contemplative and the activist are invited to see the other in a new way.
If I’m more of a contemplative bent, then I am invited to see spiritually-led activism as a form of worship, rooted and grounded in divine love. If their activism is how they experience divine presence, then it is a species of worship. If I’m more of an activist, then I am invited to see the spiritual practices of the contemplatives in my meeting as a genuine form of activism. If prayer and worship are centered in the love of the God whose identity is revealed in justice, then they in some unseen, mysterious way contribute to a world restored.

“There is a feeling common among Quakers under thirty, or even forty, that Friends over forty have been in charge so long that there’s no way for us young people to contribute. When my fellow youth attend their home meetings, they are usually still thought of as children; when they go elsewhere they are outsiders. It is not intentional exclusion, but long memories and unspoken traditions shut people out— also true among younger Friends, I admit. Quakerism, a Friend said, is “Like a game of Mao,” Mao being a game in which the rules are never explained, and new players learn the rules when they’re punished for breaking them. It is a game designed to frustrate; the Society of Friends can be similarly hostile.” (pg. 10)

No doubt some Young Adult Friends (YAFs) feel shut out – though I don’t think that reaction is as common as Paul thinks. It’s easy to generalize from a small base of data; I know of YAFs who feel an active part of their meetings; one is quoted below. So alienation is not universal. Nevertheless, the “Mao game” experience is real enough, yet it is not only a generational issue: I’ve seen plenty of older new attenders scratching their heads and wondering, “What did I do wrong??” This point is reinforced by a comment online on Paul’s article from a recent attender who’s still struggling to figure it out: he’s fifty-something.
So how do we “work with” various generations? One way, I believe, is to hold loosely to age-based categories. Yes, there are generational cohorts, with somewhat distinctive outlooks and experience. Yet I’m persuaded there’s much more going on among Friends, and seeing the problems of Quakerism through a generational lens misses a lot of important points; otherwise, why do I read of similar complaints in Quaker history a century ago, and a century before that? And why haven’t all the similar tensions I felt in my first years back in the Sixties gone away as I’ve grown older?
Instead, let me suggest that dealing with generational (and most other) difficulties in the Religious Society of Friends today calls for learning and applying some specific skills, or what might also be called virtues. Pardon the clunky mnemonic, but I call them “The Seven Ups.”
Yep. The seven ways to fix Quakerism, whether you’re young or not. They are:
Show Up.
Read Up.
Speak up.
Ante up.
Smarten Up.
Toughen Up. And
Don’t Hurry Up.
Permit me a brief explanation:
Show Up: Quakerism belongs to those, of whatever age, who stay around, attend the meetings, and do the grunt work. If the Society doesn’t bring Light for you, find another path. But if it does, don’t expect to mail it in and get anywhere beyond the fringes. There’s a reason liberal Quakers generally don’t believe in hell: because we have committee meetings instead. (What? Did you think I like them any better after forty years’ worth?)
Read Up: I get weary of hearing the complaints, from young or old, that nothing about Quakerism is explained. Sure, many of us elders are too diffident about speaking of it. But have you looked into the meetinghouse library? Many Friends have done their best to distill the explanations into writings long and short, old and new, enough to fill several shelves. (Your Meeting lacks a library? No excuse: lots of it is now online.) Make use of them.
This is a key point for me. Quakerism may be young among the world’s religions, but it has still produced a rich deposit of faith and experience. When I look over our little hedge, I see Talmudic scholars pursuing their studies for decades, and Quranic jurists doing likewise; a Jesuit priest invests a decade learning his craft, and my friend Sarah who is becoming a nun has spent six years in fulltime study and preparation. So please, why should anyone expect understanding Quakerism to involve no more than a couple of pamphlets, or an hour or two in group discussion?
Does that mean we’re all supposed to become rabbis? Well, as an occupation, no. But Quakerism abolished the rabbinate, remember? And the bishops and the priests and the mullahs too. So who does that leave ultimately responsible for my “faith seeking understanding”? It’s me, that’s who. (And the Spirit.)
Having learned something, then Speak Up. Paul wrote that, “Young people of all ages need to speak out, respectfully but firmly. Conversation between equals is the rock that we have to build on.”
Young people of all ages; I’ll drink to that (root beer, of course, popularized by a Quaker). Such effective speaking up is greatly enhanced when the speaker has done some serious reading and exploring and is beginning to know what they’re talking about.
Many will be surprised to discover that much of the over-forty reluctance to speak about Quakerism is based on a failure to heed this counsel. Yes, all too many older American Friends don’t talk about it because in fact we don’t know diddly about Quaker history or thought, beyond a couple of pamphlets and whatever certain social action groups say it is.
This fog of ignorance, which I’ve dubbed, “the Age of Amnesia”, is among my generation’s least attractive features, and thanks to Paul for calling it out, because it is largely based on laziness and timidity.
Yet a bit of learning can be dangerous, especially if it obscures what is the equally or even more important mandate to Ante Up. I stopped being a “Young Adult Friend” and turned into a plain “Adult Friend,” not on my 35th birthday, but on the day I sat down, after many years of attending and membership, pulled out my check book, made a donation to my Meeting, and then followed it up each month thereafter.
That was when I began to “carry my weight,” and before long, to realize I was “gaining” what those older Friends called “weight.” How did it happen? The answer was a bit unsettling, but no less true for that: I was now concretely invested in the meeting.
Yes, I know we older Friends rattle on endlessly about how money should not be the measure of anyone’s value to a Meeting, or inhibit participation therein. And mostly, we mean it.
Mostly.
But there’s another side to the coin: Quakerism, like just about every other institution, has a material base: bills have to be paid. Meetinghouses need lights, heat, maintenance, sometimes costly. Scholarships to camp or yearly meeting don’t fall from the sky. Religious Education materials are not all given away free. The joyous community of yearly meeting or whatever requires groceries, rent, insurance and fees. If there are staff, salaries don’t magically appear.
This is probably the most closely guarded of older Friends’ secrets, and I may get in trouble for spilling it, but what the heck? – money counts. Our only excuse for concealing this fact, and it’s a lame one, is that we didn’t invent the rule: such double-talking hypocrisy about money is practically ingrained in the Quaker DNA.
So if you don’t feel taken seriously in your meeting, consider this advice, hidden away under the heading “Stock” in the oldest printed Discipline: “A stock [i.e., treasury] having been generally kept, and by experience found useful, for the necessary occasions of the society, it is agreed, that the same be occasionally renewed by a collection from each quarter . . .” Or this, from Query 4 of the North Carolina Yearly Meeting (Conservative) Discipline: “4. Do we assume our rightful share in the expenses of our Meeting?” i.e., Ante Up.
Eventually I came to see that this was not simply a money question, but also a spiritual one; for “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also,” is a true statement (Matthew 6:21).
So far, so good. Still, I admit there will be times and places where the above habits will not be enough. There are meetings and organizations with entrenched establishments which will take your money, let you do the grunt work, and still keep you and others at arm’s length, patronized and on the back benches.
Paul also writes,

When young Friends are welcomed to participate, we often wind up as the token young person on a committee. This can exhaust and deaden, for committees are not designed for action or vitality; Quaker tradition moves slowly. Tradition guides, but tradition grows comfortable, and change grows hard. When we young folks try to act, we’re told “We don’t do it that way,” and we’re never told why. Older Friends must talk with us about Quaker traditions and history, or we won’t learn them; only by trusting and supporting us in our ideas can we become part of the life of the meeting.”

Older Friends need to talk, and do so plainly; here Paul is absolutely right. But sometimes those in charge refuse to listen. So what then?
Here’s one “what then”: In the early 1890s, after an evangelical autocracy had ruled (and stifled) London Yearly Meeting for decades, a band of young insurgents gathered and discovered that they were well and truly fed up, religiously as well as generationally. So they planned a coup. And to bring it off, they went underground. That is, they Smartened Up.
If you believe such things do not and cannot happen among Quakers, Friend, it’s time thee woke up and smelt the fair trade organic shade-grown roast arabica.
In this particular case, which has been well-documented, the plotters proposed to hold a “Home Missions” conference, on matters of “current concern” — which were left deliberately vague and innocuous-sounding, and obtained a pat-on-the-head green light from the dozing elders. Then they stacked the program committee with their own kind, and quietly, so quietly, put together a program which, in 1895, started a revolution. The old farts didn’t discover what the whippersnappers were up to till the conference was actually underway; and then, by golly, it was too late. Freaking brilliant.
Sometimes, in dealing with elders, you’ll find you may have to wait for a Quaker funeral or two before taking your rightful places among the in-crowd. But often enough, if you get together and Smarten Up, this process can be accelerated.
Yet the time may come when passive aggression and guile don’t cut it. Now and then you may have to actually push your way into the charmed circle, and even engage in open conflict. In Ecclesiastes (the Bible again), we are told there is a time for everything, including “war.” That applies to Friends too, so when that time for conflict comes, Toughen Up, do what has to be done, and thank God for the peace testimony.
This sixth injunction has a special applicability to younger Friends: The Society of Friends is not, as you are discovering, always a warm fuzzy, welcoming, ever-safe, nurturing and generous place. (What human institution is?) Sometimes, if you want in, you’ll have to Toughen Up and push your way in; politely, if at all possible. Or with an elbow here and there if need be.
Don’t be put off by this penultimate of the Seven Ups. It doesn’t come into play that often. Usually, if you’re among those who Show Up and Ante Up, the experience is milder, more like what happened to me in the Meeting I attended from the late ‘70s to the early ‘90s.
There was definitely an “entrenched establishment” of elders there when I arrived. I don’t say they were “oppressive,” but there they were, and why not? They had created this meeting, found the meetinghouse, raised money to renovate it, and kept it going until I came in to fumble along and find my way.
But then one First Day — it was literally like this — I looked around the meeting room at those I had regarded as “Younger Friends” (like me), and was hit with a shocking double realization: first, that almost all the Establishment Elder Friends were now gone (retirement, disability, death—i.e., the usual); and second, their departures meant it was now our turn, to see if we could continue what they had started. This prospect was more than a little daunting: could we, could I handle it? One by one, we stepped into all the big slots: Clerk, Treasurer, etc. That was twenty-plus years ago; and last I heard, the Meeting was still there.
It wasn’t a power struggle. Quite the opposite: it was more as if someone had dropped a precious vase, and it was up to my cohort to catch it before it smashed on the floor.
Here I note Paul’s comment that he feels many of his peers need something to believe in, like a common, unifying cause. I can’t buy the “in common” part: the world is complex, people (& Friends) are wonderfully (maddeningly) diverse, and leadings are various. For many of us, no matter how impatient we are, sorting them out takes time.
In my case, I didn’t really get a clue as to my “cause” or “leading” (vocation was my term) until the mid-thirties; and then it took another decade-plus to feel as if I was getting on track with it; we’re talking late forties here.
Yeah, I think I was pretty dense. Along the way I stressed about this unclearness a lot. Sometimes I envied my peers who made choices early and were well into regular careers; but that didn’t speed anything up for me. But I can look back and see that God was working on this denseness. (Still is, one hopes.)
Which leads to the last item on the Seven Ups list. If my life experience has anything to offer today’s YAFs, it is a paradoxical charge to hang on to your impatience, keep seeking and threshing, but Don’t Hurry Up — that is, don’t be surprised if it takes awhile; because the Spirit “is like the wind, it blows where it wants to, and you hear the sound of it, but you don’t know where it comes from or where it’s going. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” (John 3:8)
These “Seven Ups” make up my effort to follow Paul Christiansen’s advice to “young people of all ages… to speak out, respectfully but firmly” here. And I’ll close by quoting one of the online YAF comments on his article, which I think does the same:

Quakers have a valuable, unique, and vital message and approach badly needed in this world and if the “old guard” aren’t interested in working with young Friends it will be their loss. I don’t plan on going anywhere (Unitarianism, ugh) and I have the wherewithal to stand in my meeting and demand change. I hope other adult young Friends realize the power they have in their youth and energy.

Okay, so that was from my daughter Guli, in whom I am well-pleased; so I’m hardly unbiased. But it was unsolicited, and I think she kicked it. So go for it.
Chuck Fager is Director of Quaker House, a peace project next to Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, North Carolina. He publishes widely on Quaker topics, and blogs at www.afriendlyletter.com.  There is some evidence that he was once a Young Adult Friend. Click here to read Paul’s original article and the lively conversation in the comments section.

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