At the Spring 2008 session of College Park Quarterly Meeting, the theme was “Differences among Friends,” which was intended to bring out the range of beliefs that exist among Quakers, which nonetheless do not prevent us from worshiping in silence together.
We conducted an exercise to illustrate our diversity. Six ribbons were taped to the wall of the meeting room, each representing one axis of belief or self-identification. At the two ends of each ribbon were labels for the extremes on (for example) the activist/contemplative axis, the Christocentric/Nontheistic axis, and the old/young axis.
Every attender at the plenary session was given six round white sticky dots, and instructed to place a dot along each ribbon according to his or her position on that spectrum between the extremes. Everyone milled around, going from one ribbon to another. It was not long before they discovered the rules had a loophole – you were not required to place a dot at just one place on the spectrum. You could occupy several positions by tearing your dots in half, or even into quarters. At the close of the exercise, about a third of the dots were torn in pieces.
We laughed: “Quakers don’t know what they believe!” But the exercise showed something more significant:
There are not only differences among Friends, but differences within Friends. We often hold – and acknowledge holding – contradictory beliefs. We are each spread across the spectrum. The truth is rarely so simple it can be condensed into one dot.
Other differences come to mind that can be expressed as extremes we hold simultaneously. One such issue discussed in Faith and Practice is Friends’ position on abortion. Supporting the right of a woman to choose when to have a child and believing that all life is sacred would seem to be incompatible opposites, yet we can believe both are true.
Friends uniformly believe there is a Light within each person, and most of us would say that the Light leads us to act with justice and compassion. Yet we are not so naïve that we think appealing to leaders’ sense of justice and compassion will result in changed behavior and better leadership. How can we hold our belief in the Light when we know it doesn’t always work?
Friends also practice decision-making by all those assembled for business meeting, not by a single leader or governing board. Yet we know that one person can be right and the whole rest of the assembly wrong, and one person’s leading can guide the actions of the whole meeting. Even so, having a leading does not entitle one to leadership; instead, it obliges one to accept the discipline of approval by one’s meeting.
Finally, when we are deeply in worship, when we have set aside all those other, lesser spectra of difference, there remains one great contradiction. The deeper we go, the more we find ourselves in The Now, occupying an infinitesimal dot on the scale of time. Being in The Now carries with it a sense of being in Eternity – the longest possible scale of time. Whenever you find one, you find the other. ~~~
Eric Sabelman recently retired from a career in bioengineering, and moved to Friends House in Santa Rosa, CA, with his wife, MaryAnn. He began attending Orange Grove Meeting in Pasadena in 1969. He is currently serving as Clerk of College Park Quarterly Meeting. Although most often attending Friends House Worship Group, he remains a member of Palo Alto Friends Meeting (PacYM).