At the close of our business meeting last August, I felt a lack of Light in the room. Upon greater reflection, I realized that what I experienced was a lack of transcendence. This seemed unusual to me. Most members of Pima Friends Meeting tend to refer to and think of our business meetings as “Meetings for Worship with Concern for Business” or “MWCB.” In the past, we all seemed to share a sense of community that arose through MWCB, a sense that we would all gladly lay ourselves down to become part of something greater. Transcendence is a welcome relief from always thinking about oneself, and it is possible through community. We experience transcendence as a community when we create ourselves anew into something we have never been before.
It is clear to me now that this is not an experience that Friends can ever take for granted. Transcendence in community is a gift. It is a gift that we must prepare ourselves to receive. Experiencing deep and profound renewal in myself has led me to seek this renewal with others.
I experienced an awakening at the end of my high school years. For the first time, I realized that I could act on my own feelings and do what made me happy. This was in direct opposition to the teachings of the church that I grew up in, the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod. I had to let go of my religion and reorganize my life according to this revelation, and this took a long time
In college, I worked with a therapist on personal issues. Also, at a religious school more moderate than my original religion, I further looked at religion as something that could better suit me, as well as open my eyes and my heart to other people.
After college, I continued to explore my thoughts and feelings through time in nature. In a private place, I would speak out loud to an imagined “other” who understood me; then I internalized this empathy. Thus, I came to accept myself, came to a new understanding of my place in the world, and experienced transcendence. The beauty around me revealed the beauty inside me. I felt whole.
I also joined a group of young adult Unitarian Universalists. Here, I seemed to make sense to other people as I never had before, and I began to thrive. I attended a liberal seminary and through my coursework there, I developed a better understanding of ways that individuals, by acting according to social norms, can be hindered from knowing how they actually feel.
From learning how people can be hurt through their participation in society, I moved to Tucson to study how schools could be organized so that people would not become alienated from themselves in the first place. At the same time, I began anew to open myself to different kinds of relationships. I fell in love and got really hurt.
As a means of clarifying my difficulties in being human, I wrote and produced a play, highlighting the interactions between authoritarian pressures in my life and my own temperament. I had become the person I was, not only through my choices, but also through my own personality.
This new acknowledgement of responsibility for my emotions opened me to a new part of my life. Through a dream, I saw that I needed to join a church, one that would be somewhat like my old church, but without the strictures of my old religion. Quakers seemed to be such a church.
When I first came to Quaker meeting, I found people who were speaking from their hearts during worship. I was thrilled to be in a place that prioritized honest expression of emotions and insights.
Among Quakers, I found ways to live by sharing deep feelings with others, and I developed a much richer ability to be with people. Quaker meeting offered me opportunities to learn, in structured settings, how to speak my truth to others – structured settings such as threshing sessions and MWCB. I remember feeling as though my orientation to the whole world could change – from how I was when I arrived at the meetinghouse in the morning to how I was when I left in the afternoon after worship and business meeting. I had a whole new orientation to everything. I was put together differently.
I have experienced transcendence in the meeting many times. Sometimes it would be in a threshing session, when one person would offer an opinion that was markedly different from everyone else’s. We would be challenged by a person’s ability to name a problem clearly, after everyone else had just been talking about everything being good. People would listen to this new point of view, and the conversation changed. People became more honest and offered different opinions. Sometimes, in MWCB, there would be such disagreement that I did not know how we could possibly go on. Then someone would say something that would offer a different way forward, and we came together as one, in a new way. The newly recreated bonds of our togetherness recreated me.
The formal structures of our meeting provided a safe place for me to be vulnerable. But as time went by, I learned to become honest with people outside these formal settings as well. More and more, I learned to trust that when I was honest about myself, people usually responded with kindness. I no longer needed the formality of Quaker practices to be vulnerable.
Throughout my experience in meeting, the focus in my life has shifted from working on myself to working on learning how to care for others. My Quaker meeting has helped me with this. Soon after I became a member of the meeting, I began to serve as the clerk of the newly created Adult Spiritual Development Committee. I continued in that position for over ten years. Through that service, I found that what I had learned for myself during the early parts of my life could guide my efforts to help others. Eventually, I outran my light. I didn’t know how to help my meeting, and I was very unhappy. After so many years on this committee, I needed a change, and I accepted the invitation to serve as our meeting’s recording clerk.
A difficult thing about being a recording clerk is that the person who serves in that role is expected to avoid speaking during business meeting. For me, speaking during MWCB had become an important way for me to feel like I was part of something greater. I strove to speak my truth as it arose from listening to others, and I felt that my contributions made a difference.
The co-clerks that I work with have been clear that the clerk’s job is not to try to figure out how to get the meeting to do what they think is right. Instead, their job is to try to discern the will of the meeting. It has been hard for me not to have a voice in our meetings, but something else has emerged. Instead of focusing on my own feelings, I am tuned in to the experience of my meeting as a whole.
It is from this perspective that I experienced a lack of transcendence in our meeting last August. Instead, I experienced merely the same people saying the same things. And I heard some Friends express unwillingness to trust each other. I do not know why this is happening, but I can offer a few suggestions.
Our business meetings are hybrid now. That is, we hold MWCB in a room where some people are physically present and others attend by way of videoconference. Maybe it is harder to inhabit the spiritual space of another person when we are not in the same physical space. It also might be easier to discount someone if you are not in the same room with them.
Second, many members of our meeting have died in recent years or have moved away. We have not gained a similar number of new members. How can we create ourselves anew without enough new voices?
Further, the quality of our worship is dull. We offer two times for worship on Sunday morning – 8:00 and 10:30. Even before the pandemic, the 10:30 meeting had become increasingly silent. I think many of us have come to feel that it is better to stay silent than to say something inappropriate. Yet, I wonder what “inappropriate” even means. As Jon Watts pointed out in his keynote address to Intermountain Yearly Meeting this summer, most Friends in the U.S. practice a White, middle-class interpretation of Quakerism. Many other interpretations exist throughout the world, and in some places, Friends worship much more expressively.
My entire life, I have wanted to share with others the joy I have found in expressing myself, and what I have learned in my journey since late adolescence. I want other people to know that growing and expressing oneself feels so good. I would like my Quaker meeting to be a place where we recreate each other through the life that bubbles up inside each of us and that we share with each other. I would like our business meetings to be opportunities to turn joy and growth into the work of our community.
I’m not sure how we can have more of this kind of creative expression in our meetings. A Friend recently told me that all three of these are interrelated in any meeting: the quality of worship, the presence of religious education, and the practice of MWCB. Perhaps if we pay more attention to the quality of our worship, and if we put more effort into religious education, then we might find our business meetings to be transcendent. ~~~
Susan Calhoun has grown and flourished for the past twenty years under the care of Pima Monthly Meeting in Tucson, AZ (IMYM). She is indebted to their love.