Jon Watts

Transcript

Lloyd Lee Wilson: Are Quakers Christian? Many Quakers are Christian. Worldwide, most Quakers are Christian. I’m a Christian. I’m a Christian today because there was a place for me in the Religious Society of Friends when I wasn’t a Christian.

Are Quakers Christian?

Chloe Schwenke: Are Quakers Christian? I would almost turn that question around and say, “Ok, tell me what a Christian is.” And it goes to the heart of what I think is the magic of Quakerism, which is that we don’t try to define God. We let God be God and we just experience God. Some of us including myself feel a great connection to the experience and testimony of Jesus Christ. The way that Jesus Christ brought love into the world as a tangible and important and central piece of what it means to be a human being is a very powerful testimony that many, many Quakers would feel absolutely at home with who may not call themselves Christians. But they don’t need to call themselves Christians.

The History of Quakerism

Lisa Motz-Storey: My practice is definitely Christian. But it doesn’t mean that I feel like Christianity is the only way. It’s our history as Quakers, too. George Fox would have answered, “Yes” to that question and everybody else.

David Johnson: Certainly the first Quakers were Christian. Their whole life and spirituality were centered around the light within them, which they experienced as the light of Jesus as the Christ working within them.

A Distinctive Approach to Christianity

Mark Wutka: I would say from its beginning, Quakerism was rooted in Christianity but it wasn’t necessarily the same kind of Christianity that was surrounding it. I would say one of the distinctives is that Quakerism tended to take external things and understand them from an internal perspective.

Gregg Koskela: For me one of the ways that a Friends perspective helps me to follow Jesus is probably best described for when I first walked into this room as a freshman at George Fox College: I was really moved by the attentiveness to the Spirit of God and I remember calling my Mom and saying, “These people believe what all these Christian churches I’ve been a part of have believed but not taken seriously.”

Lloyd Lee Wilson: Much of Christianity is what we might call “cataphatic” spirituality, which you can think of as a list of all the sentences that you could make that begin “God is…” Quakers have lifted up in large part an “apophatic” spirituality, which you can think of as all the sentences that begin, “God is not…” and you fill in all the blanks. Which is not to deny God but to recognize that all our intellectual constructs and our language and our words are not quite it.

Valerie Brown: This is one of the things I really love about Quakerism, is that it is so unconventional. It is noncomformist. I really appreciate that element of the mystery of Quakerism.

The Universal Light of Christ

David Johnson: The Light is a universal light, and that’s clear in Penn’s original statement, that the spirit of God is in every person. That’s taken primarily from the ninth verse of the first chapter of John’s Gospel. I’m sure that that light which comes from a universal spirit of God is experienced by every other person.

Lloyd Lee Wilson: I think that Quaker corner of the big tent of Christianity doesn’t bring anything from outside Christianity, but highlights and lifts up things that were in the Christian tradition always but have been neglected or almost lost over the millennia. One of the things is the direct and immediate and perceptible encounter and relationship with God. That idea that God pours out God’s spirit on everybody, and that’s a life-changing encounter.

Questioning Labels

Tom Hoopes: I personally identify as Quaker. I do not self-identify as Christian. And the reason I don’t choose that identity is for me, the label Christian includes a very large community of people in the world, too many of whom practice a too-enthusiastic form of exclusion and intolerance for me to feel okay with that. I do unite with many of the teachings of Jesus Christ. I specifically am enthusiastic about the Gospel of Thomas.

Jade Souza: I am a Christ-centered Friend, as we tend to call ourselves, or a Christian. It’s fine to call me Christian. I guess my question back is: why is it important for some people that you call yourself Christian when that’s a word that never crossed Jesus’s lips? I think the word Christian is really a worldly term. It’s a contemporary term that has a social meaning and can mean a lot of different things to different people.

Lisa Motz-Storey: When I first came to meeting, I called myself “post-Christian” because if I really believe that everyone has their own spiritual path, then I’m not really Christian, I’m just sort of open and seeking. That was a popular term to use within Quaker circles. But I’ve come full circle, and really embraced that I am Christian.

Chloe Schwenke: The whole labeling thing of “tell me what you believe, tell me who you are” is the antithesis of my experience of Quakerism and the Quaker testimonies. I like the fact that we don’t have a creed. We have testimonies: things we share that seem to be common experiences and ways of being as Quakers that flow from the experience of the Divine, but do not define the experience of the Divine. They’re coming the other way. You’ve got to experience it and you’ve got to stop trying to put God in a box. If we were able to put God in a box, he/she/it would not be God anymore. I mean, come on, we’re only human beings.

How Quakers Fit Into Broader Christianity

Fritz Weiss: I don’t think that this whole teaching that is captured in what we know of Jesus was about individual salvation and hereafter. It was about this world we live in now. It was about what being a people of God, being a community of God would look like in this world right now. When Jesus said, “This is what I command. I command that you love one another,” he meant now, here. How could I not take that commandment up? That is such a clear prescription for what it would mean to be living as people gathered in God’s name.

Gil George: I think the witness that Quakers bring the broader Christian family really is that one of the “priesthood of all believers” as is spoken. We don’t operate with a hierarchy because we recognize that there’s really only one boss, and that’s no human agency.

Lloyd Lee Wilson: I think Quakers remind the rest of Christianity that words are insufficient, that there is something beyond words, something beyond intellectual constructs that is there and is vital about this Christ who lived 2,000 years ago and who we say we encounter today in our worship and in our silent meditation and in our relationship with the divine.

Fritz Weiss: And I think that’s for me the heart of the controversy sometimes about, what do we mean? Do we mean being Christian means accepting Jesus Christ as my personal savior so that in the hereafter I am able to sit at the feet of God? Or do we mean that accepting Jesus Christ and the teachings of Jesus Christ informs my life here and now, in these times, in this culture, in this context? For me it’s the second. It informs how I live my life, here.

Transcript

I have this thing that I do when I’m in the studio, that I think I also should maybe say to myself in worship more often, that is: banishing judgment. I always think of it also with hands because I also draw hands a lot. Just like, “Get out. Go out the door, and I’ll tell you when you can come back in.”

How Quakerism Influences My Artistic Process

My name is Maggie Nelson. I live in Portland, Maine. My pronouns are she/her/hers. I go to Portland Friends Meeting, and I’m an artist, and I also coordinate the young Friends program of New England Yearly Meeting.

I think the turning point that happened for me was when I started learning more about Quakerism. I had been making art my whole life, and I started—I was starting to realize that the way I am… the way that Quakers talk about listening for some inner voice, or the voice of God, or the voice or the divine—that actually feels a lot like something that’s really familiar, which is trying to figure out what to make.

A Focus on Listening

I had thought a lot about how do I set myself up so I can best listen. For me with art, that would look a lot like paring down any sort of elaborate process or materials or anything like that. I just wanted to be able to make marks or images and have there be very few barriers from head to paper or head to canvas or whatever I was working with. And I think about how there’s so many ways to worship. In Quaker worship there’s still a million variables but you have your body and your voice and that’s kind of it. And so we have these limits, but we can go to a million different places. That’s helpful for me to set the boundaries and build this container that I think is really necessary. After that, it’s like, okay, I’ve built the house, and now I just have to step back and let it be filled.

Suspending Judgment

I feel like it’s so common to see people trying to draw who maybe don’t draw that often who are just like, “Oh this is terrible.” And I’m like, “You’ve only drawn, like, two lines.” And they’re like, “Well it’s terrible.”

You can never know where you’ll go if you’re constantly assessing what’s given to you. If you’re constantly sitting in worship and holding what you have in your hands and judging it, then where are you going from there? So I think that process of banishing judgment and seeing what comes out of that is the really spiritual process.

Being Comfortable With Not Knowing

It feels kind of like when you’re in worship and there’s like a million messages. Only after the fact do I try to be like “that person meant that” or “this is how I’m going to relate to what this person said.” I think it’s acknowledging that it’s from God and not from you. It allows me to be like, “I don’t know what it means.”

…which is my favorite thing to say about what I’m making and my favorite thing to hear when kids are making stuff. When I’m like, “Hey, what are you making?” And they’re like, “I don’t know.” And I’m like “Good.”

Transcript

When I was teaching at Guilford College, looking the way I do–I wear a straw hat, I don’t have collars, I wear gray and all that–people ask me about my upbringing: “Were you born Quaker? Have you always been a Quaker?” And it’s a complicated story.

Growing Up Quaker in Indiana

My name is Max Carter and I live in Greensboro, North Carolina, where I recently retired from teaching at Guilford College. I’m a member of New Garden Friends Meeting which is jointly part of Friends General Conference and Friends United Meeting.

I was born into a Quaker family, 11 generations. I was born into a Quaker community, Quakers had settled that part of Indiana in the 1840s. But the Quakerism I was born into in 1948 was an assimilated Quakerism that after the Civil War had taken on more and more Protestant trappings.

My “Plain Quaker” Ancestors

My great-great grandparents on my mothers side—Robert and Elizabeth Johnson—were plain Friends living in New London, Indiana. My great-great grandparents on my father’s side were Fleming and Rachel Johnson (inbred!) who were also from New London, Indiana. They were all plain Friends. The photographs we have of them show them even in the early 1900s in broad brim hats, bonnets, plain clothes. Both of them attended the New London Meetinghouse, which is a plain, divided meetinghouse after the Civil war: still women on one side, men on the other because of the business meeting structure, with a partition down the middle. Silent meetings. Old, plain Quaker culture.

My great-great-grandparents were ministers in that meeting, adhered to that old, plain Quakerism.

The Influence of Holiness Revivals

Post-Civil War the revivals came through. By 1865 there was a Quaker meeting in Indiana that had already adopted pastoral worship. By the 1870s the revivals were so widespread that many Quakers were beginning to adopt more Protestant traditions of prepared sermons and music and hymns and alter calls. Many people were being converted in these revivals were coming into the Religious Society of Friends from outside the culture.

New London held firm. My great-great-grandparents resisted this enthusiastic religion of the revivalists, but one night the caretaker of the meetinghouse (who was a revivalist in sympathies) “inadvertently” left the basement door unlocked and the revival preacher came in and held a rip-roaring revival in the old Quaker meetinghouse. Many people in the community were converted. The only church in the community was the old Quaker meeting and so they came into membership there and within a decade, it was a programmed, pastoral Quaker meeting and my great-great-grandparents were pastors essentially in that meeting.

Assimilation into the Protestant Mainstream

It happened rapidly, this assimilation into the Protestant mainstream. By the time I was born, you still had Quakers in my meeting (they were called churches by that time) who remembered the old style of Quakerism. Their grandparents were plain and still used the plain speech. They didn’t anymore, but they remembered that style of Quakers and revered their ancestors. But more and more influence came from the revivals, from the Holiness movement, and from a type of Christianity that emphasized a personal relationship with Jesus: a personal conversion, an alter call experience. There were enough similarities to early Quakerism—his devout and holy life, the possibility of perfection—that it was readily accepted by many Friends.

Transcript

My experience of being a Friend is that being a Friend is a commitment of your life. It isn’t a commitment of your time on Sunday or your time when you are gathered for worship, it is a commitment to how you are in the world.

Being a Quaker

My name is Fritz Weiss. I live in Portland, Maine and I’m a member of Portland Friends Meeting in New England Yearly Meeting.

Finding Moments of Prayer and Reflection

Being a Friend requires of us an openness to the Divine as we walk in the woods, as we are gathered with our family, as we are in our work, which takes effort. It takes discipline. I start each morning with a period of prayer and reflection and find moments through the day where I can stop and breathe and center into that sense of God that is at the heart of us.

In my professional life I would find myself at a moment before a meeting started or at a moment before a conversation, taking that breath and letting go of a sense of what I wanted the outcome to be and turning to God and saying, “in your hands,” and then going forward and continuing to do this secular, prosaic work, but in a sense looking from that moment to invite God in.

The Importance of Gathering Together

But that’s not sufficient. It’s not all there is. Early Friends understood that we felt God more powerfully and most powerfully when we were gathered together—that seeking on our own and seeking by ourselves prepares us for the experience of coming together as a community and seeking together, and experiencing God together. We know the truth we’re given, but we only have our experience, and if that’s the only truth we know, it’s limited.

Welcoming Opportunities to Gather

The opportunities to gather aren’t just on Sunday mornings. The opportunities to gather and be a body experiencing that which we call God happen at meals, happen at other moments during the week. One of the ways I am a Quaker through the week is welcoming those opportunities. Early Friends used the word “opportunities” as invitations to ministry. There was an “opportunity.” That awareness, to me, that word… we miss opportunities all the time. We’re too busy, we’re too distracted, we’re too caught up in our own lives and we miss that moment and to me part of being a Quaker is constantly seeking to be open so that we don’t miss those opportunities.

Living with Attentiveness

Being a Friend through the week requires a particular form of attentiveness, a particular form of openness, a particular form of gratitude and celebration. How can we be in God’s presence and not be joyful? How can we be doing God’s work and not be celebrating? Of course that’s what we celebrate, and yet there are times when that celebration and that joy isn’t present, where there’s stress and tired and sad. And yet God is there in those times too.

Attentiveness isn’t just attentiveness to the moments when God is present, it’s attentiveness to the moments when we feel the absence, and that is part of living in God’s hands and knowing that joy will be back.

Transcript

Hannah Mayer: I did not expect to be changed by becoming married, because I couldn’t tell that anything would be different. But being in the room in front of my whole community and Eric’s whole community and being so deeply seen in our connection and affirmed in our connection is incredible, and it did something to relax our relationship I think. And it’s different for me coming out of it in a way that I don’t think it would have been if we hadn’t had a Quaker ceremony.

What to Expect in a Quaker Wedding

Sterling Duns: So it’s your first Quaker wedding? What I would recommend doing, one: silence your cell phone because there’s going to be a lot of quiet—a lot of quiet.

Anna McCormally: If you’re invited to a Quaker wedding, it’s because the couple getting married really values you, and that they want you with them as they make these vows.

Valerie Brown: So I think what to expect at a Quaker wedding is maybe the opposite of what many weddings can be: very lavish. There is a real heart of simplicity and there’s such elegance and beauty in that simplicity. So come prepared for the kind of simplicity that is both elegant and beautiful, and to find the beauty in that simplicity.

By the Power Vested in Us

Traci Hjelt Sullivan: Well, the most unique thing about a Quaker wedding is there is no officiant at the front of the room marrying the couple. The couple are marrying themselves. And there are a couple of ways that you can think of that. You can think of it as God has already married the couple in their hearts, and they are publicly attesting to that and their community is witnessing and affirming that’s true. The other way you can understand it is that the couple is in that moment marrying each other before a community.

Anna McCormally: Quakers believe that no one can marry a couple except the two of them and God, that it would be untrue to have an officiant say, “I’m pronouncing you. You’re married.” The only person who can say you’re married is you and your partner and God and the space that you leave for God in your relationship.

Laura Goren: So rather than a pastor or a minister marrying the couple, it is the people getting married themselves who are doing so, and they’re doing so before God and their gathered community and they’re making a promise that they’ll work hard and abide by their vows and the community in return is making a promise that they’ll support the couple.

What to Wear

Traci Hjelt Sullivan: You may wonder what you should wear to a Quaker wedding. My grandfather asked me this question about two months before our wedding, and I told him, “Grandpa, there’s going to be people there in anything from nice jeans to three piece suits. There won’t be any cutoffs and there won’t be any tuxedos.” And that pretty much describes every wedding I’ve been to.

Anna McCormally: Some weddings will definitely be formal. When I got married, I wore a long white gown and my husband wore a suit. Our family and friends dressed up a little bit. I think it would be unusual to go to a black tie Quaker wedding. You probably won’t see a row of groomsmen all in tuxedos. So my advice to you about what to wear to a Quaker wedding is to read the invitation and do what is says.

It Starts With Worship

Barry Scott: So first put on a clean sheet of paper, because it’s not like you might have expected a traditional wedding in our culture to be. It starts basically built around a Quaker worship service, so as community we gather.

Max Carter: The traditional Quaker wedding will proceed like a meeting for worship. They will have done their pre-marital counseling with committees, clearness committees will have done all of that ahead of time. Typically the couple will walk in together, will sit in the front of the worship room.

Faith Kelley: Sometimes the family will walk the bride and groom in and sometimes the bride and groom walk in together, so there’s a lot less of that couple-focused-ness. The father doesn’t give the bride away, there’s none of that sort of transactional trappings that sometimes are in other weddings.

Max Carter: But essentially the couple comes in together. There will usually be an announcement of what’s about to happen, so a description of the traditional Quaker wedding will be given. There might be music or there might not. And then you will settle into silence as you would in meeting for worship in an unprogrammed setting.

Settling into Silence

Traci Hjelt Sullivan: It’s pretty common early on in the wedding that there will be 5, sometimes 10 minutes will be completely silent before the couple exchange vows.

Kevin-Douglas Olive: If you’re religious or if you’re spiritual or whatever faith tradition you’re a part of, it’s a time where we enter into this holy space. For Quakers, it is not the meetinghouse that is holy, there is no consecration of these grounds, this is not a holy space but it’s holy while we’re together. So in a Quaker wedding, you’re entering into a sacred and holy space and you’re part of what makes it sacred and holy by your presence.

Mary Crauderueff: So before everything really gets started you’ll walk into a service and sit down and there will be this period of time when everything is silent and you have no idea what you’re supposed to be doing.

Anna McCormally: If you’re not used to silent worship, you might be like, “What’s going on? When is something going to happen?” Oh my gosh, my niece was two at our wedding. As soon as the silence started, she started saying, “No one’s talking. No one’s talking. No one’s talking!” Which I think is how a lot of non-Quakers also felt, but she was the one who said it out loud, because she was two.

Mary Crauderueff: Something that I think about is thinking about if you’re a praying sort of a person or even just a reflective person, think about the couple. This is a time to really think about the joy and the love that you feel for them.

George Lakey: For me, a Quaker wedding is an opportunity to let go of any agenda besides delight in the person that you’re rooting for. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to an athletic contest where you so strongly wanted one team to win that you were really on somebody’s side. Maybe you were yelling out as long as you can, rooting for them to win. That’s what we do in Quaker meeting but we just tend to keep quiet while we’re doing it, but inside we have this chance to just 100% root for the success and the happiness, the delight and love of the person that’s getting married or the pair of them together.

Exchanging Vows

Max Carter: And after a few minutes, the nervous couple will rise and, facing each other, take each other by the hand, and repeat the traditional Quaker wedding vows, which in my wife’s and my case back in 1974 were: “In the presence of God, I take thee, Jane to be my wife, promising with divine assistance to be unto thee a loving and faithful husband for as long as we both shall live.”

Anna McCormally: What I love about that vow is how simple it is. All you are promising to do is be loving and faithful, and of course those are enormous things. I know in a lot of wedding vows, people write their own vows and there’s a lot of inside jokes or long promises and I think that is really beautiful and it comes from the people who are marrying, but what we wanted was this really simple promise, which was brief but also had space in it, space within “loving and faithful” for us to decide what that meant and what that looked like and to keep deciding it for the rest of our lives together.

Kevin-Douglas Olive: So those are the vows and they’re very simple, and they’re spoken with the couple standing in front of the meeting. I stood right over there with my partner and then afterwards we signed the marriage certificate.

Max Carter: This goes back hundreds of years to when Quakers as a non-conformist group had no ordained clergy. The only thing that legalized their marriages was this certificate that had essentially their genealogy on it, who they were who their parents were, and what their vows were. And then that certificate will be read as the couple goes back and sits down finally, having done their vows and gotten through the nervous part of it.

Open Worship, Space for Vocal Ministry

Kevin-Douglas Olive: Then we go back into silent worship, and at that point, people present can stand and speak.

Doug Gwyn: Whereas a pastor or a priest might talk about what marriage is (and these two people in particular that are being married in that moment), that’s something we will do as a group. Each participant is welcomed to speak something if they feel a clear sense of leading or prompting by the spirit to rise out of the silence to speak a few words of encouragement—maybe out of your own experience of marriage or your knowledge of one or both of the two people getting married. That can be really rich.

Sterling Duns: You don’t have to share, but you might feel called to share something. Give some space between messages: it just allows the messages to resonate with folks, to land on folks.

Traci Hjelt Sullivan: It’s like having a conversation with someone who is really listening to you really well. One of the signs that someone is really listening to you is when you stop talking, they don’t respond right away. You have this sense that they’re really taking in what you have to say before they start thinking about whether they have a response. It’s that kind of silence that follows a message.

George Lakey: I find myself standing up and speaking in the middle of one of these Quaker weddings only if I can’t hold back any longer: when my heart just feels so full that I need to express it. I try to express it briefly because I know others will want to as well.

Traci Hjelt Sulivan: For some people, the closest thing they’ve ever seen is the “toasts and roasts” at a bachelor’s party or rehearsal dinner, and it ain’t that.

Anna McCormally: I think also more practically, toasts are often funny or sort of roasty and messages come from a place of sincerity. There’s a qualitative difference I think that the message is a little more reverent, a little more rooted in seriousness and the gravity of the occasion.

Doug Gwyn: There’s room for laughter and lightness, but still you want to keep some sense of the gravity of this moment in these people’s lives and so hopefully you strike a balance with that.

Walter Hjelt Sullivan: There’s a particular spiritual rhythm to weddings because generally there are more messages in weddings because people are filled with the love and excitement. But if you’re always kind of touching that point of silence and then coming again, that way Spirit is continuously invited to be present in the room. We say “with divine assistance” in most of the vows, so the wedding is the opportunity to practice letting divine assistance start seeping into this couples shared community experience.

The End of the Ceremony

Mary Crauderueff: So after a period of time, there will be lots of messages that have happened and then there might be this silence that settles over the wedding. The way that you know it’s done is that people will start shaking hands. Usually someone at the front will start shaking hands with the couple, and then the people around them. That’s a time to greet each other, and to greet the people next to you whether you know them or not.

Eric Peterson: I think it’s like every other wedding, where someone gets up and says, “You’re married!” and we kissed several times and sort of ran out of the room. That’s a pretty good indication that the wedding is over.

Hannah Mayer: The ceremony…

Eric Peterson: The ceremony part. That’s a good indication that the ceremony part of the wedding is over.

Hannah Mayer: And then comes the party!

Eric Peterson: Yeah!

Mary Caruderueff: Quakers love to party in varieties of ways. Some people have blowout—huge parties in tents afterwards—and some just have a small reception at the meetinghouse.

George Lakey: The Quaker wedding format is a bit strange for some portion of the people there who aren’t Quakers, so it may feel to some folks a bit confining. That makes it all the more fun then to party afterward because that’s a chance for us to do however we do in a celebration kind of way.

Sterling Duns: And then people hang out yes, absolutely! Have fun, dancing, depending on the kind of Quaker wedding and the folks getting married… it is not abnormal for Quakers to get down, so be open to that being a possibility.

Mary Crauderueff: But something before you get there, something that is part of that transition point, what you’ll do is you’ll be part of signing the marriage certificate.

Signing the Certificate

Ted Heck: Everyone who has attended signs the certificate and so the certificate is, in addition to having basically the vows of the couple on it, it also has all the names of all the people who were there.

Doug Gwyn: And that is formalized at the end of the wedding by all of us signing the wedding certificate with our names that we were witnesses to them making promises to one another and joining our intentions with theirs that this will be a successful marriage, and we are also committing ourselves really in whatever ways turn out to be possible for us—to support them and encourage them in that commitment that they’re making that day.

Max Carter: It’s no longer in most cases the legal document. They’ve already gone downtown and gotten their certificate and their license, but this will be framed. It will be hung on their bedroom wall or their living room wall, and for the duration of their lives it will represent who that community of witnesses was, and it’s a moving thing to see, to reflect on. It reminds you of the vows you took, the promises you made. And there’s that nephew who signed in block letters at age 3 who is now married with children of his own in his forties, and there’s the beloved parents and grandparents who have passed onto their great reward but there are those, in these neat columns of witness that were there.

The Journey Beyond the Wedding

Walter Hjelt Sullivan: So in that sharing, that worship with maybe vocal ministry, prayer, a few songs, always going back into the silence, the hearts of the community are knit together. The couple’s hearts are knit together in love for each other and in appreciation for the community that is holding their marriage, and then this particular group of people who have assembled for this particular event become an entity, a spiritual entity that will actually never get together again but who all commit at some level to care for this couple that’s going to go through marriage and hopefully a life together.

And I think as we all know there’s the love and joy and lush of the beginning of a relationship and marriage and all that kind of stuff, and then there’s the long journey into deepening that relationship that has rough edges, big mistakes, poor responses to big mistakes, and yet some effort to build a life together and to grow and change. All of that is being held by the gathered community. So instead of being a list or a schedule of sayings and prayers and things that have been written by other people, the content of a Quaker wedding is a specific group of people with their specific love and well-wishing for a specific couple. It’s a very special thing.